December 8, 2024 • 16 mins
Guest host Richard Syrett and documentarian Stephen Sakellarios discuss a literary classic and controversial claims about who may have really written it.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Stephen, this is reminiscent to me of an equally controversial
theory that William Shakespeare did not write any of those
all of his famous plays that were written by I
think it was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de
Vere And that comes up again, you know, with some
strong objections from the literary circles in academia and so forth.
(00:31):
What are the literary what a literary figures say about
your theory and why are they so resistant to the
idea that Dickens didn't write a Christmas Carrol.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
That's a good question. Most of the people, I think
who have focused on Charles Dickens have done so because
they're fans. So they're emotionally invested. And there's a lot
of people who are their career as invested and they're
financially invested. You know, there's there's films, there's you know,
just just imagine what would have to be changed, you know,
(01:05):
in academia and in society if this were to come out.
You know, and people don't like change, they experience change
has pain, you know, so there's a lot of pain here.
But as far as what they say, they don't say
anything because they won't talk to me. You know, I
can't get a conversation going, except with the exception of
a few people who have been critical of Dickens. I've
(01:26):
reached out to a few who are critical, and they
will talk to me to a point. But when it
comes to a certain point, the point where I say
Dickens was a sociopath and that basically he was not
a great writer at all. You know, he was faking it,
I lose them, and they won't talk to me anymore.
You know, I've pushed them too.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Far, all right, So let's talk about the actual you believe,
the pair that are the actual authors of A Christmas Carol,
Matthew Franklin Whitty and his wife Abby. Just give us
kind of a thumbnail sketch of who these who this was.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well, Abby came from an upper class family. She was
raised French Catholic, but her mother was Scottish. And I
think that she came by these two different streams, you know, honestly,
in the sense that you know, she went to Mass
and you know she learned Catholicism, but she also learned
(02:21):
the old ways Wickan essentially from her mother, from the
old Scottish teachings scene. So she had both and she
respected both. And she had studied Eastern mysticism. I had
some evidence to that she'd studied her meticism. She may
have studied other teachings, mystical teachings, and she drew from
different ones exactly the way that I started when I
(02:42):
was nineteen and started investigating the different religions. I went
on the assumption that at the esoteric level, they were
all talking about the same thing, same reality, same experiences,
you know. So I took it that way when I
started studying, and she had that same view, I think,
And I think she was also psychic. There's one poem
(03:02):
that she wrote that talks about herself as a child
and her mother told her about the fairies, and so
she took it quite literally and went out as a
little girl, went out looking for the fairies the whole day,
and she had a mystical experience, not of the fairies,
but like of God's light coming up from the earth,
you know, or something like that. So I think she
was psychic. So she also wrote when she was fourteen,
(03:27):
she wrote very powerful, very sophisticated mystical poetry, which was
I believe plagiarized by Albert Pike. And you may be
familiar with Albert Pike or your listener's yeah, yeah, right,
came up in a number of conspiracy theories and so on. Well,
he was a school teacher in eighteen thirty eighteen thirty
one in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and I extrapolate from a whole
(03:50):
bunch of evidence that she was a student in that class,
and she was writing what he later termed the Hymns
to the Gods, and that was a class assignment to
write to. He wanted her to write to the Roman gods,
but as soon as she got into it, after the title,
it became the Greek gods, because she loved, you know,
ancient Greece, not ancient Rome. So you can see that
(04:11):
in the poems, you know, all of a sudden the
name of the god changes to the Greek one, and
so on, you know, in the poetry. Well, those were
class assignments, and then she wrote a lot of beautiful,
deeply mystical private poetry. Albert Pike apparently went into her
workbook and stold Oliver Poetry and published it under their
(04:31):
joint initials, because AP for Albert Pike and AP for
Abby Point. And I think he must have thought to himself,
if I get caught, I'll just say that I was
publishing them for her. Well, he never got caught. The
editors all assumed it was his, and he basked in
the glory and became somewhat famous for that poetry as
though it was his own. Well it wasn't his, it
(04:52):
was Abbey's at age fourteen. So we've got one mystical,
psychic child prodigy who has a deep understanding of mysticism
and the occult as well. So then Matthew was the
younger brother of the Quaker poet John Greenquitdier. He obviously
was raised Quaker. He was disowned by the Quakers when
he married Abby, who was Catholic, but he retained his
(05:15):
Quaker values in Quaker worldview. He was, you know, a
pacifist generally except when war really had a good noble purpose.
