Doubting Dickens - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 12/7/24

You know, and people don't like change, they experience change has pain, you know, so there's a lot of pain here. But as far as what they say, they don't say anything because they won't talk to me. You know, I can't get a conversation going, except with the exception of a few people who have been critical of Dickens. I've reached out to a few who are critical, and they

will talk to me to a point. But when it comes to a certain point, the point where I say Dickens was a sociopath and that basically he was not a great writer at all. You know, he was faking it, I lose them, and they won't talk to me anymore. You know, I've pushed them too.

some evidence to that she'd studied her meticism. She may have studied other teachings, mystical teachings, and she drew from different ones exactly the way that I started when I was nineteen and started investigating the different religions. I went on the assumption that at the esoteric level, they were all talking about the same thing, same reality, same experiences, you know. So I took it that way when I started studying, and she had that same view, I think,

And I think she was also psychic. There's one poem that she wrote that talks about herself as a child and her mother told her about the fairies, and so she took it quite literally and went out as a little girl, went out looking for the fairies the whole day, and she had a mystical experience, not of the fairies, but like of God's light coming up from the earth, you know, or something like that. So I think she

was psychic. So she also wrote when she was fourteen, she wrote very powerful, very sophisticated mystical poetry, which was I believe plagiarized by Albert Pike. And you may be familiar with Albert Pike or your listener's yeah, yeah, right,

came up in a number of conspiracy theories and so on. Well, he was a school teacher in eighteen thirty eighteen thirty one in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and I extrapolate from a whole bunch of evidence that she was a student in that class, and she was writing what he later termed the Hymns to the Gods, and that was a class assignment to write to. He wanted her to write to the Roman gods, but as soon as she got into it, after the title, it became the Greek gods, because she loved, you know,

ancient Greece, not ancient Rome. So you can see that in the poems, you know, all of a sudden the name of the god changes to the Greek one, and so on, you know, in the poetry. Well, those were class assignments, and then she wrote a lot of beautiful, deeply mystical private poetry. Albert Pike apparently went into her workbook and stold Oliver Poetry and published it under their joint initials, because AP for Albert Pike and AP for

Abby Point. And I think he must have thought to himself, if I get caught, I'll just say that I was publishing them for her. Well, he never got caught. The editors all assumed it was his, and he basked in the glory and became somewhat famous for that poetry as though it was his own. Well it wasn't his, it was Abbey's at age fourteen. So we've got one mystical, psychic child prodigy who has a deep understanding of mysticism and the occult as well. So then Matthew was the

younger brother of the Quaker poet John Greenquitdier. He obviously was raised Quaker. He was disowned by the Quakers when he married Abby, who was Catholic, but he retained his Quaker values in Quaker worldview. He was, you know, a pacifist generally except when war really had a good noble purpose. But he was very much against the supposed glory of war for its own sake. And he was a skeptic.

He was a philosopher, and he would actually make fun of Abby's occultism like he made fun of Pressian dreams, which I think Abbey actually had, and he made fun of astrology to the point where Abbey actually was, you know, temporarily convinced that it wasn't true, so he would make fun of her. But gradually she brought him around. So by eighteen thirty eight, when they would have started working on a Christmas Carol, he was at least intellectually. He was a believer in many of the things that she

tried to teach him. But he was also a child prodigy. I found work that he did at age twelve in eighteen twenty five, very sophisticated work, but it was the poetry was mostly humorous poetry. He was extremely good at it. But I think Abby taught him poetry. Abby became his tutor because he couldn't you desperately wanted to go to college,

but he couldn't afford it. So she stepped in. She'd had a privately tutored education, upper class education, and she taught him, and then he educated himself, so he was Matthew educated himself, and Abby also taught him right well.

This goes way into another rabbit hole. Okay, so we won't go into it, but I can prove that Francis Derivage published a whole bunch of Matthew's work. He apparently swindled him out of an entire portfolio in mid eighteen forty eight and started publishing it as his own along with a partner. So this would have been Matthew's story in the compilation published by Francis Durrivage after he got

control of that portfolio. And there's so many parallels, you know, if you look at it, it's obvious if The New Year's Bells came first, which I believe it did, that obviously a Christmas Carol was a pattern after it.

