Eric Foxley's Victorian Magic Lantern

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Gabriel Grub
or
The story of the goblins who stole a sexton

This is a moralistic story by Dickens, appearing in Pickwick Papers.

We are missing the first two slides, but have

The complete booklet of the script
"Preliminary hints to amateur lecturers" (lanterneers)
The story with slides interspersed.
A thumbnail page of all the slides.

There is a theory that both Scrooge and Gabriel Grub relate to a Dutch folk tale, see an article in the Daily Telegraph. This theory is propounded by Sjef de Jong, the director of the Dutch Dickens Museum (Members of the Pickwickclub Holland, Bronkhorst, Holland, with 176 inhabitants, the smallest town with town rights in Europe).

Sjef de Jong writes:

It is generally accepted that there is a relation between Gabriel Grub of the “Pickwickclub” chapter 29 and Scrooge of the Christmas carol of the great author Charles Dickens. This was confirmed by a literature search I made in 1993. In a copy of the manuscript Monica Dickens suggested this already in the sixties but I was the first who proved it scientifically with facts in my study.

This Gabriel Grub always had the attention of the Dutch Dickens Fellowship (read the speech of Godfried Bomans in the English meeting of the International Dickens Fellowship. In 1847 Hans Christian Anderson was here in Bronkhorst and the town Deventer (Dickens town of Holland) and we have copies of his correspondence with Charles dickens here from the royal family in Denmark. In Bronkhorst there lived a sexton Gabriel de Graaf (Grub) in those times whose story mirrors that of Gabriel Grub. The “Historisch Nieuwsblad” opened in 1991 with the story of Gabriel Grub after a research with a successor of Gabriel Sexton Lendering, who knew this Gabriel in 1905. There is a video of this interview. Sexton Lendering died 6 yaears ago at the age of 95 years.

Never the less it is still in study but has the form in Holland of a myth. Another great question is: Did Hans Christian Anderson contact with letters before 1947. We suppose yes because Dickens likes his fairy tales already in the beginning of his marriage. Anderson was 10 years alder than Dickens.

We have slides of the Christmas Carol for a magic lantern from 1856 here. There is also a high correlation between your slides of Gabriel Grub and our slides of SCROOGE in the Christmas Carol. It indeed is fascinating!

Eric runs the Dunkirk Arts Centre and manages web sites for Chaturangan, Foresters, Greenwood, Grant Publisher and Freds Folks.