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

by Carlo DeVito

  Dickens later abandoned the idea of using Cornwall for a story setting, according to Slater, but “his imagination continued to be haunted by its rugged landscape, mines, and dramatic coastline. They appear in the Carol, for example, when Scrooge finds himself transported to ‘a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about as though it were the burial place of giants,’ and then whirled out to sea where his ears are ‘deafened by the thundering of water, as it rolled, roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.’ ”

  From there, the ghost takes Scrooge to the lighthouse Dickens had always envisioned, with a few solitary figures standing within the thick, heavy walls of the lighthouse, with weather and water raging all around and the yellow-orange glow of the fire proving safe inside. This was all locked up for safekeeping by Dickens in 1842, and was now spilt out onto his pages.

  “He’s a comical old fellow,” said Scrooge’s nephew, “that’s the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him.”

  With the holiday season coming up, Dickens put on himself not only the immense pressure of writing, producing, and publishing his own book, he still put pressure on himself to learn a new dance or parlor trick for the season’s festivities. And of course, he loved parlor games.

  Charles Dickens in 1842.

  “Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” recalled Catherine and Charles’ daughter Mamie many years later. His son Henry recalled that Christmas in their home “was a great time, a really jovial time, and my father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything that was going on.”

  “Our Christmas Day dinners at ‘Gad’s Hill’ were particularly bright and cheery, some of our nearest neighbors joining our home party. The Christmas plum pudding had its own special dish of colored ‘repoussé’ china, ornamented with holly. The pudding was placed on this with a sprig of real holly in the centre, lighted, and in this state placed in front of my father, its arrival being always the signal for applause. A prettily decorated table was his special pleasure, and from my earliest girlhood the care of this devolved upon me. When I had everything in readiness, he would come with me to inspect the result of my labors, before dressing for dinner, and no word except of praise ever came to my ears,” recalled Mamie Dickens years later.

  “He was a wonderfully neat and rapid carver, and I am happy to say taught me some of his skill in this. I used to help him in our home parties at ‘Gad’s Hill’ by carving at a side table, returning to my seat opposite him as soon as my duty was ended,” remembered Mamie Dickens.

  She ended her holiday remembrances with, “Supper was served, the hot mulled wine drunk in toasts, and the maddest and wildest of ‘Sir Roger de Coverlys’ ended our evening. . . .” Of course, during the Christmas season, he loved to imbibe. So much so that he eventually created his own holiday punch, like the lord of an old English manner. Punch and flips were both big in those days, and Dickens was no stranger to their appeal.

  Below is Charles Dickens’ own recipe for a punch. It is sourced from a letter Dickens wrote on January 18, 1847, to Amelia Austin Filloneau, affectionately known as “Mrs. F.” This punch may be served warm or cold, as noted. The recipe is in his own words.

  * * *

  CHARLES DICKENS’ PUNCH RECIPE

  3 lemons rinds

  1 cup sugar

  1 pint rum

  1/2 pint brandy

  1 quart water (boiling)

  1. Peel into a very strong common basin the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit.

  2. Add sugar, rum and brandy. Stir.

  3. Take a ladle full of brandy and light on fire, and ladle gently into bowl. Let it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame.

  4. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons.

  5. Add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again.

  6. Skim off the lemon pieces with a spoon. Take the lemon-peel out, or it will acquire a bitter taste.

  7. If not sweet enough, add more sugar to your liking.

  8. Serve warm.

  NOTE:

  The same punch allowed to cool by degrees, and then iced, is delicious. It requires less sugar.

  * * *

  After tea, they had some music. For they were a musical family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a Glee or Catch. . . . Scrooge’s niece played well upon the harp; and played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he softened more and more. . . .

  Here is another allusion to Fanny and to her children. Fanny had been sent to music school, and had, after a time, married another music student, and the two had moved to Manchester. There she and her husband taught music, and from time to time, Charles lent or gave them money. Charles always felt badly that his sister had married badly (in his opinion) and lived so far away. But there is no question that music introduced throughout the story is associated with Fanny’s family.

  Dickens himself was a good singer and liked to sing. Dickens regarded his comic singing as having saved him in troubled spots throughout his life. He used it to ingratiate himself with adults and children to good effect as a youth, and just as much when he was an adult.

  “Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?” . . .

  “Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

  “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

  For the ending of the second stave, Dickens chose to close with those who had inspired his tale. These were the ragged school children, the poor of the city, which he had seen so many times around London but most ironically near Covent Garden where the storehouses of food for the city rested.

  “Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful company. The great waggons of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party. But one of the worst night sights I know in London, is to be found in the children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet. A painful and unnatural result comes of the comparison one is forced to institute between the growth of corruption as displayed in the so much improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the growth of corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except inasmuch as ever-hunted) savages,” wrote Dickens of Covent Garden.

  Of the Ragged Schools, Dickens wrote, “It consisted at that time of either two or three—I forget which—iserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house. In the best of these, the pupils in the female school were being taught to read and
write; and though there were among the number, many wretched creatures steeped in degradation to the lips, they were tolerably quiet, and listened with apparent earnestness and patience to their instructors. The appearance of this room was sad and melancholy, of course—how could it be otherwise!—but, on the whole, encouraging.”

  Dickens continued, “The close, low chamber at the back, in which the boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable. But its moral aspect was so far worse than its physical, that this was soon forgotten. Huddled together on a bench about the room, and shown out by some flaring candles stuck against the walls, were a crowd of boys, varying from mere infants to young men; sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars—with nothing natural to youth about them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces; low-browed, vicious, cunning, wicked; abandoned of all help but this; speeding downward to destruction; and UNUTTERABLY IGNORANT.”