But he was very much against the supposed glory of
war for its own sake. And he was a skeptic.
He was a philosopher, and he would actually make fun
of Abby's occultism like he made fun of Pressian dreams,
(05:38):
which I think Abbey actually had, and he made fun
of astrology to the point where Abbey actually was, you know,
temporarily convinced that it wasn't true, so he would make
fun of her. But gradually she brought him around. So
by eighteen thirty eight, when they would have started working
on a Christmas Carol, he was at least intellectually. He
was a believer in many of the things that she
(06:00):
tried to teach him. But he was also a child prodigy.
I found work that he did at age twelve in
eighteen twenty five, very sophisticated work, but it was the
poetry was mostly humorous poetry. He was extremely good at it.
But I think Abby taught him poetry. Abby became his
tutor because he couldn't you desperately wanted to go to college,
(06:21):
but he couldn't afford it. So she stepped in. She'd
had a privately tutored education, upper class education, and she
taught him, and then he educated himself, so he was
Matthew educated himself, and Abby also taught him right well.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
What was their version called their version of a Christmas Carol?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Before it it was called a Christmas Carol. And the
reason I say that is for a couple of reasons.
First of all, they appeared to have used a story
they had written back in the early eighteen thirties as
a template. It's called The New Year's Bells. It's the
next to the last story in a compilation called Three
Brides Loving a Cottage and Other Tales. It was published
(07:02):
by a fellow named Francis A. Derivage in eighteen fifty two.
This goes way into another rabbit hole. Okay, so we
won't go into it, but I can prove that Francis
Derivage published a whole bunch of Matthew's work. He apparently
swindled him out of an entire portfolio in mid eighteen
forty eight and started publishing it as his own along
with a partner. So this would have been Matthew's story
(07:26):
in the compilation published by Francis Durrivage after he got
control of that portfolio. And there's so many parallels, you know,
if you look at it, it's obvious if The New
Year's Bells came first, which I believe it did, that
obviously a Christmas Carol was a pattern after it.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Three visiting spirits, tiny Tim Jacob Marley, any of those parallels.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Well, what you have let's see, I have to go
back through the plot. You have a miserly landlord and
his tenant who is an old woman living with her grandchildren,
and he evicts her in the middle of winter. So
after he leaves there, he walks to his place through
the graveyard and he decides he gets sleepy and cold.
(08:13):
He lies down on a tombstone and he starts to dream,
and he dreams of let's see, he dreams of himself
as a boy, and he's walking with his young friend
who was actually the husband of the you know, of
the old lady he's kicked or the son I think
of the old lady. He's kicking out. And he has
(08:35):
several other dreams, and he's one of them is he's
watching a lecture. Anyway, I won't go into all that
because it's not a direct parallel. But he's woken up
by the townspeople and he's a changed man because his
last dream was that he was in hell, so he's
now a changed man. And he directs the townspeople to
(08:55):
go and send some wood, you know, for the old lady,
and also to say, and I think it's either a
turkey or a goose and a pig for her to eat,
you know, just like in a Christmas Carol. And then
the ending is almost verbat on the same as the
next to last paragraph of Christmas Carol. Well, the next
(09:17):
to last paragraph of a Christmas Carol was the original.
What Dickens tacked on as the last was that was his.
But in the New Year's Spells it ends like this Israel,
that was the name of the miser lee. Landlord Israel
was as good as his word and never relapsed into
his old habits. The widow and the orphaned children were
(09:38):
provided for by his bounty. He gave liberally to every
object to charity, hospital, schools, and colleges with the recipients
of his bounty. And when he died in the fullness
of years, the blessings of old and young followed him
to his last resting place in the old churchyard, where
he had dreamed the mysterious dream and had been awakened
to a better life by the pealing of the New
Year's Spells. Well, the next to last paragraph of Christmas
(10:02):
Carol is very similar. He says Screws was better than
his word, he did it all and infinitely more, etcetera, etcetera.
And that's not the only story Matthew ended that way.
Another of the ones that Francis Duabage played your eyes
ends like this says he was as good as his word.
