More Favorite Scrooges

The following post was written by Matt Barton and Laura Jenemann.

Do you have a favorite version of “A Christmas Carol” or a favorite “Ebenezer Scrooge?” We do too: many of them! In fact, back in 2014, we wrote about one of our favorites Scrooges: Lionel Barrymore. In this post, we’ll discuss even more Scrooges, and  revisit Lionel Barrymore.

First published in 1843, “A Christmas Carol” was an immediate hit, and within weeks unauthorized stage versions were drawing huge audiences in England and, soon after, in the United States. Dickens performed it himself on his reading tours, and it was a staple of “Magic Lantern” shows before the arrival of sound recordings and movies in the late 19^th century.

The earliest film version of “A Christmas Carol” was released in 1901. “Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost” (1901) was only about five minutes long, of which about three and a half minutes survive in the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive.

Short films like this were typical of the day, and it would be a while before anyone made a feature length version that could tell the full story. But this film and the many versions that appeared throughout the next thirty years were short for another reason: they were based on a stage version that greatly truncated and simplified the Dickens original.

This is reflected in a phonograph cylinder entitled “Scrooge’s Awakening,” released by Australian music hall star Albert Whelan in 1905 and in another cylinder by English performer Bransby Williams in 1909: “The Awakening of Scrooge.” Both were performing dialogue written not by Charles Dickens, but by J.C. Buckstone, whose play “Scrooge,” first presented in England in 1901, was perhaps the most popular of the unauthorized adaptations. He did away with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, leaving Jacob Marley’s ghost to work all night showing Scrooge the errors of his ways. The result was a one act play about 45 minutes in length that served as an attraction on varied programs alongside jugglers, acrobats, singers, dancers and others.

The Whelan and Williams recordings are curious and unsatisfying now, though Buckstone’s take on Dickens was tremendously popular in the early 20^th century.

One of the earlier holdings of “A Christmas Carol” in NAVCC’s Moving Image Section is not a full film, but rather, documentation from the film’s copyright deposit. This version of “A Christmas Carol” dates from 1914 and features Charles Rock in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. The documentation submitted for copyright registration includes paper print fragments and a summary excerpted below. The twenty paper print fragments were bound at one point into a small booklet.

“His eyes are suddenly attracted to the knocker. A curious change has come over it. What he sees is not a knocker at all, but the ghastly, yet living face of old Marley, his seven years dead partner.” (Description from the Motion Picture Copyright Descriptions Collection, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/cdmmi.s1229l03502)

While the Library does not hold a full copy of this film, the BFI includes holdings of the film in their collection.

Another early Scrooge in the Library’s collection is portrayed by Seymour Hicks in “Old Scrooge” (1913). Hicks had previously performed as Scrooge on stage, including in a 1901 performance before Princess Maud of Wales, later Queen of Norway. The Library holds a motion picture copyright description for this release as well, proclaiming “Seymour Hicks in his greatest character: Scrooge.” The Library’s nitrate copies, silent and tinted, are from the 1926 reissue of the film, and are part of the Prelinger Collection. The copyright deposit descriptive material also dates from 1926.

A few years later, William Sterling Battis, an American performer who portrayed Dickens characters in makeup and costume in one-man shows, recorded versions of several of his routines for Victor, including two 12” discs in character as Ebenezer Scrooge, whom he portrayed with gusto. The four sides, below and in the National Jukebox, clock in at a bit less than 19 minutes in all, but preserve the original spirit and much of the dialogue between Scrooge and all the ghosts:

Scrooge
Part 1 | Marley’s ghost | A Christmas carol

 

Seasonal readings and stagings of “A Christmas Carol” on the radio date back to the early 1920s. Craig Wichman, in his history of “A Christmas Carol” on radio and records “Standing in the Spirit at Your Elbows,” lists more than 75 local and network productions from 1922 through 1933. These included several by actors who’d made a specialty of performing Scrooge, such as Tom Terris, an English actor who’d appeared in supporting roles in his brother-in-law Seymour Hicks’ “Scrooge” productions before taking on the role himself in the United States. Terris also entered film as an actor and director, and in 1928, announced that he would play Scrooge in an all-talking film, but Hicks threatened legal action, and the film was never made.

In 1934, radio’s definitive “Scrooge,” Lionel Barrymore, essayed the role as part of a 2¾-hour “Christmas Party” presented by the Nash automobile company over CBS that originated from Chicago on the afternoon of Christmas Day. The broadcast is not known to survive, but one newspaper account says that the “Carol” portion was approximately forty minutes. It was true to Dickens’ original, with all four ghosts and much of the original dialogue retained. The sixty-minute 1939 version in which Barrymore fronted the players of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater is generally considered among the best. Welles and his troupe had practiced, having staged a version the previous year with Welles in the role of Scrooge.

