George MacDonald: My Little King, Part 3, “My Uncle Peter”

This is the third and final post of George MacDonald’s collection of Christmas poems and short stories under the book title, My Little King.

You can read Post #1, on the poem, “A Christmas Carol,” here.  

You can read Post #2 on the short story, “The Gifts of the Child Christ,”  here.

 

This post will focus on the short story, “My Uncle Peter.”  You can read the story online at The Literature Network, here.  It is part of a volume of MacDonald’s stories interweaved in a frame story called Adela Cathcart.  “My Uncle Peter” is in chapters 14 and 15.  You can skip the frame narrative.  The story in my My Little King collection does not include it.

Summary

A story told from the first person of Charlie about his Uncle Peter, a man born on Christmas Day and whose wish is that he die on Christmas Day.  Peter is a good hearted person, a lifelong bachelor, who does surprising acts of charity for his family and anyone who he comes across that needs it.  He takes great joy in these acts.  There are two inflection points in Uncle Peter’s life.  The first is when he inherits a large sum of money, and then the acts of charity go up exponentially.  The second is when he comes across a little beggar girl, perhaps a gypsy, who is without parents but lives with an abusive aunt.  Uncle Peter takes in the girl as an adopted child and raises her to be a noble woman. 

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So what’s unique about “My Uncle Peter?”  Is a story about a totally good man interesting?  For the most part I enjoyed it, though I do have one little criticism, and I’m not sure if it’s a valid criticism.  I’ll get to later.  First let’s try to pick out the highlights and ask some questions.

What do we know about Peter Belper?  We do catch his last name at one point, but it doesn’t seem to have any significance.  The most significant feature about Peter—according to him, I think—is that he was born on Christmas Day, and he wishes to die on Christmas Day.  We know, alas, that from an offhand remark by Charlie, who is telling the story in retrospect, that he does not die on Christmas Day.  In a way, this seems odd since so many other events take place on Christmas Day, that a reader might think there is some significance to not dying on that day on the calendar.  We know that Peter is a life-long bachelor, though there was a hint of a previous love that has saddened his life.  We know Peter is a religious man, going to church regularly and has definite opinions on theology.  We know he has no attachment to money, giving it away in what I would call radical charity.  I think the oddest characteristic of Peter is his exuberant boyishness, almost as if he never grew up, but he has and he does live the life of an adult.  It’s his joy that gets expressed as boyishness.  Here’s when he takes Charlie for the first time to a toy store to choose his Christmas present.

I wandered about, staring like a distracted ghost at the 'wealth of Ormus and of Ind,' displayed about me. Uncle Peter followed me with perfect patience; nay, I believe, with a delight that equalled my perplexity, for, every now and then when I looked round to him with a silent appeal for sympathy in the distressing dilemma into which he had thrown me, I found him rubbing his hands and spiritually chuckling over his victim. Nor would he volunteer the least assistance to save me from the dire consequences of too much liberty. … As soon as, in despair of choosing well, I had made a desperate plunge at decision, my Uncle Peter, as if to forestall any supervention of repentance, began buying like a maniac, giving me everything that took his fancy or mine, till we and our toys nearly filled the cab which he called to take us home.

Peter gets a sort of thrill in watching Charlie caught in indecision, and then buys “like a maniac” anyway, even after he picked one.  When Peter receives the letter with his inheritance, he jumps on the table to dance, and when the table collapses he continues dancing “amidst its ruins like Nero in blazing Rome.”  With his wealth he went around the neighborhood giving out presents, presents of money hidden in rather mundane objects, rubbing his hands in glee as he dropped them off.  When one woman catches him and questions him, and he responds naively and she accepts it, Peter again does a strange dance.

 

She kept the parcel and shut the door. When I looked round I saw my uncle going through a regular series of convolutions, corresponding exactly to the bodily contortions he must have executed at school every time he received a course of what they call _palmies_ in Scotland; if, indeed, Uncle Peter was ever even suspected of improper behaviour at school. It consisted first of a dance, then a double-up; then another dance, then another double-up, and so on.

Again he goes into a weird gyration.  The radical charity is strange enough, but these boyish body movements seem rather perverse.  But there is no harm or evil or baseness to his perversion.  It’s as if it’s a perversion of goodness.  If this had been a modernist story by a “sophisticated” writer, there is a very good chance that the “strangeness” of the central character would have been toward some baseness.  But not in this story.

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Madeline Commented:

I wonder how many of us have a bachelor uncle like Peter. He is a paradigm of a blessed vocation to the single life.

