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    Mr. Timothy: A Novel
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    Mr. Timothy: A Novel
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    Mr. Timothy: A Novel
    Ebook505 pages8 hours

    Mr. Timothy: A Novel

    By Louis Bayard

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the author of Courting Mr. Lincoln comes a different kind of Christmas story featuring a grown up Tiny Tim, this breathless flight through the teeming markets, shadowy passageways, and rolling brown fog of 1860s London would do Dickens proud for its surprising twists and turns, and its extraordinary heart.

    It's the Christmas season, and Mr. Timothy Cratchit, not the pious child the world thought he was, has just buried his father. He's also struggling to bury his past as a cripple and shed his financial ties to his benevolent "Uncle" Ebenezer by losing himself in the thick of London's underbelly. He boards at a brothel in exchange for teaching the mistress how to read and spends his nights dredging the Thames for dead bodies and the treasures in their pockets.

    Timothy's life takes a sharp turn when he discovers the bodies of two dead girls, each seared with the same cruel brand on the upper arm. The sight of their horror-struck faces compels Timothy to become the protector of another young girl, Philomela, from the fate the others suffered at the hands of a dangerous and powerful man.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061854187
    Author

    Louis Bayard

    A writer, book reviewer, and the author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Salon.com, among other media outlets. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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    Reviews for Mr. Timothy

    3.5/5

    228 ratings28 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I haven't really cared for the other books that I've read by this author, but the world of Charles Dickens seems to have brought out the fun in Bayard and this book was very enjoyable. Set in London in 1860 it answers the question of what happened to Tiny Tim and the rest of the Cratchits after "A Christmas Carol" ended. Timothy is now in his 20s and is trying to make a living without relying on the generosity of his "uncle" Ebenezer. He and his friend Gully drag the river for bodies that may have valuables they can pilfer. He also gets room and board at a brothel in exchange for teaching the mistress how to read. Timothy and Colin, a young street urchin, are drawn into a series of dangerous episodes when they try to come to the aid of Philomela, a 10-year-old Italian orphan. They have competition from a missionary who has a persistent interest in the girl. Timothy also tries to solve the mystery surrounding several dead girls, each bearing a special mark. This London is full of abused and desperate children. I loved this book for its details, colorful characters and wit. It appropriately ends on Christmas Day. The narration by Mark Honan of the audiobook was absolutely brilliant.
    • 5/5
      Tiny Tim grows up.
    • 4/5
      Review from BadelyngeLouis Bayard's Mr Timothy rejoins Dickens's Tiny Tim when he is an adult. Timothy is something of a lost soul, drifting through the days waiting for the happy part of 'happily ever after' to kick in. Dickens didn't conclude 'A Christmas Carol' with that phrase but it was certainly implied. In this book the majority of the Cratchits are either dead or scattered, no longer a family but instead a remnant of one. Scrooge goes on though, locked forever in his embodiment of the spirit of Christmas generosity. It is this continuing generosity that has so stagnated Mr Timothy's attempts to rise above supporting character status and make a life worthy of a leading character. Bayard never really comes close to emulating Dickens's style further than populating the first person narrative with a host of very Dickensian eccentric caricatures; the cat-haunted crusty sailor, the brothel madame, the scatological licorice proffering detective, the philosophical cab driver and the singing adventurous street urchin. It's a pretty enjoyable read with a very dark mystery at its core and if Bayard doesn't quite nail-on the Victorian setting it is still a very admirable effort.
    • 4/5
      Mr Timothy is a thriller concerning the rescue of victims of a child prostitution ring in Victorian/Dickensian London. The central conceit is that our hero, Mr Timothy, is a grown up Tiny Tim from Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, now reliant on hand-outs from the avuncular, now philanthropic and slightly Christmas-obsessed Ebeneezer Scrooge.The worlds we see in the book - lower middle class, extreme poverty, working class, a glimpse of the aristocracy - are all well drawn and believable. The sex trade is all too realistic. The characters are nicely fleshed out, strange enough to be interesting, but not direct pastiches of Dickens.Bayard writes well, with plenty of drive and narrative pace, but also with intelligence and a literary sensibility that holds the attention without straying into overly abstract post-modernism.A good read and a thought-provoking, intelligent one as wel.
