CHRISTMAS CAROL

     Below you see the Maclise drawing of Dickens at the time he wrote A Christmas Carol. Forster wrote that "nothing ever done of Dickens himself has conveyed more vividly his look and bearing at this yet youthful time."  

IGNORANCE AND WANT

     In 1843, an American friend of Dickens came to vist. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arrived in London, and, of course, Dickens had to show him the worst of the city. From the Forster biography:

"[W]e had lately taken Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, 'thousands of immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance."

FORSTER BIOGRAPHY at 182.

     Dickens was a champion of education for all. Ignorance, he thought, was the absolute bane of society. Ignorance also became the name of one of his most extraordinary characters in the Carol. This, then, was his inspiration for one of the greatest scenes in literature and film.

     But it wasn't one trip to the skid rows of London that he managed. On the contrary, this he saw as his constant duty. Miles and miles at a time and on foot.

(Les, this goes to the incredible characters of "Ignorance and Want" in the Carol.).

DICKENS WRITING THE CAROL

"It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him out of the time taken up by two numbers of his Chuzzlewit; and though begun with but the special design of adding something to the Chuzzlewit balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own acount of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let himself loose like a madman."

FORSTER BIOGRAPHY at 182, 186.

UNIFIED THEORY OF CHARLES DICKENS

     In my mind, the Dickens short story called The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain is the chief manifesto of the author's beliefs. The richness of one's heart is built and maintained by the memory of the good AND the BAD times. Empathy depends upon memory. From Forster's biography about the genesis of the Carol, at page 182: " ... but for disappointments the year had also brought might never have been thought of." His great achievements were built on past disappointments.

     I thought that I was unique in this perspective, but I have since found out that author John Irving also believes that Charles Dickens preached the gospel of memory. Irving went further with the idea writing a book to explore the subject: "'In One Person' is a story about memory."