Though the forthcoming BBC series, Dickensian, may alter this, it’s a fair bet that if you dropped into conversation that an acquaintance was “a perfect Pecksniff” or that someone had “a touch of Mrs Gamp” about them, you’d be met by a blank stare. If you described someone as “a bit of a Scrooge”, on the other hand, almost everyone would catch your drift. While some Dickens characters are more or less forgotten, others remain part of the national consciousness. Growing up in the English-speaking world, it’s hard to avoid encountering Scrooge, his name was so well chosen for a miser, a glorious melting together of “scrape” and “ooze”. Over the years, Jim Carrey, George C Scott, Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine, Bill Murray, Albert Finney and, currently on stage in London, Jim Broadbent have laid claim to the role, as have Scrooge McDuck, Yosemite Sam, Grouchy Smurf and Mr Magoo. There they all are, hearing Jacob Marley’s chains on the stair, conducted through the air by spirits, ordering a prize turkey from a small boy, all of them caught in the echoes of the role.

Even in the 1840s, this sense of expectation coloured the response to Dickens’s series of seasonal books, which came to seem, as one reviewer put it, as inevitable as the Christmas goose. Christmas is anyway at once a sacred feast, a moment for reflection and an array of repetitions. We are saved by memories – including, perhaps, today, memories of Scrooge and A Christmas Carol. It is not so much a tale as a ritual; we like it because, despite all the many versions, it is always the same. Even when he was doing public readings in the 1860s, Dickens felt the audience wait for the entrance of Tiny Tim, anticipating a reverberation of an emotion they had yearly experienced. The more self-conscious movie adaptations, such as Bill Murray’s merger of the sardonic and the heartfelt in Scrooged (1988) and the purely brilliant The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), riff on that ritual, both giving us and withholding from us what we expect. In particular, Scrooged both sends up the saccharine selling of Christmas and gives itself up to the real sweetness beneath.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Murray in Scrooged. Photograph: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat

For a work established in reiteration, it may be invidious to pick out one definitive version. However, one actor claimed the part in a way that no one else has managed. In Scrooge (1951), Alastair Sim utterly possesses the role. He’s a man physically framed for the Dickensian world: huge-eyed and hangdog, at once over the top and subtle, sinister and comic. His apparently old face is remarkably unlined, yet he exudes the seediness of shabby rooms in lodgings, criminal wickedness in a cardigan (the part of the macabre Professor in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 The Ladykillers was written for him). You feel about Sim the loss of better days; there’s a sadness of experience in him, a twinkling stoicism. In films such as Guy Hamilton’s An Inspector Calls (1954), he could at once personify goodness and menace. In other words, he was born to play Scrooge. Sim’s performance was so definitive, so excellent, that it produced its own reiteration. Richard Williams’s animated A Christmas Carol (1971) is the screen version with which I grew up; it reunites the voice (now tremulous with age) of Sim as Scrooge with Michael Hordern doing a much improved account of Jacob Marley. It’s a beautifully, inventively made short film, and a worthy recipient of an Oscar.

Dickens’s subtitle tells us that his book is “A Ghost Story of Christmas”, and it was a formative text in the establishment of Christmas as the most fitting time for a spooky tale. It was simultaneously a forerunner of another Victorian Christmas tradition, that of the seasonal fairytale. The story begins twice, once as a ghost story with its opening words “Marley was dead, to begin with” and then again, on its third page, with “Once upon a time”. On its heels tread William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring and John Ruskin’s The King of a Golden River, another tale of the costs of miserly niggardliness. This dual allegiance may account for A Christmas Carol’s singular cosiness for a spooky story. Marley’s ghost is both dreadful and a conversable figure who might be countered by a joke: Scrooge reasons with the spectre that he’s probably a hallucination summoned up by indigestion (“there’s more of gravy than of grave about you”).

With one exception, the tale’s real terrors are raised by images of the poverty and social unrest of the hungry 1840s, the bleakness of unemployment and deprivation drawn into the gilded radiance of a fairytale. When it comes to the unnerving, those two emaciated children under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ignorance and Want, haunt you. Images also linger of the impoverished, degraded thieves who strip the dead Scrooge of his belongings, down to the bed-curtains that veil the body and the shirt he’s to be buried in. For all Scrooge’s personal renewal, the story has glimpsed depths of misery and cruelty that can’t simply be erased by one man’s reclamation. Otherwise, judging by my own childhood memories, the only thing in the story that truly drags us towards the uncanny is the Ghost of Christmas Future, that hooded, faceless figure, remorselessly pointing Scrooge to his own gravestone.

