The idea of movies

I recently watched a theatrical version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas. Carol”. One particular moment jumped out at me.

The Ghost of Christmas past is showing Ebenezer Scrooge scenes from Scrooge’s own personal history. Events are taking place all around them, as though real.

At some point, Scrooge tries to talk with somebody in the scene around them. The next moment the ghost tells him “These are but shadows of the things that have been. They have no consciousness of us.”

What this tells me is that, in essence, Dickens came up with the idea of movies by 1847, long before Edison. It wasn’t a technological enablement, but it was a mature conceptual understanding of the power of a medium that did not yet exist.