Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

The Return of Dinny

When I put together this Third Decade reading list, I thought, “I hope I like Galsworthy since I put one novel from The Forsyte Saga on each of the first nine years.” Thankfully, I do indeed like Galsworthy. These books have become a dependable treat each summer.

It’s year 8, so I’m on the eighth book of the series, Flowering Wilderness. I was glad to see Dinny Charwell (pronounced “Cherrell”) return. In the previous book, she raised questions about duty as she continually tried to help everyone, even when she couldn’t help and even when her efforts put her in bodily danger. In this novel, Dinny is the flowering wilderness of the title, a young woman who is figuring out that she might have her own life to live, not just the life of the dutiful phantom her family traditions have placed in her head. In fact, Dinny has realized that she might even make herself happy by marrying Wilfrid.

*sigh* When two people meet and fall in love near the beginning of a novel, you know they’re going to have trouble. It seems that, while traveling in the East, Wilfrid has accepted Islam at the point of a gun, and the story gets back to England just a few days after our lovebirds plight their troth. All of Dinny’s family and all the family’s friends believe that it is now impossible for Dinny to marry Wilfrid; what he has done is simply not acceptable. The catch is that no one involved is actually a Christian believer, so they can’t agree on exactly what is so wrong about Wilfrid’s conversion. Is it wrong because he betrayed an essential myth? Is it because he acted un-English? Is it because he wasn’t courageous enough to accept death?

Once again Galsworthy critiques modernism in a fascinating way. His modern characters are all very comfortable and self-assured as long as they’re attending clubs and running charity drives. But then an event comes along that shows tension between their agnostic beliefs and their vestigial Christian ethics. The intriguing conundrum plays out through strong, elegant prose presenting full-bodied characters speaking to one another in rational and emotional and absolutely essential dialog. By contrast, I’ll end today’s post with a weak, colloquial, superfluous line:

It’s so good!

Orlando Ritornando

A few years ago I published a post called “Full Circle,” in which I explained that a chance mention of Orlando Furioso somewhere in C. S. Lewis (with all my rereading of Lewis, I still haven’t found the passage!) inspired my whole project of reading the classics of great literature. At the time of the post, April of 2011, I had finally made it to the book that started it all. First encountering the colorful scenes, full-blooded characters, and melodious narration of Orlando made me realize that a part of me was made to love this epic book – a part of me I didn’t totally know the existence of before. My return to it is just as delightful if not as self-revelatory.

Thirteen years ago I mentioned many of the fantastic elements I was enjoying. But fantasy alone doesn’t excite me; I need a fantastic world to be filled with characters I can root for or against, not, as Mark Twain said, tedious characters I wish would simply drown. In the last two or three years, I’ve read two classic fantasies with drown-worthy characters (The Well at the World’s End and The Worm Ouroboros), and I didn’t like them – couldn’t wait to get away from them. But The Silmarillion, The Divine Comedy, Many Dimensions, and Orlando Furioso are among my very favorite books. Oh! I should also add The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: fantasies all and every one a favorite.

So let me concentrate this time on some features of characters in Orlando Furioso that I especially like. First, I couldn’t be happier than I am to see Muslim and Christian knights respecting each other while fighting to the death. Join me in savoring this stanza from book I:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!
Here were two rivals, of opposed belief,
Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and sore,
Aching from head to foot without relief,
Yet to each other no resentment bore.
Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if
Two friends, they go. Against the charger’s sides
Four spurs are thrust until the road divides.

Well, and then they have a choice to make. What common end could make these fierce enemies ride the same horse? It could only be money, power, or a woman, and they’re both too chivalrous to pursue money or power. Angelica, the maid who ultimately drives Orlando furioso, stands down one of these two branches in the road. She is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (until we meet Dalinda and Olimpia, who are also, each, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World) and she is from China. Angelica, like Helen of Troy (also the MBWitW), is in the end not worth pursuing, but that’s what makes her and the search for her interesting. And can we cheer the sixteenth-century European author for locating ultimate pulchritude in Asia?

Ariosto is progressive in other ways, as well. Rinaldo rescues a woman who has been sentenced to death for having sex with her boyfriend. Rinaldo doesn’t care if she has done the deed or not; he knows it simply isn’t right to punish the girl while the boy goes scot-free. And Bradamante, one of the knights of most prowess and courage, is a woman, doing everything in the field that a man can.