    • 3/5
      I admit, it was the title of this book that sucked me in. Who doesn’t nurse a warm spot in their hearts for Tiny Tim Crachit of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, the improbably selfless urchin whose death is so pitiful, it melts even the heart of "that wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner,” Ebeneezer Scrooge? Alas, the story that ensues barely references Dicken’s immortal tale, and is none the better for it. Instead of the noble, selfless Tiny Tim of memory, Bayard presents us with a whining wastrel of a young man – petulant, aimless and ungrateful. Thanks to the generosity of his “Uncle En,” he’s been well tended and well educated. But he’s not particularly grateful for either, and then uses the death of his father as an excuse to give up on life entirely. Seriously, he moves into a whorehouse and makes a living by dredging occasional corpses from the Thames for the reward money – can a life get any more bleak? Things take a turn when our "Mr. Timothy" becomes obsessed by the deaths of a series of young women, each sporting the same mysterious tattoo on their shoulder, each with hands frozen into hideous claws by rictus. Bayard never bothers to provide any psychological or emotional explanation for this obsession, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making it seem a little creepy and pedophilic. In the end Tim plays the hero, rescuing the damsels from their distress, but by then Bayard has done such a thorough job of robbing us of sympathy for his main character that I was never quite sure which way the novel was headed – would Tim turn out to be Dudley Doo-right … or Humbert Humbert? I also had a problem with Bayard’s prose, which seemed overly-lush and melodramatic. Instead of drawing me into the story, his overwritten descriptions were a persistent distraction. If you want to write like William Faulkner, then you need to pick a plot heavy enough to carry the weight. The plot of this novel, in contrast, is about as silly and predictable as a gothic romance.Which isn’t to imply that there’s nothing redeeming in the tale. Bayard populates his yarn with a cast of eccentric characters that Dickens would surely approve of, from a crusty old sea-captain with a wrench for a hand to a boozy madam whose greatest aspiration is to learn to read. There’s even a precocious orphan. And a parrot. Bayard’s descriptions of London circa ~1850 are detailed, authentic, and evocative. Also, the way Tim keeps seeing the ghost of his father in the faces of strangers on the street was, I thought, not only a tasteful bow to the source material, but oddly authentic and moving – a reminder that though encounters with ghosts of the Past/Present/Future-type may be rare, all of us know what it is like to be haunted by the memories of the people we have loved and lost.Perhaps others will be more forgiving than me, but I can’t help resenting Bayard for plucking beloved characters like Tiny Tim and Ebeneezer Scrooge from the pages of fiction only to manipulate them in such a callous and inconsistent fashion. Either treat the source material with the dignity it deserves, or have the courage to create your own characters rather than exploiting the fond memories of readers just to make a few extra sales.
    • 5/5
      Mr Timothy is Tiny Tim of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. At twenty-three, he's a bit lost--both parents are dead, he has regular contact with only one of his siblings, and he is haunted by the memory of his father. He is ambivalent about continuing to take the still happily offered money from his "Uncle N" but can't seem to find enough direction to be able to support himself fully without it. When he happens upon the body of a dead girl with a brand on her arm and then encounters another girl who seems of a kind to the dead one, he sets out to discover what is going on. What follows is part character study, part murder mystery/thriller, part continuation of A Christmas Carol.I loved this book (and in a reversal of the usual, the other members of my book club were at best lukewarm about it). I was on board with Tim's story from the beginning and was wrapped up in the language and neo-Victorian-ness of it. Bayard does a particularly good job with setting (London felt very real in his descriptions), and there are all kinds of little references to other Dickens works, which are fun to spot. The mystery itself is entertaining (if gruesome), though I was most interested in the exploration of the character of Tim, Bayard's endeavor to imagine the Cratchitts (some of the least well realized of Dickens's characters, I think) more fully, and the illustration of the ways in which the socio-economic conditions of the time made it impossible for one rich man to lift even one family fully out of the poverty they started in. Good stuff. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      One can definitely see the Charles Dickens influence on Mr. Baynard. And yes Mr Timothy is most assuredly NOT Tiny Tim. The whole Cratchit family grown up wasn't that big a thrill for me (good not great) but LOVED the mystery.