He lies down on a tombstone and he starts to dream, and he dreams of let's see, he dreams of himself as a boy, and he's walking with his young friend who was actually the husband of the you know, of the old lady he's kicked or the son I think of the old lady. He's kicking out. And he has several other dreams, and he's one of them is he's watching a lecture. Anyway, I won't go into all that

because it's not a direct parallel. But he's woken up by the townspeople and he's a changed man because his last dream was that he was in hell, so he's now a changed man. And he directs the townspeople to go and send some wood, you know, for the old lady, and also to say, and I think it's either a turkey or a goose and a pig for her to eat, you know, just like in a Christmas Carol. And then the ending is almost verbat on the same as the

next to last paragraph of Christmas Carol. Well, the next to last paragraph of a Christmas Carol was the original. What Dickens tacked on as the last was that was his. But in the New Year's Spells it ends like this Israel, that was the name of the miser lee. Landlord Israel was as good as his word and never relapsed into his old habits. The widow and the orphaned children were

provided for by his bounty. He gave liberally to every object to charity, hospital, schools, and colleges with the recipients of his bounty. And when he died in the fullness of years, the blessings of old and young followed him to his last resting place in the old churchyard, where he had dreamed the mysterious dream and had been awakened to a better life by the pealing of the New Year's Spells. Well, the next to last paragraph of Christmas

Carol is very similar. He says Screws was better than his word, he did it all and infinitely more, etcetera, etcetera. And that's not the only story Matthew ended that way. Another of the ones that Francis Duabage played your eyes ends like this says he was as good as his word. And from a miserly, surly old curmudgeon, Harman Brinkerhoff became, to the astonishment of all who knew him, one of

the most genial of the Knickerbockers. Now when I learned about Matthew from studying his work, I got over three thousand of his published words. He was like a lot of comedians. He would improve on his gags. He would take a gag that was particularly successful before, and he would improve on it and rework it and reintroduce it later on, like maybe ten years down the road in another publication, he would use it again. So this is

just one example of Matthew fine tuning something. You know, he'd already used it twice, and then a Christmas Carroll he said, well, let's bring it back and end his story that way.

So when Dickens wrote that first time, he was in a hurry and he had run out of Robert Seymour's material, so suddenly it was serialized, so he had to come up with something for Christmas, right, So I believe he had in front of him this unpublished manuscript New Year's Bells, which Matthew must have submitted to a magazine in London probably,

So that's the weak point. I can't prove that. The other thing he apparently had in front of him was a published story by Matthew which was called The Unbidden Guest. It appeared in the April eighteen thirty sixth edition of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which is something that Dickens almost for sure would would have read. Excuse me, so we know he was exposed to that one, And that one I can prove was Matthew's work. He signed a Tris Magistus, which is a pseudonym he used as early as eighteen

twenty eight, were now in eighteen thirty six. So Dickens had both of these together. If you put both of them together, they comprised like ninety percent of Dickens's story, the story of the goblins who stole the sextent. So one of them we could basically prove he had seen. The other one we have to extrapoli.

I believed that they had written a Christmas Carol with the idea of changing the world, that they were going to bring each reader, massive numbers of readers through a vicarious conversion experience, and by identifying with the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, they were going to get to this point and this by identification with him, have this conversion of the heart, and that they were going to transform the world.

Which they were young, they were in their early twenties, and it's an extremely naive idea, but I think that's what they wanted to do, so it's almost sort of worked. But anyway, when Abbie died, Matthew didn't know what to do with this manuscript, but he wanted to somehow fulfill Abbey's hopes for it. And he was personal friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Holmes was instrumental in arranging for dickens reception in Boston. So he would almost one hundred

percent sure have been given an introduction to Dickens. That much, I can, you know, be pretty confident about. So what happened was that Matthew would have handed this manuscript over to Dickens at that point. What he told Dickens I don't know. I do know that he wrote Dickens a letter because there's an acknowledgment of a letter that he

had written to Dickens. I think that Dickens took it back along with maybe one hundred other manuscripts that he was given, and then in eighteen forty three, he was his what he thought was his, you know, his masterpiece, because Dickens told his friend John Forster, this is Martin chuzzle With is my masterpiece, best thing I've ever done. But nobody liked it, okay, So he was in financial trub because it wasn't selling and he had to make

money quick. So he conceived what he privately told somebody was a little scheme, and his little scheme was to rework Matthew and Abbey's sacred Manuscript, their inspirational manuscript, into a ghost story because he was a you know, aggressive skeptic of spiritualism, so he didn't believe in any of those elements that are in a story, and he dumbed it down in six weeks, you know, and published it as a ghost story. And he really didn't expect it any more from it, I don't think, than to just

pay his bills, you know. I think he was as shocked as the next person when it was popular and he didn't really understand why.