After our first visit to Bartfield’s, we had done a little research and discovered that the story surrounding the writing and production of A Christmas Carol was almost as interesting as the book itself.
Charles Dickens wrote at a time when writers were afforded rock star status and he was the Beatles. He hit the best-seller list at the age of twenty-one with his first book, Sketches by “Boz,” then followed up immediately with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. By twenty-five, he was perhaps the best known writer in the world.
Dickens’s work was published in serial form (“in parts”), a common vehicle at the time and aimed mostly at the general population, a kind of literary miniseries. People everywhere waited breathlessly for the next installment of the latest Dickens tale. In 1841, in New York Harbor while The Old Curiosity Shop was running, a crowd watched a tall schooner from England being towed to the pierhead. This was before transatlantic communication when ships brought all the news from the Continent. The crowd pressed forward. Suddenly, someone on the dock yelled out breathlessly to those standing at the ship’s railings, “Is Little Nell dead?” People in the English countryside who could not afford the shilling or so per installment would pitch in together, sometimes an entire village at a time, to buy a part, which was then read aloud to the group.
When Dickens himself paid his first visit to America in 1842, he was besieged with requests for interviews and inundated with invitations from towns fighting over the opportunity to afford him a public celebration. He was wined and dined in every city he visited. On his first day in Boston, after a two-week Atlantic crossing, he opened up his hotel room door at tea time to find a line of strangers stretching down the corridor, waiting patiently to come in and speak to him. He had them all in, one at a time. When he arrived in New York, New York society threw him “The Boz Ball,” in which three thousand people danced quadrilles around the thirty-year-old author in a room festooned with Dickens medallions and tableaux vivant, groups of performers dressed and arranged to depict scenes from his novels.
Yet, incredibly, in the very next year, 1843, Dickens’s career was threatened with collapse. He was in debt to his publisher, Chapman and Hall, badgered for money by relatives and, worst of all, sales of the installments of his new book, Martin Chuzzlewit, (part of which was an excoriating portrait of the America that had greeted him so adoringly) were going very poorly.
Depressed and agonizing over a way out, in October of 1843, while still turning out the obligatory monthly installments of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens decided to write a Christmas story to renew his reputation and make a little money. He only had six weeks to dash off a manuscript and get it to Chapman and Hall. Because time was so short, the story had obviously to be short as well, so Dickens departed from the standard monthly installment format and instead published A Christmas Carol as a complete novel.
Dickens gave as much thought to the manner of publication as to the content. He wanted the book itself to embody the spirit of Christmas: the red cover, those green endpapers, the eight illustrations (four in color, a big deal in those days). These were somewhat extreme requests for a man already in debt to his publisher but he was still Charles Dickens and he insisted. This was to be his salvation every bit as much as that of Ebenezer Scrooge.
For most people, an act of desperation, going double or nothing, usually results in nothing. For Charles Dickens, however, it was double and then some. The first issue of six thousand copies sold out in a matter of weeks. Subsequent issues (with the expensive green endpapers replaced) sold out as well. Even Dickens, no stranger to meteoric success and adulation, was unprepared for the phenomenon of A Christmas Carol.
He received letters of praise from all over England. A Christmas Carol was immediately adapted for the theater. The story changed the way Christmas was viewed and celebrated in England. What before had been a one-day, quiet sort of holiday became an occasion for feasting and gifts, songs and games. Christmas cards, which had never been particularly popular before, suddenly became a fixture of the holiday. It was as though Charles Dickens had taught people how to rejoice and celebrate.
That the original manuscript for A Christmas Carol is housed in the Morgan Library is something of a curiosity. J. P. Morgan, while perhaps the best-known book collector of all time, also remains to this day the man who comes most quickly to mind as a word association with “greed.” It was as if the living Scrooge had bought the one on the page.
The library itself, a three-story building stretching from Thirty-sixth Street to Thirty-seventh Street, is stupendous in its breadth, but it was not created solely for personal gratification. Pierpont Morgan began his collection with the express aim of bringing culture to America and establishing the United States as the preeminent base of classical scholarship. The library was created to make the best written works in the world available to the best American minds.
At the time Morgan decided to undertake this effort, virtually everything that represented the best in classical culture was in Europe. Fortunately for Morgan and his library, many parts of Europe, decimated by war, were almost bankrupt and land-poor aristocrats, especially the British, were perfectly willing, even anxious, to trade art for cash.
They sold books, letters, original manuscripts, and artifacts of national icons. No one was exempt. Shakespeare, Swift, Molière, Dante, even Gutenberg Bibles made their way across the Atlantic in a wholesale migration that Americans considered a brilliant stream of acquisition and the Europeans often viewed as looting. The result was, among other things, that if a Dickensian scholar at Oxford wanted to study the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, he would have to come here. It was as if an American, in order to study the original papers of Mark Twain, had to travel to Liverpool.
