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the young Charles Dickens—court reporter, freelancer, would-be actor, and playwright
smile that threw light in all directions.
The night was as grim as Pluto.
“Oh, dear friend. The love between husband and wife bears the weight of awful responsibilities. What begins as modest inspiration ends … in deepest debt.”
How strange, to return to the place of his own long-ago undoing, in hopes of somehow being redone.
a city is an impression of itself, a kaleidoscope of not-quite-right things, a variegated jumble of place and memory, all that is and once was.
Of course his feet would lead him here. Feet had memory, too.
“Yet isn’t there also, in that very chime, the chance to begin again?”
“Your past is quicker than you are and will catch you soon enough.”
He knew that every person was a fiery furnace of passions and attachments, unknown to every other. He had stepped too close and been burned. It was his own doing, but the red-hot pain of it seared all the way down.
We are all players in the great pantomime of life!”
The distance between him and Catherine, as in all
marriages, was sometimes an inch, but other times the great expanse between hill and valley, ocean and desert. It was Dante’s dark forest, shrouded in shadow, the right path so often obscured. It was being together but feeling alone.
“A door closes at times. Even between those who’ve loved well.”
“That man is in a club all his own, to which you will never find admittance! No driveling, sniveling bloviators allowed!”
“A percentage of something is a good deal more than a percentage of nothing. Which is what we shall have if you do not finish this blasted book!”
Signed, Charles John Huffam Dickens.’”
he’d collected all his disappointment and anger, like kindling to fuel his own feu de misère—a bonfire of agonies.
Even a grown man can be an orphan.
Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom
of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.
Adults were astonished, but children, any children, were the best audience by far.
“What a lucky boy you are,” he whispered, “to be loved by such a one as she.”
Never mind necessity, melancholy is the mother of invention.
Her sincerity was her sword.
As did he. As does anyone, he knew, who has a moment of true feeling without encumbrances, that cannot be got another way. That has no history, no list of injuries and faults. Someone to see only the best in us. For the worst parts are
written on our skin in iron gall ink, indelible, and recited on a regular basis, by whoever knows us best. But a few simple, kind words, even from a near-stranger, can say everything else. And that in itself must be a prize.
Christmas Log,” he said. “That will do fine.”
But I knew somewhere deep inside … that he had broken my heart forever.”
“What kind of man would leave his son?” “A lost man,” she said.
“But can you not see,” she said, “that in that moment, his heart was broken as well?”
“For the second saddest thing in the world after a child who’s been abandoned,” said Eleanor, “is the parent who abandons him.”
“We are all lost, all broken,” said Eleanor. “Trying desperately to be whole again.”
“But every book you’ve ever written is a book about Christmas. About the feeling we must have for one another, without which we are lost.”
“When my husband died, your books were all he left us, all he had. Yet I think them the very thing that saved me, and my son.”
That despite what is cold and dark in the world, perhaps it is a loving place after all.”
“You were that writer long ago, even here; and that very boy, the writer you became.” “A boy who loved Christmas, with all his heart.”
Some days are blessed with a feeling of newness from the start.
How glad he was that carols were the thing again, after being stamped out by the Puritans
two centuries ago. They’d survived in the hearts of the people, sung in secret, but had returned, of late, to their rightful place in church choirs, on the streets, house to house.
wanted to lift the thin veil that separates one person from another and in its place raise the flag of fellow feeling, selflessness, charity, and return Christmas to the little child whose story had begun it.
pausing at the corner of what’s-long-forgotten and all-things-possible to watch their shared city yawn to life.
“But it’s who you are that makes a name.”
Begin again, he thought. Second chances, everywhere.
The young boy’s chin was lowered, as if he somehow understood the intermingling of loss and hope,
that only young children who have lost and hoped can know.
“I guess Christmas begins in the heart after all.”
He couldn’t have been happier had he been transported to Paradise. Here it was, in front of him now.
The book is, most of all, a fan letter—a love letter—to the “Inimitable Boz” himself that says, “I know you were
a flawed man who had a heart as big as the world. That you saw Christmas as a time to reconnect with our humanity and revel in even our smallest blessings. And that you lived with so much darkness, inside and out, but leaned—urgently,