  “ . . . [H]e saw before him always the twin phantoms of Ignorance and Want,” wrote biographer Peter Ackroyd. “He saw legions of what he called ‘Doomed Childhood’. . . .”

  “Many of them retire for the night, if they retire at all, under the dry arches of bridges and viaducts; under porticoes; sheds and carts; to outhouses; in sawpits; on staircases,” wrote Dickens. In a letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts he had written, “[I have] very seldom seen . . . anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children . . . in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sewn.”

  Dickens harked back, once, to his boot-blacking days, and wrote, in earnest, “I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given to me by anyone I spent it [on] a dinner or tea. I know that I worked from morning to night, with common men and boys. . . . I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.”

  * * *

  Ghost of the Future

  “Ghost of the Future!” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

  It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.

  Dickens and Forster continued to go back and forth on Dickens’ relationship with his publisher. He wrote to Forster on November 19, “I was most horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it, and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9 last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote eight printed pages of Chuzzlewit yesterday. The consequence is that I could finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh very much.”

  Returning to Carol, with the visitation of this grim ghost, showed Dickens at the height of his literary powers.

  * * *

  The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

  The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

  It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

  There is no question that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a loosely dressed version of the Angel of Death, a popular character in Western literature. The concept of death as a sentient entity has existed in many societies since the beginning of history. Certainly characters like the Grim Reaper, for example, date back to the fifteenth century. The most popular version was shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe and clothed in a black cloak with a hood.

  The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, illustrated by John Leech for the first edition of A Christmas Carol.

  Grim Death by William Strand (1800).

  The most popular of these was the character “Death” from a popular religious play from the medieval days. “In the play Everyman, death is personified and treated as an agent of God that goes to visit the play’s protagonist, Everyman. The unknown author of the play uses Death as a character to present a very real truth that all people will meet death. Death is an antagonist in the play and represents physical death,” wrote entertainment reporter Daniel Bolton. “The author brings Death into the story to carry out God’s will and conviction. Everyman had been living his life according to his own plan and desires. God needed him to realize and see His plan so He calls in Death to carry out His will.”

  * * *

  The Exchange

  But there they were, in the heart of it; on ‘Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.

  The first place the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Scrooge is the Exchange. Bankers and businessmen who owned counting houses bought and sold lists of debtors in the halls and steps of the Royal Stock Exchange. They destroyed many lives in doing so.

  Charles Dickens Jr. wrote, “[The] Royal Exchange was opened by Queen Victoria on January 1st, 1845. It was built after the designs of Sir W. Tite, and cost no less than £150,000. The old Exchange, which occupied the present site, was built after the Great Fire, and again suffered from the same element in 1838. The first Exchange was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1570, who, by her herald, declared the house to be ‘The Royal Exchange.’ Sir Thomas Gresham introduced exchanges into England, but they had been popular in most of the commercial cities of Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, many years previous to their adoption in England.”

  Dickens loathed the Royal Exchange, as seen in his diary entry from January 10, 1838, when he wrote, “At work all day and to a quadrille party at night. City people and rather dull. Intensely cold coming home, and vague reports of a fire somewhere. Frederick [mentions] the Royal Exchange, at which I sneer most sagely. . . .” The next day he wrote, “To-day the papers are full of it, and it was the Royal Exchange. . . . Called on Browne and went with him to see the ruins, of which we saw much as we should have done if we had stopped home.” Despite his dislike of what the Exchange stood for, it was a popular milestone in his nightly walks and was surely on his mind and inspired some part of his story.

  * * *

  The Pawnbroker

  Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman, similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each other.

  Now Dickens dove deep into his past, and went to a part of his own life that had been so painful he could not bear it. He must have wandered one of these nights up Hampstead Road to revisit the scene of this personal ghost to refresh his mind of the details. But the reality of it must have been overwhelming.

  After his father had been placed in Marshalsea, but before his mother joined her husband, there was a period when Elizabeth Dickens attempted to keep her family and her house together. But with mounting bills and no credit, it was hard to take care of and feed the growing Dickens family.

  Elizabeth attempted to open a school, spending many hours and a little money they could not spare to open her own little business at Bayham Street named “Mrs. Dickens Establishment.” As Dickens
later remembered, “ . . . nobody ever came to the school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody.” The scheme came to nothing. The wolf was at the door.

  “ . . . [H]is distracted mother tried to keep things going and the whimpering children fed by pawning brooches and spoons and gradually stripping the rooms bare of furniture. Charles became well known to the pawnbroker’s shop, where the broker or his principal clerk, while making out the pawn ticket, would often hear him conjugate a Latin verb or decline musa and dominus,” wrote Edgar Johnson of Dickens.

  “Charles, as the man of the family, just twelve years old, was sent to a pawnbroker in the Hampstead Road, first with the books that he loved, then with items of furniture, until after a few weeks the house was almost empty, and the family was camping out in two bare rooms in the cold weather,” wrote Claire Tomalin.

  Awful memories to conjure on a cold night’s walk on the dark streets of London. The sugar tongs and sheets and clothes that Scrooge saw the charwoman and undertaker flipping through in the pawnshop were in reality the property of John and Elizabeth Dickens then, via the courier of a child. To see strangers fumble through the things of one’s life, hoping for money to feed your family—these were not memories that kept one warm. Surely these memories must have brought tears to Mr. Dickens’ eyes.