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Speaker 2: Stephen, this is reminiscent to me of an equally controversial
Speaker 2: theory that William Shakespeare did not write any of those
Speaker 2: all of his famous plays that were written by I
Speaker 2: think it was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de
Speaker 2: Vere And that comes up again, you know, with some
Speaker 2: strong objections from the literary circles in academia and so forth.
Speaker 2: What are the literary what a literary figures say about
Speaker 2: your theory and why are they so resistant to the
Speaker 2: idea that Dickens didn't write a Christmas Carrol.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. Most of the people, I think
Speaker 3: who have focused on Charles Dickens have done so because
Speaker 3: they're fans. So they're emotionally invested. And there's a lot
Speaker 3: of people who are their career as invested and they're
Speaker 3: financially invested. You know, there's there's films, there's you know,
Speaker 3: just just imagine what would have to be changed, you know,
Speaker 3: in academia and in society if this were to come out.
Speaker 3: You know, and people don't like change, they experience change
Speaker 3: has pain, you know, so there's a lot of pain here.
Speaker 3: But as far as what they say, they don't say
Speaker 3: anything because they won't talk to me. You know, I
Speaker 3: can't get a conversation going, except with the exception of
Speaker 3: a few people who have been critical of Dickens. I've
Speaker 3: reached out to a few who are critical, and they
Speaker 3: will talk to me to a point. But when it
Speaker 3: comes to a certain point, the point where I say
Speaker 3: Dickens was a sociopath and that basically he was not
Speaker 3: a great writer at all. You know, he was faking it,
Speaker 3: I lose them, and they won't talk to me anymore.
Speaker 3: You know, I've pushed them too.
Speaker 2: Far, all right, So let's talk about the actual you believe,
Speaker 2: the pair that are the actual authors of A Christmas Carol,
Speaker 2: Matthew Franklin Whitty and his wife Abby. Just give us
Speaker 2: kind of a thumbnail sketch of who these who this was.
Speaker 3: Well, Abby came from an upper class family. She was
Speaker 3: raised French Catholic, but her mother was Scottish. And I
Speaker 3: think that she came by these two different streams, you know, honestly,
Speaker 3: in the sense that you know, she went to Mass
Speaker 3: and you know she learned Catholicism, but she also learned
Speaker 3: the old ways Wickan essentially from her mother, from the
Speaker 3: old Scottish teachings scene. So she had both and she
Speaker 3: respected both. And she had studied Eastern mysticism. I had
Speaker 3: some evidence to that she'd studied her meticism. She may
Speaker 3: have studied other teachings, mystical teachings, and she drew from
Speaker 3: different ones exactly the way that I started when I
Speaker 3: was nineteen and started investigating the different religions. I went
Speaker 3: on the assumption that at the esoteric level, they were
Speaker 3: all talking about the same thing, same reality, same experiences,
Speaker 3: you know. So I took it that way when I
Speaker 3: started studying, and she had that same view, I think,
Speaker 3: And I think she was also psychic. There's one poem
Speaker 3: that she wrote that talks about herself as a child
Speaker 3: and her mother told her about the fairies, and so
Speaker 3: she took it quite literally and went out as a
Speaker 3: little girl, went out looking for the fairies the whole day,
Speaker 3: and she had a mystical experience, not of the fairies,
Speaker 3: but like of God's light coming up from the earth,
Speaker 3: you know, or something like that. So I think she
Speaker 3: was psychic. So she also wrote when she was fourteen,
Speaker 3: she wrote very powerful, very sophisticated mystical poetry, which was
Speaker 3: I believe plagiarized by Albert Pike. And you may be
Speaker 3: familiar with Albert Pike or your listener's yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 3: came up in a number of conspiracy theories and so on. Well,
Speaker 3: he was a school teacher in eighteen thirty eighteen thirty
Speaker 3: one in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and I extrapolate from a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of evidence that she was a student in that class,
Speaker 3: and she was writing what he later termed the Hymns
Speaker 3: to the Gods, and that was a class assignment to
Speaker 3: write to. He wanted her to write to the Roman gods,
Speaker 3: but as soon as she got into it, after the title,