Barrymore was an immediate hit in the role and went on to perform it a total of 18 times on all of the radio networks before his death in 1954. The version he performed was faithful to Dickens’ text, with all the ghosts present and much of Dickens’ original text preserved. Its success may have also influenced subsequent film and radio adaptations to keep the structure of the original story. Only the year before, NBC presented an adaptation narrated by Alexander Woolcott that owed more to Buckstone than Dickens, with Jacob Marley the only ghost to visit Scrooge.

In 1935, Barrymore committed to five more turns as Scrooge over CBS, but despite this success, “A Christmas Carol” was already so beloved that the story sold itself, and there would be many other versions produced for radio from the 1930s on. In 1935, Sir Seymour Hicks was heard portraying Scrooge on NBC via shortwave from London on Christmas Day. A talkie (with synchronized sound) film version of Hicks as Scrooge had also been released. While the Library does not hold film prints of the 1935 copyright deposit (LP6025/MP8137), the promotional material deposited for copyright registration is available at the Moving Image Research Center.

The Library has a videocassette from a later copyright deposit. NBC’s transcription division, Thesaurus, produced a forty-minute version for syndication starring the English actor Alfred Shirley as Scrooge and followed it up with an hour-long version in 1938 with Shirley fronting a new cast, which included Peter Donald, now remembered as “Ajax Cassidy” of Fred Allen’s “Allen’s Alley.” Shirley was less flamboyant and more modulated than Barrymore, but he gave a strong performance in this production.

It was not unusual for there to be more than one network presentation in a year. Claude Rains played Scrooge in a production for the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1940, as Everett Sloane did in 1944. Basil Rathbone also played Scrooge during the war years.  In 1949, CBS presented a version recorded in England with Alec Guiness playing Scrooge on December 22, and on Christmas Eve, a version starring Edmond Gwenn. While Barrymore was heard that year over the Mutual Broadcasting System, Gwenn had played Scrooge in a 1941 broadcast and would repeat the role in 1949 and three more times in the 1950s. For good measure, the 1935 film version of “A Christmas Carol” starring Sir Seymour Hicks aired on NBC television in 1947.

There were other transcribed versions, including one in 1945 produced by the Kaster-Gordon company of Boston, which featured Tom Terris as Scrooge. Two years earlier, Terris read “A Christmas Carol” as part of the Library of Congress and National Library Services’ program Talking Books for the Blind.

Beginning in 1941, the public could buy recorded performances of “A Christmas Carol” over the counter in versions spread across three 78 rpm discs in attractive album covers. The first of these featured Eustace Wyatt as Scrooge. An album starring Ronald Coleman was also released, though it wasn’t until 1947 that  one featuring Lionel Barrymore was offered for sale. This version, and some of his surviving radio performances, still get airplay every year, alongside several popular film versions, yet new ones just keep coming. We’ve only had space to highlight a few, so let us know what your favorite versions of “A Christmas Carol” are!

Sources 

Battis, William Sterling, Charles Dickens, Ted Levy, and William H Reitz. Scrooge: Part 2/ A Christmas Carol / The Ghost of Christmas Past 1916. National Jukebox, Library of Congress.

BFI. “A Christmas Carol (1914) – extract – Charles Dickens.” December 1, 1914. Video, 2:17.

BFI. “Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901).” November 3, 2009. Video, 3:27.

Big A Features, Ltd. Scrooge. 1913. Motion Picture Copyright Descriptions Collection. Class L, -1977. Library of Congress.

Cromelin, Paul H. A Christmas Carol. 1914. Motion Picture Copyright Descriptions Collection. Class L, -1977. Library of Congress.

Evening Times. (Washington, DC), Nov. 26 1901. Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

Pathe Exchange, Inc. 1926. Old Scrooge. Motion picture copyright descriptions collection. Class L, -1977. Library of Congress.

Wichman, Craig. 2012. Standing in the Spirit at Your Elbow : A History of Dickens’ Christmas Carol as Radio/Audio Drama. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media.

Thanks to Josie Walters-Johnston for the paper print fragment research, Dave Gibson for adding the Scrooge files to the National Jukebox, and to Kelly Chisholm for assistance with nitrate film research.

For more information related to this blog or any Library of Congress holdings, please see Ask a Librarian, and if you plan to come in to view or listen to any collection items, please reach out to our reference staff in the Moving Image Research Center and the Recorded Sound Research Center.