Day 78 - King of Kings

It was the first time for a long time I had been in a full cinema. And the first time I had been to the cinema on a Good Friday!

Released for Easter 2025, King of Kings is more than an animated biopic! It begins in a Victorian Theatre as Charles Dickens is giving a solo performance of A Christmas Carol. Taking a curtain call he is distracted by his all too mischievous children. That evening, at home, his put-upon wife Catherine, urges the exasperated Dickens to give his full attention to the youngest of them and use his dramatic story-telling to tell The Life of our Lord.

Dickens was already a celebrity author, actor and story-teller when in 1845 he had written The Life of our Lord. He had taken the whole of his large family with him on a grand tour of the continent, not before setting in train a venture that was to occupy him for the next decade. Passionate about social justice, he had plans for setting up a refuge for women and girls working the London streets as prostitutes. Claire Tomalin recounts the story in her magisterial biography, Charles Dickens, A Life (179-181).

That Christmas he performed his short story telling the life of Jesus to his family; he continued to do so each Christmas until his death in 1870. It was something specially for the family and he determined not to publish the book. The family continued the Christmas tradition after his death and continued to read or perform the story each Christmas. Finally, at the death of his last remaining son, the family agreed they would published the book. So it was that the Daily Mail serialised it in 1934.

King of Kings imagines Dickens acting out the story of his Life of our Lord to his recalcitrant son. As the story unfolds, the two of them are drawn more and more into the story.

Voiced by a star-studded cast with Kenneth Branagh as Dickens, Uma Thurman as Catherine and Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, it caught the imagination of a cinema full of families with little children. At one level it worked brilliantly. At another level, it frustrated me.

In spite of its stated intention, it was true neither to the tale Dickens told, nor to the Gospel text. It presented Jesus as a superhero always doing miracles, and failed to recount a single parable. It had nothing of the content of the sermon on the mount, nothing about love for God, love for neighbour. It had Dickens reaching for a dusty tome replete with archaic pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, something that is in neither the gospels nor in Dickens. It was as if sin were some primeval thing from long ago, rather than the failure we each of us succumb to, to measure up to all God expects of us.

No doubt, there are weaknesses in Dickens’s story, and most definitely in Dickens’ life, but I preferred reading his story for myself with its challenging conclusion.

Remember! It is Christianity to do good always – even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful and forgiving and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to shew that we love him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in peace.

Charles Dickens, The Life of our Lord, published 2025 with a new afterword and notes by Tim Dalglish, Wonky Octopus Classic.

Richard Cleaves