And from a miserly, surly old curmudgeon, Harman Brinkerhoff became,
(10:24):
to the astonishment of all who knew him, one of
the most genial of the Knickerbockers. Now when I learned
about Matthew from studying his work, I got over three
thousand of his published words. He was like a lot
of comedians. He would improve on his gags. He would
take a gag that was particularly successful before, and he
would improve on it and rework it and reintroduce it
(10:44):
later on, like maybe ten years down the road in
another publication, he would use it again. So this is
just one example of Matthew fine tuning something. You know,
he'd already used it twice, and then a Christmas Carroll
he said, well, let's bring it back and end his
story that way.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
How did dickens and get his hands on the Whittier's
version New Year's.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Bells New Year's Well, Well, here's a gap. But there's
apparently when Dickens wrote the twenty ninth chapter of the
Pickwick Papers, and there's a whole bunch of evidence behind this.
I'll just give you my interpretation because I don't don't
have time for me to go into all the background.
So when Dickens wrote that first time, he was in
(11:27):
a hurry and he had run out of Robert Seymour's material,
so suddenly it was serialized, so he had to come
up with something for Christmas, right, So I believe he
had in front of him this unpublished manuscript New Year's Bells,
which Matthew must have submitted to a magazine in London probably,
So that's the weak point. I can't prove that. The
(11:48):
other thing he apparently had in front of him was
a published story by Matthew which was called The Unbidden Guest.
It appeared in the April eighteen thirty sixth edition of
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which is something that Dickens almost for
sure would would have read. Excuse me, so we know
he was exposed to that one, And that one I
(12:09):
can prove was Matthew's work. He signed a Tris Magistus,
which is a pseudonym he used as early as eighteen
twenty eight, were now in eighteen thirty six. So Dickens
had both of these together. If you put both of
them together, they comprised like ninety percent of Dickens's story,
the story of the goblins who stole the sextent. So
one of them we could basically prove he had seen.
(12:30):
The other one we have to extrapoli.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So when a Christmas Carol is published in eighteen forty three,
how do Matthew and Abbie Whittier react? Are they angry?
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Well? I think that first of all, Abby had died
in March of the previous year forty one, and I
don't think she would have okated. Matthew was a big
fan of Dickens. I think there were a lot of
things that Abby knew were not really you know, or
people that she knew were not really up to snuff,
and Matthew didn't believe her. So he was a big
(13:06):
fan of Dickens, and I think this is one of
those things where she wouldn't have agreed, but she wasn't there.
I believed that they had written a Christmas Carol with
the idea of changing the world, that they were going
to bring each reader, massive numbers of readers through a
vicarious conversion experience, and by identifying with the character of
(13:29):
Ebenezer Scrooge, they were going to get to this point
and this by identification with him, have this conversion of
the heart, and that they were going to transform the world.
Which they were young, they were in their early twenties,
and it's an extremely naive idea, but I think that's
what they wanted to do, so it's almost sort of worked.
(13:54):
But anyway, when Abbie died, Matthew didn't know what to
do with this manuscript, but he wanted to somehow fulfill
Abbey's hopes for it. And he was personal friends with
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Holmes was instrumental in arranging for
dickens reception in Boston. So he would almost one hundred
(14:15):
percent sure have been given an introduction to Dickens. That much,
I can, you know, be pretty confident about. So what
happened was that Matthew would have handed this manuscript over
to Dickens at that point. What he told Dickens I
don't know. I do know that he wrote Dickens a
letter because there's an acknowledgment of a letter that he
had written to Dickens. I think that Dickens took it
(14:38):
back along with maybe one hundred other manuscripts that he
was given, and then in eighteen forty three, he was
his what he thought was his, you know, his masterpiece,
because Dickens told his friend John Forster, this is Martin
chuzzle With is my masterpiece, best thing I've ever done.
But nobody liked it, okay, So he was in financial
(14:59):
trub because it wasn't selling and he had to make
money quick. So he conceived what he privately told somebody
was a little scheme, and his little scheme was to
rework Matthew and Abbey's sacred Manuscript, their inspirational manuscript, into
(15:20):
a ghost story because he was a you know, aggressive
skeptic of spiritualism, so he didn't believe in any of
those elements that are in a story, and he dumbed
it down in six weeks, you know, and published it
as a ghost story. And he really didn't expect it
any more from it, I don't think, than to just
pay his bills, you know. I think he was as
shocked as the next person when it was popular and
(15:41):
he didn't really understand why.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
All right, very quickly, because I've got less than a
minute here. Do you do you prefer when you read
or a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or his version,
and New Year's Bells by the Wittiers? Which which do
you prefer? Which is better?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Well, I mean, inasmuch as I can kind of extrapolate
what a Christmas Carol was, I think that was the
full fruition of their ideas. New Year's Bells is kind
of a treatment.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Stephen, this is reminiscent to me of an equally controversial
theory that William Shakespeare did not write any of those
all of his famous plays that were written by I
think it was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de
Vere And that comes up again, you know, with some
strong objections from the literary circles in academia and so forth.
