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.