(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The War on Christmas and a Question: Where Did Charles Dickens Find His Scrooge? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-12-19 THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS Pagans and Progressives built a Christmas tradition that conservatives fought against for centuries with a dollar-and-bible fury. Pagan peasants in Germany brought small fir trees into their homes to celebrate the season, the shortest day of the year was upon them, and they could look forward to better weather and the growing of crops. Townsfolk in England held a holiday feast on Christmas Day while braving Puritan Oliver Cromwell's actual, real, people-went-to-jail War on Christmas. His troops enforced the edict. The Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a crime punishable by fine to celebrate Christmas because that’s what Puritanical Christians do best. They forbid shit. Later, in America, it was writer Washington Irving who brought the beginnings of a modern Christmas to this country. That’s right! The Headless Horseman and Rip Van Winkle guy. He spread the joy of the holiday with his many writings describing the holiday, especially as it was celebrated in England, including his invention of Jolly Old St. Nick. . A few years later, it was the world's most influential and popular Progressive, Charles Dickens, who became the true Father Christmas, first with his world-wide best seller The Pickwick Papers (everybody who read that book wanted to take part in a feast and holiday like they had in good old Dingley Dell) and later in novellas that he released around Christmastime each year, starting in 1843 with A Christmas Carol. His effect on the holiday has been, if anything, underrated, even with the London Sunday Telegraph, on December 18, 1988, calling him, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” On the left is a column from the Yakima Herald (12/22/1892) in which he is called “the guardian of Christmas time” and “the genuine wizard of Christmas.” The fact that capitalist Scrooge was the antagonist in that story, and hardline Puritan Oliver Cromwell was the antagonist in his story, typifies how conservatives and capitalists were always at War with Christmas. It wasn't until the latter realized that they could use the holiday to sell shit did they show interest in the holiday besides the adrenaline rush from putting coal in somebody’s stocking. Then, in the early part of the 21st Century, Republican conservatives realized that Christmas could be useful in their culture wars. We invented “Merry Christmas,” they fought dollar-and-bible against it, so now we get to decide if it’s appropriate to say, “Happy Holidays.” And, yes, it is. Happy Holidays to YOU! WHERE CHARLES DICKENS FOUND HIS SCROOGE Below is a short 9:48 video that I recently published to YouTube about A Christmas Carol, especially the strangeness of it all. It really was quite weird! Additionally, I make a case for the person whom I believe was the final inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge’s magical transformation. One of the icons of Christmas—one of the most iconic characters in all of fiction—is the ultimate misanthrope Ebenezer Scrooge. From what or whom did the author base this character? Dickens never indicates where he found him, nor do his biographers, but perhaps with a little investigation we can discover the truth. THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS Thomas Robert Malthus was the dickhead who first invented what is currently in vogue with conservatives in America: Do not give charity to the poor! His thin rationale was that it would increase their numbers, and then we would all starve and die off or something like that. Charles Dickens almost certainly never met Malthus, as he died in 1834 while the author was only twenty-two. Yet, Malthus does live in Scrooge, a condition easily divined by this passage from the book in which two gentlemen from that day’s Salvation Army sought alms for the poor from Scrooge: “At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, … it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.” “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again. “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?” “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.” “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge. “Both very busy, sir.” “Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.” “Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?” “Nothing!” Scrooge replied. “You wish to be anonymous?” “I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” There. Did you see that? The key phrases were “idle people” and “surplus population.” The Reverend Malthus was famous for suggesting charity to the idle poor would increase their number and thereby the surface population, subjecting everyone to famine. So very Christian! Republicans today have also found reasoned ways not to help the poor! There is no doubt that Malthusian economics is a part of Scrooge. He quotes Malthus. It was Scrooge’s philosophy at the beginning of the book. It was a then-trendy rationale not to care about anybody else. There are undoubtedly other malefactors that caught the attention of Dickens at the time. This was the beginning of the era of the robber barons, those who built factories and created giant monopolies on the sweat and labor and, quite frequently, the death of their laborers. It was the time of the Poor Laws, and the same folk who drafted those brutal statutes also built the debtor prisons. I feel that we have part of our answer with Malthus and other villains of his day, but contributions to the Scrooge character came from additional sources. THE SEXTON GABRIEL GRUB From the author who decided that Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without g-g-g-ghosts, we have a Christmas story about goblins. The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton was actually a chapter in Dickens' first best seller—the book that made him a household name across the globe— The Pickwick Papers . The plot in The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton is quite similar to the author's later and more mature masterpiece A Christmas Carol: An older man, who curses all things beautiful and joyful, is set upon by forces of the supernatural on Christmas Eve. In the story, Dickens described the Scrooge-like Sexton Gabriel Grub in this way: "Gabriel Grub was an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow--a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle.