“I’m sorry,” whispered the clerk. “Perhaps they didn’t want to be disturbed after all.”
“Nonsense!” cried Scrooge, elbowing his way past the clerk and banging on the door with the handle of his walking stick. Before the clerk could restrain him, the door opened slightly and the scowling face of Mr. Portly appeared.
“I’m sorry, sir,” muttered the clerk, “I tried to . . .” But what he tried to do Mr. Portly never discovered, for as soon as Portly saw Scrooge, he swung the door open and grinned with delight.
“Mr. Scrooge, what a pleasure! What a delight. We’d no idea you would honour us so soon with a visit.” The befuddled clerk took this opportunity to make his exit, and Mr. Portly grabbed Scrooge by the hand and, shaking vigourously, pulled him into the inner sanctum in which the highly important conference was taking place.
The room might easily have contained Bob Cratchit’s entire house; Freddie’s family might have comfortably lounged in the fireplace; the table was as large as the stage of a West End theatre; and the woman who sat at the table (next to Mr. Pleasant, who now jumped from his seat to greet Scrooge by shaking the hand not claimed by Mr. Portly) wore a diamond ring that might, if pawned, have covered the weekly deposits in the bank with change left over for Sunday dinner.
“We’re so pleased you’ve joined us, Mr. Scrooge,” said Mr. Pleasant, apparently loath to release Scrooge’s hand until the old man was comfortably seated in a chair large enough that it might accommodate (and the thought occurred to all three men at once) the Ghost of Christmas Present.
“This is Mr. Scrooge,” said Mr. Portly, turning to the lady, who sat patiently at the far end of the table.
“Yes,” added Mr. Pleasant, as if she might not have heard (and she was, indeed, quite far away), “this is Mr. Scrooge.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Scrooge,” said the lady, with a slight nod of her head.
Scrooge was on his feet again as soon as Messrs. Pleasant and Portly dropped his hands, and he skipped around the table to where the lady sat so that he might offer a proper greeting. Taking a deep bow, he said, “The pleasure is all mine,” and then, looking her straight in her deep-set blue eyes, he added, “And may I take the opportunity of wishing you a very Merry Christmas.”
The woman’s face, which had remained unmoved up to this point, now showed the slightest flicker of what might have been delight or amusement or both, and she said in a soft voice, “I thank you, sir, and a Happy New Year to you and your family. Mrs. Aurelia Burnett Crosse at your service.”
“Ebenezer Scrooge at yours. I do hope I’m not interrupting.”
“On the contrary, sir,” said Mrs. Crosse, “we were only just bemoaning your absence. Your arrival could not have been more propitious.”
“Mrs. Crosse is one of our very best clients,” said Mr. Portly.
“One of their very wealthiest clients, he means,” said Mrs. Crosse with a laugh. “I’m afraid, Mr. Scrooge, you’ll find me quite inept when it comes to the old stricture against talking about money. I have quite a lot of it, and, as I’m sure your friends here will tell you, there are days on which I talk of little else.”
“You see, Mr. Scrooge,” said Mr. Pleasant excitedly, “after our . . .”
“Our adventure last night,” continued Mr. Portly.
“Yes,” said Mr. Pleasant. “After our adventure, we decided we would find a way to help some of those people we met and to . . .”
“To cover some of your cheques!” cried Mr. Portly.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Pleasant. “To cover some of your cheques.”
“And there is no one in London more suited to the task of covering cheques than myself,” said Mrs. Crosse.
“So you see,” said Mr. Portly, “we’re forming a little society.”
“The Scrooge Society,” said Mr. Pleasant.
“Yes, the Scrooge Society,” continued Mr. Portly. “We’ve asked a few of our best clients.”
“Your wealthiest clients,” said Mrs. Crosse with a twinkle in her eye.
“As you put it,” said Mr. Portly, “our wealthiest clients. We’ve asked them to join this society and to start a fund to be used for the relief of distress.”
“With the funds to be dispensed at the sole discretion of Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge!” cried Mr. Pleasant.
