This post is contributed by Mads Golding. Mads is a playwright and writer currently pursuing an MA in English literature at Loyola University, Chicago. Her research interests include Dickens, Shakespeare, and theater. Mads currently serves as a member of the communications committee for The Dickens Society, for which she is also a guest contributor. She is always open to new conversations: Twitter: @MadzGolding, Instagram: Madsrose93.

Still from The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Christmas Special dir. Ben Gosling-Fuller 2011 © BBC.

Comedy is a serious business, and the BBC knows that the best way to handle Dickens is not to take him too seriously. As the title suggests, The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Christmas Special is a gloriously satirical Christmas-themed romp through the Dickensian canon that, surprisingly, barely mentions A Christmas Carol at all. The Christmas episode, written by Mark Evans, was spawned by the four-part BBC TV miniseries, The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff. The original series is a literary, self-referential meander through Charles Dickens’s best-known novels. The Christmas episode follows a young man named Jedrington Secret-Past who has his shop of curiosities confiscated by the malevolent lawyer, Malifax Skulkingworm. His family is jailed due to his inability to pay an inherited debt. The money must be paid by Christmas day, or his family will be confiscated forever. Evans satirically exaggerates the image of robbery for the sake of this hyperbolic plot point. While it is entirely possible for a shop to be seized by debt collectors, he takes the image one step further by making it legally possible for Skulkingworm to steal Jederington’s family and become their “new father.” Thanks to the Artful Codger and his band of street urchins, Jedrington discovers that he is not the grandson of the alleged debtor, but rather the son of Miss Christmasham, who abandoned Malifax to marry Mr. Fruitcake, a madman who Jedrington met in The Skint (the debtors’ prison). With the help of the Artful Codger, the old couple is reunited. After the family escape from jail, Miss Christmasham and Mr. Fruitcake marry on Christmas eve, thus giving Jedrington legitimacy and thwarting the lawyer’s plans. The threat of loss here is hyperbolic and satirical. In a forty-minute episode, Evans fits in almost as many plot twists and dramatic transitions as one might expect from one of the original novels, and while there are many hilarious references to the books, one need not be a Dickensian expert to enjoy the ride.

Each character is a collection of subtle references to character tropes present throughout Dickens’s work, but the references are not so blatant as to distract from the flow of the story. Jedrington Secret-Past is an amalgam of David Copperfield, Pip and Nicholas Nickleby. Malifax Skulkingworm’s last name is a reference, of course, to Mr. Tulkinghorn from Bleak House, but also has a whiff of Ebenezer Scrooge and Paul Dombey about him. Miss Christmasham needs no explanation, and her supposed fiancé, Mr. Fruitcake, appears to be a combination of Dr. Manet from A Tale of Two Cities, Mr. Micawber, from David Copperfield, and William Dorrit from Little Dorrit. His penchant for wearing a dead goose on his head could also be a nod to Miss Flight from Bleak House. The Artful Codger and his merry band of street children provide the network of support required to spring a family from prison, as well as making the obligatory Oliver Twist reference, without which, a Dickensian pastiche would be incomplete.

Still from The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Christmas Special dir. Ben Gosling-Fuller 2011 © BBC.

The threat to the nuclear family structure works on a satirical level because the idea of stealing another man’s family is ridiculous. Yet, families including Dickens’s own, were indeed torn apart by debt, imprisonment, and premature death. Mark Evans’s script shows family love by staging quarrels between Jedrington and his mother at the least opportune moments. Miss Christmasham obviously relishes the small fights that suggest the intimacy of a long relationship. Familiarity breeds contempt, but for a woman who has lived in isolation for decades after leaving her fiancé, familiarity is a rare delicacy. This comic break and others like it not only maintain the quick pace of a very full plot, but the comic elements also deftly avoid sentimentality. Where some characters are allowed emotional release and connection through comedy, others have to make do with displacement onto inanimate objects. Malifax Skulkingworm is pictured playing with a pair of woolen dolls, a possible allusion to Dickens’s fixation with the performativity of family life.

