GETTING AHEAD - Oliver Cromwell's Post mortem Travels:

 

I would call it the definitive way of dealing with a swelled head. Oh sure, on his death bed Oliver Cromwell admitted to some doubts. And it was about time he did. All his life Oliver had been such an imperious narcissistic autocrat that in retrospect, the despotic and conceited Charles I now seemed reasonable - once Oliver had beheaded Charles. But then Oliver went on the ultimate ego trip, launching a bloody war trying to eradicate Catholicism from Ireland. He would have had better luck trying to reintroduce the snakes. Oliver was so supercilious that in 1650 he wrote to a Scottish opponent, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken,” and just three years later he suffered no such introspection while making himself dictator, because, “…the spirit of god (was) so strong upon me, I would not consult flesh and blood.” Flesh and blood has bowels, Oliver, it seems, did not. It turns out the one nation Oliver never even attempted to conquer was gall.

And then at the age of 59, on his death bed, on the afternoon of 3 September, 1658, Oliver was beset by humility at long last (as well as a urinary tract infection – which is what kills you when you don’t have antibiotics). Oliver whispered, “My design is to make what haste I can to be gone.” But it was too late to be hasty. Even dead, Oliver could no longer escape the judgment of those who had suffered under his turgid arrogance.

His corpse was entombed in Westminster Abbey, along with all those kings and queens he thought himself superior to. His followers attached a plate to his coffin reading “Oliver Cromwell, Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland”, so that on Judgment Day there would be no chance Oliver would be overlooked. They might as well have planted a big arrow above his crypt that read “Dig Here!”

Judgment day arrived less than three years later. As soon as Charles II was crowned king, he had 12 of those who had participated in his father’s trial tried for high treason. The inevitable executions which followed produced a macabre precursor of Super Bowl Week. From Monday October 8th through Saturday the 13th , 1660 (on the old Julian calendar), the twelve were each subjected to what contemporary witness William Harrison described as “The greatest and most grievous punishment used in England….drawing from the prison to the place of execution upon an hurdle or sled, where they are hanged till they be half dead, and then taken down…”. It wasn’t until after the hanging that the festivities really got started.

The guest-of-dishonor was stretched naked on a butcher block table. First, his genitalia were removed and displayed to him. They were then thrown into a fire. Then, according to English Wikipedia, “A splash of water was usually employed to wake the man if unconscious…A large cut was made in the gut…and the intestines would be spooled out on a device that resembled a dough roller. Each piece of organ would be burned before the sufferer's eyes, and when he was completely disemboweled, his head would be cut off.” And not quickly removed, with a single swipe of a massive sword or an axe, but via repeated whacks with a meat clever. The idea was not to kill the unfortunate honoree, but to torture him, and thus to entertain the crowd.

This was a spectator sport, drawn out for hype and hyperbole. Samuel Pepys was there for the anticlimax. He noted in his diary, “Saturday 13 October…went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered…He looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy…After that I went…home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket, which I bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it.” Ah, violence. Where is thy operate conditioning?

Oliver Cromwell, being legally and retroactively the villain-in-chief would not be spared these humiliations just because he was deceased. He was spared the pain, but then there had been the urinary tract infection. On the morning of 30 January, 1661 Oliver’s corpse and those of two of his fellow deceased co-conspirators, were hung by their necks at Tyburn, the traditional place of execution for “commoners”. Ouch, that little insult must have hurt. The un-dearly departed hung in public, like hams in a smoke house, until four in the afternoon. Then their heads were removed; I presume they cut off Oliver’s last, as we are told it took eight chops. The poor executioner must have been pretty near shagged out from removing the first two heads.

After this academic execution, Oliver’s corpse was discarded into a pit and his head was raised upon a 20 foot wooden pole above the south side of Westminster Palace. Finally, Oliver was as aloof as he had always imagined himself to be, head and shoulders above all other contenders...except he no longer had any shoulders. And there he bobbled about in heavy winds until at least 1672, by which time it seems, people had begun to forget just whose head was which head.