But the poet can be conservative, too, because progressivism and conservatism are not in themselves goals or ideals but merely tools that can and should be used for good. Where a good is threatened, be conservative; where change toward the good is needed, be progressive. Answers aren’t simple, and you need wisdom to know when to preserve and when to reform. And you can’t make things simple again by just deciding that everything used to be good. Hear this wisdom from the preacher of Ecclesiastes: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

OK, enough theory. Where is Ariosto conservative? Where he has Orlando throw the ninth century’s only cannon into the sea, because launching a deadly ball from behind a stone battlement is not chivalrous. (“Aha! I’ve got you!” you say. “Gun control is not conservative!” Yes it is, when what you are trying to conserve is the way weapons used to be.)

So, anyway. Magic, realism, fantasy, heroes, villains, adventure, mystery, intrigue, love, loyalty, betrayal, beautiful poetry, dramatic plots, inspiring philosophy, “dark wood and winding paths,” hippogriffs, and Merlin prophesying from the grave – Orlando Furioso has it all! And I love it!

Two Civil War Biographies

Are these Great Books with a capital G and a capital B? No. Virtually no one will read them in a hundred years. (Sure: some future Ken Stephenson will one day walk through the oldest stacks in the quaint thing called a library, breathe in the delicious, wholesome air of the browned and brittle pages, find these books, and learn from them, so I won’t say absolutely no one will read them a century from now.) They haven’t won Pulitzers (although one has won the American Batllefield Trust Prize). But did these books make me think and rethink about what I understand of American history? Yes.

First, the better-written of the two books: Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. Only last year, I found out that Longstreet plays an important role in the Lost Cause Myth: the notion that the South didn’t truly care much about slavery and fought a noble, hopeless war for liberty, led by great Christian heroes and stopped only by a godless butcher (according to the myth, Grant) and a crass commercial enterprise that simply made more guns (according to the myth, the United States). Whatever the tenets of this poorly supported historical theory, General James Longstreet certainly cared about slavery and white supremacy during the war: his rallying speech to his troops in front of Richmond warned them that a United States victory would mean abolition and a black-run society. But near the end of the war, he explained several times that he saw inevitable defeat for the Confederacy and determined that he would work to live at peace in the new, slaveless polity. He became a Republican (the liberal, pro-civil-rights party at that time, remember), worked to elect Grant, earned a spot as Customs Controller for New Orleans, and then was tapped to head the Louisiana Militia. When, in September of 1874, thousands of white supremacists gathered on Canal Street and threatened a violent end to Reconstruction and black voting rights, General Longstreet led the militia out to defeat them. The former rebel, now determined to abide by the newly amended Constitution and to recognize the constitutional rights of all citizens, led a militia of black soldiers and white soldiers, a militia in which every man of equal rank received equal pay regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude. A militia in which black soldiers could be and were promoted, all the way to the rank of general. A militia in which regiments were integrated. A militia in which white officers led both black and white soldiers and black officers led both black and white soldiers. Southern Democrats never forgave him.

I see a lot to admire in a man who left a life in which racial hatred and fear could lead him to betray his sacred oath to his country (he was a commissioned U. S. officer when secession started) and adopted a new life in which respect for the law could raise members of the recently enslaved race to positions of high authority. But Jubal Early and his ilk didn’t find Longstreet’s post-war stance admirable, and so they started a campaign against him, a campaign whose ramifications are still felt today, whose tenets I’ve read in history books that have won a Pulitzer. By the time Early got the ball rolling, the Daughters of the Confederacy were publishing materials defending the justness of the Confederate cause and, in their words, praising the “moral and military infallibility” of Robert E. Lee.

So look, there’s controversy about Longstreet. The Lost Cause side says that he disobeyed Lee’s orders at Gettysburg and lost that battle, thus losing the war, betraying his new country (let’s ignore the first betrayal), betraying his race (at least that’s what they said in the 1800s), and betraying his commander (whose military infallibility, I guess, couldn’t overcome one supposedly disobeyed order). Do I really, finally know if he screwed up at Gettysburg? Do I really, finally know that he ended up a good guy? No (although my parentheticals in this paragraph perhaps indicate which way I lean). But when the side that started the defamation program claims moral infallibility for their hero, I’m strongly inclined to believe that they have at least stretched the truth about their nemesis, also.

