Ebenezer Scrooge: Post Transformation

Cafe Society
1

…so what do you think old Ebby was like after he turned his life around? We know he chipped in some cash to help Tiny Tim get cured…but what about his business practices? Or did he just give money to anyone who asked, and end up like MC Hammer, who went broke being nice to everyone around him?

Did he ever turn someone down for a loan because they had no collateral? Did he begin offering no interest loans?

Did he ever go visit the Treadmill or the Poor Law?

Did he ever get angry at someone and tell them to go fly a kite?

Did he go back to his one-time fiancee and say “hey, look, I’ve turned over a new leaf…let’s get hitched!”

Ah, so many questions left unanswered…

2

He got addicted to ghost hunting and seeking the aid of psychics and charlatans and lost all his money and had to move in with the Crachits(msp). Shared a room with Tim.

3

Caught a wicked case of Flu flying around on a cold winter night in nothing but his PJ’s and was dead by January 3rd.

Sorry to have to break that to ya.

4

SNL covered this in an episode hosted by Danny DeVito. Basically, he ends up impoverished, but still trying to keep his mood up. Just getting a little … discount … in his generosity.

“So, I hear you took Tiny Tim out of the hospital”

“But … but … they were coddling him. He wasn’t going to get better that way. The new hospital is still a good hospital.”

Reading Wikipedia, I find out that Dickens came up with the name, “Scrooge” by reading a random gravestone that said “Ebenezer Scrooge, a Dealer of Corn.” And Dickens was like – that’s the guys epitaph? No, beloved husband, devoted father or the typical “good person” epitaph? You want your job on the gravestone?

We tend to stick to the character’s anti-Christmas sentiments, and being an utter cheapskate. But that’s not the problem – Marley says its because, like Marley himself, Scrooge never looked beyond his counting house.

Scrooge can help Cratchit more, after all, when Scrooge dies, it will be Cratchit and Son’s counting house. Scrooge can also: take a trip to the continent and expand his vistas, endorse the arts (betcha Dickens would have loved that,) done some science, work with cleaning up his local community. He doesn’t have to stop being a hard-assed businessman. Because Dickens doesn’t really want that.

Reading the story, I get kinda confused, there’s this aside with the Ghost of Christmas Present. The GoCP doesn’t hate mercantilism – he wants people spending money, in the name of the Season, giving gifts and yes, giving more than you receive, but enjoying good cheer.

Scrooge: “So, Santa Clau … er … Ghost of Christmas parties …urm…Presents…uh…Present. You like mercantilism, so what’s with the no business conducted on YOUR day.”

The GoCP: “Hey, that’s you people who do that, wasn’t my idea. Don’t assume I came up with ALL your holiday traditions.”

Dickens is really going off on some strange, to us, tangents in the story. Seeing it on TV, by actors and with a certain producer’s and director’s and screenwriter’s vision, kinda dulls the complexity of the story.

5

I think the short answer was that he turned into George Bailey.

6

Louis Bayard wrote a book called “Mister Timothy” a few years back. It was about a grown up and healthy Tiny Tim trying to escape his dependence on “Uncle” Ebeneezer and getting involved in a murder mystery. Scrooge is depicted as a old man, living in a house constantly decorated for Christmas and entertaining an endless stream of honest and fraudulent charities. He is wracked with the worry that all that he has done won’t be enough to prevent the fate he was shown by the Ghost of Christmas Future.

7

Well, who the hell is Dickens to judge somebody by his gravestone? Maybe this Ebenezer grew up hungry and poor, and built up a grain distribution business from nothing. Maybe his grain fed hundreds, even thousands of people who would’ve otherwise gone hungry to bed at night. Maybe the corn dealership was the only thing in his life that made it worth living. Maybe he truly loved it and was proud of it. Just because he has that on his gravestone doesn’t mean he’s a miserable lonely bastard. Beloved husband…devoted father…Have you seen some of the horror shows that pass as families? True human shitstorms? Who would want that kind of hypocrisy on their gravestone for all eternity? Or maybe the guy was gay, and he couldn’t put that on his marker then, could he? Maybe he just thought that beloved family crap was cliche, and he considered himself a dynamo of of the new industrial age.

That’s a fine thing. A guy works all his life at a decent trade, and wants posterity to know it, and here comes social justice warrior Charles Dickens to piss all over his grave. Like it’s any of his fucking business. And then, Dickens takes the guy’s name, this man who just wanted people to eat his cereal and remember him for that, and Dickens makes his name Scrooge a byword for a rich and miserable jerk.

Ebenezer Scrooge could’ve been a delightful man, full of warmth and kindness, good to his employees, fair and honest with his customers, a wonderful intellect, nice to small animals. We’ll never know. Ebenezer Scrooge could’ve rested safe in the ordinary and anonymous infinite. But along comes Charles Dickens, and all Mr Scrooge is famous for is being a rich greedy son of a bitch played by wife-beater George C. Scott. Why should Ebenezer Scrooge be singled out for such a fate?
What did he ever do to Dickens? Huh? Answer me that!

Boz my ass! If I got one of them ancestry DNA thingies, and it proved I was related to the Scrooge family, I’d sue the Dickens out of his friggin’ estate!

8

There is absolutely no part of this that I didn’t love. 10/10. Subscribe newsletter.

9

It’s just possible that you’re confusing yourself by attempting to insert a treatise on economics into a section of the narrative intended to criticise the sour-face sanctimony of the Lord’s Day Observance Society and their ilk, and the Blue Laws they promoted that deprived the urban poor of a hot meal on Sundays or other holy days.

10

He kept his business, but he was far more lax with people who were late on payments and he donated a lot more money (and time) to charity.

He didn’t go broke, but he ran his business at a loss because he was always bailing out people and donating profits.

11

I like to think he’d be shrewd, but not cynical; good-hearted, but no pushover; under no illusions about the depths some people might sink to, but also having faith in the goodness many people can be capable of. And, in the light of his own experiences, believing that no one is beyond redemption or a second chance. (Perhaps, not unlike Jean Valjean after the Bishop’s influence on him.)

I’d had a plot bunny for a story about post-redemption Scrooge, in the course of his charity work, helping some of Fagin’s boys escape his clutches…because, after all, Scrooge’s eyes have been opened to the dangers of the Spirits of Ignorance and Want, and what may become of children growing up under their influence. Trouble with that idea is…Oliver Twist was written before A Christmas Carol, and I’m not sure I could get away with the hint that the action of the former book takes place a few years after the conclusion of the latter.

12

What, you’ve never heard of the prequel?

I think you have a charming idea. Go for it.

13

Am I the only one who heard this in Michael Palin’s voice?

14

What?! The nice Python?!

I felt more like I was channeling an R-rated Tom Servo.

15

I was thinking of one of his Outraged Working Man characters, like Dennis.

I can hear Tom Servo, too.

16

Or maybe the tombstone had suffered weathering, and it made the last word look like it started with “C” instead of “P.”

17

He’s an author. That gives him every right.

18

Is this a riff on something I’m not recognizing? Otherwise, author, schmauthor, he’s still a jerk.

19

I agree. Figure out a way to put Miss Havisham in there too, while you’re at it. (Scrooge is a bachelor, right…the wedding writes itself.)

20

Did Dickens get the name Scrooge from the gravestone, or the whole name? Because “Ebenezer” Is a Hebrew name that means “The Stone that helps,” or something like that. “Help from a rock,” maybe. You get the idea. It seemed like a deliberately chosen name to me.