Les Standiford (15 page)

14.

D
ickens may well have intended to begin a new chapter in his career when he set out for the Continent, but the legacy of all that he had done by that time would trail his steps forever. And of everything that he had written to that point, nothing would prove more persistent and pervasive and powerful than
A Christmas Carol.

In addition to the piracies and the imitations, soon after the publication of the novel there appeared on London stages the inevitable—and mostly unlicensed—dramatic adaptations of the kind that followed the publication of any moderately successful book. It was a backhanded form of acclaim that Dickens endured from the earliest days. And in those unauthorized imitations of his first novels, Dickens actually saw more reason to be flattered than aggrieved or threatened. For one thing, there was little money in the theater for a writer in those days. Even a licensed adaptation might bring an author a pound per act at most, and Dickens had come to view the productions more as free advertising and evidence of the broad appeal of his work than anything else.

Until 1843, in fact, the national licensing laws permitted only the Royal Theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden to present serious dramatic productions. While there was plenty of spectacle available elsewhere, in saloons, meetinghouses, and other public venues, these presentations generally took the form of vaudeville, including burlesques, sketches and scenes from popular sources interspersed with music, and various conglomerations of pantomime, soliloquy, magic acts, mesmerism, ventriloquism, and acrobatics, antedating the variety shows of the television age to come.

As a young man, Dickens had been fascinated with this shaggy form of theater, and he often took part in school and amateur productions. Only the onset of a terrible head cold had kept him from auditioning for a part in a Covent Garden production during his early days as a journalist, in retrospect a happy accident that may have forestalled quite a different career path. Though his success with
Sketches by Boz
may have displaced any serious aspirations as an actor, Dickens's interest in the theater never left him. In 1838 he penned a farce titled
The Strange Gentleman,
which was doing well enough to encourage him in further dramaturgical endeavors, until the landslide popularity of
The Pickwick Papers
swept him irreversibly in a different direction.

Still, Dickens remained a resolute theatergoer, and often an eager performer. During the Canadian segment of his American tour, he directed and appeared in a series of farces staged by the officers of the Royal Garrison in Montreal, giving the unpaid role his all. As he wrote Forster, “[T]he pain and perspiration I have expended during the last ten days exceed anything you can imagine.”

In addition, he counted a number of playwrights and theater critics among his closest friends, including Forster, the multitalented Bulwer-Lytton, and lawyer-cum-playwright Thomas Noon Talfourd, who represented him in the
Parley's Illuminated
case, and whose work had been produced at Covent Garden. And while involvement in the theater remained a vaguely disreputable enterprise well into the nineteenth century, the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843 changed things greatly. The act diminished the rather dictatorial powers of the Lord Chamberlain to restrict the licensing of theaters and limited him to the prohibition only of performances where he thought it “fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do.”

While such ambiguous language would remain largely in effect until 1968, and prompt more than a bit of debate about what was offensive to twentieth-century manners, the Theatres Act was a boon to serious playwrights, extending the reach of their work into a wide range of venues and thus to middle-class England. Theaters thereby gained a heightened respectability and more secure economic footing. The boom in 1840s theater-building would result, in fact, in the creation of London's famed West End district.

Prior to 1843, however, theater in London was something of a mongrelized enterprise. The concept of copyright for a stage play was laughable—and besides, why would any director or producer pay an artiste serious money to concoct an original composition, when any number of hacks would be glad to “re-originate” the works of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, or Smollett for a few shillings?

One of Dickens's early stories, “A Bloomsbury Christening,” was co-opted in this way in 1834, and Dickens himself was happy to review the proceedings, where he noted good-naturedly that the characters were “old and particular friends.” Dickens scholar Paul Schlicke estimates that by 1840
The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist,
and
Nicholas Nickleby
had been staged at least sixty times, and the author had become somewhat resigned to the matter, though it did annoy him when the productions were poorly done, or his dialogue carelessly transcribed, or the conclusions to his stories given away before the final publication in book form.

Of everything Dickens had written up to that time, however,
A Christmas Carol,
with its brevity, tight-knit story line, vivid characters, and colorful dialogue, was a natural for the stage, and the adaptations (carefully cataloged by Dickens scholar H. Philip Bolton) began to appear almost immediately. On Monday, February 5, 1844, three productions opened simultaneously in London.

One, titled
A Christmas Carol: or, The Miser's Warning,
a drama in two acts, was penned by C. Z. Barnett and performed at the Surrey Theatre. Described by critics as “much grimmer” than the others, and lacking any songs, its run was brief. A second,
Scrooge, The Miser's Dream,
was penned by Charles Webb and opened at Sadler's Wells, where it lasted fifteen performances. The third was the only version actually sanctioned by Dickens (and thus the only version for which he would receive a share of the profits).
A Christmas Carol: or, Past, Present, and Future,
in three acts, by Edward Stirling, opened at the Adelphi, the theater with the best reputation at the time, and ran for more than forty nights.

Dickens attended a production of the last, and though a bit apprehensive before going in—“Oh, Heaven! If any forecast of this was ever in my mind!”—he seemed pleased by what he saw: “Better than usual,” he dubbed the effort, adding that the actor playing Scrooge (“O. Smith,” a scenery-chewing veteran who had starred in the lead of
Frankenstein,
as well as in a few adaptations of Dickens's work previously) “was drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind of meat underdone, and his face is quite perfect.”

The production of Webb's version would close relatively quickly at Sadler's Wells, but it had already begun a simultaneous run at the Strand in London. Not only did it run at that theater well into March, but Webb's rendition was so popular that it was given at least five productions elsewhere during the season.