When I say this isn’t a Great Book, I don’t mean to malign Varon’s writing: her research is detailed, her arguments are nuanced, and her prose is smooth and polished. I’m just saying I don’t predict that her work will last as long as Herodotus’. John A. Carpenter’s Sword and Olive Branch, by comparison, is much less literary but, to me, equally enlightening. It, too, relates the life history of a Civil War general. Its subject also was and has been the subject of a smear campaign whose effectiveness can be gauged by its reverberations in Civil War histories of our time. And its subject also worked for the promotion of the four million new citizens naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sword and Olive Branch tells the story of Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who watched his corps disintegrate in fifteen minutes at Chancellorsville. For this and for a retreat at Gettysburg (to a more defensible position!), he developed and suffered, as the history books continue to tell us, a bad reputation with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. And yet, when I continue to read accounts of the Civil War, I find him later in a place of high authority acting nobly and effectively under Sherman, without, to my recollection, authors pointing out that his earlier bad reputation may not have been deserved or had at least been atoned for by greater success later in the conflict. Carpenter points all this out, though, and I’m glad to see Howard’s full war record properly celebrated.

But the story gets really good after the war. As the Director of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Howard fought hard to get black citizens housing, jobs, pay, and, above all, education. I knew he founded Howard University, which is why I wanted to read about him. I didn’t know his work with the Bureau actually helped create several other colleges open to blacks (and women!) as well as almost two thousand elementary and preparatory schools. And I didn’t know that Howard by himself achieved in a few days what the government backed by the Army had not been able to do in thirteen years by treating successfully with Cochise (and apparently to Cochise’s satisfaction!) and almost eliminating violence between whites and Apaches in Arizona. I’m not quite finished with the book, and I think things don’t go so well or so honorably with the Nez Perce later. But what I’ve read so far makes Howard fascinating and admirable.

If these two books teach anything, they at least demonstrate that you can’t believe anything just because you read it in black and white. So let me just clarify before I close this too lengthy post that, while I have now read one biography of each general, each biography decidedly tending toward approval of its subject, I haven’t drawn any lines in the sand: I won’t say definitively whether either of the two was a good guy or a bad guy. But I tentatively admire each general while firmly believing that neither was either morally or militarily infallible.

Disappointment and Hope

Rarely have I found the first part of a book so good only to be deeply disappointed by the rest. I was looking forward to Owen Wister’s The Virginian, having heard that it was the first western (i.e. cowboy) novel; I was ready to find Wister an unjustly forgotten American author like Kenneth Roberts. And my first couple of says with the book confirmed my prognosis. Wister offers poetic descriptions of the West and keen observations of the characters: for instance, it’s a surprise to the first-person narrator that one cowboy can call another a son of a — (Wister uses the dash!) and have it received as a term of endearment. He also establishes a classic cowboy trope in 1902 when an enemy calls the Virginian an SoB. The Virginian pulls out his pistol, lays it on the table, and says, “Smile when you call me that.” The saloon gets quiet for a couple of seconds until everyone sees that no violence will ensue. Then the mingled noise of music, cards, and revelry returns. How many times have we seen that scene in movies and on television!

But things turned sour on the third day. First, Wister says that Equality means an equal chance for everyone to show how unequal he is. And then, of course, he has to try to redefine Christianity: “As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you – if you deserve it – as their superior. That’s the whole bottom of Christianity.” And there’s a very distasteful scene in which the manly Virginian humiliates a missionary by seeming to go along with his program, wrestling with his sin nature all of one night, only to laugh at him in the morning and go about his way, displaying true Christianity by showing how superior he is. That’s Wister’s disgusting idea of a hero. From then on the book just gets boring, with the cowboy getting moony about a girl, and continued trouble with the predictable villain. Oh, and there’s an attack from Indians who are called “peaceful” (with the quotation marks).

