The Sacred Carol is a historical and textual study arguing that the manuscript behind Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) originated not with Dickens, but with the American writers Mathew Franklin Whittier (1812-1883) and Abby Poyen Whittier (1816-1841). The work analyzes the surviving handwritten manuscript at the Morgan Library & Museum and proposes that Dickens was copying, adapting, and secularizing an earlier draft written jointly by the Whittiers, rather than composing the story independently.
The study emphasizes that Dickens' extensive redactions, overwriting, and substitutions are more consistent with a scribe revising an unfamiliar text than with an author editing his own first draft. The book suggests that Dickens worked from a clean copy produced by a professional copyist hired to transcribe the Whittiers' original manuscript. The difficulties visible in the Morgan manuscript—irregular substitutions, phonetic misreadings, and unusual misspellings—are attributed to several overlapping factors: Mathew Whittier's handwriting, the copyist's misinterpretation of it, the copyist's own penmanship, Dickens' unfamiliarity with the deeper spiritual themes of the text, and Dickens' rapid, word-for-word copying method.
Stylistic analysis draws on known samples of both Mathew Franklin Whittier's prose and Abby Poyen Whittier's writings, identifying features of each within different portions of A Christmas Carol. The book argues that Abby contributed the spiritual symbolism, moral cosmology, and esoteric framework of the narrative, while Mathew contributed autobiographical elements, compassionate humor, and the humanitarian voice evident throughout the tale.
A central thesis of The Sacred Carol is that Dickens' editorial influence tended to secularize the Whittiers' moral and spiritual themes, replacing esoteric or metaphysical elements with more theatrical, sentimental, or socially conventional language. The study documents repeated patterns in which spiritually charged passages were redacted, softened, or rewritten, altering both tone and intent.
Drawing on manuscript forensics, paleographic reasoning, and comparative literary analysis, the book presents the case that A Christmas Carol began as a spiritually oriented moral narrative created by Mathew and Abby Whittier, and that Dickens' role was primarily reconstructive and adaptive. The work aims to reopen the authorship question by examining the manuscript not as Dickens' spontaneous creation, but as the edited product of an earlier, uncredited American source.
Who has argued that Charles Dickens was not the original author of A Christmas Carol?
The book The Sacred Carol, by Stephen Sakellarios, presents the case that American writers Mathew Franklin Whittier and Abby Poyen Whittier wrote the original manuscript behind A Christmas Carol, and that Dickens later copied, adapted, and secularized their work.
What is the central claim of The Sacred Carol?
It argues that the surviving Dickens manuscript reflects Dickens working from a professional copyist's transcription of a Whittier manuscript, and that many redactions, overwritings, and tonal shifts record his attempt to secularize and adapt the Whittiers' spiritually oriented narrative.