My Reply:

I have a bachelor uncle who eventually got married in his fifties. I wouldn't say he was a saint, but he was (and still is) incredibly handy at fixing anything. If you had, and still today, a repair problem all you had to do is call. Come to think of it, he was the one who taught me how to drive. 

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So what is the significance of so many events in the story occurring on Christmas Day?  Is it just a way for MacDonald to make the story a Christmas story?  Could he have written almost the same story without the events occurring on Christmas Day?  

First let’s list the Christmas occurrences.  Peter is born on Christmas Day.  He wants to die on Christmas Day.  He takes Charlie Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve.  He finds out he has inherited a fortune on Christmas Eve.  He goes out and gives presents on Christmas Day.  He dresses up and plays with his nephew and nieces on Christmas.  He finds the little girl who he will adopt on Christmas Day, The little girl’s name is “Little Christmas,” and she too was born on Christmas Day.  When Chrissy was thirteen and got abducted a month before Christmas, she found her way back to Peter on Christmas Day.  Perhaps there are more Christmas instances, but that is quite enough.  It makes the point. 

Are these just forced Christmas occurrences?  Perhaps some but I think it emphasizes the magic around Uncle Peter’s giving spirit.   But it does even more than that.  Christmas is linked narratively to Peter.  This is how he explains his radical generosity.

And to hear him defend any of his extravagancies, it would appear that he considered himself especially privileged in that respect. 'Ah, my dear,' he would say to my mother when she expostulated with him on making some present far beyond the small means he at that time possessed, 'ah, my dear, you see I was born on Christmas-day.'

His birth connection to Christmas is so often repeated that it becomes a leitmotif: 'for wasn't I born on Christmas-day?' concluded Uncle Peter for the twentieth time that forenoon.”  And Charlie pays him a high compliment to his generosity.

 

"One Christmas-eve we had been occupied, as usual, with the presents of the following Christmas-day, and--will you believe it?--in the same lodgings, too, for my uncle was a thorough Tory in his hatred of change. Indeed, although two years had passed, and he had had the whole of his property at his disposal since the legal term of one year, he still continued to draw his salary of L100 of Messrs. Buff and Codgers. One Christmas-eve, I say, I was helping him to make up parcels, when, from a sudden impulse, I said to him-- 

 

"'How good you are, uncle!' 

 

"'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed he; 'that's the best joke of all. Good, my boy! Ha! ha! ha! Why, Charlie, you don't fancy I care one atom for all these people, do you? I do it all to please myself. Ha! ha! ha! It's the cheapest pleasure at the money, considering the quality, that I know. That _is_ a joke. Good, indeed! Ha! ha! ha!'

But we know that he does care about these people.  It’s a façade.  “How good you are, uncle!”  Uncle Peter is fundamentally a good man, and his goodness is linked to Christmas in name and birth, but ultimately it’s linked to Christ who was born on Christmas Day.

And so I think we can surmise why Uncle Peter does not die on Christmas Day.  The clue is in the last sentence of the story.

 

From that time till now that she is my wife, Chrissy has had no more such adventures; and if Uncle Peter did not die on Christmas-day, it did not matter much, for Christmas-day makes all the days of the year as sacred as itself."

While yes Charlie says that all the days of the year are sacred because of Christmas, it is Christmas Day that provides the light of Christ’s love, a love that shines in Peter.  Peter cannot on die on Christmas because goodness stems from it.

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To wrap this up, I think we need to look at the character of Chrissy and the conclusion of the story.  My summary above I think was a little lacking on the conclusion of the story.  The story doesn’t end with Uncle Peter adopting the little street urchin.  She is transformed in time with love, faith, and decent living.  But then an incident happens when she is thirteen where she is kidnapped and dragged into her old life.  A month later she makes her way back home, returning on Christmas Day, in similar ragged and dirty clothes she was first found on the street.  After bathing and returning to her clean clothes, she narrates the entire month long ordeal.

She tells how she was abducted in the street by what might have been her reprobate aunt and her spouse, how she was stripped of her clothing and given rags, locked in a room until they came back intoxicated and incapacitated.  She was given very little food and when the adults no longer had use for her, brought her to the country home of a Mrs. Sprinx where she was indentured into servitude.  While there she made friends with a little boy named Eddie who eventually gives her a key to escape.  Even after Chrissy finishes this narrative, she convinces Charlie to take a ride out to Mrs. Sprinx to visit Eddie.

