The man who invented christmas

How it works

Bharat Nalluri directed. Susan Coyne wrote the screenplay from Les Standiford’s 2008 book of the same name. The film is set in London in 1843. Dickens, played by Dan Stevens, is short of money after weaker books and wants a new story in time for Christmas. His publishers will not back the rush he wants, so he pushes the book out himself. Christopher Plummer plays Ebenezer Scrooge as a figure Dickens argues with while he writes. Jonathan Pryce plays John Dickens, the writer’s father. Morfydd Clark plays Catherine Dickens. The rating is PG. Runtime is about one hour forty-four minutes. Bleecker Street opened it in the United States on 22 November 2017.

A Christmas Carol was a real novella, published in December 1843, and it did colour how English-speaking households talk about the season: charity, a family table, “Merry Christmas” as a greeting that the book helped spread, ghost stories at the turn of the year. The film turns that labour into a crowded, talking workshop in which characters walk in from the street and from memory. That is a biopic device. It is not a documentary of every hour Dickens sat at the desk.

What the title is selling, and what it is not

Nobody invented 25 December. Churches had kept Nativity for centuries. Yule, St Nicholas, and local winter customs were already in the street. What the film means — and what Standiford’s title meant — is that A Christmas Carol gave the Victorian revival a story people still stage. Dickens did not hang the first tree in England and did not write the first carol. He wrote a miser, three spirits, and a clerk’s sick child, and the book sold. The movie is honest enough, in its comic way, to show bills, deadlines, and a man who is kinder on the page than he is at breakfast.

Dan Stevens: Charles Dickens, trying to finish a Christmas book on a clock. Christopher Plummer: Scrooge, as Dickens imagines him in the room. Jonathan Pryce: John Dickens, the father the writer has not settled with.

The book inside the film: A Christmas Carol, 1843. The real limit of the title: Christmas as a feast is older than that manuscript. If you want the novella, read the novella. It is short. If you want a film of the Carol itself, there are many, from Alastair Sim onward, and they are adaptations of the ghost story, not of Dickens’s writing process. This 2017 picture is the process, with jokes. Keep the two stacks apart on the shelf so a child who asked for Scrooge does not get a movie about typesetting.

Nobody invented December. Dickens wrote a ghost story that made the season harder to shrug off, then the posters did the rest of the bragging.

How to watch it in December

It plays as a family film if the family can sit through writer’s block, Victorian rooms, and a few raised voices. It is not frightening in the way a straight Carol can be. It is busy. Treat the conversations with Scrooge as a stage trick, not as minutes from a séance. Treat the publication deadline as the plot. When the book is out, the film is over. That is the right shape for a story about a man racing the calendar.

Pairing it with a reading of the Carol on the same night works. Pairing it with a lecture on “who invented Christmas” does not. The honest sentence is: this movie is about the writing of one book that still gets opened in December. The feast on the 25th does not depend on whether you liked Dan Stevens.