Reading through some of the reviews for The Man Who Invented Christmas, it occurred to me that many reviewers failed to get the point of the film. An example of this disconnect is Ben Kenigsberg’s review for The New York Times. He commented that the film: “endorses the theory that artists are secret documentarians.”[1] Kenigsberg’s review demonstrates the fallacy of film critics: while they can be gifted at seeing the meaning behind the script lines and scenes, they can fail to grasp the metaphorical allusions to creative processes, perhaps because they themselves are observers and not necessarily creators (he cites Shakespeare in Love and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus as also demonstrating authors as “secret documentarians”). Kenigsberg is referencing scenes in The Man Who Invented Christmas where Dickens meets a decrepit, skeleton of a man by the name of Marley. The name strikes Dickens so much that he asks him the spelling of it so that Dickens can write it down. The film also has Dickens witnessing a funeral devoid of mourners, except one. This haint of a man spots Dickens and slowly begins to amble towards him, finally looking Dickens in the eye and saying only, “Humbug.” These episodes (and more) form the basis in the film for Dickens’s ability to write “A Christmas Carol,” and in their essence, are true to the author’s life. No one could prove a chance meeting between Dickens, a walking skeleton waiter named Marley and a graveyard spook who says “Humbug,” but any Dickensian will tell you that Dickens avidly walked the streets of London late into the evening observing those he saw, and these night ambulations undoubtedly effected his creative process. Dickens even walked into one of the worst American ghettos of the nineteenth century, New York City’s Five Points, and describes it in detail in American Notes.
Another reviewer for The Guardian failed to read the most basic of Dickens biographies and states, “each character is imagined as someone from Dickens’s life; Tiny Tim is an invalid nephew…”[2] While Mullan’s review is much more thorough than Kenigsberg’s and delves into the acting, screenwriting and biographical concurrencies, it was disappointing to see him miss this huge chunk of Dickens’s life. Tiny Tim WAS based on Dickens’s own nephew, his sister Fanny’s child Henry Burnett Jr. Fanny died of consumption in 1848 and her crippled son followed her the next year.
Henry Jr.’s physical disability made a great impact upon Dickens, and can be read about in more detail in his biographies. Kenigsberg also cites the bending of history with the Irish maid who helps Dickens through his writer’s block by introducing him to “Varney the Vampire.” Again, Dickensians will note with glee that this character was based upon Dickens’s own stories of his childhood caregivers, one of which he calls “Mercy” in a nonfiction piece. Michael Slater points out that Mercy “may or may not have been based on Mary Weller, Dickens’s nurse, who told him tales of horror which as an adult, “still lurk[ed] in the ‘dark corners’ of his mind” (Slater 7). The young Dickens, like the young Edgar Allan Poe (later the master of macabre), metaphorically ate up Penny Dreadfuls in his youth and as a consequence, always had a soft spot for a good ghost story.
I’ll agree with both reviewers that the film did stretch history a bit, one example being the use of William Makepeace Thackeray as Dickens’s literary nemesis, who bombards Dickens and Forster at the Garrick Club with reviews of Dickens’s three “flops” (Martin Chuzzlewit, American Notes and Barnaby Rudge). Mullan references that at the time of Dickens’s drafting of “Carol,” Thackeray had only written one novel and was in the midst of his career in journalism. However, I enjoyed this nod to Dickens’s colleagues and utilized it instead to gain a better understanding of the pressures Dickens must have felt at being an author with two successes under his belt but three failures. Another oversight of history was pointed out by Twitter user @DigiVictorian, otherwise known as Bob Nicholson, whose tweet on the film’s inaccuracies of utilizing headlines in Victorian newspapers garnered over 11,000 likes. He vehemently disliked the film’s use of inaccurate headlines (which of course is true and I 100% agree), but failed to see the joke the filmmakers were making. Of course @DigiVictorian was speaking about the trailer to the film, so could not anticipate that this was a “sight gag.” The gag is that as Dickens walks through the crowded Garret Club, and tries to avoid Thackery, he holds a newspaper over his face. Sadly, the newspaper has his name written on a headline, so the gag is that Dickens points himself out to those he’s wishing to avoid.
