What the Dickens? A Christmas Carol is 160 pages of humbug at my expense

The name is Scrooge. Ebenezer Scrooge, and my word is my bond. I’m here to correct one of the great travesties of literature which has seen my good name traduced for 180 years [since December 19th, 1843] when that lowbrow purveyor of cheap potboilers Charles Dickens, through a mixture of misinformation and sentimentality, destroyed my good name and made a fortune. Humbug, indeed.

“A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” is how he described me. He must have been looking in a mirror. “Hard and sharp as flint ... secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster,” and that just about sums him up too. All made up, where I’m concerned.

Tiny Tim? Bless my sweet soul. He was 6ft 2in, colossal in my time. His only “disability” was that damn ukulele, a four-stringed instrument of torture with which he annoyed everyone. He was lucky not to end up with broken bones. You may have heard of his great-grandson, also called Tiny Tim, a giant who sang Tip Toe through the Tulips in 1968. Even Dickens could not make him up!

Did you know that at one point he was going to call Tim “Little Fred”, then veered towards (you Irish will love this!) “Tiny Mick”?

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As for Tim’s father, Bob Cratchit, there was hardly a more useless clerk in all of London in the entire 19th century. He had been fired six times before I took him on and only then because he had four children who would have ended up in a workhouse or a blacking factory if I hadn’t. Useless, useless.

And whoever heard the likes of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet To Come? Silly nonsense. I was never in a boarding school and had a very happy childhood. “Tiny” Tim was in fine health and needed neither medical treatment or my money to pay for it, and Christmas Yet to Come is purest crystal ball gazing. All from a man they say invented Christmas. A stake of sharpest holly should have been put through his heart, if he had one.

A Christmas Carol is 160 pages of humbug at my expense. And you thought misinformation began with social media. We had it long before that. It was called gossip. Fiction, even.

Humbug, of unknown origin, meaning “to deceive by false pretext”.

inaword@irishtimes.com