I was wondering yesterday, if anyone had written an alternate version of dickens “a christmas carol” where scrooge was the “good guy”. a busy man surrounded by idiots. Cratchit is a poor employee and an awful father and fritters his check away on nonsensical whims causing his family to be malnourished, scrooges nephew is an annoying lush, etc. etc.
Surely such a thing exists ad im just having trouble finding it… And yes… im having a merry bah humbug this year. Thanks for asking.
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol is a bit like that: Ebenezer is a good guy who gets screwed over by everyone else.
Following in the footsteps of *Wicked, * this would be called Miserly.
I have seen a few columns written that have the ghosts coming back to Scrooge and telling him that this whole “keeping Christmas” thing has gotten waaayyy out of hand…
Also, Bob Cratchit is not really all that bad off. He obviously makes enough that his wife can be a SAHM. Only one of his several children has any health problems.
Doctor Who did an interpretation of A Christmas Carol a couple of years ago that was quite well received, even garnering a Hugo nomination. In this version, the Scrooge character is still an SOB but a visit to his past explains why.
There was an SNL skit with Danny DeVito as Scrooge a few years later. He was still nice … but just as broke as Cratchit, patched clothes, hovering near a meager fire. Cratchit noted that Scrooge had taken Tiny Tim out of the hospital, but Scrooge said, “They were just coddling him, we wasn’t going to get better there. The new hospital was a good one 'tho … still a good one” It was said with that special mix of Danny DeVito’s serious commitment with slight petulance. You get the point that Scrooge is still good, and everyone has taken advantage of him, and he just can’t be generous any more.
I recall a Playboy cartoon in the early 1960s of two guys in a gentlemen’s club discussing the book that way.
Tell me this is a whoosh.
:rolleyes:
in head about the blackadder special, and its on my list to watch, but id really like to see it played seriously, and not for laughs.
Tell me you not knowing it’s a whoosh is a whoosh.
"Then dear old Scrooge, bless his heart, turned to Bob Crachitt and snarled, ‘One more word out of you and you’ll keep Christmas by losing your situation!’ "
– Chas Addams
No, I’m serious. In Dickens’ time, except for the wealthy, everyone in the family was normally at least attempting to be employed, and death in childhood was extremely common. Mrs. Cratchit from all appearances is not taking in piecework or working outside the home. How many children did they have? Five? Six? All but one were healthy. IIRC the oldest daughter is employed, and the oldest son is about to become so.
In one of Burr Schafer’s cartoons, J. Wesley Smith remarks, “It’s the story of a worthy banker named Scrooge who degenerates into a sentimental weakling.”
Since Mrs Cratchit’s only appearance is on Christmas Day, you’d hardly expect her to have any piecework on hand at the time, and I’m not sure how you deduce she never has any other or, indeed, doesn’t work outside the home. The oldest daughter is indeed employed (in a hat-shop) and only gets home for Christmas dinner after she’s done tidying up at work. We know “Master Peter” is about to find paid employment; we also know that in spite of all this Bob is still the family’s major breadwinner on fifteen shillings a week.
The Cratchits aren’t the poorest of the poor by any means; they’re able to live together in a house (undoubtedly rented) that they can keep respectably clean, but they also don’t have two matching pieces of glassware to drink their Christmas toasts out of. And they can afford a Christmas goose, by dint of scrimping and saving and making do with a bird that will just about stretch to all of them.
They do seem to have been lucky enough to avoid childhood deaths, since the Christmas Future scene has Bob referring to “this first parting among us”. On the other hand, perhaps the still births and babies that died without knowing their own names weren’t counted.
Heard a story on NPR about how if you look at the details in a historical context, the Cratchits are actually fairly well off for a large family at the time. Bob makes 14 schillings a week with the average accounting clerk salary at that time being 11.
I’ve started writing one of these; it’s getting to be longer than I had planned, and I’m liking it more and more. Hopefully it’ll be done by next Christmas.
Thank you! I’ve tried to find that for years!
<spittake>
Awesome!