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We’ve got Charles Dickens to thank for the ‘EastEnders Christmas Special’; for family squabbling and unwanted relatives and sprout bloat and a month-long hangover and being bullied into wearing stupid jumpers to work ‘for charity’. Okay, he may not technically be – as the new film claims – ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’, but Chuck D did a hell of a lot to define Yuletide as central to our idea of family, society and community.
The Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury always goes full-Christmas (how could it not?) but this year it’s also got a special exhibition looking at the background to ‘A Christmas Carol’, with costumes from the Dan Stevens-starring film dotted throughout Charlie’s handsome townhouse. Scrooge and Tiny Tim and ‘God bless us, every one’ may have entered popular culture, but ‘A Christmas Carol’ started life as an impassioned and very un-festive polemical pamphlet railing against the iniquities of child labour.
Dickens, though, was a canny lad, and realised that the British public – though often goodhearted and charitable in theory – sometimes failed to convert their good intentions and pony up either action or cash. So he turned his idea into the most famous Christmas story ever, raising awareness of the plight of the poor and restocking his own coffers at the same time. See this show – it’s the perfect time of year to go round Dickens’s house – and then remember the hopeful faces of the meek and lowly when you’re sulking over the chestnut stuffing about not getting an iPhone X in your stocking.