12/21/25
Despite my initial intentions, I have been emphasizing Charles Dickens' brazen "little scheme" and his disrespectful re-writing of "A Christmas Carol," more than the sacred nature of Mathew and Abby Whittier's original. The reason is that I instinctively balk at throwing my pearls--or rather, their pearls--before swine, as it were. This world is so heavily secularized, now--so bawdy, and trite, and cynical--that I don't feel I can emphasize the sacred aspect of this story, as it was before Dickens dragged it down.

To use a visual analogy, people imagine that Charles Dickens raised the bar, say, 10 feet in the air; and they are all very impressed with that ten feet. I'm speaking now of spiritual power. What he actually did was to lower Mathew and Abby's bar from 100 feet down to 10 feet. This requires a paradigm shift of massive proportions; and the reason there is such a massive shift required, is that Dickens was a full-blown sociopath, capable of telling and maintaining a "big lie."

What I've done, is to expose evidence of his crime from within his own manuscript--specifically, by revealing the text that he redacted. My book is comprised of one piece of this evidence after another. It's beyond compelling--it's a done deal. Even AI balks at my phrasing, when I say things like this, but I'm only being logical. If there were any shred of doubt left, I would honestly say so. When the case is proved beyond a reasonable doubt six, seven, eight times over, I call it like I see it. That's real scientific rigor. You don't say, as a scientist, "This looks like gold alright, maybe 20%." Not if it's 100%. You just report the facts as you find them.

Now, what about the truly sacred character of the original novella, as written by Mathew and Abby? Here is where I pause, because I don't know who I'm writing to. I don't know whether you're all the same people, or different people casually passing by. I don't know if you support my work, or monitor it in cynical disbelief. I have no idea who you are. And Mathew and Abby's original, as I have found evidence for it still remaining under Dickens' heavy redactions, was indeed sacred. It was originally far more spiritually powerful, and far more deeply nuanced, than Dickens' trite published version. Dickens' version is a veritable cartoon, compared with the original. Worse than that, Dickens inserted his own nastiness into parts of it--right into the middle of Abby's beautiful, lyrical prose in some cases.

He was really a "piece of work." You have no idea, because you've swallowed the false myth you've inherited from Society.

When Ebenezer Scrooge is shown his own corpse lying there, he was actually shown two corpses. The second one was the body of a highly virtuous man, whose virtue--and whose soul--death cannot touch.

When Bob Cratchit runs upstairs to sit "beside the child" (lower case "c") briefly, he had originally prayed his heart out to a little figurine of the Christ Child (upper case "C").

When Marley's ghost says there isn't enough time for all the good we could do on earth, originally he was speaking of many lifetimes, and of the soul's immortality.

When Tiny Tim says, "God bless us, every one," originally that was not a toast, with all the children drinking alcoholic punch. It was a prayer circle, and Tiny Tim was asserting the truth of Universalism, i.e., that God would bless (and save) every single person, rather than just the Calvinist "elect."

I could go on. Who cares about the sacred, now? I seemingly can't even get the Catholics interested--despite the fact that it was one of their own who originally wrote the sacred portions of "A Christmas Carol."

I am seeing something very odd where my Facebook posts and comments are concerned. Far more people are leaving "likes" than are disparaging me. Thirty "likes" to eight laughing emojies, in one case, last I looked. But it is the cynics who comment, typically. The people who leave a "like" are silent.

I think that means there are people who are receptive, but are not prepared to commit or even be publicly known as investigating it (although their full names do show up when they click "like"). Some of this is probably due to the fact that Dickens is being exposed as an unpleasant wife-hater and wife-betrayer by the more radical Dickens scholars. So already, people are questioning, "Could this boorish ass really have written 'A Christmas Carol' within six weeks, when he was suspiciously in need of quick cash?"

It may be that the time is ripe for this. But it is something like doing organ transplant surgery, to migrate people's instinctive love of "A Christmas Carol" away from Charles Dickens, who has owned it for 180 years, to its original, hitherto-unknown, authors. This, I think, is going to take time; and I predict it will be a bumpy ride before it's over.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.