Inventing Scrooge: The Incredible True Story Behind Charles Dickens' Legendary A Christmas Carol

by Carlo DeVito

  But Dickens pressed Forster again, writing, “And do, my dear fellow, do for God’s sake turn over about Chapman and Hall, and look upon my project as a settled thing. If you object to see them, I must write to them.”

  Forster convinced Dickens to delay. As Edgar Johnson rightly pointed out, “Chapman and Hall were publishing A Christmas Carol on commission for Dickens; that announcement that Dickens was quitting them at such time would foolishly jeopardize the little book’s chances.”

  With all this swirling in his head, Dickens was now turning to the highpoint of the story. Things here must highlight the direst of circumstances. His walking did not abate. As the book began to near the end of its story, Dickens made more and more preparations for its publication. He hired John Leech to illustrate the title, and agreed to print the book himself, so sure was he of its success (and of his publisher’s inabilities based on the lackluster sales of Martin Chuzzlewit).

  Dickens pressed on with Chuzzlewit and Carol.

  “Come in!” exclaimed the Ghost. “Come in! and know me better, man!”

  Abundance was the signature of the Christmas season for Dickens. And he loved no more abundance than food at Christmas time. Dickens himself was not an over indulger, but the symbolism of it to him was paramount. A respite from the world’s cares and worries, in a moment of enjoyment, jollity, and rest. He loved Christmas.

  Dickens was obsessed with his little book, and when John Leech—the celebrated Punch magazine illustrator he had hired—showed him the original hand-tinted illustrations of the Ghost of Christmas Present, Dickens objected to the color of the ghost’s robe; Leech had tinted the robe red. Copies of the illustration exist to this day at the Pierpont Morgan Library. Dickens had described the robe as green in the text, but had Leech taken literary license or was it just a mistake? Nonetheless, Dickens corrected it, and in the final edition the robe was correctly colored green. But these were the kinds of details that were not escaping Dickens despite his massive creative commitments.

  “Leech was a nervous, easily offended artist, and Dickens must have taken pains to please and appease him,” wrote historian Hearn.

  The final version of John Leech’s illustration of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

  There was no mistake that Dickens loved Covent Garden. He walked there often. He found its abundance, though, was tarnished, and it was this very thing that Dickens next shared with his readers. The first scene of Stave III was set in the major market of the Old City.

  Dickens had first read about Covent Garden Market in George Coleman’s Broad Grins in 1822, which inspired him to come see the market when he was ten years old.

  “When I had money enough I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have a half-a-pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. When I had no money I took a turn in Covent Garden Market and stared at the pineapples,” Dickens later remembered of his youth when he worked in a factory where he placed labels on pots of boot black.

  Covent Garden.

  “Constantly underfed, Charles sniffed hungrily at the food in the London stores and streets. He played mental games whether to buy one type of pudding or another or to buy attractive food now and have no money later, or to buy attractive food later and have no food now, or to act like a grown up and plan sensibly,” wrote biographer Fred Kaplan. Regardless, the market was a bonanza that appealed to Dickens his whole life, and these early childhood experiences stuck with him.

  The first record of a “new market in Covent Garden” was in 1654 when market traders set up stalls against the garden wall of Bedford House. The Earl of Bedford acquired a private charter from Charles II in 1670 for a fruit and vegetable market, permitting him and his heirs to hold a market every day except Sunday and Christmas Day. The original market, consisting of wooden stalls and sheds, became disorganized and disorderly with rampant crime and widespread prostitution, and the 6th Earl requested an Act of Parliament in 1813 to regulate it, then commissioned Charles Fowler in 1830 to design the neoclassical market building that is the heart of Covent Garden today. With the new buildings and the new laws surrounding it, the market enjoyed a better (even if it did not have shining) reputation by the time Dickens was walking about in 1844. Still, there was nothing that compared with the abundance with which the market sparkled.

  Dickens described his mornings in the garden, writing, “There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, and that was more company—warm company, too, which was better. Toast of a very substantial quality, was likewise procurable: though the towzled-headed man who made it, in an inner chamber within the coffee-room, hadn’t got his coat on yet, and was so heavy with sleep that in every interval of toast and coffee he went off anew behind the partition into complicated cross-roads of choke and snore, and lost his way directly.”

  In the beginning of Stave III, Dickens catalogued the many foods available. “The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars. . . . There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes . . . there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods . . . setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons. . . .”

  Dickens mentioned sticks of “cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious.”

  . . . on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped to bless Bob Cratchit’s dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen “Bob” a-week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!

