12/16/25
I'm re-writing this because I wasn't entirely happy with where I took it the first time. I'm thinking about a professor--one of the very few--who wrote back to me this afternoon. He told me that he still thinks that Charles Dickens was a genius.

I don't really enjoy belittling people's heroes. But the problem is, so long as people think Dickens was a fine humanitarian and a literary genius, they will forever be coming up with rationalizations and excuses, as to how he could have written "A Christmas Carol." Because a legitimate genius could have, perhaps, done that within six weeks. But a scoundrel and a hack writer, could not have.

My foray into the handwritten manuscript of "A Christmas Carol" proved to me, once and for all, that left to his own devices Dickens was an awful writer. One must judge a plagiarist on his worst work, because that is likely to be his true level. In this case, whatever genius you attribute to Dickens, was stolen. It's that stark.

But should I plunge these admirers into black despair and confusion, by proving it to them? On the other hand, if I don't, is there any way to preserve Mathew and Abby Whittier's magnificent legacy for the future? Because if I can't break through one of these famous plagiarists' false claims to their work, I won't be able to save it. It will die with me, and unless I'm going to be another Dick Van Dyke, I may have at most 10 or 20 years.

This coming Christmas will be my 72nd birthday. I bought myself a chocolate cake (a birthday tradition, for me, since childhood, except now I have to buy my own), some eggnog, and two runner rugs for the hallway from Goodwill, as my Christmas present. It's simple around here; I have a little wooden creche from Bethlehem out, and I play carols from the Roger Wagner Chorale that I heard as a baby. Can you believe those songs bring it back to me, even now? But that's a story for another day.

I want to focus on what was really sacred--powerfully sacred--in Mathew and Abby's original version of "A Christmas Carol," which Charles Dickens callously slashed out, or painfully distorted. But who will understand it? Anyone who reads the book all the way through, will understand. I can't do it in a blog. This understanding builds slowly, through the chapters. I can't really summarize it.

I feel myself dancing around the subject I want to write about, and never being able to fully state it. In my book, I made an analogy to the animated movie, "The Last Unicorn." If you are familiar with it, think about the Red Bull trying to drive the Unicorn into the sea. This is what Charles Dickens did, or tried to do, with Mathew and Abby's story, "A Christmas Carol."

If you can't see that, you still don't get it.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.