Stave . An archaic form of "staff," a stanza of a poem or song. [as Malryn said]. Dickens here extended the pretense of his story being "a Christmas carol in prose" by calling its chapters verses. He maintained the conceit in the two subsequent Christmas Books by setting off their chapters in accordance with the stories' titles. The Chimes (1844) is divided into four, "quarters," like the tolling of a clock and the divisions of The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) were called "chirps."

"What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money . . .?"

"Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"

Scrooge and his lonely life stand in stark contrast to what we like to portray Everyman in our holiday season in 2004, but is he so bad? Do you know anybody like Scrooge in 2004? What is your assessment of his character in these opening lines?

From: The Annotated Christmas Carol:

Few modern readers realize that A Christmas Carol was written during a decline in the old Christmas traditions.

By the early nineteenth century, there appeared to be little left of the old celebrations that had begun as far back as AD 601, when Pope 'Gregory instructed his missionary St. Austin of Canterbury…to make the local winter feast a Christmas festival... Read more about this and bring it here?

The magnitude of these celebrations did not decrease when Henry VIII established the Church of England; on the contrary the king did not merely promote the holiday pageants but performed in them as well.

Everything changed under Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Quoting the Scriptures, they attacked the old customs for being no more than pagan superstition; it was blasphemous to celebrate the birth of Christ in the same manner as the Roman feast of Saturnalia. Simple pleasure like mince pies were judged no more than a superstitious and popish abomination. The first blow struck the old holidays with an ordinance of 1642 forbidding the performance of plays. Read more about the Puritans and their decrees on Christmas and bring them here?
According to Josiah King's The Examination ant Tryal of Old Father Christmas, in 1678, Father Christmas

of the town of Superstition in the Country of Idolatry now stood accused of having from time to time abused the people of this common-wealth, drawing and inticing them to Drunkenness, Gluttony and unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lascivisiousness, Cursing, swearing, abuse of the Creatures some to one Vice and some to another: all to Idleness.

The Restoration of the English monarchy did not completely renew the splendors of Christmas past. Yet many of the old customs could still be found in the provinces.

. Round about Our Coal Fire in 1740 declared: Several of the gentry are gone down to their respective seats in the country, in order to keep their Christmas in the old way, and entertain their tenants and trades-folk as their ancestors used to do.

Yet by the end of the eighteenth century many of the old trappings and entertainments had entirely vanished. Such items as plum porridge and peacock pie were now unknown, and the court demonstrated little interest in celebrating in the lavish former manner.

The Industrial Revolution further discouraged the simple pleasure of the season; employers kept their factories running through Christmas Day. Read more about Christmas Customs during the Industrial Revolution, what was the role of the Church? What celebrations did it sanction, if any? Read about the influence of an American, Washington Irving and his influence on Dickens and bring all or any of this here?

GE Stembridge in "What Was Scrooge's Business" in The Dickensian, April 1924) reported that Scrooge was a "financier," "something in the nature of a company promoter or a money lender." Scrooge thus does not provide any actual services or goods; he deals solely in the exchange of money.

Oddly this statement as well as perhaps the most famous line in the story, "God bless us, every one!" could not be spoken n the London stage of the time. Up until 1968 every script had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's examiner of plays, who decide whether or not it could be publicly performed. This censor had to check for indecency, impropriety, blasphemy, libel and sedition. However, it was perfectly fine to say "Heaven save you1" in the London theater in 1844.

Lower (lou´er, lour) also lour (lour) verb, intransitive
lowered also loured lowering louring lowers lours

1. To look angry, sullen, or threatening. See synonyms at frown.
2. To appear dark or threatening, such as the sky.



noun
1. A threatening, sullen, or angry look.
2. A dark and ominous look: the lower of thunderheads.



[Middle English louren.]

Certain parts of the body were at one time believed to be the seats of human affections; the bowels were thought to be the center of compassion, as mentioned in I John 3:17 "But whoso hath the world's goods, and seeth his brothers have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dewelleth the love of God in him?" Thus Marley, like Scrooge, lacked in life any pity for his fellowmen. Dickens, is, of course, also reasserting that "Marley was dead to begin with": from the time of ancient Egypt, corpses have been disemboweled before burial, to retard the body's deterioration.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no , not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with softening influence, and gave a free passage to his tears.

" . . . . so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever."

"Would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!"

