For the first time in around ten years, I recently re-read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with a group of friends, and I was surprised at how much I’d mis-remembered or plain forgotten about it. Mostly, I was reminded how beautifully it was written and just how dark, powerful, and revolutionary a story it is. Dickens catches a lot of flack—rightly so, at times—for “padding” his stories, but A Christmas Carol is lean and efficient. Inspired by that re-read, my wife and I watched this movie tonight, The Man Who Invented Christmas, a somewhat fictionalized account of Dickens’ conception and composition of A Christmas Carol in just about six weeks. This…