There’s A Version of A Christmas Carol Where Scrooge is an Attempted Rapist

Adaptations and What They Mean

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I’m obsessed with A Christmas Carol. 

This is probably my least academic opinion, but next to A Tale of Two Cities it’s by my favorite Dickens. I love the tight cleanness of the story, and the grandiose characterizations, and the big, plainly-drawn themes. I think it’s just great. 

And I know I have a lot of company in loving this story. I probably have even more company among people who love the adaptations. Most people’s first exposure to A Christmas Carol isn’t actually the book itself, it’s one of its many film adaptations, or possibly its prominent place as a yearly staple in local theater (there are three productions of A Christmas Carol going on in my metro area this week). This is a story that gets told a lot, and by virtue of telling it a lot, it changes. The story of A Christmas Carol necessarily changes when it makes the jump from text to script, from script to screen, or from script to stage. Descriptions of images on the page have to become images we can actually see with our eyes. Adaptational choices have to be made, scenes taken out, sometimes scenes added in. There’s a core of the story that remains, but in order to tell it ourselves, the story does have to change. 

But what happens when the story really changes? What happens when someone very deliberately makes the choice to tell this story in a way that doesn’t blend in well with previous versions, or is even radically different from the source text itself? 

Most of us know the story of Scrooge. Scrooge owns a business (in the book it’s not clear, but in most adaptations he’s a moneylender or does something with real estate) with one clerk, Bob Cratchit. Scrooge pays him terribly and makes his life miserable by keeping his office incredibly cold and unpleasant. Scrooge’s primary flaws are twofold: above all he is miserly, mercilessly hounding people who are behind on payments to Scrooge and hoarding wealth, and secondarily he is misanthropic and isolated, having no real relationships.

People often instinctively describe Scrooge as “greedy” but this actually doesn’t quite capture the peculiarity of Scrooge’s problem. Scrooge is greedy insofar as he refuses to give to charity, and justifies this in Malthusian terms – it’s better for people to go to poorhouses and prisons or simply die rather than drag down society as sponges. But it’s particularly important to know that Scrooge is not greedy the way we would normally think of greed. Scrooge has money, hoards money, and pursues more money – but he doesn’t enjoy a penny of it. Scrooge lives miserably, working in a cold office, living in a dark house, eating the cheapest and worst meals at taverns, and never spending a cent he doesn’t have to. Scrooge is not in pursuit of money for the sake of hedonism – he’s into money for itself. He just wants to have it. This is one of his primary objections to Christmas – people spending money for pleasure and community, when a smart person would simply keep it. 

Because of this it’s actually hard to tell exactly how much money Scrooge has. Because he lives cheaply, we actually see very little evidence of Scrooge’s wealth. We also know that he certainly didn’t come from wealth – he can plausibly claim to have earned every cent he has. Scrooge may appear in some versions (and your local community theater productions) as a snarling ogre and his namesake Scrooge McDuck from Disney literally goes swimming in a vault of money every day. Ebeneezer Scrooge actually may be more relatable, and more convicting, to a broader audience if we don’t really think of him as either extravagantly wealthy nor as monstrously evil. He’s a misanthropic grouch, with ideological reasons to justify his lack of charity, who drives his workers excessively hard, and whose harshest words are reserved for how own family (Ebeezer doesn’t spout off the “boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart” at anyone who walks through the door, he saves that edge for his only living relative).

This is all flawlessly executed in The Muppet Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge (played by an extraordinarily game Michael Caine, making acting look easy) is staged as primarily taciturn. He has only occasional, jarring explosions of anger, which are played straight. The comedy from his grouchiness comes from his fuzzy costars, not any mugging on Caine’s own part. His “humbugs” are unpunctuated by “bah’s,” and his first “humbug” of the movie – and his first line – is muttered gravely to himself. You’ve probably met someone who reminds you of Michael Caine’s Scrooge. You might even do it yourself. He’s not a cartoonish Grinch. He’s just difficult, self-absorbed, and unhappy.