In an essay written for Household Words, entitled A Christmas Tree, Dickens takes the reader on a nostalgic house tour around the inside of a doll’s house at Christmas.

“Ah! The Doll’s house!—of which I was not proprietor, but where I visited. I don’t admire the Houses of Parliament half so much as that stone–fronted mansion with real glass windows, and door–steps, and a real balcony—greener than I ever see now, except at watering places; and even they afford but a poor imitation. […] Even open, there were three distinct rooms in it: a sitting–room and bed–room, elegantly furnished, and best of all, a kitchen, with uncommonly soft fire–irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils—oh, the warming–pan!—and a tin man–cook in profile, who was always going to fry two fish.” (Dickens, Household Words. 2, 39).

Here, Dickens appears to use the dollhouse as an externalized physical structure onto which he can project and relive warm childhood memories, or perhaps fantasies. He compares the opulent, impressive houses of parliament (with which he is very familiar), with the simple, warm, childlike space offered by the dollhouse, and makes it very clear that he prefers the latter. The metaphorical emotional puppetry comes to a head in the Christmas special when, in the middle of a high-speed chase, Jedrington’s incredibly upbeat sidekick, Joliforth Jollington manages to briefly waylay Skulkingworm. Skulkingworm realizes that Jollington is literally physically inflated with Christmas cheer, so he begins whispering depressing sentiments into his opponent’s ear until he deflates in an appropriately pantomime fashion. This alludes to Dickens’s ability to transition seamlessly from comedy into tragedy on the same page, a technique he described as “streaky bacon” (Akroyd).

The episode is replete with British comic talent, from Stephen Fry serving as the malevolent, larger-than-life lawyer. Robert Webb, of Michell and Webb fame delivers a perfectly straight-faced performance as Jedrington Secret-Past. Johnny Vegas makes an appearance as the Artful Codger. The screenwriter, Mark Evans, also responsible for That Mitchell and Webb Look, doesn’t miss a single opportunity for innuendo.

Jedrington Secret-Past: There isn’t time, I need help. Urchins, ho!

Artful Codger: How can we help, sir?

Jedrington Secret-Past: I need Christmas delayed until I can get my mother married.

Artful Codger: It seems to me, fine sir, that you need to knobble the donging. And I’m a great dong knobbler.

Jedrington Secret -Past: I beg your pardon?

Artful Codger: Knobble the donging. [Awkward pause.] You know, stop the three great alliterative clocks from declaring Christmas!

Jedrington Secret-Past: Oh, that’s what it means! Thank goodness. Can you do that?

Artful Codger: Consider the dongs knobbled! (Evans).

Still from The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Christmas Special dir. Ben Gosling-Fuller 2011 © BBC.

It’s unclear whether “alliterative clocks” is a deliberate reference to Dylan Thomas’s Stop All the Clocks, but, nevertheless, the wordplay for which Dickens is famous, provides ample opportunities for snort-inducing smut. The dirty humor is key; it humanizes the highly stylized Victorian story, and it provides relief from an otherwise bleak plot. The episode of course, ends in the re-unification of the broken family and the defeat of the evil bureaucrat. Of course, life resists neat narratives, but there is great comfort in romantic simplicity and the structure of the Christmas comedy special dictates that all the emotional threads end up tied in neat narrative bows.

Christmas specials can run the risk of being saccharine or sentimental, but in the case of The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff—a Christmas Special, the restrictive theme required a shorter plot and tighter writing than the four-part miniseries that spawned it. Mark Evans effectively managed to keep a classic alive by letting us laugh with it, instead of at it.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter, playwright. The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Stanza Studios, 2000.

Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Tree, Household Words: A Weekly Journal. 2, 39 (1850): 289-295.

Evans, Mark, screenwriter. The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Christmas Special, BBC TV Special 2011.