“And when I leave, Mr. Scrooge, you shall have a thousand pounds at your disposal, so you’d best get to work, because I assure you there is more where that came from.”
Scrooge could not hide his delight, and there followed a period of hand shaking and backslapping and Merry Christmasing such as had not been seen in that hallowed chamber for many a year (if, in fact, the eyes of the portrait above the chimneypiece had ever witnessed such a display). Scrooge agreed to dine with Messrs. Pleasant and Portly the following day to discuss the details of how the charity they had insisted on naming in his honour would be administered. For the moment, though, he said that he must be going, as he had a rather important visit to pay.
It was past his usual luncheon time when Scrooge arrived at his place of business, but earthly hunger had no effect on him that day. He was pleased to find the offices shut tight, and no sign that they had been occupied since the previous evening.
Scrooge’s last visit of the day was brief. He shook no hands, slapped no backs, made no bows, and wished no one a merry anything. The street on which Timothy and Lucie Cratchit lived was, like their home, neat and modest. At two o’clock on a summer afternoon, it was empty of pedestrians, save for an old man in a colourful waistcoat strolling slowly away from the Cratchit home, a tear glistening in his eye. Scrooge had arrived at the Cratchits’ only a few moments earlier and, peeping over the garden wall, had observed his partner, Bob, on his hands and knees in the garden doing a passable impression of a lion, whilst his grandson toddled towards him. Scrooge did not watch long enough to discover if little Tim was playing the role of big game hunter or lion tamer; he had seen enough to know that his work was done.
• • •
Scrooge half-expected another visit from Marley that evening, and sat up reading for some hours (long enough to see the young boy in the novel become a young man) before he despaired of a visit from his friend. It was nearly autumn when Marley did return, a night with a bite in the air cold enough that Scrooge entertained thoughts of a closed window and a fire in the grate. If a spirit can be said to smile, on that night Marley did. His chain, he said, was considerably lighter thanks to Scrooge’s machinations, and growing lighter every day. It was nearly four years before Marley paid his final visit, and on that occasion Scrooge’s late partner, overcome with emotion, could only mumble a simple thanks for the rest that was, at last, about to come his way.
Cratchit continued to work hard, but he left the office after lunch every Tuesday and spent the afternoon with his grandson; Scrooge saw to it that Cratchit’s income did not suffer for this indulgence. Tim always looked upon his grandfather with eyes full of love, and would consider the hours the two spent together amongst the happiest of his childhood. As Cratchit’s life became blessed with additional grandchildren, he spent more time with them and less at the office, until Scrooge convinced his partner to take early retirement and to hand the reins of the business over to his son. From that day forward, not a day passed when Cratchit did not bless the life of some member of his increasing family with an act of kindness or a display of love, and it was said by those who knew him that he taught all the Cratchit grandchildren the true meaning of family and that they would doubtless carry this lesson forth in the world as they married and had children and grandchildren of their own.
Freddie did his best to be a great reformer, and though he never became prime minister, he did attain various positions of influence and he was often, behind closed doors, the initiator and driving force behind many of the social improvements in the ensuing two decades. In his retir
ement, he continued to administer the charity founded in honour of his uncle.
The Scrooge Society (which eventually included several members of Parliament in addition to Freddie) met for luncheon at the club of Messrs. Pleasant and Portly every Wednesday. Scrooge had wanted to change the name to the Wednesday Club, but the members insisted that the name reflect the role Mr. Scrooge had played in all their lives. These pages are too brief to enumerate all the good the society did as the years passed, but many a desperate Londoner had his life transformed by the generosity of its members, and though the money they gave away was not, strictly speaking, Scrooge’s, they nonetheless depended on the old man’s guidance. And Scrooge’s understanding of the people of London, coupled with his genuine belief that they were, as his nephew had said so long ago, fellow passengers to the grave, always steered the society towards accomplishing true change in the lives of the people it touched.
