Christmas Carol Criticised for Cratchit's Interracial Marriage

[ArranUpsideDown]

BBC's Christmas Carol is criticised for Cratchit's interracial marriage

As Vinette Robinson (Mary Cratchit) says, it's depressingly predictable

twitter.com/_vinette/status/1209496988120690690

But, it's given rise to a fabulous thread about magnificent women and interracial marriages from C18 onwards. I've certainly learned a lot (eg, Dumas, Pushkin, Coleridge-Taylor were all the children of interracial unions) and have a list of fabulous women that I want to learn more about in the near future.

twitter.com/WhoresofYore/status/1209240686937202695?s=20

See how you feel about Ma Cratchet being a Transgender woman next Christmas.

Really interesting. I love hearing about forgotten/unexpected lives from the past.

(Haven’t watched ACC though, so nothing to say about that)

Whoresofyore 's research and presentation is fab! 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.

Some gorgeous photos on that thread.

Makes me want to get out my family history stuff and bore the legs off everyone in the house

It's good, very dark.
I did like Vinette's reply about Miss Piggy too.

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.

Should we grant someone with a camera some temporary access to the MN portal?

children was that necessary? Saying interracial marriages are okay is nothing to do with the debate about the transgender movement cough cough, racist, much?

MIL has apparently been moaning that they have re-written it to make it more PC with bigger roles for women.

She's visiting tomorrow so I've genned up on the original plot which had a surprising amount of prominent female characters. She doesn't like me already so I've nothing to lose! her internal misogyny runs sadly deep

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

Yeh but what about the muppet Xmas carol. He’s a frog , she’s a pig and it still works 😂

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

A lot of American couples on that thread.

Somewhere in that thread a Breitbart writer makes the same point and Whores of Yore has a discussion about it with him. (I still have no idea how to see all of the separate discussions in a Twitter thread.)

Arran another couple of musicians/composers. The Chevalier At George, who as well as being a composer was a brilliant soldier and military strategist, as well as swordsman (taught Dumas senior to fence). And Bridgetower, the violinist for whom Beethoven originally wrote the Kreutzer sonata (they later fell out over a romance, hence the change in dedication).

There was a very sizeable black community in London in the late 18th/early 19th century. (And I seem to remember a programme on radio 4 about the history of the cowboy which pointed out 1 in 4 were black - the wild west wasn't the all-white environment portrayed in cowboy films). Arguably the casting of black actors, far from being historical revisionism, is actually a move towards reflecting the way things actually were.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

a progression...

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.

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.

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.