The first Scrooge

Mom,

I have always love the story, A Christmas Carol. Dane and I watch the movie version with Patrick Stewart every year without fail. It wouldn't be Christmas without it.

Did you know that Ebenezer Scrooge was not the first solitary, crotchety old man who despised both people and Christmas that Charles Dickens wrote about?

Dickens first literary imagining was a man he named, Gabriel Grub. He wrote about him in 1836. It was a short story that made up chapter 29 of The Pickwick Papers. “The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton” relates the strange experiences of Gabriel Grub, the sexton (caretaker and gravedigger) for a church in a rural village, and a literary cousin of Ebenezer Scrooge. According to Dickens, Gabriel Grub was “an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow – a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself.” He had “a deep scowl of malice and ill-humor.” Sounds like Scrooge, doesn’t he?

One Christmas Eve, Grub decided to go to the churchyard to dig a grave. As he walked through the streets of his village, he watched people making preparations for Christmas parties – parties he wouldn’t even think to attend, should he have been invited. When he saw children playing games, Grub amused himself with the thought of “measles, scarlet fever, thrush, whooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolations besides.” If his neighbors offered him a Christmas greeting, Grub returned “a short, sullen growl,” not “Humbug!” but its pre-verbal precursor. When a young lad was singing a Christmas song in the street, Gabriel Grub cornered the boy and “rapped him over the head with his lantern five or six times.” As he began digging a grave, Grub cheered himself with this thought: “A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas box! Ho! ho! ho!”

But then, Gabriel Grub received a surprise visitor, a grinning goblin who taunted him with clever dialogue. Soon this goblin was joined by “a whole troop of goblins” who captured Grub and dragged him down into the earth. Grub found himself in a cavern with the first goblin, the “king of goblins,” and his band. They proceeded to show him a series of scenes that were magically projected in the end of the cavern. The first scene was of a poor family: many children and their mother. The children rejoiced when their father joined them. But then the scene shifted to a bedroom, in which “the fairest and youngest child lay dying.” “Even as the sexton looked upon him with an interest he had never felt or known before, the little boy died.” Yet the family had assurance that their little one was in “happy Heaven.” (The similarity between this scene and that of Bob Cratchit’s family in A Christmas Carol is striking.)

Reading the story of Gabriel Grub is like looking at the charcoal sketches of an artist getting ready to paint a masterpiece. The parallels between “The Story of the Goblins” and A Christmas Carol are obvious: a solitary, nasty old man not only refuses to celebrate Christmas, but also spurns the greetings of those who do, and even tries to hurt a boy who sings a Christmas carol. On Christmas Eve, this man receives unexpected supernatural visitors who proceed to show him many scenes of life, including a moving scene of a poor, loving family whose youngest child is terribly ill. In the end, the man is changed by this experience. These are some of the obvious parallels between the story of Gabriel Grub and that of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Of course there are also many differences between “The Story of the Goblins” and A Christmas Carol. One of the most striking differences emerges when we compare conclusions. Whereas Gabriel Grub slunk away out of fear that the townspeople would laugh at him, Ebenezer Scrooge resolved to live a changed life. After the Ghost of Christmas Future revealed to Scrooge his own sorry death, Scrooge exclaimed: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” And so he did.

But the differences between Grub and Scrooge suggest a tantalizing question: Why did Ebenezer Scrooge change? And why did he change so thoroughly that he didn’t even mind if people were to laugh at him? To these questions I’ll return in my next post.

Dane, Lucy and I are going to see a music version of A Christmas Carol today. I'll see if I can get some fun pictures to share tomorrow.