by Carlo DeVito
According to Forster, the original schools were “begun by a shoemaker of Southampton and a chimney-sweep of Windsor.” In 1843, Charles Dickens began his association with the schools and visited the Field Lane Ragged School. He was appalled by the conditions, yet moved toward reform.
Dickens wrote some time later, “This attempt is being made in certain of the most obscure and squalid parts of the Metropolis, where rooms are opened, at night, for the gratuitous instruction of all comers, children or adults, under the title of RAGGED SCHOOLS. The name implies the purpose. They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some people not depraved, willing to teach them something, and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out, which is not the iron hand of Law, for their correction.”
While he initially intended to write a pamphlet on the plight of poor children, Dickens realized that a dramatic story would have more impact.
All this turned in the head of Dickens as he walked the streets, as was his custom, late, late at night. How to get the story across? The next day, he boarded the train once again and took the daylong journey back to London. All the discussions, all the people he had met, now swirled in his head. A story, a story, but how to tell it? Something began to take shape in Dickens’ mind. A story was stirring. Characters were beginning to form. But who would be the protagonist? The point of the story was clear to him. The lesson, the moral, the theme were already in place. But the story. Dickens turned it over in his head. . . . With Chuzzlewitt droning on, or so it seemed, something different had to be written.
Wrote Forster years later, “Active as he had been in the now ending year, and great as were its varieties of employment; his genius in its highest mood, his energy unwearied in good work, and his capacity for enjoyment without limit; he was able to signalize its closing months by an achievement supremely fortunate, which but for disappointments the year had also brought might never have been thought of. He had not begun until a week after his return from Manchester, where the fancy first occurred to him, and before the end of November he had finished, his memorable Christmas Carol.”
* * *
Ebenezer Scrooge
Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, covetous, old sinner!
Dickens returned from Manchester and continued to be intrigued by the story that was swirling in his mind. He walked the streets of London as he pieced together the story and the plot. From October through November, Dickens walked many, many nights, often not embarking until after dark, and sometimes returning well into the morning hours of the clock’s dial.
Dickens eventually wrote of his combination of insomnia and restlessness, explaining, “Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.” He continued, “In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night in the year.”
“None of Dickens characters knew London as well as the novelist himself. No one walked its high roads and its streets and lanes as much, and as avidly, as he did. His fascination with the city, it thoroughfares and its by-ways was established early in his life. London scenes seemed to have inspired him,” wrote Dickens scholar Andrew Sanders.
“The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first entertainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and stray people were left us, after that. If we were very lucky, a policeman’s rattle sprang and a fray turned up; but, in general, surprisingly little of this diversion was provided. Except in the Haymarket, which is the worst kept part of London, and about Kent-street in the Borough, and along a portion of the line of the Old Kent-road, the peace was seldom violently broken,” Dickens remarked. “After all seemed quiet, if one cab rattled by, half-a-dozen would surely follow; and Houselessness even observed that intoxicated people appeared to be magnetically attracted towards each other; so that we knew when we saw one drunken object staggering against the shutters of a shop, that another drunken object would stagger up before five minutes were out, to fraternise or fight with it. When we made a divergence from the regular species of drunkard, the thin-armed, puff-faced, leaden-lipped gin-drinker, and encountered a rarer specimen of a more decent appearance, fifty to one but that specimen was dressed in soiled mourning. As the street experience in the night, so the street experience in the day; the common folk who come unexpectedly into a little property, come unexpectedly into a deal of liquor.”
“For Dickens, London was a city not of dark contrasts, but of an extraordinary variety and energy. From the very beginning of his career as a writer he knew he had a distinctive vocation, and that vocation was to articulate the phenomena that was London,” wrote Dickens scholar Andrew Sanders.
Dickens wanted something magical, fairy-like, with supernatural elements and the like. He must have thought back to a story he had told inside the larger book of The Pickwick Papers. His new story would reimagine that of the character Gabriel Grubb in the chapter “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” In that story, Grubb, a gravedigger, was determined not to make merry at Christmas time. Grubb was kidnapped by goblins and convinced to change his ways. Dickens wanted something that used this story but fit his philosophical ideas on economics and humanity toward man. But the basic principle appealed to him. He would use horror, memory, and a touch of fairy dust to concoct this new, more modern parable.
These kinds of stories were not new to literature. Men confronting demons or angels were popular literary backwaters, with stories like “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving, wherein a miserly old man makes a deal with the devil. While he becomes very rich, he cannot save himself, and eventually death comes in black garments to take him away. Dickens was a fan of Irving and sure knew of the story. There had been many of these, most of them owing their origins of the old German legend of Faust.
