The Greatest Victorian Storyteller
Charles Dickens was so influential that we named an adjective after him. “Dickensian” means a whole world: grim poverty, sharp characters, social injustice, and stubborn hope. Few writers ever become a word.Share on X
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, and he’s generally considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He wrote Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, and the one almost everyone meets first, A Christmas Carol.
His own childhood fed the work. When Dickens was twelve, his father went to debtors’ prison, and the family pulled young Charles out of school and put him to work in a boot-blacking factory. That humiliation and that close-up view of poverty never left him, and it shows up everywhere in his fiction, in the workhouses and orphans and desperate families. He wrote about the poor because he’d been one.
He became so identified with a certain world of grim streets and sharp characters and social injustice that we turned his name into an adjective. When something is “Dickensian,” everyone knows what you mean. Very few writers ever become a word.
Watch: Charles Dickens Documentary (Full Biography), Mind Palace
And I Thought It Was Mediocre
I was forced to read A Christmas Carol in grade school and remember nothing about it except that I had to. School has a gift for making great books feel like a chore. It did it to me with Dickens.Share on X
Here’s my honest history with Dickens, and it starts badly.
I was forced to read A Christmas Carol in grade school, and I found it mediocre. I remember almost nothing about that experience except the fact that I had to do it. The book made no impression on me at all beyond being an assignment.
I had slightly better luck with a dumbed-down version from the Scholastic Book Club, one of those simplified editions they sold to kids.
Stripped down and easier to get through, I liked that one a little more. But still, this wasn’t a writer who grabbed me. Dickens, at that age, was just more required reading.
What I did enjoy, even then, was the television. Every year my family watched a black and white version of A Christmas Carol on TV, almost certainly the 1951 British film with Alastair Sim, the one that became the classic.
I don’t remember choosing it or thinking much about it. It was just a thing we did every year, part of the season, and it was always fun. The story reached me through a yearly ritual on a black and white screen long before it reached me on the page.
Then I Got Older, and the Story Got Better
Something changed as I aged. The story I shrugged off as a kid became interesting to me as an adult.
I love A Christmas Carol now. I love the structure, the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, and the whole machine of a hard man being shown his life and given a chance to change.
As a kid I couldn’t see any of that. As an adult I see why it’s lasted almost two hundred years. And I’ve become a complete sucker for the adaptations. I think I’ve seen nearly every version of A Christmas Carol ever made, and there are a lot.
The Alastair Sim classic. George C. Scott’s excellent 1984 version. The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine playing it completely straight surrounded by felt puppets, which somehow works perfectly. Animated ones, modern ones, stage ones. I’ll watch a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol any day of the week. The bones of the story are so strong that they hold up no matter who’s wearing them.
The Bill Murray One
My favorite of the bunch might be Scrooged, the 1988 version with Bill Murray. It drags the story into modern times, with Murray as Frank Cross, a cruel, cynical television executive who gets the full three-ghosts treatment. It’s hilarious from start to finish. It’s a great movie.
Here’s the funny part. I’m not really a Bill Murray fan, because Bill Murray plays Bill Murray in everything. Once you’ve seen him in a few films, you’ve seen the whole act, the same dry, smirking guy in every role. That’s a complaint I have about a lot of actors, the ones who never disappear into a part and just keep playing themselves.
But every so often the role and the actor line up perfectly, and the thing I usually find tiresome becomes exactly right. Murray in Groundhog Day is one. Murray in Scrooged is the other. Sometimes the persona is the perfect fit, and when it is, I’m all in.
The Weird Ones, and a Question
Part of what I love about A Christmas Carol is how strange some adaptations get, and the weird ones often work best. The Muppets doing Dickens shouldn’t work and does.
People keep finding new angles on the same plot, and the strangeness is half the fun. It makes me wonder about the edges of the genre.
Is something like The Nightmare Before Christmas a Christmas Carol spinoff? Not really, if we’re honest. That’s Tim Burton’s own original story. But it lives in the same neighborhood, that odd corner where Christmas meets the gothic and the slightly spooky, a corner Dickens helped build.
A Christmas Carol is a ghost story, after all. We forget that because we think of it as heartwarming, but Dickens wrote it with chains and specters and a terrifying vision of your own grave. The spooky Christmas tale owes him a debt even when a given film isn’t adapting him directly.
What can writers learn from Charles Dickens?
For a writer, A Christmas Carol is a near-perfect machine, and the lessons are clear. The first is structure. The whole story runs on one of the cleanest structures ever built.
Three ghosts show a man his past, his present, and his future, and what he sees changes him. That three-part shape is so strong that it survives any setting, any tone, any cast, puppets included. Build a structure that solid and people can retell your story forever.
The second is the redeemable character. Scrooge works because he changes, and we believe it. Dickens makes the transformation believable by showing us exactly how Scrooge got cold in the first place, the lost love, the lonely boy, the choices. A change the reader believes is among the most powerful things in fiction, and it only works if you set it up first.
The third is the lesson of my own life with this book. A great story can wait for you. I hated A Christmas Carol at twelve and love it at sixty.
The fault was never the book. I just wasn’t ready. That matters both as a reader, before you write something off, and as a writer, because you never know when your work will finally land for someone who first met it and shrugged. So on February 7, raise a glass to Charles Dickens. Then go watch any version of A Christmas Carol you like, the older the better, or the stranger the better. The man built something durable enough to survive all of them.