Speaker 3: it became the Greek gods, because she loved, you know,
Speaker 3: ancient Greece, not ancient Rome. So you can see that
Speaker 3: in the poems, you know, all of a sudden the
Speaker 3: name of the god changes to the Greek one, and
Speaker 3: so on, you know, in the poetry. Well, those were
Speaker 3: class assignments, and then she wrote a lot of beautiful,
Speaker 3: deeply mystical private poetry. Albert Pike apparently went into her
Speaker 3: workbook and stold Oliver Poetry and published it under their
Speaker 3: joint initials, because AP for Albert Pike and AP for
Speaker 3: Abby Point. And I think he must have thought to himself,
Speaker 3: if I get caught, I'll just say that I was
Speaker 3: publishing them for her. Well, he never got caught. The
Speaker 3: editors all assumed it was his, and he basked in
Speaker 3: the glory and became somewhat famous for that poetry as
Speaker 3: though it was his own. Well it wasn't his, it
Speaker 3: was Abbey's at age fourteen. So we've got one mystical,
Speaker 3: psychic child prodigy who has a deep understanding of mysticism
Speaker 3: and the occult as well. So then Matthew was the
Speaker 3: younger brother of the Quaker poet John Greenquitdier. He obviously
Speaker 3: was raised Quaker. He was disowned by the Quakers when
Speaker 3: he married Abby, who was Catholic, but he retained his
Speaker 3: Quaker values in Quaker worldview. He was, you know, a
Speaker 3: pacifist generally except when war really had a good noble purpose.
Speaker 3: But he was very much against the supposed glory of
Speaker 3: war for its own sake. And he was a skeptic.
Speaker 3: He was a philosopher, and he would actually make fun
Speaker 3: of Abby's occultism like he made fun of Pressian dreams,
Speaker 3: which I think Abbey actually had, and he made fun
Speaker 3: of astrology to the point where Abbey actually was, you know,
Speaker 3: temporarily convinced that it wasn't true, so he would make
Speaker 3: fun of her. But gradually she brought him around. So
Speaker 3: by eighteen thirty eight, when they would have started working
Speaker 3: on a Christmas Carol, he was at least intellectually. He
Speaker 3: was a believer in many of the things that she
Speaker 3: tried to teach him. But he was also a child prodigy.
Speaker 3: I found work that he did at age twelve in
Speaker 3: eighteen twenty five, very sophisticated work, but it was the
Speaker 3: poetry was mostly humorous poetry. He was extremely good at it.
Speaker 3: But I think Abby taught him poetry. Abby became his
Speaker 3: tutor because he couldn't you desperately wanted to go to college,
Speaker 3: but he couldn't afford it. So she stepped in. She'd
Speaker 3: had a privately tutored education, upper class education, and she
Speaker 3: taught him, and then he educated himself, so he was
Speaker 3: Matthew educated himself, and Abby also taught him right well.
Speaker 2: What was their version called their version of a Christmas Carol?
Speaker 3: Before it it was called a Christmas Carol. And the
Speaker 3: reason I say that is for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 3: First of all, they appeared to have used a story
Speaker 3: they had written back in the early eighteen thirties as
Speaker 3: a template. It's called The New Year's Bells. It's the
Speaker 3: next to the last story in a compilation called Three
Speaker 3: Brides Loving a Cottage and Other Tales. It was published
Speaker 3: by a fellow named Francis A. Derivage in eighteen fifty two.
Speaker 3: This goes way into another rabbit hole. Okay, so we
Speaker 3: won't go into it, but I can prove that Francis
Speaker 3: Derivage published a whole bunch of Matthew's work. He apparently
Speaker 3: swindled him out of an entire portfolio in mid eighteen
Speaker 3: forty eight and started publishing it as his own along
Speaker 3: with a partner. So this would have been Matthew's story
Speaker 3: in the compilation published by Francis Durrivage after he got
Speaker 3: control of that portfolio. And there's so many parallels, you know,
Speaker 3: if you look at it, it's obvious if The New
Speaker 3: Year's Bells came first, which I believe it did, that
Speaker 3: obviously a Christmas Carol was a pattern after it.
Speaker 2: Three visiting spirits, tiny Tim Jacob Marley, any of those parallels.
Speaker 3: Well, what you have let's see, I have to go
Speaker 3: back through the plot. You have a miserly landlord and
Speaker 3: his tenant who is an old woman living with her grandchildren,
Speaker 3: and he evicts her in the middle of winter. So
Speaker 3: after he leaves there, he walks to his place through
Speaker 3: the graveyard and he decides he gets sleepy and cold.
