The Story Behind Dickens' 'Christmas Carol'

Mitchell Kaplan, left, and Les Standiford lecture on Sea Cloud Spirit (Photo by Gerry Barker)

By GERRY BARKER
North Palm Beach Life

There aren't many people on the planet who haven't read, seen or know about "A Christmas Carol." Charles Dickens' classic story about the power of redemption has not been out of print since its initial publication in 1843, not to mention countless adaptations for film, TV, stage -- even operas and a video game.

What you may not know as well is the story behind the novella, and how it changed the way we celebrate the holidays.

When author Les Standiford learned the surprising backstory of how Dickens' Christmas classic came to be, he was inspired to chronicle it in his 2008 non-fiction book, "The Man Who Invented Christmas," which was made into the 2017 movie by the same name starring Dan Stevens and Christopher Plummer.

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Charles Dickens

Recently, Standiford and close friend Mitchell Kaplan, one of the film's producers and owner of Books & Books independent book stores, based in Miami, were onboard the sailing yacht Sea Cloud Spirit to talk about both the book and the movie in a series of lectures.

"I wanted to start making movies from books because so many movies come from books," said Kaplan at a screening of the movie. So he and a partner started a company in Los Angeles that has made four films to date, the first of which was based on Standiford's book. "It shows how you can take a non-fiction book and adapt it into a narrative film that is really quite compelling."

Standiford talked about how Dickens, beset with financial problems and discouraged with his writing career, had to see "A Christmas Carol" to print by putting up his own money after his publishers turned it down. "To imagine Charles Dickens ever had a tough time as a writer, to imagine Charles Dickens' publishers said no to the most popular Christmas story ever told and the best-selling novel of all time, was astonishing to me."

He was even more surprised that no one had collected those facts into a book. "I told my agent I'm going to write this book and it's going to do well." The other reason he wrote it? "It's one of the great stories of writer's revenge I have ever seen."

Not long after it was published in 2008, it was optioned for a film. "The movie didn't come out until 2017, so that gives you some idea of what the development time in Hollywood is," he said.

Kaplan noted that two of the actors who appear in the film are in real life devotees and scholars of Dickens: Miriam Margolyes, who plays Mrs. Fisk, the housekeeper, co-wrote and performed a solo show, "Dickens' Women," exploring their lives and stories, and Simon Callow, who wrote a biography of Dickens and performs his work onstage, plays Leech, the book's illustrator.

While the film may take dramatic license on occasion, Stevens, who plays Dickens, had this to say: "Frankly, whether it's historically accurate, I'm not that concerned about. I was interested in that moment of the creative process, watching a great man struggle – to me, that's dramatically and comedically interesting. Certainly, I was keen not to play Dickens as a bearded old sage."

Said Standiford: "It's not simply Mitchell and I who think this is a decent movie. It's been named as the most underrated Christmas movie of the 21st century and on a number of '10 Best' Christmas films of all time."

That's something that would even make old Scrooge sit up and smile.

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