In all other ways, it’s a benevolent supernatural on offer here, one that wants to redeem you, and will do so not through purgatorial suffering, but by presenting you with a kind of theatre. This is why the story has always worked so well on stage and on film. The people Scrooge witnesses have no consciousness of him, or of us in the audience. There’s a wonderful moment in the 1951 Scrooge where Tiny Tim stands at the window of a toy shop watching the intricate mechanical toys bow and dance. It’s a paradigm of the film as a whole, and for all the movie versions of this story. As Scrooge, Sim is both actor and audience, a performer busy watching others perform. Tom Pye’s set design for the current production of A Christmas Carol at the Noel Coward theatre also taps into this element in the story. An audience for his own past self, Scrooge discovers himself in what is said about him. The tale imagines death as rendered less terrible by the tender feelings it may produce in others.

A Christmas Carol review – Jim Broadbent's sentimental Scrooge has a twinkle in his eye Read more

In its evocation of a benevolent supernatural realm, Scrooge was in good company. The story offers a benign version of the “visitant”, that mysterious figure from outside who comes to shake up and transform our lives. In the films made following the second world war, others were entertaining angels, heavenly messengers and spirits – in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), or with Clarence Peabody, apprentice angel, in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or Cary Grant as the especially suave angel, with the not-so-suave name of Dudley, in The Bishop’s Wife (1947). And even in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) – Santa Claus is, after all, an other-than-human embodiment of the human. These films are also Christmas films, concerned, as Christmas is, with drawing the supernatural into connection with the ordinary world, with troubled marriages, divorce, money worries, the sense of entrapment. Set at the dark pivot of the year, A Christmas Carol offers a descent into the gloom, before rising towards the light.

In one sense, the plot tumbles its hero into the depths; in another, the tale remains at all times snugly on the heights. As GK Chesterton noted, there’s an atmosphere of comfort and humour and gusto in all of it; in his view, Scrooge’s tight-fistedness is as festive, certainly as funny, as his ascent into mirth. Being a miser feels as though it’s a game he’s playing. In his enclosure, he’s palpably open, already poised to be converted; in his emotional deadness, he’s intensely alive. Jim Broadbent’s current performance similarly taps into the essential gusto and humour in the character.

Yet for all the irrepressible flamboyance of the Dickens atmosphere, the story certainly presents us with someone committed to the suppression of the festal world, and of kindness itself. Scrooge is the anti-festive man brought into the circle of festivity, the kill-joy transformed into the joyful player. At the close of his tale, Dickens informs that people ridicule Scrooge for his newfound generosity and mirth. But he now belongs to an order of laughter so great that he’s happy to join in the joke on himself. In a tale preoccupied with report, he now disregards its significance. He’s content to look a fool.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robin the Frog, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy in The Muppet Christmas Carol. Photograph: Everett/REX Shutterstock

The ultimate concern of Scrooge’s story is that we should not gain the whole world, and lose our own souls. In the words of that greatest of all Christmas films, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), it’s about “being a mensch”. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, one wonderful paradox is that Michael Caine as Scrooge is almost the only real human on screen, while the film concerns itself with what makes us humane. Christmas draws our thoughts to the passing of time, and to the concomitant dangers of embitterment, of deterioration as a person. Dickens’s fable and its stage and cinematic manifestations counter the long slowing down of the heart with a story of renewal and redemption.

What would Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, so strongly influenced by Dickens, have made with the basic premise of A Christmas Carol? Something more moving, perhaps, something real and impassioned, and psychologically true. However, they could hardly have produced a tale with the fabulous resonances that Dickens delivers, or given us that plunge into a deep, symbolic cosiness, an atmosphere of fog and snow and firesides, that blend of darkness and awakened generosity that may mean Christmas.

Scrooge starring Alastair Sim is showing at the BFI, London SE1, until 30 December. bfi.org.uk.