  But this blessing—though Dickens himself wrote it— was difficult for him to face, for the Cratchits were none other than the Dickens family when they’d just moved to London, just before their father went into debtors’ prison. Yet the memories of Bayham Street were all painful ones for Dickens.

  Remembering years later the loss of innocence in this period, with the ultimate imprisonment of his father and his being sent off to factory work, Dickens wrote, “ . . . I fell into a state of neglect, which I have never been able to look back on without a kind of agony.”

  But in the Cratchits, he tried to paint a more stiff-upper lip, more optimistic portrait of his youth. While in Dickens’ mind his family’s days spent on Bayham were awful, he painted the Cratchits as downtrodden but not beaten. They were the heroic working class.

  Dickens’ own memories were less optimistic.

  “I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and the baker, and that very often we had not too much to eat,” Dickens recalled of their time at Bayham Street. He wrote of his father that “ . . . I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of a poor way of living.”

  There were eight people altogether in the four-room house—his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and in order of their birth: Fanny, Charles, Letitia, Harriet, Frederick, and Alfred.

  “Workers with some income, could do better,” wrote Victorian historian Daniel Poole about housing in that period, “and a clerk like Bob Cratchit, at the bottom of the middle class, characteristically might enjoy a small four-room house in a London suburb like Camdentown with one room for the kitchen, one for a dining room-parlor, and the other two for bedrooms.”

  As an adult, Dickens threw himself into Christmas, but “ . . . others observed that Dickens’ enjoyment of Christmas seemed mo
re determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun,” wrote Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Dickens expert. “Perhaps his memories of Warren’s Blacking were to blame. His family’s accounts certainly suggest an attempt on Dickens’ part to re-create his childhood as it should have been, rather than as it was. His fiction too reveals surprisingly mixed feelings over Christmas as a time of peace and joy. For all its versions of plum puddings and mistletoe, and all that readers have come to think of Dickens as literature’s answer to Santa Claus, he rarely describes a family Christmas without showing how vulnerable it is to being broken apart by a more miserable alternative.”

  Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit’s wife, dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob’s private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.

  And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker’s they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled.

  “That image of everyone sitting around the table with a great big goose—this is when it comes about, in the 1830s and 1840s,” says Alex Werner, a senior curator of social and working history at the Museum of London.

  “Narrative snapshots like the Cratchits’ happy family Christmas may linger in the memory, but in Dickens’ fictional world they are set against a background where the domestic ideal is far more likely to be flaking around the edges,” concluded Douglas-Fairhurst.

  This tenderness of scene, this simple show of home and hearth and goodwill amongst the Cratchits, is what endeared the Cratchits, and by extension, Dickens, to readers since the story’s publication.

  * * *

  Tiny Tim

  “And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit. . . .

  “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

  Now Dickens would introduce a new character. A little boy. As Dickens began to write of the little handicapped boy he had conjured, he was not sure for whom he would name the character. Originally he named him “Little Fred.” Dickens may have been thinking of his younger sibling Alfred, who had died in childhood. But he later decided to name Scrooge’s nephew Fred, and so he later scratched out “Little Fred” for “Tiny Mick” for a time, but ultimately settled on “Tiny Tim.”

  Who was Timothy Cratchit? In reality, Tiny Tim as we know him today was an amalgamation of two different people.

  Dickens’ sister Fanny had a disabled son named Henry Burnett Jr. also called Harry. Tiny Tim did not receive his name from Fanny’s child, but the aspects of Tiny Tim’s character are taken from Henry Burnett Jr.

  Henry Burnett Jr. was born in 1839 in Manchester. According to Dickens biographer Fred Kaplan, “Franny’s crippled eldest son, who always had a fragile hold on life, seemed unlikely to outlive his mother by much, if at all.” At the time of the writing of A Christmas Carol, Henry would have been five years old. There is no doubt Henry was one of the inspirations for Tim. And ultimately, he was the inspiration for Paul Dombey Jr. in Dombey and Son.

  According to the Reverend James Griffin of Manchester, “Harry was a singular child—meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree. He was the original, as Mr. Dickens told his sister, of little ‘Paul Dombey.’ Harry had been taken to Brighton . . . for hours lying on the beach with his books, given utterance to thoughts quite as remarkable for a child. . . .” Like many Dickens biographers, Peter Ackroyd suggested that Harry “had also suggested to his famous uncle the character of Tiny Tim.”

  It has also been claimed that the character is based on the son of a friend of Dickens who owned a cotton mill in Ardwick, Manchester, in the same town as Fanny’s sister. Ardwick was a tony suburb of Manchester in Dickens’ time, with three cotton mills in operation before 1850.