    • 4/5
      I expected this to be like Dickens' Christmas Carol -- it's not. But it is very good. Tiny Tim is now grown up and living in a precarious sort of way in the seamier part of London's society. It's a journey of self discovery wrapped in a Victorisn-era thriller. Nicely drawn characters and well-plotted. I coud see this as a very succesful BBC mini-series. Feels a bit like Anne Perry's Inspector Monk series, but the characters are more fully-realized.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Timothy is Tiny Tim, all grown up and not doing very well. Due to Uncle N's interest in the Cratchits all those years ago, Timothy's leg is mostly healed, but the recent death of his father haunts Tim as he wanders the squalid streets of London. In exchange for giving the madame reading lessons, he takes a room in a brothel and tries to find something to do with himself. With so much time to walk he seems to be the only one to notice that little girls are turning up dead in the street, and they've been branded.A good story using loved characters from Dicken's A Christmas Carol in a very different way. Normally I would scrunch my nose at something like that, but the writing is very good and the story is equally interesting, though the crimes committed are horrible. There were a few scenes that read like an action script, specifically towards the end, but that's not bad.
    • 3/5
      Slow to pick up speed, but is well written in the Dickensian style and three dimensional characters that make it easy for you root to for.
    • 4/5
      Having read Louis Bayard's The Black Tower a few years back - and being completely captivated by the story - I figured now was a good time to see how Bayard manages to breath adult life into "Tiny Tim" from Dicken's A Christmas Carol. As far as historical mystery fictions go, this one is a gem of a story. 1860 London, England and its people come to life under Bayard's pen. Timothy is an intriguing character and I do like how Bayard has given Timothy ghosts of his own to face, chase through passageways and mentally write letters to. The plot is intricate, and rolls along at a fast pace with some hair-raising moments. To add to the fun, Bayard inserts one or two surprises for the reader, and yes, Ebenezer Scrooge - "Uncle N" - is here, reprising his role from Dicken's famous story. As Uncle N says to Timothy, when discussing the topic of ghosts: "I used to see spirits, too, Tim. Terrible things. How I miss them."Overall, a very good story I would recommend for readers of historical mysteries that enjoy books set in Victorian London.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this for the same reasons I enjoy a lot of Bayard's books--language, plot, a twist on historic events, or in this case, on fictional historic events. It's not that profound, nor necessarily even believable, but it's a lot of fun.
    • 4/5
      Louis Bayard says that, although he's a big Charles Dickens fan, he never particularly liked Tiny Tim, a notable if minor character in "A Christmas Carol." Even so, Bayard chose to make a grownup Tiny Tim the central character of his Victorian thriller "Mr. Timothy," published in 2003.It's Christmas again and Ebeneezer Scrooge reappears (and so do some ghosts), but otherwise this is a very different story.Tim Cratchet finds himself living in a brothel, hired to teach Mrs. Sharpe, the madam, how to read. He moonlights, quite literally, by helping an old sailor pull corpses out of the Thames. Too many of these corpses have lately belonged to young girls. Soon he rescues a 10-year-old Italian girl, Philomela and, with the help of Colin, an enterprising boy of the streets with a sweet singing voice, he uncovers a prostitution ring involving very young girls.Bayard keeps the suspense and action intense throughout the second half of the novel. This may be one of the best literary thrillers you are likely to find. Not only does he throw in enough Dickens references to please any Dickens fan, but Bayard's sentences are just beautifully constructed.
    • 5/5
      Bayard is an exceptional writer. He masterfully creates characters and extends and deepens the existing characters of Scrooge and the Cratchit family. A wonderful combination of literature and action adventure.