Scrooge’s joylessness in his money is also perfectly conveyed through the sets and costumes. His house is staged as a massive, yawning, empty, dark set. Scrooge rattles around in ratty pajamas, eating miniscule amounts of food off of what looks to be his only plate, sitting on one of his few pieces of furniture in front of a tiny fire. Scrooge doesn’t really do the things that would usually trip an audience’s obvious disgust for him, such as living lavishly in front of a street of homeless people or eating like a king in front of his starving workers. In fact, a certain kind of thrifty filmgoer might even admire Scrooge’s spartan lifestyle. Scrooge lives as though he is poor, with full knowledge that he could use his money to benefit people who live worse than him but don’t do so by choice. The incredible irony is that, despite his vast fortune, Scrooge visibly lives worse than Bob Cratchit (by way of Kermit), whose family prepares a “meager feast” with tremendous fanfare that apparently smells great and looks amazing. The Cratchits don’t have money, but they do enjoy what they have and they use it to create the happiest life they can for the kids. 

Of course Scrooge’s life is interrupted by the arrival of his partner’s ghost. In life he was Jacob Marley, and he comes to announce the appearance of three spirits: Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future. The spirits warn that condemnation awaits Scrooge and countless others like him, who could have served their fellow man but did not. The spirits warn Scrooge but also use visions to elucidate his character, who he is, why he is the way he is, what other options are available to him, and what awaits him if he does not change.

The Christmas Past sequence is in particular double-edged for characterizing Scrooge and laying the groundwork of how he will have to change to redeem himself. On one hand, like all the spirits, the Christmas Past sequence convicts Scrooge for his behavior. We find out that Scrooge’s selfishness and drive to gain more and more actually cost him the one woman he ever actually loved. Obsessed with gaining more financial stability before he marries, Scrooge continuously prolongs his engagement until his fiancee finally grows tired of waiting for him, and sees his delay as a sign of him becoming a person she no longer wants to marry. But even more so, the Christmas Past sequence explains why Scrooge is the way he is. In the movie The Muppet Christmas Carol, we get hints – Scrooge spends every holiday alone at school to work harder than anyone else, ultimately securing an apprenticeship thanks to the assistance of Sam the Eagle.

But in the book, Dickens actually fills in the details so we can know Scrooge better, man. Scrooge was born into a middle-class family where he received little nurture and rarely left his boarding school. Only late in his childhood does his father, who his sister reports has become “much kinder,” consent to allow Scrooge to come home. Scrooge’s one close relation is his sister Fanny, who dies giving birth to her son Fred. Scrooge has grown up in a world where there is no security and where relationships cannot be trusted. He comes from a background of loss, lack, mistrust, isolation, and fear. His obsessive drive to gain more and simply keep it – rather than enjoy it – seems to be a reaction to this. Scrooge wants to be someone who can take care of himself. He looks down on people who can’t take care of themselves, or want more out of life than scraping by with a survivalist’s mentality. If he can do it, why can’t everyone? If he doesn’t need or want family, community, celebration, joy, pleasure, or variety, why should anyone else have it?

Scrooge is a broken man who is broken in a very predictable, mundane way. He isn’t a survivor of catastrophe. Instead, like a lot of us, he’s a survivor of the everyday ways the world is cruel to children. Scrooge’s trauma is not treated as an excuse – his treatment of his fiancee was still a foolish and hurtful choice and everything he’s done since is even worse. Instead, it’s treated as an explanation that reveals to Scrooge why he does what he does, and offers him a real possibility to change it.

Scrooge’s transformation at the end of the story is therefore both economic and personal. Scrooge makes a massive donation to the charity directors he scorned at the beginning of the movie, pays Bob more, and becomes something of a sponsor for the Cratchit family – improving their quality so much that Tim survives his illness. For Scrooge, this is a bigger move than simply moving from coldness to generosity – it’s also a real act of vulnerability. Scrooge stops using his money to protect himself and starts using it to protect others. He also takes steps to have relationships again after a lifetime of heartbreak and isolation. Previously, Scrooge only ever had two relationships that seem to have been safe for him at all – one with his fiancee, who left him because of his behavior, and one with his sister, who died suddenly decades ago. For Scrooge to decide to get close to his nephew and to accept the hospitality of the Cratchits, who welcome him as a new honorary Cratchit, is an act of profound bravery on Scrooge’s part. Scrooge had kept himself isolated with his money because his trauma taught him that was the only safe option. Now he does neither. 

