by Louis Bayard
a: Thomas Fields
b: Dick Wilkins
c: John Openshaw
4. Scrooge’s sister was named ______.
a: Sue
b: Fan
c: Liz
5. When he was young, Scrooge was in love with ______.
a: Belle
b: Dora
c: Flora
6. ______ Cratchit played a joke on her father by hiding from him when he came home.
a: Belle
b: Sarah
c: Martha
7. ______ were the children that the Ghost of Christmas Present showed to Scrooge.
a: Faith and Hope
b: Ignorance and Want
c: William and Mary
8. The charwoman, the laundress, and the undertaker’s assistant sold what they took from Scrooge to ______.
a: Old Joe
b: Uncle Nick
c: Big John
9. After being visited by ghosts, Scrooge sent a ______ to the Cratchit family.
a: turkey
b: letter
c: box of toys
10. And so, as ______ observed, “God bless us, everyone.”
a: Scrooge
b: Tiny Tim
c: The Ghost of Christmas Present
Reprinted with permission from www.triviahalloffame.com
Correct answers for A Christmas Carol Quiz: 1/c; 2/b; 3/b; 4/b; 5/a; 6/c; 7/b; 8/a; 9/a; 10/b
Know Your Dickens?
Mr. Timothy is salted with allusions to other Dickens works and to Dickens’s own history. Can you find…
the blacking factory where young Dickens was forced to go to work?
the Hungerford Market, where Mr.Dick lodged in David Copperfield?
Saffron Hill, a common haunt of Fagin’s in Oliver Twist?
the graveyard where Captain Hawdon was buried in Bleak House?
The Roman bath in Strand Lane often frequented by David Copperfield?
Craven Street, where Mr.Brownlow conversed with Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist?
Marshalsea Jail, home to Little Dorrit and her family?
the Adelphi Terrace, where Mr.Pickwick celebrated his release from Fleet Prison?
Jacob’s Island, where Bill Sikes was killed in Oliver Twist?
the Camden Town railway establishments from Dombey and Son?
Extra credit: Find two uncredited appearances made by Charles Dickens himself.
Correct answers for Know Your Dickens?:
31, 31, 147, 91, 150, 129, 236, 153, 344, and 207
Extra credit: 65 and 188
Read on
Fun Facts About A Christmas Carol
THE STORY
“Scrooge” was an actual English verb: a colloquial term for crowding or squeezing.
The book’s original title was A Christmas Carol in Prose: A Ghost Story of Christmas.
The germs of Scrooge’s adventure can be found in Dickens’s own “Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” an interlude in The Pickwick Papers. That story was, in turn, inspired by Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Dickens was a friend of Irving’s and was indebted to the American writer for his evocations of a British Christmas.
Why does Marley wear a bandage around his head? In Victorian times, dead people often had their heads wrapped in bandages to keep their faces from collapsing into gruesome expressions. Dickens received the same ministration when he died in 1870.
The depiction of the Cratchits’ home life was almost certainly inspired by Dickens’ childhood memories. Like the Cratchits, he and his family lived in a small house in Camden Town, then considered one of London’s poorest suburbs.
Tiny Tim may have been patterned after one of several real-life figures, including Dickens’s brothers Fred and Alfred (Alfred died in childhood) and his invalid nephew Harry Burnett Jr.
Medical experts have long theorized about the nature of Tiny Tim’s illness. Contemporary diagnoses include spinal tuberculosis and renal tubular acidosis, a kidney disease.
By having Scrooge send the Cratchits the gift of a turkey, Dickens helped the turkey replace the goose as England’s favored Christmas bird.
Tiny Tim was never depicted in John Leech’s original illustrations. The first known rendering of the character was an 1861 wood engraving by the great French artist Gustave Doré.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
A Christmas Carol may owe part of its genesis to an 1843 government report on child labor abuses in mines and factories. After reading the report, Dickens was inspired to strike a “sledge-hammer blow…on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.”
Writing at great speed, Dickens completed the work within six weeks, even as he was laboring on his serialized novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens later said he felt the Cratchits “ever tugging at his sleeve, as if impatient for him to get back to his desk and continue the story of their lives.”
Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol was an immediate sensation, running through an initial print run of 6,000 copies in only five days. It has never been out of print. Dickens, however, earned little money from it—partly because the book, with its hand-colored illustrations, was expensive to produce, and partly because he spent hundreds of pounds in court costs to combat British copyright pirates. The U.S.editions of the book were likewise pirated, and Dickens never earned a penny from them.
Dickens insisted on keeping the price of the book low so it would reach the broadest possible audience.
A Christmas Carol was a favored part of Dickens’s public reading repertoire. Between 1853 and 1870, he read it 127 times before British and American audiences. A notably skilled performer, he often reduced audiences to tears with the imagined death of Tiny Tim.
At least a dozen stage productions of A Christmas Carol sprang to life within a year of the book’s release.(Dickens, by law, held no copyright on dramatizations of his work.) Interestingly, the famous words “God bless us, everyone!” could not be uttered on the British stage in that era. Producers had to make do with the more benign “Heaven save you!”