(00:31):
What are the literary what a literary figures say about
your theory and why are they so resistant to the
idea that Dickens didn't write a Christmas Carrol.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
That's a good question. Most of the people, I think
who have focused on Charles Dickens have done so because
they're fans. So they're emotionally invested. And there's a lot
of people who are their career as invested and they're
financially invested. You know, there's there's films, there's you know,
just just imagine what would have to be changed, you know,
(01:05):
in academia and in society if this were to come out.
You know, and people don't like change, they experience change
has pain, you know, so there's a lot of pain here.
But as far as what they say, they don't say
anything because they won't talk to me. You know, I
can't get a conversation going, except with the exception of
a few people who have been critical of Dickens. I've
(01:26):
reached out to a few who are critical, and they
will talk to me to a point. But when it
comes to a certain point, the point where I say
Dickens was a sociopath and that basically he was not
a great writer at all. You know, he was faking it,
I lose them, and they won't talk to me anymore.
You know, I've pushed them too.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Far, all right, So let's talk about the actual you believe,
the pair that are the actual authors of A Christmas Carol,
Matthew Franklin Whitty and his wife Abby. Just give us
kind of a thumbnail sketch of who these who this was.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well, Abby came from an upper class family. She was
raised French Catholic, but her mother was Scottish. And I
think that she came by these two different streams, you know, honestly,
in the sense that you know, she went to Mass
and you know she learned Catholicism, but she also learned
(02:21):
the old ways Wickan essentially from her mother, from the
old Scottish teachings scene. So she had both and she
respected both. And she had studied Eastern mysticism. I had
some evidence to that she'd studied her meticism. She may
have studied other teachings, mystical teachings, and she drew from
different ones exactly the way that I started when I
(02:42):
was nineteen and started investigating the different religions. I went
on the assumption that at the esoteric level, they were
all talking about the same thing, same reality, same experiences,
you know. So I took it that way when I
started studying, and she had that same view, I think,
And I think she was also psychic. There's one poem
(03:02):
that she wrote that talks about herself as a child
and her mother told her about the fairies, and so
she took it quite literally and went out as a
little girl, went out looking for the fairies the whole day,
and she had a mystical experience, not of the fairies,
but like of God's light coming up from the earth,
you know, or something like that. So I think she
was psychic. So she also wrote when she was fourteen,
(03:27):
she wrote very powerful, very sophisticated mystical poetry, which was
I believe plagiarized by Albert Pike. And you may be
familiar with Albert Pike or your listener's yeah, yeah, right,
came up in a number of conspiracy theories and so on. Well,
he was a school teacher in eighteen thirty eighteen thirty
one in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and I extrapolate from a whole
(03:50):
bunch of evidence that she was a student in that class,
and she was writing what he later termed the Hymns
to the Gods, and that was a class assignment to
write to. He wanted her to write to the Roman gods,
but as soon as she got into it, after the title,
it became the Greek gods, because she loved, you know,
ancient Greece, not ancient Rome. So you can see that
(04:11):
in the poems, you know, all of a sudden the
name of the god changes to the Greek one, and
so on, you know, in the poetry. Well, those were
class assignments, and then she wrote a lot of beautiful,
deeply mystical private poetry. Albert Pike apparently went into her
workbook and stold Oliver Poetry and published it under their
(04:31):
joint initials, because AP for Albert Pike and AP for
Abby Point. And I think he must have thought to himself,
if I get caught, I'll just say that I was
publishing them for her. Well, he never got caught. The
editors all assumed it was his, and he basked in
the glory and became somewhat famous for that poetry as
though it was his own. Well it wasn't his, it
(04:52):
was Abbey's at age fourteen. So we've got one mystical,
psychic child prodigy who has a deep understanding of mysticism
and the occult as well. So then Matthew was the
younger brother of the Quaker poet John Greenquitdier. He obviously
was raised Quaker. He was disowned by the Quakers when
he married Abby, who was Catholic, but he retained his
(05:15):
Quaker values in Quaker worldview. He was, you know, a
pacifist generally except when war really had a good noble purpose.
But he was very much against the supposed glory of
war for its own sake. And he was a skeptic.