I’m reminded of a famous C.S. Lewis quote from The Four Loves when I think of Scrooge’s choice to join his own family and also a second at the end, and the obvious pain in his past that kept him away from both families in the first place: 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Scrooge’s economic vulnerability thus can’t be separated from his personal vulnerability. Scrooge takes a chance that, once he’s given his money away, it may not be there to save him. He also takes a chance at relationships again. Scrooge’s heart has already been broken a thousand times, sometimes owing to his own mistakes but usually not. Scrooge gives up his self-protection and his isolation to help others, and also simply to become a fully vulnerable human again. Scrooge can’t know that his nephew won’t hurt him, or that Tiny Tim won’t die too soon, or that the people around him won’t hurt him in the ways he hasn’t. He takes that chance. And he also takes the chance that if those things do happen, he won’t be able to cocoon himself in bottomless money.

Scrooge’s story is most frequently staged and described as a story of softening – his heart grows three sizes one day, to steal a line from a different Christmas classic. He develops compassion and empathy. But I also think these themes are impossible to separate from bravery, given Scrooge’s background. Scrooge takes a courageous step from security to vulnerability, and he gets love and community in return.

So with all this in mind: does the story of A Christmas Carol change if Scrooge gives up his money but does not develop a restored relationship with the Cratchits and his family? What if Scrooge makes economic restitution for his wrongs, but doesn’t join a family? Does the nature of his courage change? Does the story still work?

Well, interestingly enough, we have a test case. It’s the 2019 A Christmas Carol.

The Dark Gritty Christmas Carol Reboot

The 2019 adaptation of A Christmas Carol is a three-part BBC/FX miniseries starring Guy Pearce as Ebeneezer Scrooge and written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). This version is an unapologetic rejection of A Christmas Carol’s long reception history as a Christmas family story, featuring adult language, violence, sexual assault, nudity, and heavy borrowing from the horror genre – particularly ghosts and demonic/hellfire imagery. You might say that this Christmas Carol is a return to spooky form for the story. 

I’m not mad at the idea of remaking A Christmas Carol as a true horror picture – hell, just about every version of the story features at least one scary spirit in the Christmas Future sequence. Even the Muppet version is creepy. The issue with this movie isn’t that it was scary when it shouldn’t be. It isn’t even that it has very little in common with the original novel. 

It’s… well, it’s all the other stuff. 

It turns out to make a dark, gritty Christmas Carol, you need a lot more darkness and grittiness than just the ghosts can provide. Here the biggest creepy-crawly of the story isn’t the Ghost of Christmas Future. It’s just SCrooge. There are several major changes that Steven Knight made to the story, and all of these changes move the needle on other things that need to change to accommodate the changes that came before them. The sum ends up being quite a bit less than its parts. 

The change first is that 2019 Scrooge is much, much worse. Scrooge’s economic interests are drawn in much more detail in this version and his investments and ownership of a range of businesses is part of the story. Thus, his particular responsibility for mine collapses, factory fires, and manufacturing injuries is much more explicitly drawn. Scrooge doesn’t only impoverish and degrade people, he kills them. This is played out in several graphic and disturbing sequences where we see scores of people die in Scrooge-owned businesses. 

Also this guy was supposed to be played by Rutger Hauer (RIP)

I don’t want to downplay the extent to which Scrooge causes misery and suffering in the original book, because Dickens surely doesn’t. But it does hit very differently to actually listen to a woman burn alive because of Scrooge, rather than to simply be aware that Scrooge’s dealings can cause such suffering. Secondly, while Scrooge’s economic dealings in all adaptations make him morally monstrous, in his 2019 incarnation his personal life is just as bad. In the original book, Scrooge’s personal miserliness causes largely incidental consequences for everyone around him – Bob Cratchit isn’t just poor, he’s also miserable at work because the counting house is freezing, as Scrooge doesn’t heat it. In the 2019 version, Scrooge quite intentionally sets out to cause shame, humiliation, and pain to others for no real reason besides sadism. 

