A Dickens of a Tale

Christmas isn’t Christmas without Dickens, and that’s a bit of an oxymoron given the macabre nature of Dickens’ holiday classic, A Christmas Carol.

The new Disney animated version reminds us how grotesque and gruesome Dickens could be. Not that this is bad, mind you, but at least one family left the theater in the middle of the show last night. Let’s just say this version, though engaging and delightful, is not suitable for children – or grown-ups—susceptible to nightmares.

Dickens was indeed the master of macabre – and with good reason.

According to Dickens, when he was a young, precocious and sickly child in 1815, the family kept a maid who wasn’t very good at cleaning or keeping things tidy. What she was good at was telling stories, the kind we hear and tell late at night, hunched over a campfire with a vast wilderness and strange noises enveloping us.

As a three-year-old, Dickens didn’t like to go to bed, preferring to bounce around the house until 10:30 every night. As this upset the family routine, Mary Weller, the indigent Irish peasant of the streets who wasn’t much of a maid, was allowed to remain in the household if she could contain the little dickens to his room in the evenings.

Mary Weller, bless her Irish tongue and memory, knew 125 tales of terror, and she told every one of them to young Charles over the course of the next two years. At night he begged for his favorite, “The Tale of Captain Murderer,” and Mary was happy to oblige.

The story involved a handsome sea captain with culinary skills, beautiful and gullible young girls, a ten-foot retractable sword, an over-sized pie-crust, an expansive oven, bones, guts, splatterings, poison, seepage, and general mayhem. Mary Weller ended the story by implying to three-year-old Dickens that the paint on his bedroom walls was the blood of Captain Murderer.

He loved it, never tired of it, and heard it every night for two years, though he did not reveal this to the public until late in his life. That’s over 700 tellings to one impressionable little boy. When queried by reporters, he credited Mary Weller with stirring his imagination to gruesome heights.

Thus, we are blessed with graveyards, gallows, and gaols; with the ghosts of Jacob Marley and Christmas Yet To Come; with the murdering lover Bill Sykes; with the decaying, decrepit Miss Havisham; with the throat-clicking, filthy convict Magwitch; and with 3700 named characters in all of Dickens’ work, some more grotesque than others, but all painted with a genius’ precise hand.

And lest you think that the end result is the most memorable, ponder this: today the name “Scrooge” is synonymous with “miser” and “misanthrope,” despite the ending of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge has been transformed for all eternity into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew” and that he “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

So, go see Disney’s version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And enjoy every ghostly, ghastly minute of it. It’s what Dickens would have wished. It’s what Mary Weller instilled.

Published in The Virginia Gazette November 18, 2009