Adapting A Christmas Carol
and the Character of Scrooge
There are so many riches in the Dickens story of A Christmas Carol that the adapter has any number of approaches and wealth of images to draw on for their individual focus. Scrooge’s ‘journey’ can be presented as a magical fantasy or as simply a dream, and even as a very real nervous breakdown. And the thematic focus of individual adaptations of the story can range from the spiritual to the economic. In some versions the Cratchit family feature strongly as almost the lead characters and in others they have minor supporting roles. And in the original Dickens text there are so many insights into Scrooge’s life and the lives of all the various characters that no one dramatised version could present them all.