Johnny Depp returns to the screen as Scrooge – Dickens might have some notes

Another festive season beckons, and with it another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ perennial favourite, A Christmas Carol – this time as a vehicle for Johnny Depp’s return to family-friendly roles.

Boasting an all-star cast, Ebenezer explores the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge’s backstory. Dickens’ ghosts become zombies, and his London is a dark, violent place, filled with predators and danger.

Against this backdrop, we see a different side to Scrooge: a man scarred by bullying and abuse, whose worldly ambition masks his vulnerability. It’s also a reminder of how much the focus of Dickens’ original story has shifted in the retelling, and of the author’s real intentions when writing it.

An instant hit when it was first published in December 1843, the tale of Scrooge and Tiny Tim has been synonymous with Christmas ever since. It began a series of annual “Christmas books” through which Dickens sought to capitalise on his novella’s success.

While always commercially savvy, Dickens had another, more pressing motive behind his story of Scrooge’s haunting and redemption: he wanted to bring about widespread radical social change.

Dickens’ social conscience

Known for his commitment to social reform through novels such as Oliver Twist, which exposed the cruelty of the Victorian workhouse, Dickens himself had experienced a brush with poverty as a child when his father was imprisoned for debt.

Forced to work in a blacking factory at the age of 12 or 13, he knew the horrors of penury and the dangers the streets posed to vulnerable children.

In the early 1840s, Dickens read two early drafts of reports from the Children’s Employment Commission. He was horrified by their accounts of child workers and the abuse they suffered in factories and coal mines.

Around the same time, he also visited a “ragged school” and was appalled by the conditions in which pauper children were expected to learn.

Dickens initially promised to write a pamphlet that would “appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s child”. A few days later, he backed away from that decision, writing to Thomas Southwood Smith, a doctor and prominent advocate for sanitation reform, about another idea.

The work he proposed instead would leave the reader feeling, as Dickens put it, “that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea”.

It is widely agreed the sledgehammer he referred to was A Christmas Carol. With its focus on the Cratchit family and the sickly Tiny Tim, whose illness is probably caused by malnutrition, Dickens’ message might easily have been lost to sentiment.

Yet at the centre of the story, when the mood of the Ghost of Christmas Present suddenly shifts from jovial to stern, Scrooge is introduced to a pair of children named Ignorance and Want.

Described as “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable”, these emaciated “ragged, scowling, wolfish” children are the product of an industrial society steeped in the greed and self-interest Scrooge embodies.

When Scrooge asks what will become of the children, the Ghost echoes the miser’s callous dismissal of the poor back to him: “Are there no prisons? […] Are there no workhouses?” The Spirit then warns of the havoc the children will cause if left to fend for themselves.

Today’s Dickensian world

It was a source of great frustration to Dickens that readers responded on an emotional level to his impoverished characters, yet took no action to improve conditions for their real-life counterparts.

Dickens sought to shock his readers by showing them the suffering at the heart of a prosperous nation. Nearly two centuries later, sadly, his ideas still resonate.

Globally, according to UNICEF, children are much more likely to live in poverty than adults. Like the real-life children Dickens encountered, their need takes different forms: lack of food, shelter or access to education and adequate health care.

The number of children living in poverty worldwide is estimated at almost 900 million, of whom 412 million are identified as existing in “extreme poverty”.

In Aotearoa New Zealand today, an estimated 14.3 % of children live in material hardship. In Australia, one in six children are identified as living in poverty. In the United Kingdom, an estimated four million children live in similar conditions.

Dickens might see other parallels, too. He believed his 19th century readers had retreated from the turmoil of public life into a more selfish, isolated existence.

That is certainly reflected in the new film’s emphasis on the character of Scrooge and the causes of his misanthropy.

Director Ti West’s adaptation follows earlier 20th century productions, such as Bill Murray’s updated Scrooged (1988) and Albert Finney’s musical version of the A Christmas Carol (1970), which shifted the focus to Scrooge, where it has remained ever since.

In fact, Victorian readers admired Scrooge’s hardworking, underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit, the father of Tiny Tim. For them, he was the story’s hero, and producers would cast leading actors in the role for theatrical adaptations.

Loyal, Christian and devoted to his family, Cratchit embodied what his culture labelled the “deserving poor”. Scrooge’s visitations thrilled readers and theatre audiences, but Bob and Tiny Tim captured their hearts.

For West, Bob’s story becomes secondary to his employer’s, and the film downplays the original emphasis on the Cratchit family and their virtues. Today’s preoccupation with Scrooge’s individual journey towards enlightenment is at odds with the the original story’s interest in the lives of the poor, and children in particular.

Were Dickens alive today, he would probably still hold to the hope that society’s priorities can change, and that want and ignorance can be consigned to the past where they belong.

Ebenezer is in cinemas now.

Grace Moore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.