Dickensblog

FX partners with BBC on 'A Christmas Carol'

We Americans will get to see the three-part drama on the FX channel in December! In addition to this news, Deadline also has a cast list:

"The remake stars Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Andy Serkis as Ghost of Christmas Past, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Charlotte Riley as Lottie, Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Vinette Robinson as Mary Cratchit, Rutger Hauer as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Kayvan Novak as Ali Baba and Lenny Rush as Tim Cratchit."

(If Ali Baba made it in -- you'll recall that he appears in the book as a vision of young Scrooge's in the past -- it sounds like they studied the original story very carefully! Although I'm not sure who Lottie might be.)

And speaking of A Christmas Carol, it turns out that rumors of its filming at Rainham Hall were correct. The Romford Recorder has details, photos, and video.

'A Christmas Carol' filming rumors

There's filming of some sort going on at Rainham Hall in Essex, and speculation is rife that it's the new BBC version of "A Christmas Carol" with Tom Hardy. If you look at the set and the costumes, you can see why that appears likely!

Dickens and van Gogh

Did you know that Dickens was Vincent van Gogh's favorite author? Tate Britain is getting the word out with its exhibition "Van Gogh and Britain." In its review of the exhibition, The Guardian explains, 

Van Gogh loved Dickens and Eliot for the way they took the everyday details of modest lives and elevated them into something luminous. Here was social realism, in all its unloveliness, transformed into a kind of moral grandeur. A few years later, and on his way to becoming the artist who would invest old shoes, ragged sunflowers and potato-eating peasants with powerful feeling, Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “My whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes and these artists draw.”

In fact, the paper reports, van Gogh's beloved Starry Night is said to be based on one of the most powerful scenes in Hard Times.

The Economist adds, "In a number of the paintings in 'L’Arlésienne', a series made between 1888 and 1890 . . . van Gogh carefully inscribed 'A Christmas Carol' on the spine of a book. The choice of title and author was deliberate: he had read the novel every year since childhood. When van Gogh moved back in with his parents in 1879 they complained that he did nothing but devour Charles Dickens from morning to night."

Sounds like our kind of guy!  

Famous last words

The ending of A Christmas Carol makes Ron Charles's list of "the 23 most unforgettable last sentences in fiction" in The Washington Post.

R.I.P. Albert Finney

The acclaimed British actor, who played the title role in the 1970 film musical Scrooge, passed away on Thursday at the age of 82. 

BBC Dickens miniseries news

My friends, I've failed you badly. I promised you book reviews, and then I left you dangling. For that I sincerely apologize. I have so many books that are due (overdue, really) for reviews, I couldn't seem to get all the reviews written! I haven't given up on that project, but today I have something else to share: news of the upcoming series of BBC Dickens adaptations.

Steven Knight, who will co-produce these with Tom Hardy, has told Collider that their Christmas Carol script is "largely done," that Hardy will star (whether as Scrooge or another character is not known), and that they're aiming for Christmas 2019. He also had some general thoughts on the other adaptations they plan to do. Like most adapters these days, he speaks of wanting to make them "modern" and gritty and so forth; as with most adapters, we'll have to wait and see exactly how these particular projects end up interpreting those terms.

We've been having a good discussion of the news in the Dickensblog Facebook group (thanks to Art for getting that started). Which reminds me, if you're a fan of this blog and you're on Facebook, please come join us there! 

Merry Christmas!

"Christmas has become the most industrialized bacchanalia of the year, in which the gluttony is amped up now by the ease with which once exotic goodies are commonplace on the gourmet websites. . . . Much of the blame for initiating this is often given to Charles Dickens, mostly on the basis of one voluptuous paragraph from his magical moral fable A Christmas Carol. . . . 

"However, blaming Dickens is misleading and unfair to him.

"Dickens had not set out to write a blurb for gluttony. His idea was driven by a Christian impulse to awaken his readers to the vast social inequities of his time. Walking at night through some of London’s poorest neighborhoods he said he had composed the story in his head “weeping and laughing and weeping again” at sights of grinding poverty and stubborn spirits. The spirits he embodied in the family of the clerk Bob Cratchit and the uncaring greed in Cratchit’s employer, Ebenezer Scrooge. . . .

Dickens’s narrative genius was underpinned by an instinctive empathy for his subjects. A Christmas Carol was the most sentimental of his works. The dark actor, Scrooge, repents as few greedy men in the real world ever do. A few years on, as Dickens found success and wealth, he embraced the story’s final celebratory flourish and began his own family’s Christmas feasts with the toast right out of the mouth of Tiny Tim, Cratchit’s lame son: 'God bless us every one!'"

That's from an article by Clive Irving in The Daily Beast. I recommend reading the whole thing -- it's rather rambly but very good. I had hoped to write something for you myself on the recent spate of Dickens-related Christmas-themed cookbooks, but in truth, I just haven't had the time to do it. (Also, I'm not exactly Martha Stewart, so anything I wrote about cookbooks wouldn't be all that trustworthy.) I am on vacation the rest of the week, though, and I plan to take some time and write some Dickens-related (but non-cooking-related) book reviews for you all, so I hope that will be enjoyable. And I hope you've had a merry Christmas.

Revisiting Scrooge (and the maid!)

I'm quoted in this CBC piece by Mark Gollom about the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol (a.k.a. Scrooge). Also quoted is our old friend Theresa Derrington Cozens-Hardy, who played Fred's maid and whom I interviewed for this blog several years ago! It was wonderful to hear that she's still going strong and sharing fascinating memories of the filmmaking! 

Happy 175th birthday to 'A Christmas Carol'!

The tributes and honors have been pouring in from all over! Here's a roundup:

• The Paris Review, Vox, and The Christian Science Monitor all have articles about the anniversary. BuzzFeed has a Christmas Carol quiz. BBC News offers suggestions of celebratory Dickensian food and a gin punch recipe in honor of the day.
• The Dickens Museum held an unabridged reading of the book, hosted by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, and also asked various Dickens experts to weigh in on the question of which movie adaptation is the best. 
• The New York Public Library is hosting an exhibition on the book and also released an Insta Novel version.
• And finally, here's my own tribute.

It's lovely to see Dickens's "ghostly little book" still so loved and appreciated all these years later for all it's given us. If you've seen any tributes that I missed, please post them in the comments!

Commentating on Scrooge

I'm a guest on the latest episode of the podcast "The Commentarians," in which two people discuss a movie while watching it. In this episode, host Joe Zaragoza and I discuss the 1951 film of A Christmas Carol, a.k.a. Scrooge.You can find it on iTunes or anywhere else you get your podcasts!