That’s a rather strange ending.  What started as a story about a whimsical and loving Uncle Peter morphed into a story about the adventures of his adopted daughter.  The concluding adventures of Chrissy take up a third or more of the story.  What does it have to do with Uncle Peter?  He pretty much disappears from the story.  Now I’m not opposed to stories that evolve from their initial situation, but the evolved story needs I think two elements for it to work.  (1) The parts of the stories need to be linked structurally and thematically. (2) The concluding narrative should be more interesting than the initial, or it will come across as flat. 

So what’s the thematic link?  Chrissy is not as idiosyncratic a character as Uncle Peter, but she is as devout as Peter.  Peter’s goodness has instilled goodness into Chrissy.  Notice Chrissy’s faith when Charlie asks what she did when locked in the aunt’s room.

 

"'There was only one thing to be done, Charlie. I think that is a foolish question to ask.' 

 

"'Well, what _did_ you do, Chrissy?' 

 

"'Said my prayers, Charlie.' 

 

"'And then?' 

 

"'Said them again.' 

 

"'And nothing else?' 

 

"'Yes; I tried to get out of the window, but that was of no use; for I could not open it. And it was one story high at least.' 

 

"'And what did you do next?' 

 

"'Said over all my hymns.' 

 

"'And then--what _did_ you do next?' 

 

"'Why do you ask me so many times?' 

 

"'Because I want to know.' 

 

"'Well, I will tell you.--I left my prayers alone; and I began at the beginning, and I told God the whole story, as if He had known nothing about it, from the very beginning when Uncle Peter found me on the crossing, down to the minute when I was talking there to Him in the dark.'

Prayers, hymns, conversing with God, she has put her trust in God.  Isn’t that what is at the heart of Uncle Peter’s radical charity, a relying on God to have enough so that one can share with others?  When she could not escape and gives into to tears, she comes to another insight into Providence.

 

I was nearly frozen to death, and there was all the long night to bear yet. How I got through it, I cannot tell. It did go away. Perhaps God destroyed some of it for me. But when the light began to come through the window, and show me all the filth of the place, the man and the woman lying on the floor, the woman with her head cut and covered with blood, I began to feel that the darkness had been my friend. I felt this yet more when I saw the state of my own dress, which I had forgotten in the dark. I felt as if I had done some shameful thing, and wanted to follow the darkness, and hide in the skirts of it. It was an old gown of some woollen stuff, but it was impossible to tell what, it was so dirty and worn. I was ashamed that even those drunken creatures should wake and see me in it. But the light would come, and it came and came, until at last it waked them up, and the first words were so dreadful! They quarrelled and swore at each other and at me, until I almost thought there couldn't be a God who would let that go on so, and never stop it. But I suppose He wants them to stop, and doesn't care to stop it Himself, for He could easily do that of course, if He liked.'

So thematically Chrissy’s abduction is a return to the abyss from which she started but now she has her faith to guide her.  She sees God’s hand at work.  The fighting couple will stop when God wants them to stop.  Things will work out for her.  Later, a human connection is made with Eddie and that leads to her freedom.

Chrissy’s adventure is her second struggle through hell, but now she has been graced with love and faith through Uncle Peter’s nurturing.  She’s a complete human being, possessed of faith and reason.  The second narrative is linked to the first both structurally, by motif—it happens near and on Christmas Day—and thematically.

But is the second narrative more interesting than the first?  That perhaps is a personal opinion.  For me, I would say no.  Though Chrissy is a lovely child, and we wonder how she will escape, she is not as interesting as Uncle Peter, who is a marvelous creation.  The suspense is even dissipated since we know she returns to narrate the events.  I loved this story, but I think the ending could have been better thought out.  What did you think?

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Madeline Commented:

Maybe more detail could have been given about how Chrissy and the narrator ended up husband and wife. Was Uncle Peter a matchmaker too?

My Reply:

LoL, that didn’t bother me. They were about the same age and in frequent close contact. Seemed a natural.

 

Did you like the story?

Madeline’s Reply:

Yes, I did like it. It reminded me of Dickens, and his little innocent urchins and obnoxiously sanguine characters. Even the kidnappers could have come out of Dickens. I liked best Chrissy's telling of how she endured and escaped by praying through it. Dickens wouldn't have written that. The characters, except the kidnappers, of course, were sympathetic and consistently likeable. And I liked the emphasis on two characters born on Christmas, and how that led to Uncle Peter adopting her. I agree with you about the ending. Maybe he had a deadline and rushed to finish it?

My Reply:

Oh, you are so right. This owes a bit to Dickens, though I think the prose style is somewhat different.

Kerstin Commented:

The ending was a little abrupt. With Christmas stories the ending has to convey the Christian Hope we mark at this time of year, otherwise they fall flat.