Legends claim that Oliver’s pole was blown down in a storm and Oliver’s dome rolled into the hands of Mr. John Moore, a guard, who snuck the coconut home and stuffed the noggin up his chimney. When it was realized that the arch villain Oliver Cromwell had somehow escaped, rewards were offered and notices posted demanding and threatening punishments unless he were returned. To remain discreet, Mr. Moore gave the head to an apothecary in King Street, who then sold Oliver’s skull to a Mr. Humphrey Dove, Esq. Lawyer Dove kept Oliver confined to a chest until his death in 1687 – Mr. Dove’s death that is. After this it appears that Oliver made a clean getaway, no mean feat for a man with no feet...or legs. Or torso.

In 1710 a Claudius Du Puy opened a museum of curiosities in London containing as its most curious curiosity of all, the head of Oliver Cromwell. That the exhibit was a financial failure was no fault of Oliver’s. He did his part. He was still dead. He still had no body to support him . But was this head really Oliver’s head? Or was it an imposter’s skull masquerading as the demon Protestant?

It would not be until the 1930’s that two scientist issued a 109 page report authenticating to a “moral certainty” that the head in question was unquestionably the head of Oliver Cromwell. And on 25 March  1960 Oliver’s morally certain head was finally buried somewhere near the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, in Cambridge, England. And nobody will admit to knowing exactly where.

And that anonymity must be driving Oliver out of his skull!

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ABIUARE! Going After Galileo

 

I make no claims to understand the Byzantine logic of Catholicism, but I do feel empathy for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. History records that it was Bellarmine who was the instrument of Galileo Galileo’s destruction. But at least the Cardinal was not a brainless evil little toady like Caccini, or a Machiavellian social tyrant such as Maffeo Barberini (aka Pope Urban VIII), and they both played far larger roles in bringing down the best brain in Europe since Pythagoras. And the Cardinal did write, early the fifteenth century, such a revolutionary sentence as: “…Civil authority is instituted by men; (and that power resides) in the people, unless they bestow it on a Prince.” Such revolutionary sentence could almost have been written by Thomas Paine, a century and a half later, and it speaks of a faith that values logic and democracy. It is a brand of Catholicism that at times today feels nostalgic.

Things began to go ugly in the spring of 1615 when the Dominican monk Tommasco Caccini took it upon himself to journey to Rome. Caccini was very suspicious of mathematics, which he did not understand, and his intent was to throw what he saw as “money changers” out of the Vatican. On the surface Caccini was complaining about Copernican astronomy, but Copernicus was beyond earthy correction, having died in 1543. In fact this “dreadful fool”, as his own brother described Caccini, sought to overturn the dominance of the Jesuit order in the Church. This was an internal Catholic  "cultural war".

Of course the Pope himself, Paul V (above), was a Jesuit, so Caccini aimed at a stand-in instead; Galileo Galilei. Caccini told the Holy See that Galileo had contaminated all of Florence with his heresies about the sun being the center of the solar system, and the moon not being a pristine celestial orb. Worse, Caccini alleged that Galileo was saying in public that God did not perform miracles. Caccini might be a “turbulent ignoramus”, as Galileo described him, and Pope Paul V might know that his own nose was being tweaked by the Dominican, but Rome could not ignore the charges that had been made.

The pope turned to his most dependable cultural warrior, 73 year old Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (above). It had been the intellectual Bellarmine who had out maneuvered and isolated the clever James I of England over his English translation of the bible, and who had prosecuted the magician Giordano Bruno sixteen years earlier. They had been forced to put a wooden clamp on Bruno’s tongue to prevent him from shouting heresies while they burned him at the stake, but in the end Bruno was silenced. It is doubtful the Pope wanted Galileo silenced so absolutely, but he expected Bellarmine to remove the Flrointine as an irritant, whatever that demanded.