  With these little-known facts, still, Tiny Tim has been a character in fiction that has endured almost outside of A Christmas Carol. And of course, the question foremost on everyone’s mind is this: What was Tiny Tim’s illness?

  Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!

  For more than a century, doctors have discussed a multitude of possible diseases for Tiny Tim. Dickens left us few clues, but enough for Russell Chesney, a physician at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, who published his finding in March 2012 to great fanfare in a journal published by the American Medical Association. According to Dr. Chesney, Tiny Tim suffered from a combination of rickets and tuberculosis.

  Chesney made his diagnosis based on Tim’s deformities described in the text, along with the story’s insinuation that the boy’s disease would be curable if his father had more money. Rickets is a bone disorder caused by a deficiency in vitamin D, calcium, or phosphate. Lack of these crucial nutrients softens the bones, and leg braces would have been the 1840s solution, Chesney said. Since vitamin D-fortified milk and infant formula was introduced decades ago, this disorder is rarely seen in the United States today.

  According to Chesney, “The blackened skies would have prevented skin synthesis of vitamin D, and Tiny Tim’s chances of having rickets were substantial. . . . Because the ash blocked UV-B rays, it could have contributed to insufficient sunlight exposure for children in London in the time of Tiny Tim, in the 1820s.” There is no question that Manchester was an industry town of the ilk Dr. Chesney alludes to, and probably thus burdened the two boys who were models for Tiny Tim with at least one of the two afflictions considered.

  “The salary earned by Bob Cratchit would have influenced the diet available to Tiny Tim. The 4 one-pound loaves of bread that 15 shillings would buy may have been adulterated with alum [hydrated potassium aluminum sulfate] to whiten the bread and disguise the use of poor quality flour. Alum is used today as an antiperspirant, in styptic pencils, in baking powder, and as a pickling agent in many cuisines but was added to bread throughout the 19th century in London. It, like other aluminum salts used as antacids, can bind phosphate in the intestine and prevent its absorption,” reasoned Dr. Chesney.

  Even if Mrs. Cratchit had made her own bread, the likelihood of Tim having rickets was high. Chesney made the assertion that at that time, sixty percent of children of working-class London families had rickets. So this is not a stretch to say Tim probably had rickets, whether Dickens knew it or not.

  “People who have nutritional deficiency also may have diseases in which nutrition plays a role, and tuberculosis is one of them,” Chesney explained.

  But why the enduring appeal of a sickly child?

  “As the economy shifted from an agricultural base to one dependent on industrial manufacturing, people with disabilities were increasingly assumed to be ‘useless’ non-producers, ‘invalids’ who were not capable of participating in the economy. But a function was discovered for them in this secularized system—a function most perfectly fulfilled by Charles Dickens’ figure of Tiny Tim,” according to the radio program “Inventing the Poster Child” from NPR (National Public Radio), produced by Laurie Block with Jay Alli
son, which proclaimed Tim the first “poster child.”

  “The dependent person with a disability—especially the child—was able to awaken the heart of Economic Man (Scrooge) and soften the iron laws of economics. Though the laws cannot be abrogated, charitable feelings can be exercised outside their sphere. Public philanthropy directed toward those who fall out of the economic equation is the secular version of longstanding Christian charitable imperatives directed toward the poor and helpless in general. The dependent person with a disability—Tiny Tim—has no independent character in this drama. In this tale, there is no possibility that a person with a disability might be able to have an independent economic function if adaptations are made. Nor does Tiny Tim have the option of refusing the charity he inspires. Tiny Tim’s innocent goodness, helplessness, and cheerful acceptance of his ‘affliction’ remind some people with disabilities of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s near-contemporaneous Uncle Tom,” concluded the NPR broadcast.

  * * *

  The Miners

  And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor. . . .

  “What place is this?” asked Scrooge.

  “A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,” returned the Spirit. “But they know me. See!”

  Dickens for some reason had become obsessed with visiting Cornwall. He had written to friend John Forster that he had an idea to start a story there, set in a lighthouse on the rough Cornwall coast, and see “some terribly dreary iron-bound spot . . . we will then together fly down into that desolate region.”

  “From October 27, to 4 November 1842, Dickens and his friends toured Cornwall in an open carriage amid much jollity and boisterous fun. Dickens later described . . . their exploration of ‘earthy old churches’ and ‘strange caverns on the gloomy seashore’ as well as their going ‘down into the depths of Mines . . . ,’ ” recorded biographer Michael Slater.