This was the first time we’d ever been in the Morgan Library. We walked in through the marble entranceway, which was round with a high ceiling, and paid our five-dollar admittance fee. There were several rooms to look at, including an exhibit of American political pamphlets and campaign literature from the nineteenth century entitled “From Jackson to Lincoln: Democracy and Dissent.” The exhibit was filled with fascinating tidbits of Americana. For example, while it is popular in the 1990s to think that politics has never been dirtier or more personal, it was interesting to learn that in the presidential election of 1828, attacks on Andrew Jackson as an adulterer and bigamist were so scurrilous that Mrs. Jackson died a month after the election, driven to her death (according to Jackson) by the vicious and unrelenting accusations against her family.
We wandered out of the political exhibit and through the corridors and more or less stumbled upon the East Room.
The East Room is the kind of place that makes you gasp when you walk in, something you would expect to find in a castle in Europe, not in the middle of Murray Hill. In its brochure, the Pierpont Morgan Library notes that it “was designed as a Renaissance-style palazzo of formal elegance and understated grandeur.” “Understated” obviously has a different meaning to some people than to others.
The East Room was huge and three stories high. Each level was ringed with highly polished cherry or mahogany bookcases emblazoned with a repeating tulip pattern. All of the cases had glass doors with fancy iron-work grids across them. There was red carpeting in front of a stone fireplace that could easily have doubled as a garage, over which hung an enormous medieval tapestry, an ornate domed ceiling, and eight-sided windows with loop-de-loops in pale green. There were no visible staircases to the second and third floors. A guard nodded to the left and told us that there were hidden circular staircases that could only be accessed through a secret compartment behind one of the bookcases at the entrance. “You can’t use them,” he added immediately.
The books themselves were all but invisible behind the grillwork. We could, however, make out some of the titles and realized that there was incredible repetition, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen copies of the same work, in a variety of languages. Apparently, when Pierpont Morgan w
anted a book, he wanted every significant copy that was available. But what Morgan seemed to want more than anything else was the Bible. There were reputedly thirty shelves of Bibles.
There was one Bible in particular which was in a permanent glass display case as we walked in the room. It was a Gutenberg Bible. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed from movable type. It was produced, page by page, in about 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, on a screw-and-lever press inspired by, of all things, a winepress, in an oil-based ink that Gutenberg invented to adhere to the typeface. Each of the 1,284 pages contains forty-two lines and about twenty-five hundred individual pieces of type, each set by hand. There are only about fifty copies in existence and Pierpont Morgan owned two of them.
The invention of movable type is not just a footnote in bibliographic history. It is one of the key turning points in the development of the modern world. Before Gutenberg, books could only be produced one at a time and were strictly the province of the Church. Anything created for the production of one book was completely inadaptable to any other. After Gutenberg, however, people could be (and almost immediately were) in the business of printing books, producing one and then resetting the type to produce something entirely different. As a result, books became less scarce and more available. And more available meant that more people read them. By the time Aldus Manutius invented his italics less than fifty years later, the demand for books had become so great that all of Europe was clamoring for everything they could get on a printed page. After Gutenberg, printed knowledge and the dissent that comes with printed knowledge had made its way, to the dismay of the Church, through every stratum of European society.
We left the East Room and took the corridor to the left. Around the corner, there, in another glass case, was what we had come to see—the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, the one that Dickens had sent to Chapman and Hall to be typeset into the finished work. Afterward, when Chapman and Hall had returned the manuscript, Dickens had the pages bound in red leather and presented it as a gift to his lawyer. Morgan purchased it through a dealer from a subsequent owner just after the turn of the century.
Each year, the exhibited manuscript is opened to a different place. This year, it was turned to the page where the two forlorn children, Ignorance and Want, appear to Scrooge from under the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Even though this was, in theory, a finished copy, just this one page was replete with corrections. Words were scratched out; others were inserted; phrases were penned between lines, all in Dickens’s eminently readable handwriting. At one point, when describing the children, Dickens added the word “wolfish” and changed “abject” to “prostrate.”
“Why did he do that?”
“What?”
“Change ‘abject’ to ‘prostrate’?”
“That’s what writers do. They find the right word.”
“Yeah, but ‘abject’ and ‘prostrate.’ Why would he change it?”
“What is this, a male thing? We change words all the time.”
“But we’re not Charles Dickens. I mean, was ‘prostrate’ better in description than ‘abject’? Did it make the sentence flow more effectively? Did he agonize over the choice? Is there some great insight to be had here?”
“Oh, please.”
“No. I mean it. Or what if it was just arbitrary, a matter of whim?”
“I don’t know. I guess it will be just one of those great unsolved mysteries.”
“Yeah, yeah. But still, I don’t think I’ll ever read that line again without wondering.”
When we left the Morgan Library, we didn’t go to Bartfield’s straightaway. We decided to give Argosy another shot.
Argosy, you will remember, was the big used-book store on East Fifty-ninth Street where we couldn’t see the first-edition section because the only woman who had a key did not come in on weekends. This was a Wednesday.
“Hi. Is the woman who runs the first-edition section in?”
“Oh, yes, that’s Mrs. Lowry,” said the receptionist with a smile. “She’s right there at the desk in the back.”