"I am mortal," Scrooge remonstrated, "and liable to fall."

Mince pie. "Three centuries ago, a mince pie was a huge dish called 'Christmas pye' and described as 'a most learned mixture of Neats-tongues (ox tongue), chicken, eggs, sugar, raisins, lemon and orange peel, various kinds of spicery, etc.' Over the years, the pies grew smaller, and the meat content was gradually reduced until the pies were simply filled with a mixture of suet, spices and dried fruit, previously steeped in brandy. This filling was put into little pastry cases that were covered with pastry lids and then baked in an oven. Essentially, this is today’s English mince pie."

"Jane Carlyle did see him (Dickens) at that party for the actor William Charles Macready’s children. She hadn’t slept well for weeks—hadn’t slept at all for two nights—and she was quarreling again with her husband, Thomas Carlyle. But once there, she found herself, like everyone else, caught up in the Dickensian world.

" 'Dickens and Forster, above all, exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed drunk with their efforts,” she described it in a letter. Only think of that excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour—the best conjuror I ever saw . . . Then the dancing . . . the gigantic Thackeray &c &c all capering like Maenades!!'

" 'After supper when we were all madder than ever with the pulling of crackers, the drinking of champagne, and the making of speeches; a universal country dance was proposed—and Forster seizing me round the waist whirled me into the thick of it, and made me dance!! like a person in the treadmill who must move forward or be crushed to death. Once I cried out, 'Oh for the love of Heaven let me go! you are going to dash my brains out against the folding doors!'

'Your brains!!' he answered, 'who cares about their brains here? Let them go!' ”

Mince pies were a staple of the medieval English Christmas table, which survives the present. Yet the Protestants once objected to the Christmas pie as a superstitious remnant of the Roman Catholic Church: the ingredients (as late as the eighteenth century being neat's tongues, chicken, eggs, sugar, currants, lemon and orange peel, and various spices) were said to correspond to the gifts of the Magi, and the pasty was generally oblong in shape in imitation of the crèche. Fortunately the custom was preserved in the countryside, notably in Cornwall.

A pound of beef-suet chopped fine; a pound of raisins, do. stoned. A pound of currants cleaned dry. A pound of apples chopped fine. Two or three eggs. Allspice beat very fine; and sugar to your taste. A little sale, and as much brandy and wine as you like.

"Scrooge..could not hide the light." Dickens suggests that the light to memory is not so easily snuffed out; Scrooge, despite his struggle with the Ghost, cannot forget the lesson it has taught him.

Repeating watch or clock, invented about 1767, able to strike the hour and quarter hour when a button is pushed. Not all of these timepieces were as cheap as Scrooge's must be.

"welsh (or welch) wig - woolen or worsted cap, originally made in Montgomery, Wales. Old Fezziwig, in A Christmas Carol, wears a welsh wig."

The SeniorNet web site will be updated with a new look and upgraded discussion software on December 15 and may be unavailable for part of the day. Thank you for your patience.

We're sorry not to give you more notice but our server technicians are available [on the 15th] to make the change which will give you some new discussion tools. More information to come!

An Unfinished Season, by Ward Just. This novel, its author's 14th, describes a 19-year-old boy's passage to adulthood with a gravity and maturity that the conventional coming-of-age novel never achieves. It has emotional and thematic depth, rich, resonant prose and is introspective without ever being narcissistic. The story takes place in Chicago in the 1950s but is viewed from the vantage point of four decades later, which gives it distance, clarity and objectivity.

The protagonist of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is a younger boy whose story is also told after the passage of many years. Roth's work has often given me pause in the years since the publication of his brilliant first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which won a National Book Award when that still really meant something. Now as then his subject is Jewish life in the United States, but his depiction of it has taken a turn away from satire toward sympathy.something. Now as then his subject is Jewish life in the United States, but his depiction of it has taken a turn away from satire toward sympathy. The Plot Against America postulates that Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940, setting off a wave of anti-Semitism that has dire consequences for a family in Newark and its younger son, named Philip

Comedy has played a large role in much of Roth's fiction, but not this time. In John Gregory Dunne's Nothing Lost, by contrast, comedy rules. It is a serious book that has serious things to say about contemporary American life and culture, but it says them for the most part in the language of comedy.