The scene where this is made clear is when, two years after Tiny Tim’s birth, Mrs. Cratchit goes to Scrooge to beg for thirty pounds for an operation for her sickly son. Scrooge agrees to give her the money on the condition that she comes to his home on Christmas Day. Scrooge uses the money to force her to admit he would be willing to have sex with him for the money, and makes her demonstrate this by requiring her to remove her clothes and deliberately taking as long as possible to raise as many suspicions with Bob about where she has been on Christmas. Scrooge does not actually rape her, though he makes it as clear as he can that he’s absolutely able to do such a thing. Instead he simply frames this as an “experiment.” He is simply curious if he can use money to buy his employee’s wife’s fidelity and is interested in the fact that he can create a “human exchange rate.” He takes no pleasure or interest in actual sex, simply the humiliation and the experience of making people into goods for sale. 

So this Scrooge isn’t only a miser and misanthrope, he’s a thoroughgoing monster who relishes sexually humiliating people for cash.

The pins that have to be moved to accommodate a monster Scrooge are twofold. The first is backward-looking: the causes of his behavior are much more extreme than in past versions. The second is forward-looking: Scrooge’s consequences are lifelong and permanent, as there is no future where he can be meaningfully reconciled to someone he’s sexually victimized.

We’ll start with the backward-looking first. The 2019 Scrooge is actually a survivor of extensive childhood sexual abuse, in which his father trafficked him for money and school fees to a twisted schoolmaster. Scrooge’s pleasure in sexually humiliating Mrs. Cratchit for cash is a response to his own childhood trauma where he himself was a commodity, and he relishes in making other people commodities for him. This is where Scrooge developed his transactional view of the world – if he represented only money to his family, then other humans represent only money to him. This backstory isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but it does make for pretty heavy, grim viewing. I wouldn’t blame people for feeling it was excessive, especially since the addition of childhood sex abuse material seems primarily added to explain the adult sex abuse material. Neither subplot is particularly interesting or feels necessary to watch. Likewise, the abuse/abuser dynamic does change Scrooge’s arc significantly from the source material– instead of going from a lonely childhood to a lonely adulthood to integration into a family, Scrooge goes from victim to victimizer to… well, I suppose a lonely adulthood, as we’ll see.  

So that brings me to consequences. 

Scrooge is a sexually exploitative monster who humiliates and tricks Mrs. Cratchit. Thus, there’s no possibility of Scrooge having a restored relationship with the Cratchit family. Because of this, Scrooge’s redemption is at a wide distance from the Cratchit family. Bob Crachet ultimately quits his job and he and Scrooge go their separate ways forever at the end of the story. This introduces the problem that Scrooge has to find some path to redemption and restoration – but it can’t have anything to do with a continued relationship with the Cratchit family. 

The new pin that is moved to accommodate this is that Tiny Tim no longer dies as a predictable result of poverty, sickness, pollution, and so forth. Instead he dies from ice skating on a ditch near their home, where he falls through the ice. Rather than providing the long-term support Tim would need to survive as a chronically ill child (which, in the book, comes alongside Scrooge becoming Tim’s “second father”), Scrooge buys a small bag of gravel and scatters it on the ice to remove the risk to children. This is incredibly underwhelming, as our Scrooge is largely gratified (cratified) by the small amount of money he needs to invest in only a bag of gravel to save human lives. (Unintentional hilarious atrocity: he steals the gravel). This doesn’t really feel like a new leaf for Scrooge – Scrooge’s whole thing is spending small amounts of money for large amounts of gain, and having money he never enjoys. This simply isn’t a big move forward for Scrooge. He closes his business and writes the Cratchits a massive check (not clear what’s going to happen to all the businesses he’s divesting himself from), and he explains this to the Cratchits in a moment that seems to confuse and alarm them more than move them. Multiple members of the Cratchit family express concern he is drunk or high. 

