I'm sitting here reading A Christmas Carol online...let's hear it for technology this time...after watching the Alistair Sims' classic, 'Scrooge,' last night on the 167th anniversary of the publishing of this classic, and have discovered some things not usually made public in or about the Dickens' classic. For instance, in the first chapter when Marley confronts Ebby with the call to Christian evangelism:'At this time of the rolling year,' the spectre said, 'I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?' (My italics.)
Then, when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows up, Scrooge attacks Christian Sabbatarian behavior and is reproved thusly:
'Spirit?' said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, 'I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment.'
'I!' cried the Spirit.
'You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,' said Scrooge. 'Wouldn't you?'
'I!' cried the Spirit.
'You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,' said Scrooge. 'And it comes to the same thing.'
'I seek!' exclaimed the Spirit.
'Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,' said Scrooge.
'There are some upon this earth of yours,' returned the Spirit, 'who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.'
I don't like long posts, so I'll wrap this one here.
Source:[ http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DicChri.html]
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