The 1951 film Scrooge is widely considered the best adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Despite considerable creative license taken by the director, Brian Desmond Hurst, I concur with this assessment. It is a rare instance of a movie improving on the original novel.
One such revision was the addition of the character Mr. Jorkin, who eventually buys out Fezziwig & Co. The pragmatic businessman woos the young Scrooge away from his apprenticeship to the kindly and sentimental Mr. Fezziwig. The following dialogue is entirely the work of screenwriter Noel Langley. Yet it is true, I think, to the Dickensian ethos.
Jorkin: “Mr. Fezziwig, we’re good friends besides good men of business. We’re men of vision and progress. Why don’t you sell out while the going’s good? You’ll never get a better offer. It’s the age of the machine, and the factory, and the vested interests. We small traders are ancient history, Mr. Fezziwig.”
Fezziwig: “Yes, l dare say we are. And the offer is a very large one, l have to admit. But it’s not just for money alone that one spends a lifetime building up a business, Mr. Jorkin.”
Jorkin: “Well, if it isn’t, l’d like you to tell me what you do spend a lifetime building up a business for?”
Fezziwig: “lt’s to preserve a way of life that one knew and loved. No, l can’t see my way to selling out to the new vested interest, Mr. Jorkin. l have to be loyal to the old ways and die out with them, if needs must.”
Is it inevitable that those ways must die out? The Christmas season perhaps reminds us that there are still opportunities to nurture and share our traditions with others. In the words of Samuel Johnson: “It is the duty of every man to endeavour that something may be added by his industry to the hereditary aggregate of knowledge and happiness. To add much can indeed be the lot of few, but to add something, however little, every one may hope…” (The Rambler, No. 129).
Related commentary: Dickens, Orwell and Others