And so, Scrooge’s redemption, such as it is, requires little thoroughgoing financial sacrifice. He apparently has hundreds of employees but only makes restitution to one. The deal he cuts with the spirits still suggests he’s still going to die next year – he lives about a year in retirement instead, which diminishes the theme of economic justice that is so central to the original text. And it requires no dramatic change of heart that presses him towards community with others instead of isolation. He remains removed from the families around him, who explicitly deny him forgiveness and seem more frightened by his behavior than touched. 

The consequence of Worse Scrooge are that Scrooge’s consequences are worse – no redemption with the Cratchits, and (though it’s a bit of an afterthought), he actually never talks to Fred again. Fred cuts him off early in the story, after their first and only meeting in the counting house. So Scrooge ends up making only minimal restitution, and there’s very little concrete evidence of his repentance in the flourishing of the Cratchit family. Instead Scrooge goes off by himself, unforgiven by the Cratchits, apologetic for what he has done and getting an excellent rate of exchange for Tim’s life in exchange for a bag of gravel. 

The tremendous irony is that this adaptation adds so much darkness and evil to the Scrooge story but does not add more meaning. A worse Scrooge does not produce greater redemption – it produces less. Scrooge’s greater violence does not bring greater goodness, it brings much less. And I understand that this was the point of this adaptation – a much worse man is able to bring only small amounts of good from a life changed at the eleventh hour. But it just doesn’t have the emotional heft of the real A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge does change completely and does bring complete good to all around him. 

A major motif of the 2019 version is a boy who comes every Christmas to pee on Marley’s grave, in revenge for his father’s death in a Scrooge-Marley mine. In the future, the boy now comes to pee on Scrooge’s too. Scrooge of the future accepts that this urine-soaked imminent grave is all he deserves, and only attempts to save Tim’s life. There is no indication that his fate can be avoided, and that the writing (and pee) can be sponged from the stone. It is simply that Tim can be kept alive – but still in poverty. 

Scrooge’s redemption is so small, costing him so little,¹ and the gains are so little in comparison to the monstrosities he has committed. It is what it is, but what it isn’t is A Christmas Carol. 

So is it better?

I don’t think so. I think the issue here is that ultimately adding dark tones to a story usually serve some purpose towards greater meaning, or to foreshadow greater redemption. For instance, the violence in The Exorcist raises the stakes and makes the heroism of the priests far more pronounced – we see why their courage is so necessary and so difficult, because the scale of the evil is so pronounced. Same with the violence in the book and movie of Silence – if the tortures undergone by the persecuted church weren’t so severe, Father Rodrigues’ crisis of faith and harrowing decisions would not seem so urgent. But at least in this telling, more darkness in A Christmas Carol only leads to more darkness. 

It’s okay to adapt and change stories. But the changes made for an adaptation need to stand on their own, and not be changes for their own sake. There are lots of adaptations of A Christmas Carol that make significant changes, and many of them add tremendously to the story they’re telling. Gonzo as a narrator in A Muppet Christmas Carol allows for the film version to contain more of Dickens’ prose than most movie versions, without awkwardly rewriting the dialogue to have characters spout off such memorable lines as “he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.” The humor of the puppet performances makes Caine’s performance look all the more solemn and weighty – he’s the best film Scrooge, and I’d argue it’s not even a close competition. There are dozens of musical versions of A Christmas Carol that add color and emotion to the story – “Marley and Marley” is hilarious in addition to being genuinely creepy, and economically introduces us to the characters of the kinds of people Scrooge has surrounded himself with. You absolutely can make changes – but they need to be good changes, and the story that a storyteller tells has to work on its own. 

But more darkness doesn’t make more meaning. Sometimes more meaning can come from the most unlikely of places. Like Beaker giving Michael Caine his subtle, but incredibly vibrant costume change.

That’s a really good movie. 

1. To be very fair, Scrooge does make a major sacrifice by offering to sacrifice himself in the place of Tim, but the sacrifice is only potential. Scrooge does not actually sacrifice himself, it’s simply meaningful that he wishes to.