… [Happiness] was gall and wormwood to the heart of Gabriel Grub; and when groups of children bounded out of the houses, tripped across the road ... to spend the evening in their Christmas games, Gabriel smiled grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he thought of measles, scarlet fever, thrush, whooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolation besides." A sexton was the person in charge of a church’s grounds, and back in those days, would bury the dead, which is why he “clutched the handle of his spade” on Christmas Eve and why the author called him “one of the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth.” What happened to Gabriel Grub didn’t involve any ghosts, it was the Goblin King and his Goblin Chorus that taught Grub a lesson about Christmas. In A Christmas Carol, the lessons were more psychological, while in this earlier version of the story, the Goblins also gave Grub a physical lesson by kicking him about. This was a dress rehearsal, or perhaps more accurately, an off-Broadway run before the Master made adjustments and unveiled his masterpiece on Broadway. There were many differences in the stories, and the writer’s ability had matured by the time of the Carol. However, it is obvious that Ebenezer Scrooge owes a great deal of his dna to Gabriel Grubb. Here’s a link to the exact page of the book where “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” begins. It’s free and quite a good read! LAURA BRIDGMAN Our first two candidates I feel were easy targets. If you had gotten those wrong in an English class at Catholic school, you risked a rap on your knuckles from Sister Vanessa. Deservedly so! But our final candidate is not obvious at all. In fact, I haven’t found anybody else positing this theory. That’s because this theory isn’t about adopting an actual person’s persona or written philosophy or even another fictional being; this is Charles Dickens being inspired by an idea. That idea is wound up in the unforgettable real-life story of Laura Bridgman. A Christmas Carol is about transformation. A change in a person so dramatic it has fired imaginations for 180 years. I believe that Charles Dickens wrote literature’s greatest fictional transformation because he was witness to the single greatest transformation in human history. That inconceivable metamorphosis happened to a little girl named Laura Bridgman. Laura Bridgman’s family fought a death struggle with Scarlet Fever. It killed two of Laura’s siblings. At the age of two, Laura was rendered blind and deaf and remained bed-ridden for months. The tiny girl was condemned to a dark and soundproof cell. It was a life sentence. Samuel Gridley Howe took Laura to his institute in Boston at the age of eight and spent a great deal of time with her, finally falling upon the concept of using objects that Laura could hold and feel while she felt the names of those objects written in raised letters on paper labels. One day understanding illuminated her face. The first words that Laura Bridgman learned were “spoon” and “key.” She then demanded to know the words for EVERYTHING! Half a century before Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, the single greatest transformation of a human being took place at the Perkins Institute in Boston. Laura Bridgman joined our world. Charles Dickens visited with her and her instructor in 1842. He was inspired to write “that an Immortal soul might be awakened.” Charles Dickens also wrote this at the end of his description of Laura Bridgman in his nonfiction book American Notes: "Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind!" I believe that Laura Bridgman lives inside A Christmas Carol. What Dickens wrote about Bridgman he could have just as easily written about Scrooge. The fact that the author had a sympathetic heart is also some evidence of this theory. How could he not be affected by the real-life story of Laura Bridgman? Bust of Laura Bridgman at the Perkins Institute. “[T]hat an Immortal soul might be awakened.” — Charles Dickens CONCLUSION Charles Dickens endowed Ebenezer Scrooge with the philosophy of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, the story of Gabriel Grub and his goblins, and the electricity that shot through him when he met Laura Bridgman. She sparked the idea for the full transformation seen by the end of A Christmas Carol. From the time men and women first walked the Earth, the blind and deaf were trapped in a dark and soundproof cage. Then came Laura Bridgman. Dickens came face to face with her, the person who underwent the greatest transformation in human history. Was it a coincidence that he would create the greatest transformation in the history of fiction mere months later? My holiday gift to you is a direct link to the chapter in Dickens’ American Notes in which he describes the Perkins Institute and Laura Bridgman. It is the most beautiful story I have ever read, and it describes the greatest transformation in human history. I bet that you will cry. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/19/2210077/-The-War-on-Christmas-and-a-Question-Where-Did-Charles-Dickens-Find-His-Scrooge?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/