Speaker 3: He lies down on a tombstone and he starts to dream,
Speaker 3: and he dreams of let's see, he dreams of himself
Speaker 3: as a boy, and he's walking with his young friend
Speaker 3: who was actually the husband of the you know, of
Speaker 3: the old lady he's kicked or the son I think
Speaker 3: of the old lady. He's kicking out. And he has
Speaker 3: several other dreams, and he's one of them is he's
Speaker 3: watching a lecture. Anyway, I won't go into all that
Speaker 3: because it's not a direct parallel. But he's woken up
Speaker 3: by the townspeople and he's a changed man because his
Speaker 3: last dream was that he was in hell, so he's
Speaker 3: now a changed man. And he directs the townspeople to
Speaker 3: go and send some wood, you know, for the old lady,
Speaker 3: and also to say, and I think it's either a
Speaker 3: turkey or a goose and a pig for her to eat,
Speaker 3: you know, just like in a Christmas Carol. And then
Speaker 3: the ending is almost verbat on the same as the
Speaker 3: next to last paragraph of Christmas Carol. Well, the next
Speaker 3: to last paragraph of a Christmas Carol was the original.
Speaker 3: What Dickens tacked on as the last was that was his.
Speaker 3: But in the New Year's Spells it ends like this Israel,
Speaker 3: that was the name of the miser lee. Landlord Israel
Speaker 3: was as good as his word and never relapsed into
Speaker 3: his old habits. The widow and the orphaned children were
Speaker 3: provided for by his bounty. He gave liberally to every
Speaker 3: object to charity, hospital, schools, and colleges with the recipients
Speaker 3: of his bounty. And when he died in the fullness
Speaker 3: of years, the blessings of old and young followed him
Speaker 3: to his last resting place in the old churchyard, where
Speaker 3: he had dreamed the mysterious dream and had been awakened
Speaker 3: to a better life by the pealing of the New
Speaker 3: Year's Spells. Well, the next to last paragraph of Christmas
Speaker 3: Carol is very similar. He says Screws was better than
Speaker 3: his word, he did it all and infinitely more, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 3: And that's not the only story Matthew ended that way.
Speaker 3: Another of the ones that Francis Duabage played your eyes
Speaker 3: ends like this says he was as good as his word.
Speaker 3: And from a miserly, surly old curmudgeon, Harman Brinkerhoff became,
Speaker 3: to the astonishment of all who knew him, one of
Speaker 3: the most genial of the Knickerbockers. Now when I learned
Speaker 3: about Matthew from studying his work, I got over three
Speaker 3: thousand of his published words. He was like a lot
Speaker 3: of comedians. He would improve on his gags. He would
Speaker 3: take a gag that was particularly successful before, and he
Speaker 3: would improve on it and rework it and reintroduce it
Speaker 3: later on, like maybe ten years down the road in
Speaker 3: another publication, he would use it again. So this is
Speaker 3: just one example of Matthew fine tuning something. You know,
Speaker 3: he'd already used it twice, and then a Christmas Carroll
Speaker 3: he said, well, let's bring it back and end his
Speaker 3: story that way.
Speaker 2: How did dickens and get his hands on the Whittier's
Speaker 2: version New Year's.
Speaker 3: Bells New Year's Well, Well, here's a gap. But there's
Speaker 3: apparently when Dickens wrote the twenty ninth chapter of the
Speaker 3: Pickwick Papers, and there's a whole bunch of evidence behind this.
Speaker 3: I'll just give you my interpretation because I don't don't
Speaker 3: have time for me to go into all the background.
Speaker 3: So when Dickens wrote that first time, he was in
Speaker 3: a hurry and he had run out of Robert Seymour's material,
Speaker 3: so suddenly it was serialized, so he had to come
Speaker 3: up with something for Christmas, right, So I believe he
Speaker 3: had in front of him this unpublished manuscript New Year's Bells,
Speaker 3: which Matthew must have submitted to a magazine in London probably,
Speaker 3: So that's the weak point. I can't prove that. The
Speaker 3: other thing he apparently had in front of him was
Speaker 3: a published story by Matthew which was called The Unbidden Guest.