The problem was that Bellarmine was too much of an intellectual, and he understood enough about mathematics to know that Galileo’s numbers were right. When the old and ill Bellarmine interviewed Galileo, which he did three times, he fell under the genius’s spell. In the end Bellarmine provided the Florentine with a letter that allowed him to "discuss" the idea of a sun centered universe, so long as he did not claim publicly that it was not opinion but fact. Despite what Bellarmine and Galileo both knew to be fact, officially the Earth remained at the center of the universe because several Popes had said it was so. Robert Bellarmine would die in 1624, and later become a saint, but his letter of instruction for Galileo would prove to be a dead letter.That letter rose from the dead after Pope Paul V died in 1621. He was followed by the brief and sickly Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 by the energetic and energetically ignorant Pope Urban VIII, aka Maffeo Barberini (above). How Barberini’s mind worked was revealed in 1624 when he issued a Papal Bull, or pronouncement, making it a sin to smoke tobacco - not because it was unhealthful but because it often caused its users to sneeze, an act which Barberini considered similar to sexual ecstasy - which leaves me wondering about Signor Barberini’s boudoir habits during the flu season.For the next eight years it was war and not sin which occupied Barberini. If he was not fighting battles to extend the Church’s (and his families') dominions, then he was preparing to fight battles. Barberini turned the Vatican into an arsenal, and built a factory in Tivoli to supply it with weapons. And when the Holy See ran short of cannon Barberini had bronze ripped from the roof of that temple to the Roman Republic, the Pantheon, and melted into more cannon. As an unknown sage put it at the time, “That which the barbarians did not do, Barberini did” (in Latin – “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”).

But finally, in February of 1632, with the printing of Galileo’s newest book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”,  the prosaic world of ideas captured Barberini’s attention. Seeing criticism of himself in Galileo’s arguments (and, honestly, it seems to have been there) Barberini ordered the book seized and the printer arrested. And he ordered the Inquisition to investigate Galileo.The Church had been at war with dissenters from the moment Christ died on the cross, and by 1542, when Pope Paul III established the “Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” in Rome, that war had become formalized and institutionalized, replete with all forms of torture, including water boarding, and with all the advantages and disadvantages found in any bureaucracy.

By 1633, when an ailing Galileo was ordered to Rome (he arrived carried in a litter) to face the Dominican Cardinals who had been given responsibility for his inquisition, the machinery of correction had been perfected. To be charged was to be guilty.

Galileo thought his 1616 letter from Cardinal Bellarmine would protect him, but Bellarmine was a decade dead, and instead the Cardinal’s letter would be the clamp used to silence Galileo’s tongue. Galileo was presented with an “official” copy of that letter which included a phrase – “Galileo agrees to neither hold, defend, nor teach the Copernican opinion in any way whatsoever” – that had not been in the original letter, which the old man still had. Holding this official forgery Galileo mumbled, “I don’t remember the clause “in any way whatsoever… ”. And then his voice fell silent. He must have understood at that instant that this Pope (and his army of sycophants) was willing to commit the sin of bearing false wittiness to secure Galileo's silence, or his death.

When presented with his false confession the old man signed. To have refused would have been to invite a death by fire. And in the last act of the farce Galileo was required to openly announced his “abiurare”, that he abjured and renounced the idea that the sun was at the center of the solar system. Later generations would insist the old man left the court muttering his independence, but that was just wishful thinking. Barbarini used the power of Galileo's imagination, which had once opened the universe to all of humanity, to defeat him. He could imagine the endless pain the Pope could cause him. That is not faith. It is obedience. In exchange for his “abiurare” the old man was allowed to return to his home in Florence but he was never allowed to write another word on science. He died in January of 1641, blind and gagged. It was a great victory for Barbarini.

