The Man Who Invented Christmas

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a flawless story of seasonal redemption: there are many versions but you may as well start with the book. This film stars Dan Stevens as the author, coming off a three-book series of flops and an American tour which he didn’t enjoy. Dickens lives happily with his family. He goes around town meeting people—including W. M. Thackeray (Miles Jupp), and a great many people say things which are remarkably famous quotes from the book that he is about to write. It’s a lot like Shakespeare In Love, and a little like Miss Potter, the film about Beatrix Potter that didn’t mention her scientific work at all.

Dickens spent his childhood in a Blacking Factory, and his father in Debtors Prison. Here, John (played by Jonathan Pryce) is the character who is redeemed by Dickens and accepted into the family, and it is through redeeming the father than Dickens is able to write. Soon his rooms are filled with his own characters and he argues with them—even playing a modern-style word-association game with Scrooge (Christopher Plummer). As he goes about town trying to pay bills, he is talking up the unwritten story, and is given an advance—and everything starts to come together.

A really decent Christmas Carol is like being surrounded with loved ones and garlanded with Christmas decorations and the full joys of the season. And Dickens is responsible for much of the Victorian Christmas which is thoroughly visualised in this somewhat lavish production. The evocation is straight out of the playbook of Victorian Christmas cliché (and don’t get me wrong, it does have it’s place). The Blacking Factory building haunts Dickens with all the menace you can give to a building using lighting and mist; on the other hand, in Piccadilly, well dressed and upstanding people throng to Hatchards to buy his book. The thing about the story, and about Dickens, is the social commentary and the appeal for charity and goodwill. At the moment famous people are being chastised for their behaviour, and Dickens may have been an angel of mercy to the poor but he was a flawed character in many other ways. That’s hopefully not to denigrate his work here, but a film which almost takes away the poor from the redemptive story sells everyone a little bit short. So it is neither a version of the novel and the redemption of Dickens himself is less heart-warming. He makes peace with Thackeray, and sets free the talking crow (who knew?)—and we see that A Christmas Carol sold out in days and charitable donations increased. What the novel does is show that people can be redeemed, and that where possible it better suits society if we help each other where we can.

Dan Stevens is perfectly fine as Dickens. He is famous for leaving Downton Abbey at Christmas in a spectacularly downbeat way, in an episode which had been even more miserable if Bates had been hanged. Pryce is on good form as the wayward father, and casting Plummer as Scrooge is genius. Morfyyd Clark’s portrayal of the doting wife is fine, and I’m sure that’s how it’s written—but the truth of her is more complex. It isn’t really the Christmas movie that you might be hoping for, and neither is it an accurate portrayal of Dickens. It is a fun film, though, and there is something beguiling about the fantastical way in which Charles Dickens wrestled with his own characters.