11/10/25
I'm just kicking around waiting for my physical Amazon proof to arrive. I'm educating myself on book marketing, but I can't do that continually, so I'm going to relax a bit by writing an entry.

The marketing advice, by the way, is all about gearing what you write to pleasing people so that they will buy the book. That's fundamentally wrong, for me. I am announcing a discovery—one which will no-doubt be very unpopular, initially. I know I will be displeasing just about everybody. So there goes all that advice...

What I wanted to do, this morning, is share something that strikes me as odd. We know that academic scholars have gone through the entire education process. Most of these literary history professors could, surely, teach English composition; and many of them have probably prepped students for the SAT. In a recent blog entry, I mentioned the sample SAT questions I'd seen, asking you to identify the subject of a paragraph. So they should understand this principle, correct?

Here are the first two paragraphs of "A Christmas Carol" as I have deciphered them, from Charles Dickens' handwritten draft. I've put the redacted text back in place:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and [two mourners] the [chief] mourner. Scrooge signed it; and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. [deare!] I don't mean to say that I know [myself] what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I [should] have been inclined, myself to [consider] a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Here, I've compressed it to one paragraph, because that's how I believe it was originally written. This is classic Mathew Franklin Whittier prose. I've provided comparative samples in the book—for now, just take my word for it. For one thing, Mathew used the expression, "upon 'Change," in other works; Dickens did not. Mathew was a sort of amateur etymologist, who loved colloquial expressions. He was also a humorist. Philosophizing briefly about the origins of an expression, in a humorous vein, would be precisely in his register.

I'm focusing, now, on the word "deare!" It appears that Dickens experimented with tacking the "e" onto the end, so originally it may have read "dear!" It's lower case, because that was a convention in the 19th century, to continue a thought in lower case after an exclamation like this. It wasn't done with a new paragraph, however, which suggests that Dickens carried it down to a second paragraph, then deleted it and wrote above the line, "Mind!"

Now, a team of scholars has been crowdsourcing this project for some years, as I understand. They say they have gotten about a third of the way through. They also say they will be publishing this year, but I'm wondering whether the project is stalled. In any case, they have their transcription posted online. This is the official team working in conjunction with the Morgan Library and Museum, which holds the manuscript, and which makes it available.

Their official transcription was "dead!" instead of "dear!" It definitely doesn't have a letter "d" on the end. This, by the way, was the only deciphered word I looked at in their transcription, so I wouldn't be beholden to them for my own product. But my question has to do with sentence structure. Why would anyone, with expertise in the English language, think that the word "dead!" would fit, here? It doesn't follow, logically. I don't know the technical terms—in fact, I think I'll ask ChatGPT to explain it. But first, I'll try to give it in my own language. The subject, here, is the reality of paranormal phenomena—the phenomena which will be presented in the story. Making it clear to the reader that Marley is dead, is an example. In other words, we know that these ghosts are real, because Marley was dead. This precludes the skeptical explanation that Marley was pretending to be dead, or that a living person was pretending to be Marley's ghost. The subject was not Marley; nor was it that he was dead. It has been stated that he was dead, as an example—and the reader is to believe the narrator in this regard.

Therefore, a one-word exclamation, "dead!" is inappropriate. Let me see if I can think of an example. Suppose I narrate that we know Jack Johnson isn't homeless, because he lives in a white house. If, as the narrator, I suddenly exclaim, "white!," that's a side-track. So how could these highly-trained English literature professors imagine that the word was "dead!"?

Somehow, this brings to mind the old "Airplane" joke:

"I've just heard that he's in the hospital."

"The hospital! What is it?"

"It's the big building downtown where the doctors treat all the sick and injured people, but that's not important right now."

Now, I'm going to give this text to ChatGPT (i.e., my personal working-buddy, ChatGPT), and see if he can explain it in technical terms—that is, if he agrees. (The following is the short version he amended it to, as few of you would have stuck around for the longer one.)

So here's the technical problem. In English composition, a word like "dear!" functions as an interjection—a quick emotional aside that introduces a humorous comment. It fits perfectly before the line, "I don't mean to say that I know myself..." because it matches the narrator's playful tone and signals a shift into a comic reflection on language.

But "dead!" is not a normal interjection in Victorian English. It doesn't lead into the sentence that follows; it doesn't express emotion; and it doesn't serve as a discourse marker. Instead, it breaks the sentence structure and creates a logical non-sequitur. The narrator is about to joke about the expression "dead as a door-nail," not about death itself—so shouting "dead!" makes no grammatical or rhetorical sense.

In technical terms, "dead!" fails in syntax (it can't function as an interjection), in rhetoric (it adds nothing to the argument), and in logic (it interrupts the flow of thought). "Dear!" fits all three. It works grammatically, it works rhetorically, and it matches the narrator's tone and intention.

In short: from a composition standpoint, "dead!" is wrong, and "dear!" is correct.

My question is, why wouldn't college professors—highly respected ones, if I'm not mistaken—make this mistake? And keep in mind, this appears in a very conspicuous place, the first word of the second paragraph! I think it's because they aren't taking the project very seriously. It's sort of an extracurricular exericse, to them—like doing a crossword puzzle on their lunch break. The scholarly equivalent of the proverbial "poor red-headed stepchild." They intend to write a general paper, I would guess, claiming that their results support what they already believe, and presenting their transcript as a kind of literary curiosity.

Am I wrong? Is that unfair? I don't think they suspect for half-a-half-a-second that a truly rigorous—and fair-minded—examination of this manuscript proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Dickens was plagiarizing and heavily re-working someone else's novella.

I caution you not to assume that the highly-credentialed experts must be right, while the independent fringe researcher (i.e. the reincarnation nutcase) with the degree in psychology must be wrong...

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.