Scrooge never stopped wandering the streets of London, looking for places where he might spread the spirit of Christmas and wishing the passersby a happy holiday. And though he preferred to be known as an eccentric old man rather than as a benefactor, Scrooge was not quite so anonymous as to have his deeds go wholly unrecognised. And so it was that, on occasion, whilst strolling down the Strand or when stopped before the window of a bookshop on Charing Cross Road, Scrooge would encounter some former beneficiary of his kindness, and that fortunate soul, be it man, woman, or child, would invariably greet him with a hearty, “God bless you, Mr. Scrooge,” to which Scrooge would as invariably reply, “God bless us, every one.”
The End
Afterword
The gratitude I feel for Charles Dickens extends far beyond the inspiration for (and some of the passages in) this little story. Although Dickens may have been overcredited in the early twentieth century for single-handedly both reviving the observance of Christmas and inventing our modern version of its celebration, he certainly played an important role in codifying many Christmas customs that remain in use to this day—from carol singing to tree decorating. As I look back on the Christmas celebrations of my childhood, I marvel at how much of what Christmas means to me comes from (or at the very least through) Mr. Dickens, and how much is rooted in the England of the early 1840s.
Our family was self-consciously English in our Christmas celebrations. We belonged to an Episcopal church, where we attended Christmas Eve services in the Anglican tradition. True to Mr. Dickens’s call to make Christmas a time of generosity to those less fortunate, we brought presents to church for needy children. We had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas dinner and one year my father and I scoured the city for plum pudding only to be disappointed when we arrived at the one grocery store that had said on the phone, yes they had some, to find nothing more British than purple Jell-O. We listened to Handel’s Messiah and sang carols around the piano as my sister played, and of course, thanks in part to Prince Albert, who popularized the tradition in England around 1840, we decorated a Christmas tree.
Most of these traditions remain a part of my family’s Christmas celebrations. My wife and I have, for almost twenty years, sung in the choir at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On Christmas Eve we often sing two services, culminating in the eleven o’clock mass, at which we take Communion a few minutes after midnight. We try to make Christmas a time of generosity to others and of love and gratitude expressed to members of our own family.
We also send Christmas cards to distant friends and family—a tradition started by Sir Henry Cole in England in 1843, the same year that A Christmas Carol was published. Years ago a friend of mine who is an antiquarian bookseller had a copy of the first-ever Christmas card for sale and showed it to me—it pictures a large family eating and drinking together. Even the small children receive a sip of wine, and I was reminded of the tiny cordial glass of wine that would sit at my place at Christmas dinner when I was a child. On either side of this central, colored image are two uncolored scenes—one showing a man distributing bread to the poor and another showing a woman draping a cloak over a cold mother with a baby. It was wonderful to see in this card the two ideas that we hold closest at Christmastime (and that Dickens promotes in his famous story): feasting and celebration with family, and care for and generosity to others.
In 2003, my wife, daughter, and I spent Christmas in England. My daughter’s high school glee club was scheduled to sing in London the week after Christmas, so we decided to go a few days early. I was, at the time, teaching a seventh-grade English class for a few months while a friend was on maternity leave. I had only one student in my study hall—an independent-minded young man to whom I carefully introduced Monty Python as an extension of our study of Arthurian legends. Each day, after I had read to him a scene (edited for seventh-grade ears) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he would get to work on his assignments and I would pull out a new project of my own. Since we were planning on Christmas in England I had been thinking a lot about English Christmas celebrations in general and about Charles Dickens in particular, so I thought I would try my hand at writing a sequel to A Christmas Carol. In the context of King Arthur and Monty Python, I had had a conversation with my student about parody, so I decided to begin my story with a parody of Dickens’s opening passage.
What if, I wondered, Ebenezer Scrooge had, following his conversion at the end of A Christmas Carol, embraced Christmas with the same fervor with which he had previously rejected it? So I made both Scrooge and the day on which the story was set the antithesis of what they had been in A Christmas Carol and waited to see where the old man (for he must be in his eighties by now) would take me.