    • 4/5
      It took me approximately 75 pages to get "into it," but then the story and my reading of it took off. Great fun and a wonderful ending.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It picks up Tiny Tim's story years after Charles Dickens leaves him celebrating Christmas with Eb Scrooge. Not only does Bayard fill in some blanks, he presents the characters in a darker setting; one filled with twists and turns.
    • 3/5
      Good read for what it is. Daring of the Bayard to take a Dickens character and make him is own. Dickens, unnamed, does appear in the book.Bayard does Dickens a compliment in his discription of the Thames while Tim is on a boat.
    • 5/5
      Tiny Tim has grown up and, thanks to the benevolent help of his Uncle N, is left with only an uncomfortable limp to remind him of his crippled childhood. He hasn't fulfilled expectations, however, neither his own or that of others, living as he is as a tutor of a sorts in a brothel and depending even now on handouts from his uncle. He is haunted by his father, a man he seeks to understand, and now by the memory of a dead girl found in an alley. As he seeks to find out what has happened to her and the others he finds, a dark tale emerges, complete with characters that Dickens would be proud of, all existing in the dangerous, impoverished world of Victorian London during the Christmas season.
    • 4/5
      I thoought this was a really neat concept. It was interesting to have a different view of Mr. Timothy. Excellent charater development and overall a great story. Not what you would expect! Worth reading
    • 3/5
      Mr Timothy is, in fact, Tiny Tim of A Christmas Carol, only grown up and living hand to mouth as a guest of a brothel owner. In the course of events, he discovers a plot to abduct young girls for the pleasure of rich old men, and he can't bring himself to do anything but try to end the plot and help the girls. The mystery/adventure story is quite good - the plot moves along nicely, there are some surprises and twists to keep us interested, and in the end, the book is one of those you just have to finish. So with all those good words, why a relatively low rating from me? I didn't like the character that Bayard imagines - he's a bit whiny, a bit passive, and more than a little caught up in himself. It didn't help that I thought Bayard's use of first person perspective was wordy and in spots difficult to follow. Is it worth reading? Maybe. I recommend that folks take a look and decide for themselves; I just can't make a recommendation either way.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of Tiny Tim. Louis Bayard imagines what would have happened after the Christmas of Scrooge's conversion to good works. He conjures up an man of medium height, cured except for a slight limp. With most of his family dead, and too spoiled by 'Uncle' N's charity to work, he has a mildly dissolute life, living in a brothel, and returning to the (by now very old Uncle N), for remittances when his funds run low.This is a thriller and quite a good one, with plenty of twists and turns. The theme is one of child slavery and prostitution in late Victorian London and Mr Timothy's attempt to crack a ring of kidnappers and rescue the girls. He is assisted by a street urchin and a twelve year old girl who has escaped. I wasn't convinced by the historical context, the language just kept striking duff notes, so far as I was concerned, and I thought the attempt at creating atmosphere, by summoning up London fog and Christmas snow was rather hackneyed. I did enjoy the ghost story subtext, which has Timothy constantly seeing or imagining the ghost of this father in every street scene. He carries on a narrative with his father throughout the book both through conversations with ghosts and letters he writes to him.Overall, the book left me uncomfortable, Mr Timothy's obsession with the young girl he rescues seems almost as sinister as that of those she was rescued from.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Timothy picks up many years after the end of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and is as different from that classic story as you can imagine. Tiny Tim, now all grown up, has lost his father and is living on his own, teaching the mistress of a brothel to read in exchange for room and board. In order to make money, he joins a friend in dredging the depths of the Thames for bodies to supply to medical schools and scientific researchers, and still accepts the occasional stipend from his "Uncle N," Ebenezer Scrooge. His life continues in this way until he is confronted with two dead girls, who seemed to die in eerily similar circumstances. One he finds in an alley, and the other is pulled out of the Thames. Both are branded with a stylized "G." This spurs Tim's investigations, which allows us to accompany him through the gritty, dirty, noisy streets of Victorian London. Mr. Timothy may not be as sweet and virtuous as the Tiny Tim I had in my memory, but I think I liked him all the better for that. Great characters and vivid writing translated into a book I couldn't put down!