It was not until 31 October, 1992 – Halloween, 350 years later –that Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s official regret at the way Galileo had been persecuted. John Paul admitted that the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun, once a year. According to John Paul II, “The error of the theologians of the time…was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.”It seemed, at least for a time, that Catholicism would enter the twenty-first century in peaceful coexistence with science. Cardinal Bellarmine would have been pleased, but I remain  more than a little wary of the sins the church might commit tomorrow, in God's name.

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RUBBER DUCKIES - Fan Mail From Some Flounder

 

I find that as I rush into old age my view of the oceans has been defined by two cartoon shows from my youth. One was the first episode of ”Johnny Quest” in which he and Bandit battled ”The Mystery of the Lizard Men” in the Sargasso Sea: and the other was the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” when the flying squirrel announced he had an important message and the Moose asked if it could be “Fan mail from some flounder?” Call it “The Oceanography of Hanna Barbera”.

The Sargasso Sea was first reported by the Carthaginian navigator Himilco, and first crossed by Christopher Columbus on his way home from "discovering" America. The Sargasso lies in the center of the North Atlantic gyre, trapped between the north and eastern flow of the Gulf Stream, the south bound Canary Islands Current and the westbound Atlantic Tropical Current, which brings hurricanes to North America.

Legend (and Johnny Quest) has it that these “Calms of Cancer” are choked with sea weed and littered with trapped ships. Of course they are not. The Sargasso sits beneath a weather high pressure zone, where wind driven currents are slow and floating patches of sea weed are common enough to provide shelter for adolescent fish, eels and sea turtles. But it is hardly so crowded with Sargassum weeds as to foul propellers and trap ships. But why spoil a legend (or a cartoon show) with reality?

The Sargasso Sea has a counterpart in the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. Charles Moore first sailed through this man-made sea in 1988. “As I gazed from the deck…I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic….In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” It almost sounds as of the Lizard Men could be walking about by stepping on all the empty gallon milk jugs. Actually things in the north Pacific aren’t that bad. In a way they are worse.

What we commonly call plastics are a product of what I call the “Oil Age”, roughly from 1900 to approximately 2020 or so, when petroleum was (is) still common enough to be cheap enough to be used as 3F - i.e. used as fuel, fertilizer and fat (as in extravagant).

It takes 685 gallons of oil (line at the top of the chart) to make one ton of plastic, which is what makes plastic a “fat”.  And that is not counting the oil you have to burn to heat the crude to 750 degrees Fahrenheit in the cracking tower (on the left side of the chart), which is when the petroleum molecules line up in endless chains called “polymers”, which is another name for plastics.

Because polymer chains endlessly repeat themselves they never completely break down, they just get shorter. And even if the sun finally degrades the plastic in a six-pack ring so that a sea gull can no longer get her head caught in it, the polymer chain merely becomes small enough to be swallowed by jelly fish or plankton, which can then be eaten by sea turtles, which can then be eaten by sea bass, which can then be eaten by sea gulls and humans.

About the same time that Captain Moore first laid eyes on the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” it first occurred to large numbers of people to start asking where the water went when they flushed their toilets. If you live in Asia, or the West Coast of North America, the answer is, eventually, The North Pacific Ocean. And it turns out that is a problem.

On 10 January, 1992 a container ship crossing the Pacific out of Hong Kong bound for Tacoma, Washington, ran into heavy weather as it neared where the 45th parallel touches the International Date Line. A dozen containers stacked on deck washed overboard. About 10,000 such containers fall off cargo ships each year. And in this case, one those 44 foot long aluminum boxes cracked open, releasing 29,000 “rubber duckies” and rubber beavers, turtles and frogs into the cold Pacific waters. At that point the ocean currents took over. In October of 1992 the duckies, frogs and beavers began washing up on beaches near Sitka, Alaska. Between November ’92 and August of 1993 they washed ashore between Cordova and Coronation Island in the Gulf of Alaska.