He was a philosopher, and he would actually make fun
of Abby's occultism like he made fun of Pressian dreams,
(05:38):
which I think Abbey actually had, and he made fun
of astrology to the point where Abbey actually was, you know,
temporarily convinced that it wasn't true, so he would make
fun of her. But gradually she brought him around. So
by eighteen thirty eight, when they would have started working
on a Christmas Carol, he was at least intellectually. He
was a believer in many of the things that she
(06:00):
tried to teach him. But he was also a child prodigy.
I found work that he did at age twelve in
eighteen twenty five, very sophisticated work, but it was the
poetry was mostly humorous poetry. He was extremely good at it.
But I think Abby taught him poetry. Abby became his
tutor because he couldn't you desperately wanted to go to college,
(06:21):
but he couldn't afford it. So she stepped in. She'd
had a privately tutored education, upper class education, and she
taught him, and then he educated himself, so he was
Matthew educated himself, and Abby also taught him right well.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
What was their version called their version of a Christmas Carol?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Before it it was called a Christmas Carol. And the
reason I say that is for a couple of reasons.
First of all, they appeared to have used a story
they had written back in the early eighteen thirties as
a template. It's called The New Year's Bells. It's the
next to the last story in a compilation called Three
Brides Loving a Cottage and Other Tales. It was published
(07:02):
by a fellow named Francis A. Derivage in eighteen fifty two.
This goes way into another rabbit hole. Okay, so we
won't go into it, but I can prove that Francis
Derivage published a whole bunch of Matthew's work. He apparently
swindled him out of an entire portfolio in mid eighteen
forty eight and started publishing it as his own along
with a partner. So this would have been Matthew's story
(07:26):
in the compilation published by Francis Durrivage after he got
control of that portfolio. And there's so many parallels, you know,
if you look at it, it's obvious if The New
Year's Bells came first, which I believe it did, that
obviously a Christmas Carol was a pattern after it.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Three visiting spirits, tiny Tim Jacob Marley, any of those parallels.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Well, what you have let's see, I have to go
back through the plot. You have a miserly landlord and
his tenant who is an old woman living with her grandchildren,
and he evicts her in the middle of winter. So
after he leaves there, he walks to his place through
the graveyard and he decides he gets sleepy and cold.
(08:13):
He lies down on a tombstone and he starts to dream,
and he dreams of let's see, he dreams of himself
as a boy, and he's walking with his young friend
who was actually the husband of the you know, of
the old lady he's kicked or the son I think
of the old lady. He's kicking out. And he has
(08:35):
several other dreams, and he's one of them is he's
watching a lecture. Anyway, I won't go into all that
because it's not a direct parallel. But he's woken up
by the townspeople and he's a changed man because his
last dream was that he was in hell, so he's
now a changed man. And he directs the townspeople to
(08:55):
go and send some wood, you know, for the old lady,
and also to say, and I think it's either a
turkey or a goose and a pig for her to eat,
you know, just like in a Christmas Carol. And then
the ending is almost verbat on the same as the
next to last paragraph of Christmas Carol. Well, the next
(09:17):
to last paragraph of a Christmas Carol was the original.
What Dickens tacked on as the last was that was his.
But in the New Year's Spells it ends like this Israel,
that was the name of the miser lee. Landlord Israel
was as good as his word and never relapsed into
his old habits. The widow and the orphaned children were
(09:38):
provided for by his bounty. He gave liberally to every
object to charity, hospital, schools, and colleges with the recipients
of his bounty. And when he died in the fullness
of years, the blessings of old and young followed him
to his last resting place in the old churchyard, where
he had dreamed the mysterious dream and had been awakened
to a better life by the pealing of the New
Year's Spells. Well, the next to last paragraph of Christmas
(10:02):
Carol is very similar. He says Screws was better than
his word, he did it all and infinitely more, etcetera, etcetera.
And that's not the only story Matthew ended that way.
Another of the ones that Francis Duabage played your eyes
ends like this says he was as good as his word.
