"Father is so much kinder than he used to be."
-- Little Fan, Ebenezer's large-hearted sister
A single, solitary line from the Dickens' classic directed to a solitary, neglected boy, would inspire a modern adaptation. Was there more to this line, thrown away by Dickens himself? Could it be a thread that when tugged upon would unfurl an entirely new Dickensian tapestry?
Charles Dickens endeavoured in his Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea, and his ghost haunted Robert Dwight Brown in the quiet, snow-ladened Christmas season, with another Ghost of an Idea, namely the ghost of Ebenezer's father, Jeremiah Scrooge.
There was no doubt in Mr. Brown's mind that the three Spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet To Come had once haunted Jeremiah Scrooge with phantasmical journeys through his past, his present, and his future, a future where Jeremiah would encounter a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, his very own son, Ebenezer.
Witness with your own eyes how Jeremiah's own ghostly journey towards reclamation affects upon his son a similar ghostly journey, a story immortalized in 1843 by Charles Dickens, the man who invented modern Christmas! Now, on its 175th anniversary, another author picks up the mantle to finish the composition of a complete Christmas Carol, complete with Christmas carols: The Hauntings of Jeremiah & Ebenezer Scrooge, a novel which should prove to be a 21st century classic.
The Authors
Charles Dickens was dead: to begin with. Old Dickens was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. Mr. Dickens has been dead this past century-and-a-half. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of my completion of story conceived in the 1843 Christmas classic. It has been 175 years since he wrote the timeless and immortal A Christmas Carol, which remains popular with countless adaptations as plays, musicals, films, sequels, and modern retellings. The Haunting of Ebenezer Scrooge could only come from the pen of Charles Dickens.
Robert Dwight Brown, the author of half-a-dozen independently published works, including plays in Shakespearean verse and the third part of the Holy Bible Trilogy, sought to deliver himself for his own debtor's prison of obscurity by telling the story of the Haunting of Jeremiah Scrooge and how it affected the haunting immortalized in A Christmas Carol. Only Mr. Brown could have taken the inspiration of a single, solitary thread hidden in a single solitary line in the Christmas classic and spin a modern 21st Century Dickensian tapestry, The Hauntings of Jeremiah & Ebenezer Scrooge.