From here Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer has calculated that a few of the “floating Friendlies” would be carried northward by the Bering Current into the Artic Ocean, where they might spend as long as four or five years trapped in the sea ice. But eventually, Dr. Ebbesmeyer figured, a few would pass through the Davis Straights and reach the North Atlantic Ocean.

And right on time, in July of 2007,  Ms. Penny Harris, a retired schoolteacher, found one of the duckies washed up at the high tide line of a beach in North Devon, Wales, thus proving that no matter where or when you flush your waste, it all ends up in the same place. Eventually that includes even the very bottom of the ocean: which in the Pacific is the Challenger Deep, a section of the Marianas Trench 35,827 feet below the waves. Mount Everest, dropped into the trench, would still be 8,000 below the surface. The pressure here is a thousand times greater than that at sea level.

Humans first visited the Challenger Deep on 23 January, 1960, when US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and a Swiss citizen, Jacques Piccard, spent 20 minutes on the bottom, staring out at the featureless ooze. They did not find a "Rubber Duckie",  but a flat flounder did wiggle past their porthole.

It has since been argued that it wasn’t a flounder but a sea cucumber, but I refuse to accept that argument. You can’t get fan mail from a sea cucumber – that would just be silly.  But the "Friendly Floatees", as the duckies have now been named, are still out there, along with everything else plastic ever thrown or dropped in the ocean. Forever.

This is all just something to think about next time you flush. And we all have to flush.  "Rubber Duckie, you’re the one, You make bath time lots of fun, Rubber Duckie, I’m awfully fond of you; Woo, Woo be doo”. (lyrics by Jeff Moss)

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A CHRISTMAS CAROL Birth of The Modern Christmas

I know precisely when and where modern Christmas was born. It was late on the evening of Thursday, 5 October, 1843. And it was on the dismal streets of the Lancaster industrial town of Manchester, England. 

Then and there a dapper 31 year old clean shaven Charles John Huffman Dickens (above) went for a stroll.  He walked purposefully past the clattering cotton and textile mills and the stinking bleach works.

He slipped like an alien through the laborers milling around the foundry shops and on the docks of the befouled Irwell River -  men women and children who toiled 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, to survive on a paltry £9, 3 shillings. It was on such walks as these ““...when all the sober folks had gone to bed” that Charles Dickens created our Christmas.

Michelangelo once said his David was always hidden inside the marble. All he had to do was chip away everything which was not the young Israelite contemplating the approaching Goliath. Writers work the same way, but first they must create their own stones. And then they must mercilessly chip away until they reveal the story hidden inside themselves. Or, as sportswriter “Red” Smith put it, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” And to do that on demand is to be a professional writer.

Charles Dickens had achieved instant fame with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, published in serial form beginning in 1836. 

This was followed by the hugely popular Oliver Twist in 1837, the equally successful Nicholas Nickleby (above) in 1838, the less successful Old Curiosity Shop, in 1840, and the forgettable and forgotten Barnaby Rudge in 1841, all serialized in magazines. 

It began to seem Charles Dickens had peaked. But he still had to support a wife and four children, with a fifth child on the way. He remained the sole financial support for his impoverished parents, and other relatives in desperate straits. And there were the demands from his tailor, for Charles Dickens was a lifelong enthusiastic clothes horse.

In Chapter 29 of the Pickwick Papers, published at the end of October 1837, Dickens made one of his first references to the holiday, in the story of a garrulous old church sexton and grave digger named Gabriel Grub. “A little before twilight one Christmas eve, Gabriel Grub...betook himself towards the old churchyard, for he had got a grave to finish by next morning.” On his way, Grub pauses to threaten a young boy who is singing carols. Then, later, when he pauses to drink from a wicker jug he is challenged by a goblin king.

"What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?" asked the goblin. "Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!" screamed a wild chorus of voices that seemed to fill the churchyard.” 