Not all critics have been kind to A Christmas Carol. A contemporary reviewer wrote, “Nothing can be more absurd than the fable itself and the whole of its groundwork: it is the veriest brick and mortar, puerility and absurdity, of the idlest fairy tale.” Henry James would later refer to Tiny Tim and Dickens’s other child characters as “little monsters…deformed, unhealthy, unnatural.”
Ironically, Christmas traditions were on the wane in Great Britain when A Christmas Carol first appeared. Dickens is credited with reviving those old customs and, in the process, helping to shape the Christmas celebration we know today.
Christmas was not universally celebrated in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, but after hearing Dickens read A Christmas Carol in Boston in 1867, a local manufacturer was inspired to close his factory on Christmas Day and hand out turkeys to all his employees. Three years later, Congress made Christmas a federal holiday for the first time.
Source: The Annotated Christmas Carol, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). With the author’s permission.
The first film version of the book was a 1901 British silent titled Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost. Since then, Scrooge has been impersonated on film, television, stage, and radio by everyone from Lionel Barrymore to Alistair Sim, to Patrick Stewart, to Mr. Magoo.
An Excerpt from Louis Bayard’s Pale Blue Eye
Mid the groves of Circassian splendor,
In a brook darkly dappled with sky
In a moon-shattered brook raked with sky,
Athene’s lissome maidens did render
Obeisances lisping and shy.
There I found Leonore, lorn and tender
In the clutch of a cloud-rending cry.
Hell-harrowed, I could only surrender
To the maid with the pale blue eye
To the ghoul with the pale blue eye.
*
“Within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead
.”
*
LAST TESTAMENT OF GUS LANDOR
April 19, 1831
In two or three hours…well, it’s hard to tell…in three hours, surely, or at the very outside, four hours…within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead.
I mention it because it puts things in a certain context. My fingers, for instance, have become interesting to me of late. Also the lowermost slat in the Venetian blinds, a bit askew. And, outside the window, a wisteria shoot, snapped off the main stem, waggling like a gallows. I never noticed that before. Something else, too: at this moment, the past comes on with all the force of the present. All the people who’ve peopled me…don’t they come thronging round…what keeps them from bumping heads, I wonder? There’s a Hudson Park alderman by the hearth; next to him, my wife, in her apron, ladling ashes into the can, and who’s watching her but my old Newfoundland retriever; and down the hall, my mother, who never set foot in this house, died before I reached twelve…well, she’s ironing my Sunday suit. My father’s somewhere out back, gathering kindling, or praying. None of them says a word to the others. Very strict etiquette in place, I can’t work out the rules of it, no matter how long I look.
Not everyone, I should say, minds the rules. For the past hour, I’ve been having my ear bent—torn, nearly—by a man named Cadmus Foot. He was run in fifteen years ago for robbing the Rochester mail. A vast injustice: he had three witnesses to swear he was robbing the Baltimore mail at the time. He flew into a fine rage about it, skipped town on bail, came back six months later, crazy with cholera, and threw himself in front of a hackney cab. Talked all the way to death’s door. Still talking now.
Oh, it’s a crowd, I can tell you. Depending on my mood, depending on the angle of the sun through the parlor window, I can attend to it or not. There are times, I admit, when I wish I had more traffic with the living, but they are harder to come by these days. Patsy scarcely stops round anymore, the boys at Benny Haven’s give me wider berth…Professor Quawquaw is off measuring heads in Havanna…as for him, well, what is there to call him back? I can only summon him in my mind, and the moment I do, all the old talks play out again. All those hours—hours and hours—trying to see if I had a soul. He was on the pro side of the question. It might have been amusing to hear him go on if he hadn’t been in such terrible earnest. But then no one had ever pressed me so strongly on this point, not even my own father (traveling Presbyterian, too busy with the souls of the nearest flock to plant much of a boot on mine). Again and again, I said, “Well, well, you may be right.” It only made him hotter. He’d tell me I was just putting off the question, pending empirical confirmation. And I would say that, lacking confirmation, what more could I say than “You may be right”? Round and round we went, until one day, he said, “Mr.Landor, there will come a time when your soul turns round and fronts you in the most empirical fashion possible. The very moment it quits you. You will clutch for it—ah, in vain! See it now, sprouting eagle wings, bound for the Asiatic eyries.”
Well, he was fanciful that way. Gaudy, if you must know. Myself, I’ve always preferred facts to metaphysics. Good hard homely facts, a full day’s pottage. It is facts that shall form the spine of this narrative, and where I stray from them, write it down as dotage, nothing more…a brain just this side of extinction.
“Extinction.”
Oh, why wrap it in quotation marks when it lies so near at hand? When it was for so many years my business? Ceasing to be my business, it continued as habit. Foolish to expect anything else. One night, a full year into my retirement, my daughter heard me talking in my sleep—very distinct—welcoming a midnight caller, she thought. She came into my bedroom to find me questioning a suspect twenty years dead. The corner won’t square, I kept saying. You do see that, Mr.Pierce…. This particular fellow had dismembered his wife’s body and fed the pieces to a pack of watchdogs at a Battery warehouse. In the dream, his eyes looked pink and sad and half-flirty; he was sorry for taking up my time, such a gentleman as I was. I remember telling him: If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.
