Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol

22:55Dickens was very insomniac for much of his life, so a lot of his thinking was done walking around.

23:03Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking. It was the biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes from all over the world. A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the Hungry Forties. There were famines starting. The big Irish famine hadn't quite happened, but there were early signs of what would come. And many, many migrants were coming from Ireland to England. A kind of migrant crisis. It was absolutely overcrowded. In this society where things are allowed to progress without controls, without those kinds of social nets in which to catch the people who happen to fall through, what you're leaving behind is a trail of destitution.

23:51On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste. London did not have a proper sewer system, sanitation system, until the 1850s. It wouldn't have smelled good. And he would have known to avoid certain areas. I read one account of an area known as Seven Dials, one of the worst slums at the time. and it was said that if you went there and you weren't from there, you could expect to get your throat cut. It was a very violent society. He would have seen children without shoes, with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air.

24:29Children were just treated worse than animals. You know, they were hit. Working-class children were often considered kind of just expendable. The days were dark and cold. And of course, there's only so many coins you can give out, so many individuals you can help. And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got. A story was forming in his mind. What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child. Unfortunately, his publishers weren't as enthusiastic about this new Christmas book. They thought it was a very uncommercial idea. But Dickens was willing to take the gamble.

25:09It's almost like he was possessed with this desire to get this story out there. just get those feelings into it, this feeling of his anger with the world. So he began to write.

25:27Once upon a time, of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. The story of A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve, and we see Ebenezer Scrooge, who's in his counting house, So his place of work, he lends money to people and he's part of his firm that is Scrooge and Marley. And what we learn is that it's seven years to that day since Jacob Marley died. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Dead as a doornail, says Dickens. And Jacob Marley was just like Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Didn't care about anybody, had a lot of money and was a miser.

26:14Let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw Marley's face. The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Ebenezer Scrooge. What do you want with me? said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. Much. Marley's voice, no doubt about it. And Scrooge kind of dismisses it. He refuses to believe in ghosts. You don't believe in me, observed the ghost. I don't, said Scrooge. Jacob Barney warns him. No rest, no peace, incessant torture of remorse. Forced to walk the earth, wrapped in these chains, chains and cash boxes, the sign of the money. All his life he's been accruing.

27:08what can he do with it in the next life? And he tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts of Christmas. Each of which will teach him an important lesson. Expect the first tomorrow when the bell tolls one. Christmas past. Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. Christmas present. The third upon the next night When the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate And Christmas Yet to Come Often called Christmas Future in adaptations Without their visits You cannot hope to shun the path I trade Scrooge says, oh, no I don't really want that to happen, thanks very much But of course it does happen

28:10The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. Are you the spirit whose coming was foretold to me? asked Scrooge. I am. Who and what are you? Scrooge demanded. I am the ghost of Christmas past. Long past, inquired Scrooge. No, your past. And he gets taken back to his own childhood by the first ghost.

28:52Good heaven, said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked about him. I was bred in this place. I was a boy here. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts and hopes and joys and cares long, long forgotten. And teaches him that in his past, Scrooge celebrated Christmas much more fully. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs. All these boys were in great spirit and shouted to each other until the broad fields were so full of merry music that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

29:40The school is not quite desired, said the ghost. He's also given the opportunity to visit himself as a schoolboy. A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left dead still. He's dead. Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed. He's kind of lonely and destitute. I think that that also is a kind of autobiographical reflection on something within Dickens. As Scrooge grew into an adult, he began to evolve into a miser. He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning dress, in whose eyes there were tears. Which upset his love interest. You fear the world too much, she answered gently.

30:35I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one until the master passion, gain, engrosses you. Have I not? She left him, and they parted. And he's left at the end of the Ghost of Christmas Past visit, disturbed by what he has found and what he's turned into. No more, cried Scrooge. No more. I don't wish to see it. Show me no more.

31:07I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me. Second ghost is the ghost of Christmas present, which of course is the ghost of Christmas 1843. He's a much more jolly kind of spirit. And his job is to show Scrooge how Christmas is celebrated in his own time. What he could be enjoying. And so he takes him, for example, to different parts of the world, to lighthouses and mines and various other places where Christmas is celebrated. Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit and crunch.

31:53All vanished instantly. He also takes Scrooge to the residence of Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit is Scrooge's clerk, who works for a very meagre wage. Scrooge is reluctant to give Bob Cratchit any time off at Christmas What has ever got your precious father then, said Mrs Cratchit And your brother Tiny Tim And Martha weren't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour And so he's part of the working poor Of which there were many of course in Victorian London Here's Martha, mother, cried the two young Cratchits

32:32We see Martha coming home from work and all the family being around the table together. These young Cratchits danced about the table, and in came little Bob, the father, and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim. He bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame. And how did little Tim behave? asked Mrs Cratchit. Oh, as good as gold, said Bob, and better. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see. Chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.

