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

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

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.

Was that Scrooged because I like that version of the story.

As for the language, I lived in a notorious area as a child and there was a lot of swearing. Yes, the respectable women in public rarely swore but if they were at home or in a throwdown fight with someone (earrings off, so pretty serious) then the language was coarse (she typed daintily).

I haven't seen it and I don't know if it was scheduled before or after the watershed (is that still a thing?) so intended for family consumption or not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There were black policemen in the Victorian Met (not many, but definitely a few).

I've seen references to port cities having black Dock Police Officers but didn't know that about the Victorian Met. A quick Google didn't return any hits for me so I'd be grateful for a reference.

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

‘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.

@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.

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

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.

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.

So from a quick google,slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. This would leave numbers of people who were former slaves, and their descendants, presumably. There might also be some further immigration in ports like London. It is plausible that there might be some interracial marriages, surely.

Every I don’t see Dev Patel as a one trick pony

A colleague said that to me about Benedict Cumberbatch and I didn’t agree with that either. Oh well.

So from a quick google,slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. This would leave numbers of people who were former slaves, and their descendants, presumably. There might also be some further immigration in ports like London. It is plausible that there might be some interracial marriages, surely.

I hate this assumption that all black people were slaves and only got to Europe via slave boats. There has been a vibrant and born free black community in London since Elizabethan times, or 15th C.

EveryI don’t see Dev Patel as a one trick pony

Each to their own. I've found him irritating and gormless in everything he's in Out of all the actors who could have been cast as Copperfield (Dickens) why pick him?

Colour blind casting is fine for Mrs Cratchit- no problem there but it's ridiculous virtue signalling in this case.

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.

Though... something like this could be plausible, and people might also question the thinking that went into the casting, because they have been sensitised to racialised casting. It can seem rather odd sometimes, weirdly deliberate, in some productions. There was that production of Troy recently that struck me that way. It seemed intended to be a sort of colour-blind casting which I could see for something so mythological, (though I did wonder what the Greeks thought of it.) And yet I wondered, given the demographics of the UK, if it wasn't actually quite improbable that a colour-blind casting would have looked like that. I don't actually know that, I didn't crunch the numbers or anything, and maybe the acting profession has a different ethnic demographic profile than the population as a whole, but it struck me more than once.

Is that a bad thing, I don't know, I'd have to know what they were trying to do. But I think many people see it in a similar way to things like affirmative action, they distrust it implicitly. And when people notice things like this, or have cause to think that it is going on sometimes, it tends to affect how they look at instances that aren't problematic as well.

Every maybe he was brilliant and the best when they were casting.

Maybe he has a thing like like Vivien Leigh virtually becoming Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois. Guess we’ll find out.

I think it’s complicated with classics. I’m glad that Maxine Peake and Cush Jumbo get to be Hamlet. Or indeed that Ben Kingsley got to play Gandhi.

Oh I should add

I think Elementary is one of the best TV shows we’ve had for years, and Watson being a woman was a big part of that.

I don't have a problem with "Buggar" being used by Mrs Cratchit. My Grandmother didn't really swear - but would call people Buggars - I think it was seen as rude but not really swearing. And it was years and years before I learnt what the word "meant", it was used more in the meaning "a nasty/annoying person".

@IlsSortLaPlupartAuNuitMostly It sort of is when people are practically rewriting history to suit modern political equality goals. Whilst I'm interested in undertold stories, you can't simply put BAME actors everywhere & anywhere in historical stories and expect people to be blind to the historical context.

My biggest issue with it wasn’t the inter racial marriage. It was the swearing, Tiny Tim’s letter from America, Scrooge’s moralising (he is supposed to be amoral) and Crachitt’s weirdly aggressive attitude.

It wasn’t Dickens. It was something else much more similar to Peaky Blinders. The language cadences were all wrong and odd, odd, odd.

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.

Same here. I don't think they were making any comment on the racial make up of Victorian London, accurate or otherwise. I just thought they did soi disant colour blind casting. Fine by me. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, including excellent performances by the cast, the swears, the cheeky fourth wall breaking at the end, and, well, just about everything about it (except the odd pacing - slow at the start, rushed at the end).