Before the year was out, there would be at least sixteen productions of the story to reach the stage in England, some of them taking great liberties with the original. In one, Scrooge was reunited with his long-lost fiancée, while one of the Webb versions culminated in a near-riot when the three Spirits of Christmas came back on stage to join such stalwarts as Puck, Punch, Pan, and Apollo in a veritable chorus-line grand finale.

Stirling's authorized version actually crossed the Atlantic, where it was performed at the Park Theater in New York City during the Christmas season of 1844. And revivals of both the Webb and Stirling versions were again mounted in London that season.

If the gratifying reviews in respected newspapers had restored Dickens's reputation in literary circles, the unprecedented number of dramatic productions spread his name to an exponentially wider audience, in the same way a successful film adaptation might for a popular novel today. And yet, while these days nearly every American has attended, acted in a school version, or at least seen the notices for
some
holiday production of
A Christmas Carol,
1844 marked the high-water point for the number of theatrical adaptations of the story for more than half a century. Part of the drop-off after that year can be attributed to the fact that Dickens churned out four Christmas books in the five years following, and one of those, 1845's
The Cricket on the Hearth,
became by far the most dramatized of its brethren during the writer's lifetime. That story actually ranked third in frequency of Dickens adaptations during that period, after versions of
Nicholas Nickleby
and
Oliver Twist.
In addition, Dickens himself began offering live readings of
A Christmas Carol
in the 1850s, a practice that proved immensely popular, and which he continued to his death.

In total, the number of early productions of
A Christmas Carol
came to about half those of
Oliver Twist
and were about the same in number as the adaptations of
Martin Chuzzlewit,
though it should be noted that the
Carol
figures are quite respectable for a “one-installment” publication. Most of the other novels, appearing in twenty installments over many months, would have a much longer shelf-life in the popular entertainment consciousness.

One other influence particular to Dickens's time is also worth considering. Even though the Theatre Act of 1843 weakened government influence over theatrical productions, the office of the Examiner of Plays still remained, wielding considerable influence over what appeared on stage, with subject matter that suggested the merest possibility of the profane receiving special scrutiny. Prayers, biblical quotations, and representations of established church figures were routinely excised by government censors. Thus,
A Christmas Carol,
secular though it is, may have been considered controversial by more staid—or more timid—production companies of the time.

Even years later, advertising copy for an 1885 production in Edinburgh went so far as to tout the “strictly moral” nature of the play. “The Very Rev.
DEAN STANLEY
,” the producers wished to remind the public, “in his funeral Sermon preached at the Grave of CHARLES DICKENS in Westminster Abbey, pronounced the ‘CHRISTMAS CAROL' to be the finest Charity Sermon in the English language.”

Whether moral concerns played into it or not, the tally of productions of
A Christmas Carol
over the next fifty years was about half the number mounted in 1844 alone. In fact, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that a significant uptick in adaptations of the story came, and that was a development that came with the advent of a brand new way of storytelling.

Novelist and Dickens admirer John Irving asserts that the particular strength of a Dickens novel is to make an audience feel more than think. And while it might be argued that in most fiction the aim is to entertain first and edify second, if ever there were a medium where the manipulation of an audience's emotion is paramount, then the motion picture form is it.

In
A Christmas Carol,
film producers were to discover the mother lode. The first motion picture version of the tale was a silent picture called
Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost,
produced in Great Britain in 1901. That was followed by half a dozen more silent films on both sides of the Atlantic, including one 1910 version by Thomas Edison. The first sound version, also called
Scrooge,
was made in 1928 in Great Britain.

In 1934 Lionel Barrymore starred in a U.S. radio-play adaptation titled
A Christmas Carol,
an event that proved so popular that the piece became a holiday tradition that lasted into the 1950s—his brother John Barrymore and Orson Welles successfully took over during two different seasons when Barrymore fell ill. It is Barrymore's series, in fact, that is generally credited with making Dickens's story the popular phenomenon it has become in the United States.

There was another filmed version,
Scrooge,
produced in Great Britain in 1935, and in 1938 came the first significant film production in the United States, titled
A Christmas Carol,
produced by Joseph Mankiewicz and starring Reginald Owen as Scrooge.
Variety
gave the film kudos—“Top production, inspired direction, superb acting”—and indeed the version holds up well to this day.

In the 1940s the new medium of television got into the act, with John Carradine and Vincent Price starring in different versions, and in 1949 Ronald Colman narrated the first commercial sound recording of the story.

It is the consensus of most critics that the very best film adaptation of Dickens's story came in 1951 with the British production of
Scrooge
(released in the United States as
A Christmas Carol
), with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and Mervyn Jones as Bob Cratchit. The film received favorable reviews in the United States, but, likely because of its rather downbeat portrayal of Scrooge, it did not become widely popular until the 1970s, when it began to receive regular television airings during the Christmas season.

Other notable adaptations include a musical version—
Scrooge
—produced in Great Britain in 1970, starring Albert Finney in the title role and Alec Guinness as Marley's Ghost. The film was nominated for several Oscars, and Finney won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy. In 1984 Clive Donner, who had edited the Alastair Sim production of 1951, directed another well-received British version,
A Christmas Carol,
starring George C. Scott. The film was originally shown on the CBS television network in the United States, where it won Scott an Emmy nomination for Best Actor.

In all, the story has spawned at least twenty-eight film adaptations, including versions starring Bill Murray as a greedy U.S. television executive (
Scrooged,
1988); a Disney version starring none other than Scrooge McDuck in the title role; and cartoon versions featuring the Flintstones, the Muppets, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the Jetsons.