Speaker 3: It appeared in the April eighteen thirty sixth edition of
Speaker 3: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which is something that Dickens almost for
Speaker 3: sure would would have read. Excuse me, so we know
Speaker 3: he was exposed to that one, And that one I
Speaker 3: can prove was Matthew's work. He signed a Tris Magistus,
Speaker 3: which is a pseudonym he used as early as eighteen
Speaker 3: twenty eight, were now in eighteen thirty six. So Dickens
Speaker 3: had both of these together. If you put both of
Speaker 3: them together, they comprised like ninety percent of Dickens's story,
Speaker 3: the story of the goblins who stole the sextent. So
Speaker 3: one of them we could basically prove he had seen.
Speaker 3: The other one we have to extrapoli.
Speaker 2: So when a Christmas Carol is published in eighteen forty three,
Speaker 2: how do Matthew and Abbie Whittier react? Are they angry?
Speaker 3: Well? I think that first of all, Abby had died
Speaker 3: in March of the previous year forty one, and I
Speaker 3: don't think she would have okated. Matthew was a big
Speaker 3: fan of Dickens. I think there were a lot of
Speaker 3: things that Abby knew were not really you know, or
Speaker 3: people that she knew were not really up to snuff,
Speaker 3: and Matthew didn't believe her. So he was a big
Speaker 3: fan of Dickens, and I think this is one of
Speaker 3: those things where she wouldn't have agreed, but she wasn't there.
Speaker 3: I believed that they had written a Christmas Carol with
Speaker 3: the idea of changing the world, that they were going
Speaker 3: to bring each reader, massive numbers of readers through a
Speaker 3: vicarious conversion experience, and by identifying with the character of
Speaker 3: Ebenezer Scrooge, they were going to get to this point
Speaker 3: and this by identification with him, have this conversion of
Speaker 3: the heart, and that they were going to transform the world.
Speaker 3: Which they were young, they were in their early twenties,
Speaker 3: and it's an extremely naive idea, but I think that's
Speaker 3: what they wanted to do, so it's almost sort of worked.
Speaker 3: But anyway, when Abbie died, Matthew didn't know what to
Speaker 3: do with this manuscript, but he wanted to somehow fulfill
Speaker 3: Abbey's hopes for it. And he was personal friends with
Speaker 3: Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Holmes was instrumental in arranging for
Speaker 3: dickens reception in Boston. So he would almost one hundred
Speaker 3: percent sure have been given an introduction to Dickens. That much,
Speaker 3: I can, you know, be pretty confident about. So what
Speaker 3: happened was that Matthew would have handed this manuscript over
Speaker 3: to Dickens at that point. What he told Dickens I
Speaker 3: don't know. I do know that he wrote Dickens a
Speaker 3: letter because there's an acknowledgment of a letter that he
Speaker 3: had written to Dickens. I think that Dickens took it
Speaker 3: back along with maybe one hundred other manuscripts that he
Speaker 3: was given, and then in eighteen forty three, he was
Speaker 3: his what he thought was his, you know, his masterpiece,
Speaker 3: because Dickens told his friend John Forster, this is Martin
Speaker 3: chuzzle With is my masterpiece, best thing I've ever done.
Speaker 3: But nobody liked it, okay, So he was in financial
Speaker 3: trub because it wasn't selling and he had to make
Speaker 3: money quick. So he conceived what he privately told somebody
Speaker 3: was a little scheme, and his little scheme was to
Speaker 3: rework Matthew and Abbey's sacred Manuscript, their inspirational manuscript, into
Speaker 3: a ghost story because he was a you know, aggressive
Speaker 3: skeptic of spiritualism, so he didn't believe in any of
Speaker 3: those elements that are in a story, and he dumbed
Speaker 3: it down in six weeks, you know, and published it
Speaker 3: as a ghost story. And he really didn't expect it
Speaker 3: any more from it, I don't think, than to just
Speaker 3: pay his bills, you know. I think he was as
Speaker 3: shocked as the next person when it was popular and
Speaker 3: he didn't really understand why.
Speaker 2: All right, very quickly, because I've got less than a
Speaker 2: minute here. Do you do you prefer when you read
Speaker 2: or a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or his version,
Speaker 2: and New Year's Bells by the Wittiers? Which which do
Speaker 2: you prefer? Which is better?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, inasmuch as I can kind of extrapolate
Speaker 3: what a Christmas Carol was, I think that was the
Speaker 3: full fruition of their ideas. New Year's Bells is kind
Speaker 3: of a treatment.
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