What bothers me is that these reviews collectively failed to see the achievements of the film: namely that the screenwriter and director had the character of Dickens explore his own traumas which acted as catalysts to help him create “Carol.” Mullan makes reference to Scrooge appearing to Dickens as his “alter ego” who points out to Dickens that the two have a shared obsession with money. However, Scrooge functions as more than just Dickens’s alter ego in the film, he is his superconscious (to use a Jungian term), a form of himself which is aware of all consciousness. In the film, Dickens cannot get the ending to “Carol” because he cannot make the characters do what he wants and finish out the chapter. In one scene, they sit in his study in silence, arms crossed over their respective chests, refusing to speak to him. This scene seemed to make Kenigsberg’s eyes roll, but not mine. My intuition is that these film critics who baulked at Dickens’s characters appearing to him as real have never themselves had to undergo the struggles of the creative process. Birthing a novel is extremely difficult. If the characters are to be believable to the reader, they must appear as real to the author, doing what they like, when they like. If the characters don’t agree with how you’ve written their lines, they tell you so and refuse to do as you say. The scenes where a flustered Dickens begs his characters to finish the last chapter is extremely poignant to the creative writer: we’ve all been there.
Dickens cannot have the ending of “Carol” because he states that Scrooge is afraid to confront himself (this is also where Dickens begins to self-examine). In the film, Dickens states this to Forster when the latter is trying to help him problem solve his story to discover Scrooge’s motivations. The film hints at, but does not fully explain, that no one in Dickens’s life (at that point) knew of his childhood traumas. Dickens kept his family’s life in the Marshalsea and his subsequent farming out to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory a secret from everyone, including his wife Catherine. His biographies explain that only his life-long friend Forster knew his secret, and even then, only later in Dickens’s life. So when the film has Dickens break into Warren’s Blacking Factory to face his own demons, he finds himself facing both his childhood self and Scrooge.
Scrooge forces Dickens to relive the trauma of abandonment and repudiation, and the power to this scene is that once Dickens does confront his fears, he is able to turn the tables on Scrooge and have Scrooge face the possibility of a lonely death. Once Scrooge is put into this position, he speaks the lines that the screen Dickens needs to hear: Scrooge’s repentant speech to the Ghost of Christmas Future. This is a masterful depiction of an author’s interaction with their own characters, and succinctly demonstrates how confronting fears, frees one from the “chain [one] forged in life” (Dickens 23).
Director Bharat Nalluri was able to gracefully display the difficult task of character creation. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the creation is not usually what the creator intended, and instead morphs into its own being, leaving the creator to have to contend with the outcome. Nalluri showed Dickens bearing all: confronting his own hidden traumas in order to move past them and heal. While this might sound a tad “new-age” of me, it is the task which “Carol” asks of its readers: to confront our own past mistakes, so that we might live more fulfilled lives in the present. In the film, Dickens must learn this lesson first so that his creation may experience the redemption necessary for the novella’s ending. The fictional Scrooge must face the hurtful abandonment he endured as a child at the hands of his family in order to see how this pain shaped him into someone who avidly inflicts pain upon others. In other words, he must face the cycle of abuse and recognize his own part in it. His redemption is clear once his acknowledgement is complete: “‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me” (Dickens 98). I came away from my viewing of “The Man Who Invented Christmas” very excited at the depths to which the film showed the traumas I know the factual Dickens to have faced. We all have our own personal demons, many of which remain private, but Dickens has long been a personality who has been emotionally dissected numerous times. Many of us have someone in our lives who we hope will face their own demons and come away with the lessons which the Three Ghosts of “Carol” strive to teach, but the sad truth of the matter is that most of us ignore the lessons of these Spirits. One could argue that Dickens too avoided his own Spiritual lessons (if you take into account how he would not but eight years after publishing “Carol” treat his devoted wife Catherine). But not to be too hard on the man, he was the nineteenth century equivalent of Leonardo Di Caprio, who used his fame to draw attention to social injustices. Most of all, Dickens succeeded in being the embodiment of the quote he would later use in Our Mutual Friend: “‘no one is useless in this world…who lightens the burden of it for any one else’” (Dickens Bk. III, Ch. 9).
[1] Ben Kenigsberg. “Review: In ‘The Man who Invented Christmas,’ Dickens as a Secret Documentarian.” The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/movies/review-in-the-man-who-invented-christmas-review-charles-dickens-dan-stevens.html.
[2] John Mullan. “Did Dickens invent Christmas? No, but he did reinvent the novel.” The Guardian, Dec. 2, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/02/dickens-changed-ficiton-man-who-invented-christmas-film.
Books cited:
Dickens, Charles. "A Christmas Carol" in A Christmas Carol and Other Stories, The Modern Library, 2001.
---. Our Mutual Friend, accessed online via Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/883/883-h/883-h.htm.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing, Yale University Press, 2009.