One of the thoughts that occurred to him was using the concept of a Christmas carol as his overriding theme, with the book broken up into ‘staves.’ The word ‘stave’ in the world of music is actually a term for verse, stanza, or a metrical unit of a poem. It an ancient form of verse or a stanza of a song. Staves are traditionally known as the pieces of a barrel that fit together closely.
The idea of calling it “A Christmas Carol” seems to have been first and foremost upon his mind. And he kept to the idea that it would be shaped like a carol in structure. Popular carols of the day were “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (which dated back to the mid-1700s), “O Christmas Tree” (1824), “The Holly and the Ivy” (fifteenth and sixteenth century), and “Adeste Fideles” (which was later translated into “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in 1841).
Several carols are usually used in productions of the story in modern times which actually were written after Carol’s publication, including “Good King Wenceslas” (1853), “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863), “We Three Kings of Orient Are” (1863), and “Deck the Halls” (a sixteenth century Welsh tune not translated to English until 1862).
Armed with this, Dickens decided to use the word “stave” instead of “staff”—possibly because the idea was that the pieces all fit snuggly like a barrel, water-tight—to increase t
he sense of construction as a small, self-contained story.
Now Dickens began to turn the story over in his head, and he searched through his notebooks for ideas and clues that would unlock the tale. He decided to tell the story of the reclamation of a covetous old sinner, and he had the perfect character. But first he had to find his diary of a previous year. Therein lay the first and most important lock. In that diary he had written down the name he knew he was destined to use.
In 1841 Dickens had visited Edinburgh, Scotland. Friend Forster received “[h]is first letter from Edinburgh, where he and Mrs. Dickens had taken up quarters at the Royal Hotel on their arrival the previous night.”
“I have been this morning to the Parliament House, and am now introduced (I hope) to everybody in Edinburgh. The hotel is perfectly besieged, and I have been forced to take refuge in a sequestered apartment at the end of a long passage, wherein I write this letter,” Dickens wrote to Forster on June 23, 1841. “They talk of 300 at the dinner. We are very well off in point of rooms, having a handsome sitting-room, another next to it for Clock purposes, a spacious bedroom, and large dressing-room adjoining. The castle is in front of the windows, and the view noble. There was a supper ready last night which would have been a dinner anywhere,” remarked Dickens.
“This was his first practical experience of the honors his fame had won for him, and it found him as eager to receive as all were eager to give,” concluded Forster.
While in Edinburgh, Dickens, looking to kill time during one of his walks, visited the Canongate Kirkyard (Churchyard) around Canongate Kirk on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. The churchyard was used for burials from the late 1680s until the mid-twentieth century. The most celebrated burials at the kirkyard were the economist Adam Smith and the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson. But while walking through the graveyard, Dickens noticed an odd sight—the tombstone of Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie.
In the gloaming of an evening in the capital, assisted by an episode of mild dyslexia, Charles Dickens created one of literature’s most famous characters. Scroggie’s tombstone read “meal man,” but through his misreading Dickens interpreted the inscription as “mean man.” He later scribbled in his notebook, “To be remembered through eternity only for being mean seemed the greatest testament to a life wasted.”
Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland.
A year or two later, Dickens pulled this name up out of his notebook and, in changing it to Ebenezer Scrooge, had finally found the right sinner for his tale. One cannot be sure today why Dickens changed the name, but coincidentally, the now obscure English verb “scrouge” meant to squeeze or press, and Dickens used those words to describe Scrooge.
“According to Peter Clark, a British political economist who seems the starting point for this story, Dickens misread the inscription. It actually said ‘Meal man,’ because Scroggie was a corn merchant,” reported the broadsheet The Scotsman. “Scroggie was far from being the Scrooge of the story being somewhat licentious by nature, tupping at least one servant over a gravestone and into pregnancy, goosing a Countess at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and in general enjoying the good things in this life while there was time to do so. And, of course, as a corn merchant he saved and improved far more lives than anyone just giving away their money does, as his Great Uncle (Adam Smith) points out in Book IV, Chapter 5 (start at para 40) of the Wealth of Nations.” Through his mother, Scroggie was the great-nephew of the eighteenth-century political economist and philosopher Adam Smith.
Of course, while this mistake yielded one of fiction’s most revered characters, Scroggie himself was one of Scotland’s greatest characters. For it was true that Scroggie was a sinner, and he was covetous, but not of money. For Scroggie was a most successful businessman and a well-known hedonist who loved wine, women, and parties.
