If you have paid but a moment’s notice to this blog, it will be patently obvious that I love Christmas.
LOVE. IT.
The songs. The tree. The lights. The bonhomie and goodwill. The presents. The spirit of giving. It all adds to what the song joyfully describes as “the most wonderful time of the year” and much of it can be attributed to Charles Dickens and his iconic book A Christmas Carol.
While, as Bleeding Cool notes, Dickens didn’t necessarily invent many of the modern elements of Christmas, he was crucial to spreading their adoption through society in the mid-nineteenth century:
“… the fundamental elements were largely in the air in America before A Christmas Carol was published here in 1844. Most notably, Washington Irving‘s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent [which] in turn inspired Clement Clarke Moore, whose 1822 poem An Account of a Visit from St Nicholas defines much of our modern notion of Santa … and his surrounding mythology of a sleigh, eight reindeer, and the idea of heading down the chimney with toys for children, with ‘Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.’
“All of which is not to diminish A Christmas Carol, which is of course a key part of Dickens’s toweringly important body of work. Thanks in part to Dickens’s stature as one of the few literary rock stars of his era, A Christmas Carol road the rising waves of American popular culture in the decade that followed the Civil War, and did indeed help redefine the holiday tradition for generations to come.”
Now Dickens role in defining and popularising the defining elements of the modern festive season will be told in The Man Who Invented Christmas:
The Man Who Invented Christmas tells of the magical journey that led to the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer), Tiny Tim and other classic characters from A Christmas Carol. Directed by Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), the film shows how Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) mixed real life inspirations with his vivid imagination to conjure up unforgettable characters and a timeless tale, forever changing the holiday season into the celebration we know today.” (Coming Soon)
While much of it, if not all, will be pure conjecture, anyone who has ever written anything desperately important to a deadline, and A Christmas Carol was a make-or-break proposition for Dickens at the time, will recognise that horrifying limbo between great inspiration and harrowing desperation.
That this pivotal moment for his career gave us such a classic, clever piece of literature goes to show how important these do-or-die moments can be for any writer.
And how, without it, we may not have Christmas as we know it today, something that doesn’t even bear thinking about it.
The Man Who Invented Christmas opens 22 November in USA and 30 November in Australia.