Mr. Timothy: A Novel (51 page)

What are you working on now?

I'm looking at another well-known nineteenth-century author: Edgar Allan Poe. Since Poe was, among other things, the creator of the detective story, I thought it would be fun to put him at the center of a mystery. The book is called
The Pale Blue Eye
, and it will feature a younger Poe than we're used to seeing. We pick him up when he's still in his early twenties-- a cadet at West Point. He's going to be thrown in with an older man, himself a detective, and their relationship will really form the heart of the book. And this being Poe, there will be more traffic with dead folk. Once you start hanging out with ghosts, it's tough to leave them behind.

I have to admit, I had some trepidation about taking on Poe, because his sensibility is so Gothic and extreme, and I just wasn't sure I could get there. But then I reread portions of
Mr. Timothy
, and I thought:
No, you're gruesome enough. You're there already
.

About the book

Keep in mind, this quiz is based on Dickens's
Christmas Carol
, not on any movie or television series that has been made from the book.

1. Marley's first name was ______.

a: Phillip b: Geoff c: Jacob

2. ______ is the name of Scrooge's nephew.

a: John
b: Fred
c: George

3. ______ and Scrooge were apprentices for Fezziwig.

a: Thomas Fields b: Dick Wilkins c: John Openshaw

4. Scrooge's sister was named ______.

a: Sue b: Fan c: Liz

5. When he was young, Scrooge was in love with ______.

a: Belle b: Dora c: Flora

6. ______ Cratchit played a joke on her father by hiding from him when he came home.

a: Belle b: Sarah c: Martha

7. ______ were the children that the Ghost of Christmas Present showed to Scrooge.

a: Faith and Hope
b: Ignorance and Want c: William and Mary 8. The charwoman, the laundress, and the undertaker's assistant sold what they took from Scrooge to ______.

a: Old Joe
b: Uncle Nick c: Big John

9. After being visited by ghosts, Scrooge sent a ______ to the Cratchit family.

a: turkey
b: letter
c: box of toys

10. And so, as ______ observed, "God bless us, everyone."

a: Scrooge
b: Tiny Tim
c: The Ghost of Christmas Present

Reprinted with permission from www.triviahalloffame.com

Correct answers for
A Christmas Carol
Quiz: 1/c; 2/b; 3/b; 4/b; 5/a; 6/c; 7/b; 8/a; 9/a; 10/b

Know Your Dickens?

Mr. Timothy
is salted with allusions to other Dickens works and to Dickens's own history. Can you find...

*
the blacking factory where young Dickens was forced to go to work?
*
the Hungerford Market, where Mr.Dick lodged in
David Copperfield
?
*
Saffron Hill, a common haunt of Fagin's in
Oliver Twist
?
*
the graveyard where Captain Hawdon was buried in
Bleak House
?
*
The Roman bath in Strand Lane often frequented by David Copperfield?
*
Craven Street, where Mr.Brownlow conversed with Rose Maylie in
Oliver Twist
?
*
Marshalsea Jail, home to Little Dorrit and her family?
*
the Adelphi Terrace, where Mr.Pickwick celebrated his release from Fleet Prison?
*
Jacob's Island, where Bill Sikes was killed in
Oliver Twist
?
*
the Camden Town railway establishments from
Dombey and Son
?

Extra credit: Find two uncredited appearances made by Charles Dickens himself. Correct answers for Know Your Dickens?:

31, 31, 147, 91, 150, 129, 236, 153, 344, and 207 Extra credit: 65 and 188

Read on
THE STORY

Fun Facts About
A Christmas Carol

"Scrooge" was an actual English verb: a colloquial term for crowding or squeezing.

*
The book's original title was
A Christmas Carol in Prose: A Ghost Story of Christmas.
*
The germs of Scrooge's adventure can be found in Dickens's own "Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," an interlude in
The Pickwick Papers
. That story was, in turn, inspired by Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." Dickens was a friend of Irving's and was indebted to the American writer for his evocations of a British Christmas.
*
Why does Marley wear a bandage around his head? In Victorian times, dead people often had their heads wrapped in bandages to keep their faces from collapsing into gruesome expressions. Dickens received the same ministration when he died in 1870.
*
The depiction of the Cratchits' home life was almost certainly inspired by Dickens' childhood memories. Like the Cratchits, he and his family lived in a small house in Camden Town, then considered one of London's poorest suburbs.
*
Tiny Tim may have been patterned after one of several real-life figures, including Dickens's brothers Fred and Alfred (Alfred died in childhood) and his invalid nephew Harry Burnett Jr.
*
Medical experts have long theorized about the nature of Tiny Tim's illness. Contemporary diagnoses include spinal tuberculosis and renal tubular acidosis, a kidney disease.
*
By having Scrooge send the Cratchits the gift of a turkey, Dickens helped the turkey replace the goose as England's favored Christmas bird.

