A Christmas Copycat?

When Dickens visited Massachusetts in 1842, he paid a visit to the Lowell textile mill, whose workers – and their monthly literary journal, The Lowell Offering – made quite an impression on him. Recently, literary scholars have suggested that Dickens may have even borrowed from journal for his classic “A Christmas Carol,” published 18 months after his visit:

The real emotional power of “A Christmas Carol,” and the reason we return to it year after year, is its message of redemption: in a single night, Scrooge turns his life around. Here, too, The Lowell Offering offered a precedent. In the essay “Memory and Hope,” written by a mill girl using the pen name Ellen, the narrator is visited by two spirits who offer competing visions of how she could live her life. After they’ve gone, the narrator promises to “never again covet the garland of fame,” but instead to “make myself more useful to my fellow creatures.” Scrooge makes a similarly triumphal statement at the end of “A Christmas Carol,” when he vows to become “as good a friend, as good a master, as good a man, as the old city knew.”

Despite the correspondences, not everyone agrees it’s an airtight case. A recent article about the claim on the Boston University website triggered a conversation on Dickns-L, an internet discussion board popular with Dickens scholars. One commenter posted that the inspiration for “A Christmas Carol” was simply the universally known story of Lazarus, the biblical figure raised from the dead. Another wrote that the seeds of “A Christmas Carol” could be found closer by, in a brief story inserted into “The Pickwick Papers,” which Dickens had written six years before he visited Lowell, and which the mill girls may well have read. … [Boston University professor Natalie] McKnight agrees that story played into “A Christmas Carol,” but says The Lowell Offering much more closely anticipates its tone, structure, and theme.

(Video: a reformed Scrooge, played by Michael Caine, sings in The Muppet Christmas Carol)