The Old Curiosity Club discussion
This topic is about
The Holly-Tree Inn
The Holly-Tree Inn
>
Our New Christmas Read
date
newest »
newest »
A new one for me. Looking forward to it.
Mod
Mod
,
Mary Lou
How’s grandma doing?
Thanks, Tristram. I found this in my Oxford Illustrated Dickens volume Christmas Stories. It is entitled The Holly Tree in my volume but has the 3 Branches so must be the same. I may have read it but not sure yet.
Thank you, Tristram, for the warm welcome back, and Peter for inquiring about my family reunion. It's been a delight to meet 3-month-old Margaret -- now dubbed Little Miss Mowcher ("Ain't I volatile?"), but also to get to know 3-year-old Nora again now that she has opinions and ideas, and is able to express them. I'm utterly smitten. See you all in December. :-)
Mod
Mod
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is probably one of the best-known stories in the entire world and is intextricably linked with Christmas, even to us who live more than 170 years after its first publication. Probably not half of the people who know the story do so because they have actually read the book but rather because they have watched one or another of the countless movie adaptations of Dickens’s classic, which it would be tiresome here to enumerate even partially. Some of these adaptations are rather faithful to the original, others take on a life of their own, as the 1988 Bill Murray comedy Scrooged or the legendary Muppets version, and as a result, one might think that everything has already been done in the way of putting Scrooge on the screen.
Has it really? Bharat Nalluri’s film The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) tries something new again in telling us the story behind that famous Christmas tale, or at least in telling us a story behind the Christmas classic, in that the film focuses on how Charles Dickens, at a time of personal and financial crisis, came to write one of his most famous and successful books despite all the apparent odds that were set against him.
Before coming to the movie itself, let me say some words about the literary source itself, which everybody thinks they know so well that no further word of explanation seems necessary. Published on 19 December 1843, A Christmas Carol marks the beginning of Dickens’s maturer works, with novels like Dombey and Son (started in 1846) that are far more complex in construction that his earlier, picaresque books, and whose characters are often more nuanced and ambivalent than his earlier creations. This can also be said of A Christmas Carol, whose major character Scrooge is often reduced to being a mean, cold-hearted miser in public folklore, and in many film adaptations. If you give this book a closer reading, however, you will discover that Scrooge’s love for money and his professed contempt for the world (and for Christmas) spring from a deeply-rooted feeling of anxiety, a distrust of the stability of human relations, and of the benevolence of life, and a yearning for some kind of security. Somehow, in his years of adolescence, Scrooge has let these darker feelings get the better of him, and so he sacrificed his engagement to the woman he loved to his strife for wealth, setting material values over the seemingly more fleeting values of the heart. He is a miser, granted, but in the first place, he is an insecure, doubting man who is afraid of life’s vicissitudes and of showing his emotions to others. In a way, this makes him a kinsman to many of us, and it is with great skill and psychological insight that Dickens undertakes the portrayal of this deeply vulnerable man. When you are reading the Christmas Carol next time, pay attention to how Scrooge became Scrooge, and you’ll be surprised at how cleverly and credibly Dickens let Scrooge grow out of a pitiable sense of distrust and self-embraced loneliness.
Why am I telling you all this? Simply because it will help you realise why I consider this film so well-devised, apart from its production values. Like Scrooge, the film depicts Dickens himself as a man haunted by past traumas, fears and resentment, even though unlike Scrooge they have not turned him into a blatantly dislikeable and anti-social person. And yet, in his heart of hearts, there is something amiss that, as his wife says, makes him a difficult person to live with because he generally casts a veil over his heart. Even in defiance of himself, as it seems, because it is only in the process of writing A Christmas Carol, as the film has it, that he becomes aware of the things he has suppressed and been hiding from himself so tenaciously. By and by, he realizes that he is still haunted by the memories of his time as a simple child-labourer in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, where he toiled in insalubrious circumstances, and that he resentment of his father not only stems from John Dickens’s attempts at scrounging on his celebrated son but probably mainly from the sense of betrayal he experienced when, a mere child, he was left alone to earn his own living while his parents and most of his siblings were taken into the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. As his friend Forster, to whom he confided this shameful and traumatizing episode of his early life, recalled, Dickens would often wonder how he “could have been so easily cast away at such an age”, and the sense of disentitlement at having to forego his schooling would sit deep within him for all his life. Interestingly, the film draws a parallel between Dickens’s growing awareness of the grudge he has been harbouring and his concomitant ability to finish his story on a conciliatory, Christmassy note and Scrooge’s incremental awareness of his own anxieties and doubts that made him worship before the Altar of Mammon, casting aside all chances of adequate social behaviour and interaction, and so it is fair to say that Scrooge’s redemption may mirror Dickens’s growing self-awareness.
Of course, it may not have happened like that but still, this theory is an apt illustration of how creativity is a matter of introspection, of coming to terms with the dark raging sea inside ourselves. Whatever there is too large, too dark, too dreadful in our souls prompts us to sing, to write, to paint, and sometimes, we are, at least temporarily, the better for it. The Man Who Invented Christmas ends on a placable note, with the Dickens family peacefully reunited for Christmas Eve, but viewers may not that real life did not take such an altogether happy turn for the Dickens family, because later, Dickens would grow sick of his wife and, as some sources suggest it, even contemplate putting her into an asylum. The sad conclusion to be drawn is that unlike Scrooge, Dickens did not manage to master the darker passions and hauntings of his heart – but that is another story.
Mod
Who is Deke Thornton? I don't feel like looking it up.
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
In times like these, I think that it is especially important to uphold the Spirit of the Christmas Season and to enjoy the time we have in the company of people we love. Therefore, I wish you all the best from the bottom of my heart! It has been a sad and troubling year, but our Dickens discussions in this choice company have always been a bedrock of sanity and joy for me. I hope that things will improve in 2021 and am sure that at least our Curiosity Club will remain a haven of insightful discussion and exchange.
By the way, it may well be that the last thread of the Holly-Tree Inn will not be opened before Monday because I don't think I'll find the time to write the recap in the next few days.
May God bless us all!
Tristram wrote: "Dear Curiosities,In times like these, I think that it is especially important to uphold the Spirit of the Christmas Season and to enjoy the time we have in the company of people we love. Therefor..."
My best to all of you, as well. Looking forward to sharing 2021 discussing Bleak House, my favorite, with the group.
Mod
Not so far.
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
As Christmas is coming closer, I would like to open our thread for our annual Christmas read, which I am hereby doing. It is a shorter piece called The Holly-Tree Inn and was written as a collaboration of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Howitt, Harriet Parr and Adelaide Proctor.
The reading schedule is as follows:
10/12/20 - 16/12/20 First Branch
17/12/20 - 23/12/20 Second Branch
24/12/20 - 30/12/20 Third Branch
I have got this story in my Delphi edition of the complete works of Dickens and don't know anything about it yet, but you can also find it on the Gutenberg site in case you have problems getting a print edition.