Before Charles Dickens Came Along, Christmas Was Considered a 'Second-Rate Holiday'
Since opening last week, The Man Who Invented Christmas has grossed $1.8 million in ticket sales, leaving some moviegoers wondering just how much of the depicted tale around the inspiration for Charles Dickens' 1843 book A Christmas Carol is true.
Obviously the film, which portrays Dickens (played by Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens) having full-on conversations with an imaginary Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer) isn't meant to be a biopic. New York Times film critic Ben Kenigsberg calls it a "fanciful" take on reality in the vein of works like Shakespeare in Love. But the movie was adapted from the 2008 biography of the same name by historian Les Standiford.
The screen version begins with a 31-year-old Dickens, newly rich and famous, renovating his new home and wracking his brain to think of the next big project to continue funding his lifestyle. That much is correct: producer Robert Mickelson tells NPR the author was a "literary rock star" by the time he was 30, thanks to novels like Oliver Twist, originally published as monthly serials when Dickens was in his mid-20s.
Dickens' publishers initially balked at his idea of a story centered around Christmas-then a "second-rate holiday" associated with paganism in Great Britain, according to TIME-but the book's immediate success signaled the population's willingness to embrace the holiday spirit. (And replace their once-traditional Christmas dinner of goose with turkey, apparently.)
"Dickens had no notion of what the festival would become today, but he was clearly onto something," author Les Standiford told TIME. "He even went on to write four more Christmas books but none were even nearly as successful as A Christmas Carol."
One of the film's wildest depictions is the author's habit of seeing and speaking out loud to his invented characters. But this is actually not far from the truth: Dickens considered his invented personalities "the children of his fancy," said Susan Coyne, the writer who adapted Standiford's book for the film. "Even when he was not working, he'd feel them tugging on his sleeve saying 'time to get back to work.'"
Mickelson echoed the notion in his interview with NPR: "Dickens would...take on the voices of all the different characters and make these faces in the mirror, and almost become the characters as he's writing."
Standiford speculates that Scrooge, for example, was a "direct manifestation" from Dickens' estranged relationship with his father-a man whose financial irresponsibility ensured his son spent an impoverished childhood working long hours in a shoe factory. Dickens never forgot where he came from.
"Having been subjected to the pains of poverty as a boy himself, Dickens often wrote stories to effect social change," Jim Greene, owner of Scarlett Rat Entertainment, the company behind the acting talent for Skaneateles, New York's annual Dickens Christmas Festival, tells CountryLiving.com. "I believe he was impelled to write A Christmas Carol to give voice to the oppressed lower class in London. He was inspired by a faith that any man could find redemption and through that redemption, joy."
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