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 publication 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.
Over the past three years, I have come to know many of my readers and I have often been touched and humbled by their responses to my work. I hope that you, as one of those readers, will look on this little book as my Christmas card to you, and with it my wish for you is that the spirit of Christmas may be with you always. May God bless you, every one.
Charlie Lovett
CHRISTMAS 2014