Foolish, as I said, to think the Pierces of the world will leave you in peace. To think you can slip away into the Hudson Highlands with your books and ciphers and your watercolors and your knobby-oak walking sticks…and leave extinction behind? It won’t be left, I tell you. It will come and find you.
I might have run. A little further into the wilderness, I might have done that. How I let myself be coaxed back I can’t truly say. The best answer I can make is no answer at all but, God help me, metaphysical. I mean to say there are times I believe it happened—all of it happened—so we should find each other, he and I.
Even as I write that sentence, my hand jerks to a halt…. Reason catching me by the sleeve, that’s what my young friend would call it. “What of the others?” Reason says. “Just tools, were they, for realizing your destiny?” I have no good reply to make her, I have only a theory: Destiny belongs to the survivors. Like history. And I am (for the moment) alive. It’s my last qualification. Alive, with these memories and these other lives—oh, if you must, souls—to account for. And since those souls were, on many sides, closed to me, I have made way where necessary for other speakers. My young friend most especially. He’s the true spirit behind this poor history, and whenever I try to imagine who’ll be first to read this manuscript, he’s the one who presents himself. His fingers tracing the rows and columns, his eyes picking out my scratches.
It’s not likely, I know that. Near impossible he will claim the authorship due him. Well. I suppose authors never know half of what they’ve written…any more than they can choose who will read them. We are the chosen ones. Nothing left, then, but to take comfort in the thought of this stranger—still unborn, for all I know—who will read these lines for the first time. To you, my beloved, dreaded stranger, I dedicate this narrative.
And so I become my own reader. For the last time. Another log in the fire, would you please, Alderman Hunt?
And so it begins again.
For Further Reading
A Victorian-Era Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. London: the Biography. New York: Nan A.Talese Doubleday, 2000.
Arnstein, Walter L. Britain Yesterday and Today. Fourth Edition. Lexington, Massachusett : D.C. Heath and Co., 1983.
Baxendale, Kenneth William. Charles Dickens’ London: 1812–1870. West Wickham, Kent: Alteridem, 1986.
Life in Victorian England: The Pitkin Guide. Pitkin Unichrome, 1999.
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. In four volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.
Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Thomas, Donald. The Victorian Underworld. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Thomson, John. Victorian London Street Life in Historic Photographs. New York: Dover Publications, 1994.
Weinreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopedia. Revised Edition. London: Macmillan London, 1995.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Christopher Schelling for nurturing this book from its infancy. Thanks also to Marjorie Braman and everyone at HarperCollins. Additional help came from Jeffrey Hunter, John Edwards, Helen Eisenbach, Abby Yochelson of the Library of Congress, and Roberto Severino of Georgetown University. Of the many historical references I consulted, I should single out The London Encyclopedia (edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert), Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, and Donald Thomas’s Victorian Underworld, which had the additional benefit of introducing me to Dickens’s great contemporary Henry Mayhew.
The usual stream of gratitude to friends and family…and to Don, above all else.
About the Author
LOUIS BAYAR
D is a novelist and reviewer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Nerve.com, and Salon.com. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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Praise
“With its linguistic razzle-dazzle, Mr. Timothy is a mock-Victorian tourdeforce: a shilling-shocker that touches the heart and makes it race.”
—Wall Street Journal
“There isn’t one throwaway sentence in this fabulous Victorian mystery…. Shimmering, knock-your-socks-off language…a subtle character examination and a page-turning plot, one truly engaging book.”
—Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)
“[A] divinely crafted novel…. It is impossible to avoid being caught up in caring about the story.”—Denver Post
“What a terrific book.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Soaring language, memorable characters, splendidly atmospheric settings, and a heartrending theme of parental love and loss…. In scope, in setting, and in heart, Bayard proves to be a worthy successor to Charles Dickens.”
—People
“Inventive and amusing…. Bayard elaborates so commandingly on Dickens…. Far from being cowed, he is confident enough to turn this story on its head.”
—New York Times Book Review
“This mix of thriller and literature is as rich as a Christmas cake…. Aspirited adventure.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A fantastic Victorian thriller…. The ending is as much Edgar Allan Poe as Mission Impossible, a plot with enough trapdoors and false bottoms to show just how much fun a ripping thriller with eggnog can be. But what’s particularly satisfying is that beneath these waves of adventure rests a truly moving meditation on grief and reconciliation.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Sink into a fireside chair with Louis Bayard’s stellar Mr. Timothy…. Bayard’s remarkable imagination is rivaled only by his elegant, mordant wit. Somewhere, Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde are applauding. Tim’s droll, insightful narration is as side-splitting as it is poignant, and deftly interwoven into the plot are his meditations on the burden of potential, on loss, and on the often discordant kinship between fathers and sons.”