A Christmas Reading
In 3 parts with a Reflection
“The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”
by Charles Dickens
[Audio coming soon]
In an old Abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago, there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the church-yard one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; your undertakers are the merriest fellows in the world, and I once had the honor of being on intimate terms with those who could chirp out devil may care songs, or drain off a good stiff glass of grog without stopping for breath. But notwithstanding these precedents to the contrary, Gabriel Grub was an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket; and who eyed each merry face as it passed him by with such a deep scowl of malice and ill humor, as it was difficult to meet without feeling something the worse for.
A little before twilight one Christmas eve, Gabriel shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself towards the old churchyard, for he had got a grave to finish by next morning, and feeling very low he thought it might raise his spirits if he went on with his work. As he wended his way up the ancient street, he saw the cheerful light of the blazing fires gleam through the old casements, and heard the loud laugh and the cheerful shouts of those who were assembled around them; he marked the bustling preparations for next day’s good cheer, and smelled the savory odors consequent thereupon, as they steamed up from the kitchen windows in clouds. All this was gall to heart of Gabriel Grub; and as groups of children bounded out of the houses, Gabriel smiled grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he thought of measles, scarlet fever, and a good many other source of consolation beside.
In this happy frame of mind Gabriel strode along, returning a short sullen growl to the good humored greetings of his neighbors as now and then passed him, until he turned into the dark lane which led to the churchyard. Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice gloomy mournful place, into which the towns people did not much care to go. Consequently he was not a little indignatnt to hear a young person roaring out some jolly song about a merry Christmas in this very sanctuary, which had been called Coffin Lane ever since the days of the old abbey. As Gabriel walked on, and the voice drew nearer, he found it proceeded from a small boy, who was hurrying along to join one of the little parties in the old street. So Gabriel waited till the boy came up, and then dodged him into a corner, and rapped him over the head with his lantern to teach him to modulate his voice. As the boy hurried away, Gabriel chuckled heartily to himself and entered the churchyard.
He took off his coat, and getting into the unfinished grave, worked at it for an hour or so. But the earth was hardened with the frost, and there was little light. At any other time, it would have made Gabriel Grub miserable, but he was so well pleased with having stopped the small boy’s singing that he took little heed of the scanty progress he had made. And so he paused and sat down on a flat tombstone which was a favorite resting place of his, and drew forth his wicker bottle. “Ho Ho Ho, a Coffin at Christmas – a Christmas box,” he chortled.
“Ho Ho Ho,” repeated a voice which sounded close behind him.
Gabriel paused in some alarm, and looked around. Not the faintest rustle broke the tranquility of the scene. Sound itself appeared to be frozen up, all was so cold and still. “It was the echoes,” said Gabriel Grub, raising the bottle again.
“It was not,” said a deep voice.
Gabriel started up, and stood rooted to the spot with astonishment and terror.
Seated on an upright tombstone, close to him, was a strange unearthly figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world. His long fantastic legs were crossed; his sinewy arms were bare. On his short round body he wore a close covering, ornamented with small slashes. The goblin looked as if he had sat on the same tombstone very comfortably, for two or three hundred years. He was sitting perfectly still, grinning at Gabriel in derision.
“What do you here on Christmas eve,” said the goblin?
“I came to dig a grave, sir,” stammered Gabriel Grub.
“What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?” said the goblin.
“Gabriel Grub, Gabriel Grub,” screamed a wild chorus of voices that seemed to fill the churchyard. Gabriel looked around – nothing was to be seen.
“What do you think of this, Gabriel?” said the goblin.
“It’s very curious, Sir!” replied the sexton, half dead with fright, “but I think I’ll go back and finish my work, Sir, if you please.”
“Who makes graves at a time when all other men are merry, and takes pleasure in it,” said the goblin.
Again the mysterious voices replied, “Gabriel Grub, Gabriel Grub!”
“I’m afraid my friends want you, Gabriel,” said the goblin. “We know the man with the sulky face and the grim scowl, the came down the street tonight, throwing his evil looks at the children, and grasping his spade the tighter. We know the man that struck the boy in the envious malice of his heart because the boy could be merry and he could not. We know him.”
Here the goblin gave a shrill laugh that the echoes returned twenty fold. As the goblin laughed, the sexton observed for one instant a brilliant illumination within the windows of the church, as if the whole building were lighted up, and whole troops of goblins poured into the churchyard and began leaping over the tombstones with such rapidity that the sexton’s brain whirled, and his legs reeled beneath him as the spirits flew before his eyes. Suddenly the king of all the goblins darted toward him, laid his hand upon Gabriel’s collar, and sank with Gabriel into the earth.
Part II
When Gabriel Grub had time to catch his breath, he found himself in what appeared to be a large cavern, surrounded on all sides by crowds of goblins, ugly and grim. “Cold tonight,” said the king of the goblins. “A glass of something warm here.” At this command, half a dozen officious goblins disappeared, and returned with a goblet of liquid fire. One of the goblins held him while another poured the blazing liquid down his throat, and the whole assembly screeched with laughter as he coughed and choked, after swallowing the burning liquid.
“And now,” said the king, “show the man of misery and gloom a few o the pictures from our own great storehouse.”
As the goblin said this, a thick cloud rolled gradually away, and disclosed, apparently at a great distance, a small and scantily furnished apartment. A crowd of little children were gathered round a bright fire, clinging to their mother’s gown. A frugal meal was ready upon the table. A knock was heard at the door: the mother opened it and the children clapped their hands for joy as the father entered. He was wet and weary, and shook the snow from his garments. Then he sat down for his meal before the fire, and all seemed the very picture of happiness and comfort.
But a change came upon the view. The scene was altered to a small bed-room, where the youngest child lay dying: the roses had fled from his cheek, and the light from his eye; and even as the sexton looked upon him with an interest he had never felt or known before, the child died. His brothers and sisters crowded round his bed, and seized his hand, now cold and heavy. But they shrunk back from the touch and looked with amazement on his infant face, for calm and tranquil as it was, they knew that he was gone.
Again the light cloud passed across the picture, and again the subject changed. The father and mother were old and helpless now, and the number of those about them was diminished. Slowly and peacefully, the father sank into the grave, and soon after the mother did as well. The few who survived them knelt by the tomb, and watered the green grass that covered it with their tears, then rose and turned away, sadly and mournfully, but not with bitter cries, or despairing lamentations. Once more they mixed the busy world, and somehow their well being and peace were restored. With that, the cloud settled back upon the picture, and concealed it from the sexton’s view.
“What do you think of that?” said the goblin, turning toward Gabriel Grub.
Gabriel murmured something, and looked somewhat ashamed, as the goblin bent his fiery eyes upon him.
“You miserable man! Show him some more,” said the king of the goblins.
At these words the cloud was again dispelled, and a rich and beautiful landscape was disclosed to view. The sun shone from out of the clear blue sky, the water sparkled beneath its rays, and the trees looked greener, and the flowers more radiant than ever before. It was morning, the bright morning of a summer’s day, where the smallest leaf, the smallest blade of grass, instinctively brimmed with life. The ant crept forth to her daily toil, the butterfly fluttered and basked in the warm sun, myriads of insects spread their transparent wings, and reveled in their brief by happy existence. People too walked in such a landscape, elated with the scene, and all was splendor.
“You miserable man,” the goblin king repeated, with contempt. “Do you not see?” And he gave the sexton a hard kick in the back.
Many a time it came and went, and many a lesson it taught to Gabriel Grub, who looked on with an interest that nothing could dispel. He saw that people who worked hard, and earned their scanty bread with lives of labor, were cheerful and happy; and that to the most ignorant, the sweet face of nature was a never failing source of cheerfulness and joy. He saw those who had been delicately nurtured and tenderly brought up, cheerful under privations and superior to suffering that would have crushed many of a rougher grain, because they bore within their own hearts the materials of happiness, contentment, and peace. He saw women and men alike who overcame sorrow, adversity and distress, because they bore in their own hearts an inexhaustible well spring of affection and devotion. Above all, he saw that men like himself, sho snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth, and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a decent and respectable world after all. No sooner had he formed that conclusion than the cloud which had closed over the last picture seemed to settle on his senses, and lull him to repose. One by one, the goblins faded from his sight, and as the last one disappeared, he sunk to sleep.
Part III
The day had broken when Gabriel Grub awoke, and found himself lying at full length on the flat gravestone in the churchyard, with the wicker bottle lying empty by his side, and his coat, spade, and lantern all well whitened by the last night’s frost, scattered on the ground. At first he began to doubt the reality of his adventures. There was no evidence of any goblin feet in the snow about the churchyard, though Gabriel reasoned that being spirits, they would leave no visible impression. But then he felt the pain from the goblin’s kick, and he began to relive the previous evening. Eventually, Gabriel Grub got to his feet, and brushing the frost off his coat, he put it on, and turned his face towards the town.
But he was an altered man, and he could not bear the thought of returning to a place where his repentance would be scoffed at, and his reformation disbelieved. He hesitated for a few moments, and then turned away to wander where he might, and seek his bread elsewhere.
The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle, were found that day in the churchyard. There were a great many speculations about the sexton’s fate at first, but it was speedily determined that he had been carried away by the goblins; and there were not wanting some very credible witnesses who had distinctly seen him whisked through the air on the back of a chestnut horse blind of one eye, with the hind quarters of a lion, and the tail of a bear. At length all this was devoutly believed; and the new sexton used to exhibit to the curious a good sized piece of the church weathervane which had been accidentally kicked off by the aforesaid horse in his flight, and picked up by the new sexton in the churchyard some time afterward.
Unfortunately, these stories were somewhat disturbed by the unlooked for reappearance of Gabriel Grub himself, some ten years later, a ragged, contented, nearly blind old man. He told his story to the clergyman, and also to the mayor; and in course of time it began to be received as a matter of history, in which it has continued down to this day. The believers in the weathervane tale, having misplaced their confidence once, were not easily prevailed upon to part with it again, so they looked as wise as they could, shrugged their shoulders, touched their foreheads, and murmured something about Gabriel Grub’s having drunk all his liquor, and then fallen asleep on the flat tombstone. And they affected to explain what he supposed he had witnessed in the goblin’s cavern, by saying that he had seen the world, and grown wiser. But this opinion, which was by no means a popular one at any time, gradually died off; and be the matter how it may, as Gabriel Grub was afflicted with rheumatism to the end of his days, this story has at least one moral, if it teach no better one – and that is, that if a man turns sulky and drinks by himself at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it, let the spirits be ever so good, or let them be even as many degrees beyond proof, as those which Gabriel Grub saw in the goblin’s cavern.
An Ever So Brief Reflection
Here’s what I like about the Story of the Goblins and Gabriel Grub. It’s an example of a mostly forgotten Christmas tradition, which is the Christmas ghost story. And unlike most of the ghost stories we know today, the stories within that old tradition revealed creatures from the beyond who were not necessarily malevolent, but who wished to convey something important to those who witnessed them. The ghost story, in other words, wasn’t a vehicle merely for fear, but for the unfolding of important truths.
But here’s what I think is happening with the goblins in this story, and the ghosts in A Christmas Carol: they stand in for the novelist and the storyteller. Like Dickens himself, the goblins create tableaus, scenes, designed to open closed hearts. Dickens wrote in a time not wholly unlike our own, with vast social inequalities, and tremendous hardships among the new urban dwellers unleashed by the industrial revolution. Dickens himself was unflinching in his willingness to chronicle the lives of those urban poor, in nearly all of his novels. Charles Dickens himself was like the goblins of his story, or the ghosts within A Christmas Carol, seizing readers, and showing them scenes that somehow opened their hearts. Dickens would have had every reason to despair given all that he witnessed, and all that he showed. He might have become something of a Gabriel Grub – angry, miserable, lonely, and disaffected. He might have created dispatches that encouraged such an outlook among his readers. But he did not. Like the goblins, like the ghosts, Dickens gave us stories that affirmed the value of life, and that upheld the dignity of human beings.
We need such chroniclers today. We need goblins who reside in churches, who can take us into the bowels of the earth, and show us scenes that will open us to the goodness of things. Around us now, there are theologies and outlooks that demonstrate the worst and most depraved aspects of human life. Dystopian visions abound that conspire to keep us gloomy, and disenfranchised. And sometimes, we find ourselves in the graveyard, just digging graves. It can be all too tempting to become Gabriel Grubs. But we need ghosts and goblins, which is to say, storytellers, to remind us of the goodness at the heart of things, to help us perceive the radiant lives around us, to help us appreciate the gift of being alive, even amidst scenes of pain and loss. We need goblins who can kidnap us for a time in order to create scenes that demonstrate that not only the worst that can befall a person, but the best. We need to witness scenes that encourage us all to believe it’s possible to change our lives.