Somewhat surprisingly, there's comedy too in Christopher Tilghman's Roads of the Heart. Like his previous books it is about fathers and sons, but this time it treats the subject in a way that is as much antic as ruminative.

Satire rather than comedy is the business of Stephen Amidon's Human Capital, a novel about suburban life during the boom-and-bust 1990s. A husband and father overreaches himself out of a foolish desire to keep pace with the fast-buck people who have invaded his once sleepy New England town, with consequences he cannot imagine

A footnote to the fiction list: three books of 2004 that I read and admired but did not review. Alphabetically by author they are: Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley, a deliciously in-your-face, wholly politically incorrect and extremely funny novel about the clash of Mideast and West in a fictitious Arabian land; The Curse of the Appropriate Man, by -- tada! a woman! -- Lynn Freed, a collection of stories in which the author writes subtly, knowingly and very honestly about women's sexual lives; and The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, by Paul Theroux, also a story collection, this one about men's sexual lives, and also subtle, knowing and honest.

Choose Norfolk Biffins with the clearest, most blemish free rinds, than lay them whole on clean straw on baking wire and cover well with more straw. Set them in a slow oven for 4 to 5 hours. Draw them out and press them very gently, otherwise the skins will burst. Return them to the oven for another hour, then press them again. When cold, rub them over with clarified sugar. When ready to serve, pull tough skins away before coring them. Roll in caster sugar and serve with fresh cream.

The old parlor game "I love my love with an A," once popular in both Great Britain and the United States; it was also used by mothers to teach children the alphabet. Each player in turn must complete a seies of sentences using the next letter.

Lewis Carroll also plays with this game in Chapter 7 of Through the Looking Glass, tho Alice's players must commence with the letter H as they aspirate their A's.

But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high
heaven
As makes the angels weep…

He reitereated his theme of the Boy Ignorance and Girl Want in a child with no name…" a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast."

The poor often visited these shops at holiday time to sell all sorts of odd items to help pay for their roast beef and plum-pudding. Albert Smith described how men, women, and children turned in bundles of "useless iron and fusty rags, choking and stenchy, and blurred phials with unwholesome breath , and lumps of dripping of an unctuous and oily nature."

It is customary at most English funerals to present all who attend as mourners with a pair of black gloves, which of course likewise proved useful on other occasions. As everyone who attended receives a pair, even those who were not at all close to the deceased had to wear them in paying their respects. This individual's reluctance to express even this small gesture for the deceased is a remarkable insult form one who then says he must have been the dead mans "most particular friend." He will not even take advantage of a free meal, for it goes against his habits. Personally finding no worldly use for these customs, this unsentimental businessman, like Scrooge is the perfect utilitarian. The funeral must profit him somehow of he will not attend.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at his robe, " hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse…Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life.

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year…I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone."

---

And so we leave Scrooge here, on Christmas Eve in real life, exactly as he started out in the book: in the dark, in despair, and hugging a bed post.

One more time quoting from Michael Hearn's Annotated Christmas Carol:

Not everyone at the time approved such generosity. "The processes whereby poor men are to be enabled to earn good wages, whereby to buy turkeys for themselves does not enter into the account…indeed it would quite spoil the denouement and al the generosity. Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them—for unless there were turkey and punch in surplus, some one must go without—is a disagreeable reflector kept wholly out of sight. (Nassau Senior…Westminster Review.")

Dickens was angered about such Toryism and wrote Forster "how annoyed he was 'that the Westminster Review considered Scrooge's presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with political economy.'"

sixth floor of a boarded up loft on Broad Street in New York. Here in the dark, dusty cold are the treasures of her life: a sleigh she used to ride in with her father, the buffalo robe she would wrap around herself on sleigh rides, old newspapers, a ship's figurehead and the dress she wore when she danced with the Prince of Wales.

Miller reportedly never came up with any especially clever or original remark,…but the book quickly became the best –known English collection of witticisms and almost any stray joke was attributed to his apparently unfunny person.

Bob Cratchit saying "if quite convenient, Sir."

