One of my favorite stories ever is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and Dickens gets a lot of credit for “inventing” Christmas with that story. His tale of a crotchety, miserly old man visited by three ghosts of Christmas whose teachings grow his heart three sizes warms my heart every Christmas. I make it a point to read/listen to A Christmas Carol each year, and each year I watch the movie with my mom. The best version is the black and white version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge.
Samantha Silva’s Mr. Dickens and His Carol is one of a series of tellings about Dickens writing his famous Christmas story that have arrived on the scene in the last few years.
The premise: Dickens, his latest novel (Martin Chuzzlewit) a flop with critics turning against him, is blackmailed by his publishers into writing a Christmas story to save them all from financial ruin. This includes Dickens himself, whose growing family and social circle is becoming more and more unruly, with his wife planning a large Christmas party for just about everyone they know. With a nasty bout of writers’ block and an approaching deadline coming up fast, Dickens meets a muse named Eleanor Lovejoy, who sends Dickens on a Scrooge-like journey of his own, testing his beliefs in generosity, friendship, and love.
The story he writes changes the way the world looks at Christmas.
A little history: this era in England – the Victorian era – was the time when celebrating the Christmas season was becoming a big deal. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularized the Christmas tree in Britain, and carols had experienced a revival. Other Christmas stories had proven successful, so it isn’t unbelievable that Dickens’s publishers would coerce him into writing one.
I loved this book. I thought it would be sappy and over sentimental but it wasn’t. I liked that Dickens was a grumpy old man and that he bah humbug’d it a couple of times. I liked that his relationship with Eleanor was more that of friendship than dirty old man, which was what I was expecting. I don’t know why I was expecting this, but I was wrong and was happy about it.
A Christmas Carol was supposedly written in a frenzied six weeks, with much of the work composed in Dickens’s head as he took long nighttime walks around London (some accounts say as many as 15-20 miles) and I felt Silva did a particularly good job conveying this time crunch in the book. Writing the whole thing in six weeks required a lot of frenzied periods of activity, and I felt that here.
Dickens put an emphasis on a humanitarian side of the season, and that was felt here too, showing Dickens influences due to his relationships with his family, friends, and fans.
And of course, there was a happy ending.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a must read for anyone who loves Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and the spirit of the holiday.
words in scarlet ink 