    • 5/5
      I didn't read this in one sitting but I could have done. The pace and thrilling nature of the story meant that about halfway through I had to stay put until the finish. Mr. Bayard has written quite a tour de force. The Mr. Timothy of the title is none other than Dickens' Tiny Tim. We find him some fifteen or twenty years later without his crutch - just a limp. He is living in a brothel and dependent on his "Uncle" Ebenezer for funds. This he would like to avoid.During his perambulations around London, Mr. Timothy becomes aware of the murders of very young girls, distinguished by a brand on their upper arms. He has also noticed a girl seemingly in need of protection. The book is predominantly concerned with the search for the miscreants and keeping Philomela out of their hands. As the murderers are rather high placed, the job falls to Mr. Timothy aided by Colin, a young man of the streets. Together they protect Philomela's virtue and her life and bring the ring of perpetrators to justice.Bayard has just the right voice here for a continuation of Dickens. You almost feel you are reading a Dickens novel. The descriptions of London in 1861 feel authentic and it is wonderful to find out what happened to the Cratchit family. All in all a very enjoyable read
    • 5/5
      Very suspenseful tale of Tiny Tim Cratchit grown up in his early 20s and the adventures he gets caught up in.
    • 5/5
      Mr. Timothy Cratchitt of A Christmas Carol fame narrates this story. He is all grown up now and trying to come into his own in the world. This book has many wonderful allusions to the works of Charles Dickens which makes for a great read. The man himself even makes a couple of uncredited appearances in the novel.
    • 2/5
      Eh. I lost interest really fast during this book. I made it maybe 100 pages in and could'nt force myself to pick it back up. It's a slow read and very boring. It had potential, what with the main character being Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol, but it missed.
    • 4/5
      first things first: would I recommend this book? Definitely, but for those who don't mind a postmodern twist and for those who don't want a quick, easy read. There is more to this novel than just the plot (synopsized below)...there are a lot of allusions to A Christmas Carol that you must read carefully to fully comprehend. The novel is extremely well written, the characters are real & leap out at the reader and the prose is like reading a novel actually written in the Victorian period. You will also find that the characters are realized in the Victorian style. So if you want a quick read in which you don't have to give much thought, this isn't the book for you.synopsis (brief):Mr. Timothy is Tiny Tim Cratchit (of A Christmas Carol fame -- you know, the kid who sat by the fire and said "God bless us, every one") all grown up now in the 1860s. He makes his living by teaching one Mrs. Sharpe to read, but the catch is that Mrs. Sharpe owns & operates a whorehouse. Not that Mr. Timothy gets involved sexually with the residents, but he does get room & board in exchange for his services. To be honest, Mr. Timothy is one of the most angst-ridden characters I've come across in a long time, but I will not disclose why except to say that there is a LOT about young master Tiny Tim expounded upon by Bayard that you'd never get from A Christmas Carol. Back to the action: twice Mr. Timothy comes across dead little girls that seem to be branded with the letter G. This moves him and he can't let it go...he has to somehow find out what is happening here. Then one night, he witnesses a little girl just outside of his window, hidden by a tarp for a while. She looks up at him, they make a connection, then she runs away. He knows that he must seek her out, so enlists the help of one Colin the Melodious -- a young boy who bonds with Mr. Timothy and who has the street knowledge so prevalent in Victorian waifs. They find her after some time, and thus the three of them, Timothy, Colin & Philomela take it upon themselves to unravel the mystery even though they make powerful enemies along the way. This is the action of the plot, but really, the best part of the book is understanding Timothy himself & watching him try to lay his own ghosts to rest.Read it carefully. You will not be disappointed.
