Not even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come could have foreseen a Bollywood-inspired film or a hip-hop fantasy performance of A Christmas Carol. But these are the latest takes on Dickens’s much-adapted classic: Christmas Karma from Gurinder Chadha, the Bend It Like Beckham director, brings us Mr Sood, a Ugandan Asian refugee (played by Kunal Nayyar), who came to Britain in 1972; Ebony Scrooge transforms the old miser into a Dominican fashion diva at the recently opened Sadler’s Wells East, London.
We may think of Scrooge McDuck and the Muppets, but there was deep moral seriousness behind A Christmas Carol. Dickens had intended to write a political pamphlet entitled An Appeal on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, but instead decided to bury “the ghost of an idea” in a festive story. A Christmas Carol was written in six weeks and published on 19 December 1843, when Dickens was just 31. By Christmas Eve it had sold all 6,000 copies. By February 1844 there had been eight stage adaptations.
Now this 182-year-old novel is being retold as 21st-century migrant stories. It is not hard to see why: Scrooge’s Malthusian fears about “surplus population” and the Victorian belief that the poor should be punished are echoed in today’s anti-immigration rhetoric.
This Christmas has also brought the latest incarnation of the UK’s favourite furry asylum seeker – Paddington. The new musical knowingly updates Michael Bond’s 1958 original, inspired by child evacuees during the second world war. Here is multicultural London – albeit a wholesome Mary Poppins version with a carnival vibe, rather than the harsh reality experienced by most immigrants. A Peruvian bear who loves a cuppa, Paddington is unfailingly polite and eager to fit in. Embodying liberal and traditional values, he appeals to both sides of the culture wars. Only Paddington could have been invited to tea with the late Queen to celebrate the Platinum jubilee.
It is tempting to be cynical about such reboots, messing around with national treasures and promoting a tourist vision of London. Do we need a breakdancing Bob Cratchit or a performing Paddington? Chadha has defended her right to take on a classic in Christmas Karma. “We all did Dickens at school. We must find ways to own art and tell stories from our unique perspective,” she told Radio 4. Updating these stories keeps them alive.
The spirit of Dickens endures, and not just in adaptations. Former children’s laureate Michael Rosen and illustrator Helen Oxenbury (the duo behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt) have created a Christmas short story, Pax, about a modern family struggling to make ends meet. It is to be published in the Big Issue.
With record levels of child poverty in the UK, rising homelessness, extreme inequality and hostility towards immigrants, Christmas isn’t looking cheery for many. Theirs are the stories we need to hear. As the Ghost of Christmas Present is fading in Dickens’s novel, Scrooge spies two wretched children huddled in the spirit’s robe – a boy and a girl, Ignorance and Want. If society doesn’t look after its children (from darkest Peru or anywhere else) we cannot expect a better future.
In our secular, consumerist times, A Christmas Carol and Paddington deliver messages of tolerance and compassion, as well as the possibility of redemption and change, delightfully wrapped up in heartwarming stories. No wonder we keep coming back for more.
