All Things Christmas (15 page)

The
Probable
Origins of Ebenezer
S
crooge

While
everyone knows about Scrooge’s misery ways, the Ghost of Christmas Past and Christmas Future, etc., few people are familiar with the name Gabriel Grub. In 1836, a full seven years before Dickens wrote
A Christmas Carol
, he produced a short story as Chapter 29 of The Pickwick Papers. Called
The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton
, it tells the eerie story of Gabriel Grub the
Sexton (caretaker and gravedigger
) of a small rural church. Dickens describes him as “…an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow – a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself.” Grub ha
d
“a deep scowl of malice and ill-humor.” Sound like anyone you know?

A Rather Morose Man this Gabriel Grub

One fateful Christmas Eve, Gabriel Grub sets out for the church yard with his pick and shovel to dig a grave. As he walks through the town
,
“
he notes all the people making preparations for Christmas celebrations…celebrations he despised and would refuse to partake in should he ever be invited, which, of course, he never was. He passes children and happily thinks of, measles, scarlet fever, thrush, whooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolations besides.”

Anyone who offered him a Christmas greeting received a “a short, sullen growl” in return. This is clearly a precursor to Scrooge’s more famous “Humbug!” When Grub comes across a young boy singing carols on the street corner he “rapped him over the head with his lantern five or six times.” He composes his own little ditty as he walks to the graveyard, “A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas box! Ho!
ho
!
ho
!”

Suddenly
Life Changes

Gabriel Grub’s miserable life
turns upside down
when he receives a strange visitor, a grinning goblin who taunts him and is quickly joined by “a whole troop of goblins.” They take Grub captive and drag him down into the earth. He finds himself in a cavern with the “king of goblins,” and his band. They show him a series of scenes magically projected
o
n the end of the cavern. The first scene is a poor family. The children and their mother are waiting for the man of the house to return. They celebrate when, at long last, their father joins them. The scene shifts to a bedroom, where “the fairest and youngest child lay dying
,
” Dickens tells us. “Even as the sexton looked upon him with an interest he had never felt or known before, the little boy died.” Yet the family took solace, since their li
ttle one was in “happy Heaven.”

It’s impossible not to see the
Cratchit
family and Tiny Tim in this scene.

The goblins then proceed to give Grub a series of beating, each interspersed with new scenes. In this way, “many a lesson is taught to Gabriel Grub. He saw that men who worked hard, and earned their scanty bread with lives of labo
r, were cheerful and happy
because they bore within their own bosoms the materials of happiness, contentment, and peace.” Meanwhile,
Grub
“saw that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth, and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all.”

The beatings eventually conclude and Grub falls asleep. He awakens in the churchyard on Christmas morning. After his encounter with the goblins, he “was an altered man. Yet he could not bear the thought of returning to a place where his repentance would be scoffed at, an
d his reformation disbelieved.”

Rather than face his neighbors, Gabriel Grub vanishes for ten years. He finally returns as “a ragged, contented, rheumatic old man.” The moral of the story, according to the narrator, was “that if a man turn sulky and drink by himself at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it: let the spirits be never so good.”

Peer
ing over
the Author’s
Shoulder

One can’t help but feel that though they’ve been given an opportunity to look over Charles Dickens’ shoulder and share in the development of his literary epic,
A Christmas Carol
. The similarities between
The Story of the Goblins
and
A Christmas Carol
are easily apparent: a solitary, nasty old man not only refuses to celebrate Christmas, but also spurns the greetings of those who do, and even tries to hurt a boy who sings a Christmas carol. On Christmas Eve, unexpected supernatural visitors show him many scenes of life that cut him to the quick. As a result, the experience cha
nges his outlook forever after.

The greatest difference between the two tales is the protagonist’s reaction to the supernatural events. On the one hand, we have Gabriel Grub who leaves town rather than face the ridicule of his neighbors. On the other, we have Ebenezer Scrooge who, faced with the dreadful sight of his own demise, decides, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut ou
t the lessons that they teach.”

Dickens writes: “Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should
wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”

Why was one character (Scrooge) able to transcend the fear of his neighbors’ reaction while the other (Grub) ran from it? What are we to make of the different way in which the two stories conclude? Could it indicate a fundamental change in Dickens’ thinking? Had he perhaps turned the story over in his mind and decided he co
uld do better by his character?

That seems to have been the case. Of course he wrote
A Christmas Carol
because he needed the income, but it also gave him a second opportunity to perfect and complete his message that we often require an agent beyond ourselves (grace, if you will) to become the person we were meant to be.

