Christmas Carol Criticised for Cratchit's Interracial Marriage

My issue isn't the curious question 'Were there couples with black and white faces in Victorian times?' That's reasonable question.
It's when these things are presented as huffy outrage at 'being politically correct' and dismissing it as tick box equality quotas or whatever and getting angry about it. Once you've learned that such relationships existed, moving on is the only response that seems sensible and not rather uncomfortably racist.

Tbh, I loved the whole production, swears and all, and I've got no time at all for people treating Dickens' work like it's religious canon and the only worthy thing is to slavishly stick to the words on the page, or at least make sure it has a patina of sentimental 50's nostalgia for Victoriana.

It was a sanitised PC version, but not in the way most people are suggesting, i.e black actors. It sanitises poverty, the injustice of the class system, that people died who could have lived because of no money for proper food and health care, that people like Scrooge helped create the system and then had the audacity to blame the poor for being poor and unable to cope.

Were we watching the same version? The one shown for the first time this week went out of its way to show that Marley and Scrooge were directly responsible for the deaths of miners because of scrimping on health and safety. It was also made crystal clear that the Cratchits didn't have the money for Tiny Tim's operation, in spite of Cratchit having a full-time job, but Scrooge did. It was the least sanitised version of ACC I've ever seen.

Nobody turned a hair when they were a pig/frog inter species couple.

@GirlDownUnder:

I don't give a toss, frankly, about the ghosts or the tv show. However, if someone is going to appeal to history to mount a defence of said tv show, they'd better be damn sure that their defence is historically accurate and their sources are watertight. The argument presented is weak as piss, frankly, and if it being ripped apart further down the thread is "answering my point", I might wonder why so many people here are lauding the thread and its creator. Presumably you think the "answer" was good enough for me (but not for you?).

As a woman of colour, I get pretty tired of other people getting outraged on my behalf, and applauding weak appeals to history as if doing so gets you your woke badge. For the record, as a poc, I don't mind if someone thinks it odd to see a black woman in a Dickensian drama, or wants to question it. As a history graduate, I do mind if someone uses faux history to close down that question. I don't approve of the closing down of questions in any circumstance. People have a right to be curious.

‘If we want to tell historical stories while giving non-white actors a fair share of job opportunities then we’re probably going to need to statistically over-represent the BAME population of Victorian/Tudor/Medieval England a bit.’

Casting isn’t supposed to be fair.

I must say I hate Dickens for the way he treated his wife.

Some twit whined that she was showing only pics of couples from late 19th/early 20th century - she pointed out that photography wasn't available to the masses til later.

I recently went to see the Hogarth exhibition at Sir John Soane's museum. There are a surprising number of black men and women in his portraits of working-class life in 18th c London.

I hated the way they got rid of most of the Cratchet kids including the oldest daughter who was already in work, and the oldest son who was about to start on an apprenticeship and the family being glad because this meant extra income for the family. I hated the way they made Tiny Tim 'die' by way of tragic accident, as opposed to slow death by poverty.

It was a sanitised PC version, but not in the way most people are suggesting, i.e black actors. It sanitises poverty, the injustice of the class system, that people died who could have lived because of no money for proper food and health care, that people like Scrooge helped create the system and then had the audacity to blame the poor for being poor and unable to cope.

That's the BBC for you though.

Americans do sometimes lack an international perspective on these things. I remember a Doctor Who episode where Victorian characters expressed disbelief that Bill could be a cop because she was female. The US podcast I was listening to asked “why didn’t they mention that she’s also black?”, not realising that race was not an official bar to the British police force, but sex was. There were black policemen in the Victorian Met (not many, but definitely a few).

And yes there were interracial marriages in Victorian London. Unusual, but perfectly possible. If we want to tell historical stories while giving non-white actors a fair share of job opportunities then we’re probably going to need to statistically over-represent the BAME population of Victorian/Tudor/Medieval England a bit : it’s hardly a big deal. I only get a bit irritated when those characters are portrayed as a beacon of one-dimensional loveliness and competence, which does sometimes happen in well-meaning but rubbish TV, but not here, where Mrs C was a crunchy and fully rounded character.

