Scrooge

Twixtmas time is here
Weariness and drear
Rest for all
That adults call
The limbo of the year.
Eggnog in my hair
Wrappings everywhere
O that we
Will never see
Another fruitcake here.

 

Fully enjoying A Christmas Carol involves you in a pact with Charles Dickens: do you accept the possibility that a unsurpassably selfish and heartless miser can, in the space of one night, be transformed into a sweet, lovable philanthropist? Are there two Scrooges? Or does Scrooge suffer from a split personality?

Watching any of the several film versions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that are available forces the viewer to enter into the same pact, but with the filmmaker. The story is so familiar and we have seen so many adaptations of it that we can no longer deal with Dickens himself, but with all the actors who have been blessed or cursed to be cast in the role – some good and some bad. In the former category I would place Michael Hordern, who played Scrooge in a BBC adaptation in 1977, and Michael Caine who was the only flesh and blood actor in A Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992. But there have been several that fall into the latter category, from the first Hollywood Scrooge, Reginald Owen, who seemed too tired to work up much of the required nastiness or sweetness in the role. Or Alistair Sim, who is probably the most popular Scrooge, but who, while doing nicely with the cheerful Scrooge, was quite unconvincing as the scowling one.

In his review of Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, Stanley Kauffmann wrote in an aside, “(The best, by the way, was the forgotten Sir Seymour Hicks in 1935.)” I watched it on Christmas Eve, and Hicks’s is certainly one of the best performances in the role.

Within days of its publication in 1843, A Christmas Carol was subjected to several stage adaptations for which, because of lax copyright enforcement in England at the time, Dickens was paid nothing. These stage adaptation lasted well into the 20^th Century, and Seymour Hicks (b. 1871) first played Scrooge in one of the most popular productions in 1901. It was so popular that he appeared as Scrooge in the very first film of A Christmas Carol, titled Scrooge, in 1913. So it is only fitting that the first sound film adaptation in 1935 should feature Hicks again in the title role.

But the film itself is an extremely mixed bag. Directed by Henry Edwards, it suffers from one serious shortcoming: it makes no imaginative or technical effort to show us the three spirits who visit Scrooge during his dark night of the soul. But the atmosphere of Victorian London, especially its signs of extreme poverty, is effectively evoked. They get the London fog right,(1) and the details of the street scenes are interesting in themselves. But Jacob Marley is restricted to a not very scarifying voice (the conceit that only Scrooge can see him is used), the Ghost of Christmas past is nothing but a light shining behind Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a little more than the huge pointing shadow of a finger.

That leaves us with Seymour Hicks, who occupies nearly every scene (except the truly horrible ones in which scavengers divide the spoils of a dead man’s – Scrooge’s – bed linen and nightshirt). Hicks is convincingly grasping and heartless (Dickens devoted two paragraphs to Scrooge’s inhuman coldness and hardness) in the first scenes, moved and terrified by the scenes revealed to him by the spirits and wonderfully, giddily joyful upon his transformation. But the success of Hicks in showing the extreme contrast in the reformed Scrooge from his former self raises a serious problem with the role itself.

Because the easiest way to accept the peculiar mystery of A Christmas Carol is to assume that Ebenezer Scrooge is either a dual personality or two people – Scrooge and his doppelganger, his double.

The pact to which Dickens requires us to agree is the faith that Scrooge can be changed, that he can be reformed from a heartless sociopath into a compassionate, loving human being.

In Stave Three, the Ghost of Christmas Present transports Scrooge to the house of Bob Cratchit and Scrooge sees how Bob’s poor family enjoys their Christmas feast, the goose and plum pudding. And Bob calls out,

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!”

Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.

“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”

“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”

“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

Dickens strenuously avoided direct political commentary. In 1843, the French Revolution was still fresh in people’s minds. Dickens wrote about the event in A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859. There were rumors that such a revolution could happen in England, especially given the horrific conditions that the Industrial Revolution had inflicted on the poor.

But the most that Dickens would say about the condition of English society was summed up by George Orwell: "His whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.” Dickens couldn’t see the point of a change in living conditions if there wasn’t also a great change of people’s hearts. That is what he dramatizes in A Christmas Carol – the change of heart that must come to even the worst people among us. Its believability is always subject to question, and nothing reveals the importance of such questioning than every time A Christmas Carol is enacted in the pages of a book, on stage or on a film or television screen.

This year, after my 62^nd Christmas, I’m inclined to disbelieve in Scrooge’s metamorphosis. I won’t deny the beauty of it as a Christmas fable, and the beauty of its great arc in a compassionate work of art. But I can’t say I believe any more that the Scrooge we meet in the first stave of A Christmas Carol, played on film by Seymour Hicks or Alistair Sim or Michael Hordern, can be reconciled in any way with the Scrooge we meet on Christmas morning. It’s a lovely and moving fairy tale, and all the more beautiful for being so impossible.

(1)  “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature  lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.”