Tiny Tim was never depicted in John Leech's original illustrations. The first known rendering of the character was an 1861 wood engraving by the great French artist Gustave Dore.

*
A Christmas Carol
may owe part of its genesis to an 1843 government report on child labor abuses in mines and factories. After reading the report, Dickens was inspired to strike a "sledge-hammer blow...on behalf of the Poor Man's Child."
*
Writing at great speed, Dickens completed the work within six weeks, even as he was laboring on his serialized novel
Martin Chuzzlewit
. Dickens later said he felt the Cratchits "ever tugging at his sleeve, as if impatient for him to get back to his desk and continue the story of their lives."
*
Published in 1843,
A Christmas Carol
was an immediate sensation, running through an initial print run of 6,000 copies in only five days. It has never been out of print. Dickens, however, earned little money from it--partly because the book, with its hand-colored illustrations, was expensive to produce, and partly because he spent hundreds of pounds in court costs to combat British copyright pirates. The U.S.editions of the book were likewise pirated, and Dickens never earned a penny from them.
*
Dickens insisted on keeping the price of the book low so it would reach the broadest possible audience.
*
A Christmas Carol
was a favored part of Dickens's public reading repertoire. Between 1853 and 1870, he read it 127 times before British and American audiences. A notably skilled performer, he often reduced audiences to tears with the imagined death of Tiny Tim.
*
At least a dozen stage productions of
A Christmas Carol
sprang to life within a year of the book's release.(Dickens, by law, held no copyright on dramatizations of his work.) Interestingly, the famous words "God bless us, everyone!" could not be uttered on the British stage in that era. Producers had to make do with the more benign "Heaven save you!"
*
Not all critics have been kind to
A Christmas Carol
. A contemporary reviewer wrote, "Nothing can be more absurd than the fable itself and the whole of its groundwork: it is the veriest brick and mortar, puerility and absurdity, of the idlest fairy tale." Henry James would later refer to Tiny Tim and Dickens's other child characters as "little monsters...deformed, unhealthy, unnatural."
*
Ironically, Christmas traditions were on the wane in Great Britain when
A Christmas Carol
first appeared. Dickens is credited with reviving those old customs and, in the process, helping to shape the Christmas celebration we know today.
*
Christmas was not universally celebrated in the United States during the midnineteenth century, but after hearing Dickens read
A Christmas Carol
in Boston in 1867, a local manufacturer was inspired to close his factory on Christmas Day and hand out turkeys to all his employees. Three years later, Congress made Christmas a federal holiday for the first time.

Source:
The Annotated Christmas Carol
, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). With the author's permission.

The first film version of the book was a 1901 British silent titled
Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost
. Since then, Scrooge has been impersonated on film, television, stage, and radio by everyone from Lionel Barrymore to Alistair Sim, to Patrick Stewart, to Mr. Magoo.

Ackroyd, Peter.
London: the Biography
. New York: Nan A.Talese Doubleday, 2000.

Arnstein, Walter L.
Britain Yesterday and Today
. Fourth Edition. Lexington, Massachusett : D.C. Heath and Co., 1983.

Baxendale, Kenneth William.
Charles Dickens' London: 1812
-
1870
. West Wickham, Kent: Alteridem, 1986.

Life in Victorian England: The Pitkin Guide
. Pitkin Unichrome, 1999.

Mayhew, Henry.
London Labour and the London Poor
. In four volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.

Mitchell, Sally.
Daily Life in Victorian England
. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Pool, Daniel.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Thomas, Donald.
The Victorian Underworld
. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Thomson, John.
Victorian London Street Life in Historic Photographs
. New York: Dover Publications, 1994.

Weinreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert, eds.
The London Encyclopedia
. Revised Edition. London: Macmillan London, 1995.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Christopher Schelling for nurturing this book from its infancy. Thanks also to Marjorie Braman and everyone at HarperCollins. Additional help came from Jeffrey Hunter, John Edwards, Helen Eisenbach, Abby Yochelson of the Library of Congress, and Roberto Severino of Georgetown University. Of the many historical references I consulted, I should single out
The London Encyclopedia
(edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert), Peter Ackroyd's
London: The Biography
, and Donald Thomas's
Victorian Underworld
, which had the additional benefit of introducing me to Dickens's great contemporary Henry Mayhew.

The usual stream of gratitude to friends and family...and to Don, above all else.

ALSO BY LOUIS BAYARD

Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck Cover illustration (c) by Bisson Freres, The Portal of Saint Ursinus at Bourges, Mary and Leigh B. Block Purchase Fund, 1980.213 Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago