Dickens wrote a Christmas Miser before Scrooge. And he might be the Better One.

What Gabriel Grub can teach us about pain, honesty and the roots of bitterness

Photo by mari lezhava on Unsplash

Some time last Christmas, I was on Instagram.

Mindlessly scrolling, I hit on a story by a lawyer. It was about her Christmas routine, specifically about watching the animated version of The Grinch. She claimed that she felt more and more like the Grinch, the older she got.

‘Sounds about right’, I thought and I’m sure quite a few people reading this will agree. (It’s possible to have a case of the summer blues, which might explain why I’m writing this out of season. Also, recently I was strangely reminded of a school friend with whom I’d use to sing ‘Deck the Halls’ with around June, to gently rib one particular favourite teacher!)

It’s easy to get grouchy as we age. Our health starts to fail, the bills stack up, responsibilities loom and relationships change, leaving us to pick up the pieces. And when fun grows more scarce and less innocent (how many of us actually still jump into a pile of leaves come fall?), it’s not hard to understand how you could become crotchety. How you could start to smile a little less, to grumble a little more, to shake your head and scowl at people who seem idiotically, blisteringly (yes, blisteringly, not blissfully!) happy.

That’s just how I see Gabriel Grub.

The protagonist of a short story (‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton’) inserted into The Pickwick Papers, he is the prototype for Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

Gabriel is a sexton (a church caretaker) who can’t stand joy of any sort. He is the kind of man who snarls at children who sing carols and who kicks a boy for being ‘too merry’. Trying to escape the inevitability of good cheer on the evening of Christmas Eve, Gabriel heads out to dig graves in the dank, gloomy churchyard. That’s when a band of sinister goblins kidnap and take him to an underground cavern. There, they beat him mercilessly and torment him with visions of human suffering, kindness and joy that call his own life and morals into question. Practically coerced into feeling his wrongs and regretting his life as it is, Gabriel surprisingly ends up finding himself back in the old churchyard come morning, the goblins having vanished without a trace. Distinctly bruised and spiritually shaken, he’s now a man bent on turning over a new leaf. The story ends with Gabriel going off into the next town where he lives a gentle, reformed life, only returning in his old age to testify to his strange experience-which people both believe and disbelieve, in the way the world usually reacts to accounts of the uncanny or supernatural.

I confess, I feel for Gabriel Grub.

At a cursory glance, he seems despicable-kicking children and taking joy in singing gristly verses about death and bones. Not someone you’d want to encounter in real life, especially not at night in a churchyard. Dickens doesn’t offer us much in terms of his back story, unlike Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who, at one point, had a sister he cared for, friends as well as a woman he loved. With Gabriel, we are firmly rooted in the present-there’s no mention of family, friends or lovers. Yet there are hints that he too once knew happiness, or, at the very least, recognises how enjoyable it is to be happy. (Right from the start, Gabriel is described as a ‘lonely and morose man’, later being identified as someone who strikes a boy for singing ‘out of envious malice of the heart, because the boy could be merry and he could not’.)

I’ve talked about how galling it can be to see people happy when oneself is down in the dumps. And I know people close to me who like to say things along the lines of ‘how can they be off, enjoying themselves, when it’s all topsy-turvy? what right do they have to be happy?’. People who believe that it’s something of a duty to be solemn, that is, in their eyes, respectable. Who live life according to these adages:

‘Happiness is not in the cards for me’

‘That’s a dream that can only be lived out in a book or a film’

‘I never had that and it was good enough for me’

The people who voiced these words could be judgmental and harsh precisely because they felt locked out of the very happiness they condemned as being ‘unsuitable’.

In that sense, The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton, as opposed to A Christmas Carol, is the moral fable that speaks to our condition. It is also the one with the more wholesome message. How? Well, think about it the way David J Greenman puts it: ‘Scrooge comes to the rather secular conclusion that it is not money that brings happiness but rather what money can buy’. Greenman argues in his piece that Scrooge falsely believes that living frugally and stinting himself only to have a pretty penny in the bank will make him happy, only to become convinced that spending lavishly, buying his way into family fun, friendship and good cheer, is the way to go. Absolute miserliness exchanged for overt consumerism.

Given that Dickens was one of the main proponents behind commercialising Christmas (he was instrumental in popularising the idea of lavish dinners, presents, games and trees, things that now characterise the holiday!), it’s criticism that rings true.

I prefer The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton because the visions Gabriel is privy to are not devoid of realism. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fanciful description of roast meats and puddings, the talk of parlour games and presents, but more than that, I find the description of a large family cheerfully settled around a frugal dinner, later leading into those same grown children kneeling by their parent’s graves, with tears in their eyes, more affecting. We get that in A Christmas Carol, but there, Scrooge jumps in as a saviour with his money, rendering the family comfortable in a way that smacks of a fairy tale.

Consider the exact passage:

The few who yet survived them, kneeled by their tomb, and watered the green turf which covered it with their tears; then rose, and turned away, sadly and mournfully, but not with bitter cries, or despairing lamentations, for they knew that they should one day meet again; and once more they mixed with the busy world, and their content and cheerfulness were restored.

The comfort that the children have here is in one day meeting their parents again in heaven. Life is still difficult and painful, poverty doesn’t miraculously evaporate. But people still band together, inspired by early joy, muddling their way through life as best they can.

It’s a message Gabriel himself lives out. We don’t learn that his change of heart instantly makes him happy-there’s no ‘Eureka’ moment, as with Scrooge, who jumps out of bed, rejuvenated, hollering out of the window to a boy to get the large prize turkey, rushing out with his clothes all astray. When Gabriel returns to his old town years later, it is as a ‘contented’ man, yes, but also as a ‘ragged, rheumatic’ one.

He learns that there is intrinsic value in soldiering on happily when the going gets rough-that going the extra mile to wrangle your inner darkness into submission can lead to light at the end of the tunnel. (No mean feat, considering that from an evolutionary perspective, we are wired to keep thinking negative thoughts and expect the worst, as a means to make sure we actually survive.) That light is hard-earned and comes with it’s own shadows-none of the quick fix solutions in terms of money that Scrooge dangles over the heads of all those who orbit him.

Gabriel does not get a feast or a fortune-he finds a peace that transcends both. A moral worth contemplating-summer or winter.

Sources

Cox, R. and Gilbert E. L. (1975) Scrooge’s Conversion. PMLA. Volume 90, Number 5, pp 922–924. Available from https://www.jstor.org/stable/461477?searchText=dickens+christmas&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Ddickens%2Bchristmas%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A6656a7702403fbc70cf222bc15df8bbc&seq=1 [accessed 18 July 20025]

Greenman, D.J. (2000) Alcohol, Comedy, and Ghosts in Dickens’s Early Short Fiction. Dickens Quarterly. Volume 17, Number 1, pp 3–13. Available from https://www.jstor.org/stable/45291750?read-now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents [accessed 18 July 2025]