John Hollingshead reported in The Critic on September 4, 1858, that "Mr. Dickens throws himself into bob Cratchit, leaning over the elbow-rest upon the reading-table, with a meek, subdued voice, and a mild timid expression of countenance, casting an instantaneous impression of the poor, feeble , struggling clerk, which lights up the whole history of his past life…." Charles Kent said the clerk had "the thinnest and meekest of frightened voices." The New York Times reported that "the audience caught sight at once of the little, round-faced, deferential, simple-hearted clerk, as if he had entered bodily; and they greeted him with a hearty round of applause, the first in which they had interrupted his reading." Dickens gave The Scotsman the vivid picture of Baob Cratchit "with this teeth missing from his lower jaw and his upper lip drawn in, and whistles in his speech and a cheery look about his wizened face, and a scared look in the eye."

knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!

The first move was a British production of 1901 , called Scrooge or Marley's Ghost. Essanay made a silent picture in 1908, Thomas Edison another in 1910. Bransy Williams had an unusual career as Scrooge, having played him on the stage he made the earliest sound recording for British Edison in 1905 and did the same for Columbia Records in 1912; he also appeared in the first sound picture in 1928 from British Sound Film and well as the fist BBC TV version in 1946.

Seymour Hicks, once the most famous stage Scrooge in England, repeated the role in the 1935 Twickenham talkie Scrooge. Lionel Barrymore played Scrooge on the radio beginning in 1934, but Reginald Owen filled in when Barrymore was too ill to appear in the 1938 MGM picture.

The first American TV version aired in 1941. Ronald Colman, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness, Frederick March, Basil Rathbone. Emlyn Williams, Albert Finney, Lawrence Olivier, Bill Murray, Michael Caine, Mr. Magoo, Mickey Mouse, the Muppets, Even Eleanor Roosevelt have all been involved in one form or another with A Christmas Carol.

There have been ballets and operas, and Benjamin Britten composed Men of Goodwill: Variations on A Christmas Carol in 1047. The strangest production was either "Rich Littles' Christmas Carol," of 1963, in which the impersonator took all the parts or Marcel Marceau's "mime" BBC version in 1973.

There was an all Black Broadway musical, Comin' Uptown which opened in 1970 with Gregory Hines. The Alan Menken musical has been a popular annual holiday production at Madison Square Garden since 1994 (and inspired Kelsey Grammer's latest TV version). There have been admirable TV productions with George C Scott in 1984 and Patrick Stewart (who also did an excellent one-man stage version) in 1999.

Perhaps the best live-action dramatization was the classic 1951 British movie with Alistair Sim as Scrooge.

The finest animated cartoon remains Richard Williams' 1970 Academy Award-winning picture, which beautifully brought John Leech's pictures to life with Sim providing the voice of Scrooge.

Dickens presented "my own and only MS of the book" to his solicitor Thomas Mitton, perhaps out of gratitude for the work he did on the chancery suit against the piracy of A Christmas Carol. Five years after Dickens' death, Mitton sold the manuscript to a London bookseller, Francis Harvey, reportedly for 50 pounds. An autograph collector, Henry George Churchill, quickly snatched it up in 1882 and late sold it to the bookseller Bennett in Birmingham. The transaction caused enormous excitement in the area, with crowds of people begging for a glimpse at the famous manuscript. Robson and Kerslake of London bought it from Benentt for 200 pounds and quickly turned it over to Stuart M. Samuel, a Dickens collector, for 300 pounds. It was from Samuel that J Pierpont Morgan secured the manuscript for an undisclosed price. Before it left England, apparently for good, a facsimile was published in 1890- by Eliot Stock in London and Brentano's in New York. The Pierpont Library published its own edition in 1967 and again in 1993 with a new introduction by John Mortimer.

A Christmas Carol , written feverishly in the last few months of 1843, was not an immediate success. But when Dickens began reading his works aloud on speaking tours, the Carol was the favorite of his audiences.

Crowds as large as 35,000 in the US as well as England, came to hear him speak.

Christmas in the eighteenth century lost almost all of its religious meaning. Church services were conducted, but few people attended them. Many simply spent the day playing cards. Theaters offered pantomimes and puppet shows to entertain the wealthy and their children, but the old Saturnalian ideas of gambling, eating and drinking held first place. For a laborer's family, Christmas often meant a chunk of beef, a pack of cards and a bottle of gin.

Finally in England, too, the day became more pleasant again. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were largely responsible, for the royal couple did much more than introduce decorated trees; their lavish family celebrations soon were imitated in middle class homes throughout the nation. …Much credit must be given to Charles Dickens…Dickens wrote a number of other Christmas stories as well…they all influenced the Christmas of his time.