And from a miserly, surly old curmudgeon, Harman Brinkerhoff became,
(10:24):
to the astonishment of all who knew him, one of
the most genial of the Knickerbockers. Now when I learned
about Matthew from studying his work, I got over three
thousand of his published words. He was like a lot
of comedians. He would improve on his gags. He would
take a gag that was particularly successful before, and he
would improve on it and rework it and reintroduce it
(10:44):
later on, like maybe ten years down the road in
another publication, he would use it again. So this is
just one example of Matthew fine tuning something. You know,
he'd already used it twice, and then a Christmas Carroll
he said, well, let's bring it back and end his
story that way.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
How did dickens and get his hands on the Whittier's
version New Year's.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Bells New Year's Well, Well, here's a gap. But there's
apparently when Dickens wrote the twenty ninth chapter of the
Pickwick Papers, and there's a whole bunch of evidence behind this.
I'll just give you my interpretation because I don't don't
have time for me to go into all the background.
So when Dickens wrote that first time, he was in
(11:27):
a hurry and he had run out of Robert Seymour's material,
so suddenly it was serialized, so he had to come
up with something for Christmas, right, So I believe he
had in front of him this unpublished manuscript New Year's Bells,
which Matthew must have submitted to a magazine in London probably,
So that's the weak point. I can't prove that. The
(11:48):
other thing he apparently had in front of him was
a published story by Matthew which was called The Unbidden Guest.
It appeared in the April eighteen thirty sixth edition of
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which is something that Dickens almost for
sure would would have read. Excuse me, so we know
he was exposed to that one, And that one I
(12:09):
can prove was Matthew's work. He signed a Tris Magistus,
which is a pseudonym he used as early as eighteen
twenty eight, were now in eighteen thirty six. So Dickens
had both of these together. If you put both of
them together, they comprised like ninety percent of Dickens's story,
the story of the goblins who stole the sextent. So
one of them we could basically prove he had seen.
(12:30):
The other one we have to extrapoli.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So when a Christmas Carol is published in eighteen forty three,
how do Matthew and Abbie Whittier react? Are they angry?
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Well? I think that first of all, Abby had died
in March of the previous year forty one, and I
don't think she would have okated. Matthew was a big
fan of Dickens. I think there were a lot of
things that Abby knew were not really you know, or
people that she knew were not really up to snuff,
and Matthew didn't believe her. So he was a big
(13:06):
fan of Dickens, and I think this is one of
those things where she wouldn't have agreed, but she wasn't there.
I believed that they had written a Christmas Carol with
the idea of changing the world, that they were going
to bring each reader, massive numbers of readers through a
vicarious conversion experience, and by identifying with the character of
(13:29):
Ebenezer Scrooge, they were going to get to this point
and this by identification with him, have this conversion of
the heart, and that they were going to transform the world.
Which they were young, they were in their early twenties,
and it's an extremely naive idea, but I think that's
what they wanted to do, so it's almost sort of worked.
(13:54):
But anyway, when Abbie died, Matthew didn't know what to
do with this manuscript, but he wanted to somehow fulfill
Abbey's hopes for it. And he was personal friends with
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Holmes was instrumental in arranging for
dickens reception in Boston. So he would almost one hundred
(14:15):
percent sure have been given an introduction to Dickens. That much,
I can, you know, be pretty confident about. So what
happened was that Matthew would have handed this manuscript over
to Dickens at that point. What he told Dickens I
don't know. I do know that he wrote Dickens a
letter because there's an acknowledgment of a letter that he
had written to Dickens. I think that Dickens took it
(14:38):
back along with maybe one hundred other manuscripts that he
was given, and then in eighteen forty three, he was
his what he thought was his, you know, his masterpiece,
because Dickens told his friend John Forster, this is Martin
chuzzle With is my masterpiece, best thing I've ever done.
But nobody liked it, okay, So he was in financial
(14:59):
trub because it wasn't selling and he had to make
money quick. So he conceived what he privately told somebody
was a little scheme, and his little scheme was to
rework Matthew and Abbey's sacred Manuscript, their inspirational manuscript, into
(15:20):
a ghost story because he was a you know, aggressive
skeptic of spiritualism, so he didn't believe in any of
those elements that are in a story, and he dumbed
it down in six weeks, you know, and published it
as a ghost story. And he really didn't expect it
any more from it, I don't think, than to just
pay his bills, you know. I think he was as
shocked as the next person when it was popular and
(15:41):
he didn't really understand why.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
All right, very quickly, because I've got less than a
minute here. Do you do you prefer when you read
or a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or his version,
and New Year's Bells by the Wittiers? Which which do
you prefer? Which is better?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Well, I mean, inasmuch as I can kind of extrapolate
what a Christmas Carol was, I think that was the
full fruition of their ideas. New Year's Bells is kind
of a treatment.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
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