The goblins take Grub under the earth, and display a tableau of a lives of a typical middle class English family, including the fate of a dying child. “His brother and sisters crowded around his little bed, and seized his tiny hand, so cold and heavy... What do you think of THAT? " said the goblin...,Gabriel murmured out something about its being very pretty.... You, a miserable man!" said the goblin in a tone of excessive contempt...”

After more lessons, Grub “came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world, after all...” In the morning Gabriel Grub has mysteriously disappeared. “The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle were found that day in the churchyard.” But 10 years later Grub returns, to share his story of the Christmas goblins. It was far from a perfect holiday story. But it clearly chipped away a few of Charles' stones.

Six years later, on that Thursday evening of 5 October, 1843, Charles Dickens (above) faced a real  financial crises. His bank account was over drawn. Sales of his latest serialized book, Martin Chuzzlewit, had landed with a thud in 1842. The man who had hired him to write the Pickwick Papers, William Hall, was increasingly turning the business over his senior partner, Edward Chapman. And it was Chapman who suggested that Dickens' stipend be reduced from £50 to just £37 and 10 shillings a week. The author figured he would need £1,000, to re-balance his checkbook and meet his obligations. Such were his hopes for the creation he conceived on that late evening walk in Manchester.

The creation of this story, like all 15 novels and 27 short stories Dickens would write, began with the title - “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story at Christmas. ”. It would not be a novel, but a novella, only about 110 pages long and less than 30,000 words total. In keeping with the musical theme, Dickens divided the novella not into chapters but into “Staves” (above).   In American English these 5 lines and the 4 spaces between them are referred to as a staff, upon which musical notes are written. In English, English they are staves. On the morning train returning him to London, Dickens began to dip his pen into ink and scratch his solution for his  financial crises onto paper.

Dickens plucked the name of his central character, Ebenezer Scrooge, from a headstone he had come across in an Edinburgh graveyard in 1841 – Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie. The real Ebenezer had been a corn merchant and bottler of “Scroggie's Highland Brandie”. His grave marker called him a “meal man”, but Dickens misread the inscription as a “mean man”, which is why he remembered the name. In truth, Scroggie was not mean or cruel, but he was a social reprobate, a 'dirty old man', who raped a servant girl on a churchyard grave stone, fathering a child, and broke up a solemn convocation of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by groping the Countess of Mansfield in the pews.

Scrooge's miserliness seems to have been based on James (Jemmy) Wood (above), famous as the “Gloucester Miser”. He was one of the richest men in England and left an estate worth £900,000. His primary business was the Gloucester Old Bank but Wood also owned an undertaking business. He wore the same clothes for weeks on end, and never took a cab when he could walk. The staff of his bank consisted of himself and just 2 clerks. But where Wood was an active participant in the city, Scrooges' mean spirit toward the poor was found in philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who, when asked about the working poor, replied, "Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?s"

The name of Scrooge's business partner came from a sign Dickens had seen in his childhood, “Goodge and Marney”.  And Marley's chains were the reality seen by Dickens during his 1842 tour of the Western Penitentiary, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

The crippled Tiny Tim (called “Little Fred” or “Tiny Nick” in early drafts) was based on Dickens' sister Fanny's 5 year old son, Henry Burnett, Jr, whom Charles had met while in Manchester. Dickens agreed to pay for the boy's medical care, adding to his own financial burden.

Bob Cratchit (above, left)  was just one of the 104 clerks Dickens created in his writings. because in the era when computers were still humans, clerks were ubiquitous in the “nation of shop keepers”. Punch described the 1845 tongue in cheek requirements for the job. “First take your son, and soak him well in spelling and writing. Grind in a few ounces of grammar, stuff with arithmetic, and season with geography. Lard with a little Latin, and baste with birch (whipping cane) whenever you find it requisite. Serve up on a high stool, at the first convenient opportunity.”