My family and I arrived in England a few days before Christmas and had a light schedule—a jaunt down to the coast, where we walked atop the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head, and a relaxed couple of days in a luxurious country hotel in Kent, which my wife, Janice, and I had discovered a few years earlier when we were on a pilgrims’ walk from Rochester to Canterbury. At this hotel that had once been a country home I slid into a plush armchair in front of a roaring fire flanked by Christmas trees and worked on my story about Ebenezer Scrooge—what better place to write? Perhaps only the place where I wrote on Christmas Eve. We could not resist the opportunity to attend the Christmas Eve service at Canterbury Cathedral, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. We arrived early to claim a seat in the choir so we could see the service of lessons and carols unfold. With nearly an hour before the service started, I pulled out my notebook and continued my tale of Mr. Scrooge until I heard, with perfect clarity in the massive cathedral’s ringing acoustics, the voice of a boy soprano singing “Once in Royal David’s City” at the far end of the nave.
On Christmas morning we traveled into London to spend the day with friends. Later in the week, after we had heard the glee club sing in both sacred and secular settings, we took the train out to the little village of Kingham to spend New Year’s Eve with more of our dear English friends. Throughout the week, in hotel rooms, on the train, and in a cozy drawing room in Kingham, I continued to work on Scrooge’s story. I did not have a laptop at the time, so much of the first draft was written in longhand—but that seemed appropriate. Dickens, of course, had written all of his Christmas stories in longhand.
When we returned home I began burrowing through Dickens’s writings, looking for descriptions of some of the places I wanted Scrooge to visit. Dickens had a great concern for social welfare, and I wanted that concern to be manifest in my story.
For a couple of months in 2004, I thought The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge would be my breakthrough book. I found an agent who liked it, he sent it to a few publishers, but ultimately no one bought it, the agent drifted away, and the book sat in a drawer (or at least the metaphorical drawer that comprises a computer file) for more than a decade.
In the meantime, I did have a breakthrough. In 2011, I signed a contract with Penguin for the publ
ication of my novel The Bookman’s Tale. This led to a close working and personal relationship with the wonderful Kathryn Court, president of Penguin Books and my indefatigable editor. Kathryn encouraged me to get straight to work on my second novel, and First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen was published in 2014, following the gratifying success of The Bookman’s Tale, which had been published the previous year. In Kathryn’s office one morning, after we had looked at the proposed dust jacket design for First Impressions, she and I had a talk about what might be next. We discussed several possible new projects, and just before I left I mentioned that I did have a Christmas story, one inspired by Dickens, already finished. Kathryn was immediately intrigued, and because I was busy editing First Impressions, I sent my agent a copy of the manuscript without even reading over it. I had not taken a close look (or even a perfunctory look) in many years, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I was pleased to hear that Kathryn loved the story. I was equally pleased to find, when I did have a chance to reread it, that I did, too.
The book has a multilayered nostalgia for me—not only does it take me back to childhood Christmases and to my earliest encounters with Charles Dickens; it also, because of its long road to publication, reminds me of those lovely couple of months, now almost twelve years ago, when I was writing the first draft.
Astute readers will recognize many passages in The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge that come from works by Charles Dickens. His immortal 1843 book, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, is, of course, the major source and inspiration and I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing, parodying, and plagiarizing passages from that classic story. I wanted Scrooge’s social concerns to reflect those of Mr. Dickens, and so some of the accounts of the less fortunate in Victorian London are taken directly from his works, including the descriptions of London slums from Bleak House (1853), an asylum from “A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree” (Household Words, 1852), London rookeries from “Gin Shops” (Evening Chronicle, 1835), and debtors’ prison from Little Dorrit (1857). The description of Scrooge’s Christmas tree comes from Dickens’s story “A Christmas Tree” (Household Words, 1850). And of course David Copperfield (1850) is not only the book that Scrooge reads in his lodgings; it is also the source of the scene in Murdstone and Grinby’s, the warehouse Freddie visits.
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