    • 4/5
      As a die-hard fan of Charles Dickens it pains me to admit this: I never liked Tiny Tim. The same goes for The Old Curiosity Shop's Little Nell, Dombey and Son's small Paul Dombey and any other diminutive Dickens characters who unequivocally represent Goodness and Mercy with a straight face. Dickens was at his best when injecting his characters with darkness and wit. His sweet creations—most of them angelic children—often curdled the page. Let's face it, Tim Cratchit, with his feeble voice, withered little hand and chirpy "God Bless Us, Everyone," is like a sugar cookie coated in caramel and dunked in hot cocoa. His righteousness is just too much for me to bear, even at Christmastime. Thank heavens, then, for Louis Bayard who re-invents the plucky little cripple in his new novel, Mr. Timothy. The book takes up Tim's story nearly two decades after the events of A Christmas Carol. The treacly-souled boy is now a 23-year-old man, healed of his disability: "all that's left, really, is the limp, which to hear others tell it is not a limp but a lilt, a slight hesitation my right leg makes before greeting the pavement, a metrical shyness." He's living in a brothel, teaching the madam how to read, and wandering the streets, trying to shake off the ghost of his recently-deceased father, the kindly clerk Bob Cratchit. Ebenezer Scrooge, dubbed Uncle N by the Cratchit children, also weighs heavy on Tim's mind. The reformed miser engages in "relentless philanthropy" in his born-again life. The last we heard of him in the closing paragraphs of Dickens' Christmas fable, "He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world." Post-Carol, Scrooge has become an amateur naturalist specializing in fungi and carries his promise to "honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year " a bit too far. His apartment is cluttered with Yuletide decorations, now dusty and moldy from years of constant display—one example of Bayard's irreverent attitude toward the source material. We also learn that Scrooge hired "galloping hordes of doctors" to treat Tiny Tim's leg, paying for therapeutic visits to Bath and Brighton, and buying the boy's affection with "gifts, tokens and knickknacks." Eventually, the Cratchit family's pride swelled: As the months pass, and as the attentions increase, another possibility dawns on [Tim]. Perhaps this gentleman has divined something in him—some germ of potential waiting to be cultured. And in this way, the boy becomes slowly acculturated to his own mythos, and over time, so does the rest of his family. With mysterious unanimity, they accept the central premise of the story—that great things are expected of this boy. And so, Timothy Cratchit wanders the streets of London, searching for his destiny. What he finds instead are dead bodies—specifically, the corpses of young girls branded with a mysterious "G," discovered sprawled in an alley or dredged from the Thames. Just who is killing the young girls of London, and why? This forms the heart of the book's plot—which is standard, connect-the-dots stuff as far as Victorian-era thrillers go. There are a couple of exciting moments near the climax, but most readers will untangle the mystery long before Tim does. It's in the telling of the tale that Mr. Timothy excels. Bayard has crafted a book of which the Inimitable Boz himself would be proud. Adopting a neo-Victorian prose style, the author peppers his pages with Dickensian wit and, above all, memorable characters. Witness this description of a lawyer hired to represent Tim: Augustus Sheldrake squeezes his way through the station-house door. A stout, whey-skinned man with a decamping hairline and advancing whiskers, soldierly red on both fronts. The hand he presents to me is quite damp, and there is a prevailing humidity all about his person: wet eyes, wet lips, wet teeth…and, exhaling from his pores, an effluvium that, unless my nostrils deceive me, represents the final gaseous iteration of imported Jamaican rum. Tim is joined in his adventures by Captain Gully, an ebullient man with a wrench (instead of a hook) for a hand—a fellow straight out of Dickens' imagination (think Captain Cuttle from Dombey and Son). There's also an Artful Dodger-like street urchin named Colin the Melodious (known for his beautiful singing voice) and Philomela, a waif Tim rescues from a menacing man in a carriage. But of course, it's Not-So-Tiny Tim who carries the novel with his melancholy, angst-ridden narration. Here is a soul wrestling with his past, which has become something of a myth and a burden. Bayard allows Tim to wink at his fictive self, at one point complaining about the prison of literature in which Dickens has jailed him. He tries to write his own story, reinventing himself as a character ("This boy…this new boy…well, he was much angrier, for one thing, terribly angry. And funnier, too: that was a surprise."). And of course, Bayard is doing the same thing in Mr. Timothy: sledgehammering that little Hummel figurine of Tiny Tim we've treasured in our heads all these years, reducing the brave, limping, cherub-hearted child to a powdery dust, then reconstructing him into something resembling a real person.