The common saying went that “A good clerk is always employed”, but the pay was meager and the restrictions were onerous. Applicants were expected to provide a doctor’s certificate as to their health and “steady and sober habits”. And if hired the clerk must “devote himself exclusively to the Company’s service and interest” even when off duty. They must also provide a 2 week salary to their boss, as “as a security for good conduct.” Bob Cratchet worked for 15 shillings a week, or less than $100 in modern American currency.

Dickens wanted the book he was about to write to be on sale no later than the Monday before Christmas, which would be 19, December, 1843. That gave him just 74 days to write and edit the story. But he found his publishers, Chapman And Hall, less than enthusiastic. Edwin Chapman suggested either no illustrations or simple woodcut drawings. But Dickens had conceived of the book as a keepsake Christmas present, which would require color art. When Chapman refused, Dickens agreed to pay the full cost of publishing the still uncompleted book himself, and split the profits with the publisher. His hoped for £1,000 profit was already fading into the distance.

The little tale was haunting Dickens. His sister-in-law, wrote that he “...wept and laughed, and wept again” and that he “walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night”. 

Now, Dickens had to find an artist for those drawings he was paying for. When his usual collaborator was already engaged, and with time at a premium, Dickens asked John Leech (above)  to create the art. Leech was journeyman known as a “rapid worker”. But Dickens' shortage of funds forced him to limit the color illustrations to just 4, with another 4 black and white etchings.

On Tuesday, 24, October, 1843, Dickens wrote to a Scottish friend, that he had “...plunged headlong into a little scheme ...and set an artist at work upon it.” And by Saturday, 2 December, 1843 his scheme was finished. But not done. Now he began the editing and rewrites. It was not until late in this process that Dickens changed the penultimate line. “ He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, he was a second father”, adding the phrase describing Tiny Tim, “who did not die”. That allowed a happy ending.

On Sunday, 17 December, 1843, Dickens was forced to finally release the book to the printer. Because of the color art work, and the rewrites, if the first edition of 6,000 copies sold out completely at the steep price of 5 shillings each (about $24 today), Dickens stood to profit just £230, far from the £1,000 he had been hoping for. The book went on sale Monday, 19 December. By Christmas eve, every single copy was sold.

The Illustrated London News praised Dickens' “impressive eloquence” and praised the novella's “unfeigned lightness of heart—its playful and sparkling humor... its gentle spirit of humanity".

The reviewer from the literary magazine The Anthenaeum said the story was a "tale to make the reader laugh and cry – to...open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable”.  

Long time Dickens critic, Theodore Martin, writing in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, fell over himself to praise the author, He called the book, "a noble book, finely felt and calculated to work much social good".

Chapman and Hall were quick to respond to the unexpected success of Dickens little scheme. They immediately issued a second edition, which sold out immediately, and then a third edition before the week – and the year - was over. All three editions sold out. 

But almost equally quick were the folks at Peter Parley's Illuminated Library, published by Richard Egan Lee and Henry Hewitt. In January of 1844 they issued an almost exact copy of the Christmas Carol, stealing Dickens work and selling it for a mere two pence. Dickens quickly sued and won,  but Lee and Hewitt promptly declared bankruptcy, leaving the author to swallow the £700 in court costs and legal fees.

Over the rest of 1844, 11 more additions of “A Christmas Carol” were released. But because of Dickens' demands for quality, the printing costs remained high, and a year later the author had profited only £744. Stung by what he saw as Edmund Chapman's lack of faith in his work, and burdened with a bill he felt his publishers should have paid, Dickens left Chapman and Hall and moved to the publishing house of Bradbury and Evans.

Since that December of 1843, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has never been out of print. But perhaps the most telling effect of Dickens' scheme was the story of a Boston factory owner who attended a Christmas eve reading by the author. The very next day this man gave all his employees a Christmas turkey, and the day off. 

But to me. “A Christmas Carol” is proof that if you struggle hard enough and long enough, you can become a journeyman at your profession. And if you work at that profession diligently, once in awhile, if you are lucky, you might achieve the level of genius.

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