C
hapter
Nineteen

WAS THERE A
GOOD
KING WENCESLAUS?

Statue of Wenceslaus in Prague

At one time or another most of us have sung, or at the very least heard, the Christmas Carol
Good King Wence
s
la
u
s
—

Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.

It’s hard to even read those lyrics without having the forceful thump of the melody echo in your brain. Be that as it may, the question remains…Was there
really
a King named Wenceslaus? And more importantly, was he good? The answer is yes on both counts.
With those
issues
out of the way
, it see
ms appropriate to delve deeper.

Let’s deal with the second question first. Goodness. He is counted among the saints by both the Western and Eastern Church. Saint Wenceslaus is the patron saint of Bohemia. Although a ruler, Wenceslaus I was, in fact, not a King but a Duke. He was made a Duke by the Emperor Otto I, and ruled Bohemia, a historic region in central Europe, which occupies the western two-thirds of the modern Czech Republic. Th
e country’s capitol was Prague.

Who Were The
B
ohemians?

Like so much of Europe, the name
Bohemia
originated with the Romans. In the 2nd century BC, the Romans were competing for dominance of northern Italy with various peoples, including a tribe known as the
Boii
. The Romans defeated the
Boii
at the Battle of Placentia in 194 BC and again at the Battle of
Mutina
in 193 BC. After this, many of the
Boii
retreated north across the Alps.

Later Roman authors refer to the area they went to as
Boihaemum
. The earliest mention occurs in Tacitus'
Germania 28
,
which was
written nearly three centuries later. The name given
to the people combines the tribal name
Boii
with the Germanic element
xaim
.
Xiam
later became
haims
, in German
heim
, and in English
home
.
(In other words, the home of the
Boii
.)
This original
Boihaemum
as Tacitus called it, included parts of southern Bohemia as well as parts of Bavaria and Austria. The name
Czech
or
Čechy
is derived from the name of the Slavic tribe of Czechs that settled the area in 6th or 7th century.

Initially, Bohemia was a part of Greater Moravia. The latter, weakened by years of internal conflict and constant warfare, ultimately succumbed and fragmented due to the continual invasions by the nomadic Magyars. However, Bohemia remained part of the Moravian Empire long enough for a large portion of the population to become Christians.

Wenceslaus was the son of
Vratislaus
I, Duke of Bohemia during the
Přemyslid
dynasty. His father was raised in a Christian environment and purportedly Saints Cyril and Methodius converted Wenceslaus’ gra
ndfather,
Borivoj
I of Bohemia.

W
enceslaus Comes to Power

The missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius, managed to convert the Czech Prince Borivoy and his wife
Ludmilla
, but the faith was not necessarily transmitted to their subjects. Many powerful Czechs were against the introduction of Christianity in Bohemia since it threatened the privileges and powers of their own pagan religion.

Borivoy and Ludmilla’s son, Prince Vratislav, married a woman named Dragomir, the daughter of a pagan tribal
chieftain
. Their first son, whom we know as Wenceslaus, was born near Prague around 907. The couple had four daughters as well as another son,
Boleslaus
. In 921, when Wenceslaus was thirteen, his father was killed in battle and Otto I confirmed him as his father’s successor. Fearing the negative influence of his pagan mother,
his
grandmother
Ludmila
, stepped in as regent and ra
ised Wenceslaus as a Christian.

Meanwhile, the same nobles who’d objected to Christianity began to encourage Dragomir to reclaim her son saying, “Your son is better fit for a monastery than a throne.” They eventually developed a plan to eliminate his Grandmother's influence and had
Ludmilla
strangled. The evil mother reclaimed her son and forced him to participate in pagan rituals.

Wenceslaus, however, secretly continued celebrating his Christian faith in private services late at night.
Dragomir’s
actions turned the people against her. The eventually fomented an uprising, deposing and banishing her. Wenceslaus turned eighteen about this time and took the throne. Ever the good Christian, he heeded the commandment to honor one’s father and mother and re
called Dragomir to the castle.

The young man developed a reputation as a good and fair ruler who, to protect his people, on one occasion volunteered to face some marauders in hand-to-hand combat and let the outcome settle their dispute. He was said to be generous to all
,
giving clothing those in need, providing s
helter to wayfarers and pilgrim
s
,
and using his own funds to ransom those sold into slavery. He constructed Christian churches throughout the duchy. The pagan nobles not only rejected his religious beliefs, but objected to his friendship with Christian King Henry I, “the Fowler,” of Germany. Wenceslas believed Henry to be the rightful heir of Charlemagne and sought his friendship to avoid having the Ger
mans take his country by force.