Agree about the swearing- there’s no way a respectable middle class woman like Mrs Cratchitt would have said “fuck”, no matter what might have been said by dockers and factory workers.

I have no issue with black people in Dickens. It makes perfect sense.

I do take issue with people comparing the existence of black people with fantastical elements like ghosts.

Storytelling often involves both the reality of a culture and its mythology - ghosts, dragons, fairies, elves etc.

It is jarring and inappropriate if you are watching a story about the past of a culture including its mythology and there is a strange anachronism inserted, like a mobile phone.

Oh whoops, this thread isn't in Telly Addicts. Sorry for going off topic

The swearing bothered me, I have to admit. It just didn't feel right in a historical context and no respectable woman like Mrs Cratchit would have sworn like that, even to someone she hated as much as Scrooge.

I liked it though. Not quite as much as the Muppets and I will always love Carol Kane's violent ghost of Christmas Present more than is strictly necessary, but it did try to create a backstory for Scrooge that explained but didn't excuse him.

I watched the first episode last night and part of the second. It has its moments but large swathes of it are like watching paint dry- it's terribly dragged out.

So far the swearing isn't excessive apart from when Meets Mrs Cratchit calls Scrooge a miserable bugger in front of the children which jarred. I can accept an interracial Cratchit marriage but the Cratchits were a respectable, lower- middle class Victorian family and that seemed unnecessary and improbable.

I read something a while ago about swearing in cowboy movies. One of the things they said was that swearing was really tame, and it would look funny to us in a film, these tough earthy men using words we don't think of as really swear words at all.
In that sense I think you could say, sure, use some modern swearing to give it the feel of swearing even if it isn't strictly the words they would have used.

But other times you do get the sense that a production is adding certain elements to be modern and cool, or edgy, or woke. I find it's a distraction.

a progression...

Somebody moaned about the 'modern' swearing. Using that, you know, Anglo Saxon word fuck

That words are old though does not necessarily mean that people swore in Victorian times the way they do now. It's not uncommon for modern films to add a lot more swearing than would really be historically accurate in order to make things seem more gritty

My own personal experience of 60 years is people do swear far more and far more casually now and this has been a profession from about the 1980s.

There is a great deal of portraiture from before the purges that shows our interracial history.
I am not surprised that many USians think that if same sex and interracial marriages were illegal here they must have been illegal everywhere.
Santayana warned us about not learning history.

Somebody moaned about the 'modern' swearing. Using that, you know, Anglo Saxon word fuck.

That words are old though does not necessarily mean that people swore in Victorian times the way they do now. It's not uncommon for modern films to add a lot more swearing than would really be historically accurate in order to make things seem more gritty.

I'm not particularly bothered about what they do to A Christmas Carol. Along with The Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities it's my least favourite Dickens' novel.

A lot of American couples on that thread. Not the same demographic at all.

But you’re a ok with the 3 ghosts of Christmas?!

(Also as ArranUpsideDown points out, the twitter thread answers that for you)

Oh this shit annoys me so much. I remember the bloody kerfuffle a Doctor Who episode had when an elderly lesbisn couple were openly married and people had conniption fits. The same episode had an evolved cat married to a human woman and their babies, but no one had a peep to say about that.

As others have said, it's not even historically anachronistic, but you know what? I'm absolutely certain you can't find historical evidence for someone staying conscious in their grave for a year before getting wrapped in chains in purgatory and appearing to haunt their miserly friend.

If you want to read the book and imagine all the faces in your head as white, knock yourself out. But moaning about black faces appearing, under the guise of pontificating about historical accuracy, imo just reveals your heart, and I'd be pretty ashamed about getting cross because a black woman and a white man are presented as married.

I have to admit I will be avoiding Armando Ianucci's remake of David Copperfield because of Dev Patel being cast as Copperfueld (Dickens) Patel is an irritating, one- tricky pony actor at the best of times. I can't see any justification for casting him as Copperfield.

I haven't seen this version of A Christmas Carol.