But now, just today, the day before I finish this novel, I was starting to think that maybe I had let some moments I disagreed with spoil a book I could have been enjoying if I hadn’t read in protest. (As to why I read books I don’t like “in protest,” that’s the topic for another post, I suppose.) But then the Virginian gave his girlfriend a lesson in civics, as if she hadn’t learned in school that the power of government by courts comes from the people. But, of course, women can’t be expected to retain, let alone, understand such things. That’s why we don’t let them vote! Then the narrator gave the reader, in a condescending tone, a lesson that one might do evil in order to achieve good, giving the example that one might correctly trespass in order to stop a murder, as if we readers don’t know that. And this was in defense of cowboys lynching cattle thieves, supposedly because the corrupt courts give them no other choice: as if killing a man to prevent thieving is just like trespassing to prevent killing a man. Then the final showdown with villain is set up, and Wister pulls back his flimsy curtain with one sentence: “It is only the great mediocrity that goes to law in these personal matters.” So much for Christianity boiling down to treating men as brothers. So much for respecting the authority of any court. We’re back to democracy meaning an arena where the best can win over the lesser. And apparently men always prove superior to women, and white men always prove superior to Indians. Seems to me I’ve read about some lies the white man told the Indian. But never mind that. It’s the Indians who lie so much they are only described as quote-peaceful-endquote. And remember: all this superiority is true Christianity. Wow! The Virginian just fell deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling pit today.

But I’ll be done with it tomorrow. And I know I have some much better reading coming up. Soon I’ll be starting to reread Orlando Furioso, the book that started my whole reading project. There’s also some Anthony Trollope coming up later this year and, in November or December, one of my very favorite books: Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. (The novel is so much better than the title!) I also have high hopes for Grimm’s Tales and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Consequently, you can hope for some happier posts in the next few months.

Seeds of a Comedic Masterpiece

I had originally intended the last post to refer to both tragedy and comedy in its title and to cover two related observations concerning The Pickwick Papers. But when I got to four good paragraphs on the tragic topic, I decided to split things up and look behind the comedic mask in a second post. Here is that second post; I can’t imagine that it will run as many as four paragraphs.

I begin my second paragraph by saying that several aspects of The Pickwick Papers seem to have found their way later into A Christmas Carol. You can’t read Dickens’s first novel – or even read much about it – without realizing that the embedded story of Gabriel Grub, a misanthropic sexton who has a change of heart one Christmas Eve when he is abducted by goblins, is the odd little tune that six years later served as cantus firmus for the gloriously polyphonic and much, much, much better Christmas Carol. But other things in Pickwick remind me of A Christmas Carol, too. There’s the Christmas dinner at Mr. Wardle’s with the games and the kissing under the mistletoe, which sounds quite reminiscent of nephew Fred’s party at which the rapidly reforming Scrooge played at Twenty Questions and Topper and the plump sister in the lace tucker “were so very confidential together behind the curtains.” And there are certain turns of phrase here and there that crop up again in the Christmas novella, too, especially in the first few paragraphs of Scrooge’s tale. A fellow in debtor’s prison asks Mr. Pickwick, “Why didn’t you say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?” I suppose the last phrase (meaning to be generous, especially in buying a round of drinks) was common in Dickens’s time, but it jumped out at me as I remembered that snow and sleet “often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” The teller of one of the stories-within-the-story in Pickwick says early on, “There is nothing at all extraordinary in this story, unless you distinctly understand at the beginning, that he [the story’s central character] was not by any means of a marvelous or romantic turn.” No person having read A Christmas Carol a dozen times (in other words, a mere beginner) can read those words and not think of these: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Hmm. That paragraph got a little bloated. I’d better finish quickly. And I will do so by offering a theory. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol after his first relative failure, Martin Chuzzlewit. He was in a funk and needed a new project, something wonderful and irresistible, to get both his readers and his mojo back. I believe he went back to Pickwick to think about the work that made him so popular to begin with (if offices had had water coolers in 1837, everyone would have stood around them talking about the adventures of Mr. Pickwick), realized that the story of Gabriel Grub would really shine after a good makeover, and in his rereading of that first novel caught a few choice constructions that could bear reusing. Remember, those phrases are all on the first page of A Christmas Carol, as if he were then still working to infuse inspiration into the new work. And now I have to wrap it all up or else I’ll find myself in a fourth paragraph. So I’ll bid adieu today with a recommendation of the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas. Everything in this dramatization of Dickens’s composing A Christmas Carol (other than the obviously fantastical scenes) is historically accurate. Except for the idea that he didn’t know, as he was writing, how Scrooge’s story would end. That bit of poetic license works fine in the movie, but we know that the real Dickens knew exactly where Scrooge was going from the very beginning: Gabriel Grub, after all, ended up a renewed man.