We looked back and, sure enough, there was a thin, very attractive, distinguished-looking woman sitting at a desk piled with papers.
“Mrs. Lowry?”
She looked up. “Yes?”
“Are you the person who runs the first-edition section?”
“Yes.”
“Great. We’d like to see the books, please.”
She looked at us vaguely. “I haven’t had lunch yet,” she said.
“Oh. Does that mean we can’t see the books? We’ve come in from Massachusetts. We tried once before but they said you’re not here on the weekends.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t come in on the weekends.”
“Well, we have to drive back tonight. Could you just let us in and have someone else watch us while you went to eat?”
“No, I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Silence.
“I’m very hungry,” she said.
Not wanting to turn and just walk out, we decided to browse in their recommended section. In the ten minutes or so that we were there, Mrs. Lowry made no move whatever to get up from her desk and get something to eat.
“Hello,” said Kevin softly as he materialized from the back room on the right. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“We just came from the Morgan Library,” we said, skipping the Argosy visit.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “The Christmas Carol manuscript.”
“Did you see it?”
“No, I didn’t get a chance this year. I saw it last year. Did you know that they have an original fragment of Aesop’s Fables? It’s priceless. By the way,” Kevin went on, “speaking of Dickens, we just got something I think you’d be interested in.”
We followed Kevin across the floor and into the back room. Once again, he unlocked one of the bottom cabinets and withdrew a large box, larger than that which had held A Christmas Carol.
“This is a complete set,” he said, opening the box.
Inside were a series of pamphlets with illustrated covers. “Our Mutual Friend,” read the one on top. It was Dickens’s last completed novel, in parts, just as it had appeared at the time he wrote it.
Kevin took the pamphlets out slowly, one at a time. They were marvelous.
“These are the original parts that came out on the stands,” said Kevin. “See, here are the advertisements.” He opened to the back and pointed to one. “GLENFIELD STARCH,” it read. “Exclusively used in the Royal Laundry.” He handed us the part.
Yes, there was Lizzie Hexam, the heroine, and Eugene and Mortimer, the reluctant heroes, and Riderhood, the villain. And there was the part where Lizzie is in trouble and Mortimer might not … looking at the pamphlets brought it all back so strongly, as though we were reading it for the first time.
But this was more than just the content. These parts evoked their time. It was as though the bookseller’s stand of 1870 London appeared before us. The crowded streets, the long skirts, the top hats, the carriages, the horses, the dirt, the smoke, the steam, the cobblestone streets … Dickens’s London.
“How much?”
“It’s twelve hundred dollars for the set,” said Kevin. “That is actually an excellent price for Dickens in parts in this condition.”
“Yes,” we agreed. We knew, however, that it was useless to bargain.
“Will you sell this quickly?” we asked.
“Oh, yes,” Kevin said. “There is quite a demand for these.”
Twelve hundred dollars. Too much. We didn’t even consider it. Well, we considered it a little.
As we were leaving, we noticed an open door to the left, which must have been closed before because we didn’t see it on the way in and we would have. The door opened onto a cramped, narrow space squeezed between the partitions that set off the center and back rooms.
It was an office, about ten feet wide, eight feet high, and
, at most, three feet deep. Each wall consisted of floor-to-ceiling shelves, broken only on one side by a small built-in desk. The desk was piled over eye-level with papers and other papers were strewn so densely over the floor that it seemed impossible that anyone could make their way through. Interspersed with the papers on the floor were perhaps ten or fifteen empty individual-size packets of potato chips or popcorn.
This office could only belong to one person.
“You may have noticed that Mr. Murray is a little eccentric,” Kevin said softly.
CHAPTER 15
It was a cold, dark, dreary January Sunday in the Berkshires. Another cold, dark, dreary January Sunday in the Berkshires. After weeks of fruitless effort, we had finally been successful in securing our new high school baby-sitter, Rebecca, (lovely girl—al- ways busy) from one to four in the afternoon. We were finally going to get to go out. The problem was, where to go?
We had been told when we moved to western Massachusetts that “you’ll either love winter or you’ll hate it.” Well, we didn’t love it and, with three precious hours at our disposal, we could not think of a thing to do. There were the movies, a Sunday matinee maybe, twelve screens at one complex, ten at another, but they were all playing variations on Sly/Schwarzenegger/Seagal blowing up a jet fighter/hijacked navy destroyer/major city, killing an enormous but indeterminate number of Arab terrorists/renegade CIA agents/psychotic modern artists. There was skiing, cross-country and downhill, but it was cold and it meant removing two inches of dust from our skis in the basement then fighting crowds on the downhill or driving over an hour to the cross-country facility, and, besides, we had discovered (subsequent to our move here, of course) that we didn’t like skiing, not enough to actually go and do it anyway.
There was the languorous, romantic lunch, but the only really halfway decent place to eat lunch that we had found in the Berkshires was the Church Street Cafe, which was five minutes from our house and at which we had eaten regularly for the past six years, and at which we could be assured of being in and out in forty-five minutes and anyway we just remembered they were closed on Sundays in the winter.
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