Scroggie was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, date unknown. And he was buried in Edinburgh in 1836. The grave marker was lost during construction work on part of the kirkyard in 1932. “Ebenezer Scroggie was a successful merchant, vintner and Town Councillor (or Baillie) in Edinburgh. He held the first contract to supply whisky to the Royal Navy in Leith and was also responsible for supplying the drink for King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This alone would have moved him into the ‘Fortune 500’ if such a concept had existed at the time,” reported historum.com. “Scroggie was known as a dandy and terrible philanderer who had several sexual liaisons which made him the talk of the town. He was a jovial and kindly man, not the mean-spirited miser with which he was associated.”
It would seem that while Scroggie and Scrooge were both sinners, one had more fun than the other.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.
So, Ebenezer Scrooge now had a name, and Dickens had an idea of what he wanted him to be like, but who was Scrooge in Dickens’ mind? Who were the Scrooges of the world at that time? Who would give Scrooge his voice?
Dickens turned to men he loathed. He turned to men with whom he violently disagreed. There were several men whom Dickens used to put words into Scrooge’s mouth. He based the miserly part of Scrooge’s character on a noted British eccentric and miser named John Elwes (1714–1789), and it is popularly thought that Scrooge’s opinions and comments on the poor of London were based on those of demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus.
John Elwes (a.k.a. “Elwes the Miser”) was born April 7, 1714, and died November 26, 1789. He was a Member of Parliament for Berkshire (1772–1784) and a noted eccentric and miser. He was thought to have inspired characters in several novels during the period following his death, including Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and John Scarfe’s The Miser’s Daughter.
His birth name was “John Elwes Meggot,” and he was born into a respectable English family. His father, Robert Meggot, was a Southwark brewer and his grandfather Sir George Meggot was a Member of Parliament for that same borough. His mother was the granddaughter of Sir Gervase Elwes, 1st Baronet and Member of Parliament for Suffolk. Elwes inherited his first fortune from his father who died in 1718 when he was just four years old. Although his mother was left £100,000 in the will, she reputedly starved herself to death because she was too miserly to spend it. With her death, he inherited the family estate including Marcham Park at Marcham in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire).
Elwes the Miser.
The greatest influence on Elwes’ life was his miserly uncle, Sir Harvey Elwes, 2nd Baronet of Stoke College and Member of Parliament for Sudbury, whom Elwes obsequiously imitated to gain favor. Sir Harvey prided himself on spending little more than £110 per annum. The two of them would spend the evening railing against other people’s extravagances while they shared a single glass of wine. In 1751, in order to inherit his uncle’s estate, he changed his name from Meggot to Elwes. Sir Harvey died on September 18, 1763, bequeathing his entire fortune to his nephew. The net worth of the estate was more than £250,000.
Elwes squandered more money on bad investments than he did on his living expenses. Still, today, Elwes would have been worth many millions. Despite his willingness to invest in business, Elwes became famous for his miserly ways in personal affairs. It was noted that he went to bed when darkness fell so as to save on candles. He began wearing only ragged clothes, and at one point he found a beggar’s cast-off wig in a hedge and wore it for two weeks. His clothes were so dilapidated that many mistook him for a common street beggar and would put a penny into his hand as they passed. To avoid paying for a coach he would walk in the rain, and then sit in wet clothes to save the cost of a fire to dry them. His house was full of expensive furniture but also molding food. He would eat putrefied game before allowing new food to be bought. On one occasion it was said that he ate a moorhen that a rat had pulled from a river. Rather than spend the money for
repairs he allowed his spacious country mansion to become uninhabitable. A near relative once stayed at his home in the country, but the bedroom was in such a poor state that the relative was kept awake all night by rain pouring on him from the roof. Unable to find a servant, the relative relocated his own bed several times himself until he found a place where no water leaked down upon him. Mentioning this to Elwes in the morning, the latter said, “Ay! I don’t mind it myself . . . that is a nice corner in the rain!”
According to author William Haig Miller, Elwes even “complained bitterly of the birds robbing him of so much hay with which to build their nests.” Even his health was limited by expense. In common with many misers he distrusted physicians, preferring to treat himself in order to save paying for one. He once badly cut both legs while walking home in the dark, but would only allow the apothecary to treat one, wagering his fee that the untreated limb would heal first. Elwes won by a fortnight and the doctor had to forfeit his fee. He also once bore a wound from a hunting accident. Legend has it that one day he was out shooting with a gentleman who was a particularly bad shot. This same man accidentally fired through a hedge, lodging several shot in the miser’s cheek. With great embarrassment and concern, the gentleman approached Elwes to apologize. But Elwes, anticipating the apology, held out his hand and said, “My dear sir, I congratulate you on improving; I thought you would hit something in time.”
