TUNED LIKE FIFTY STOMACH ACHES

Hello! I’m glad you’re joining me for more of A Christmas Carol. Today at sunset is the beginning of Hanukah, the Festival of Lights. Christmas celebrates the Light of the World entering human domain.
_____

In his introduction, Mitch Glazer (co-writer of Scrooged) says:

In the fall of 1843, thirty-one-year-old Charles Dickens was already an established transatlantic literary star, having written The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop, but his latest serial, Martin Chuzzlewit, was tanking and with a wife, four children, grabby siblings, and deadbeat parents to support, Dickens needed a hit.

* * *
A Christmas Carol: In Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, 1843

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.

You have to wonder what Charles Dickens had been eating the night he penned this.

* * *
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“I don’t,” said Scrooge.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

Confronted with the ghost of his dead partner, Scrooge tries to rationalize it away.

* * *
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Dickens uses repetition here to teach his lesson, one that Scrooge is about to learn.

* * *
In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile.

I’m assuming from this description that Dickens was not a fan of the violin. We know just from the description of her smile that Mrs. Fezziwig is a big woman.

* * *
Again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.

Dickens uses a tree metaphor here, but maybe I should, er, leaf it at that.
_____

Come back on Wednesday and I’ll continue the story