33:17Then Bok proposed, A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us. Which all the family re-echoed. God bless us, everyone, said Tiny Tim, the last of all. and he shows Scrooge that even in a household that doesn't have very much money Christmas can still be celebrated with great joy and with great fervor Spirit, said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before Tell me if Tiny Tim will live If he says remain unhoved by the future, the child will die the chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment at the end of that stave they're called the the different sections of the carol i see something strange said scrooge the ghost of christmas present presents scrooge with these two children that he produces from beneath his cloak two children named ignorance and want wretched abject frightful hideous miserable.

34:24They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment. And the ghost says to Scrooge, they are man's. They are mankind's children. And they serve as an example of the depths to which society has sunk, particularly in how it treats its children. Dickens said of the two of them, ignorance and want. Ignorance was the one that must be feared more than anything, because if you leave a child to grow up in ignorance without any understanding of how to care for themselves or care for other people or care for the world, you create all the villains that Dickens wrote about.

35:07The bell struck twelve. Scrooge looked about him for the ghost and saw it not.

35:22As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him. A very silent, scary ghost who's often identified with the Grim Reaper. I am sure we shall none of us forget, poor tiny Tim, shall we? So amongst the things that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge are the situation in the Cratchit household, where the Cratchit's young child, Tiny Tim, has now died. When we recollect how patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.

36:15And then we're shown an image of a house that is cold. He lay in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that.

36:33Am I the man who lay upon the bed? He cried upon his knees. and it turns out that this is scrooge's own house after scrooge has died no spirit oh no no nobody mourns him and at that point scrooge breaks down completely spirit he cried tight clutching at its rope hear me i am not the man i was i will honor christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year i will live in the past the present and the future the spirit of all three shall strive within me. And then he wakes up and we see him at the end calling out the window to a boy. What's today, my fine fellow? Today, replied the boy. Why, Christmas Day.

37:23Do you know whether they've sold that prized turkey that was hanging up there? By the biggest turkey that he can. It's hanging up there now, replied the boy. Is it? Said Scrooge. Go and buy it. And deliver it to the Cratchits as their Christmas dinner as a kind of apology for not just how he's treated his clerk, but I suppose in a way how he's treated all of humanity. We hear at the end of the story from the narrator that Scrooge keeps Christmas in his heart. It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us and all of us.

38:05And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone.

38:15In just six weeks, Dickens had finished his book. He called it A Christmas Carol. His publisher was sure it was going to flop. And with his debt stacking up, Dickens personally invested in publishing 6 ,000 copies of the book. Then he held his breath and waited for the first reviews to come in. Coming up, Christmas takes off.

38:48Hi, this is Adam Saper calling from Woodland Hills, California, and you're getting smarter because you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3, A Thousand and One Humbugs.

39:06When it came out in 1843, A Christmas Carol was a sensation. The first edition sold out almost immediately. 6 ,000 copies in just a few days leading up to Christmas Eve. It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success. And by the time of Charles Dickens' second U.S. visit in 1867... A Christmas Carol had just become legendary. Dickens traveled by train from as far south as Washington, D.C. and as far north as Maine, hosting hundreds of readings, hitting up major cities like New York and Boston.

39:49With an elastic step, he ascended the platform and moved quickly to his crimson throne. The applause, meanwhile, spreading and deepening. Till the whole audience joined in one universal and enthusiastic plodded, which continued for several minutes.

40:17Everything he did just sold out. There are stories of people who would wait on the street overnight in order to obtain entry to his readings. People felt that they could sympathize with the characters. People spoke about the pathos that Dickens had inserted into Tiny Tim. God bless us, everyone. For the poorer people, it was, I'm finally being talked about. I'll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family. People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into the holiday. I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present and the future.

41:02Christmas Carl became kind of the do-it-yourself manual for how to do Christmas. And people were doing Christmas, like for real. So people realised this is a time for family and friends. It became fashionable to have the kind of Christmas parties that were described in a Christmas carol, inviting lonely people as he's attempted to invite Uncle Scrooge.

41:33Also, we have Christmas carols, the songs that is associated with Christmas. They call up for people those memories that they have of the songs that are sung at Christmas. That's still the case, of course, because whenever you go into a store, in any place in the world virtually, you will hear Christmas music. The commercial side of Christmas was growing too. The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year A Christmas Carol published. The first in-store Santa appeared in Macy's Department Store in the 1860s. And on that U.S. trip in 1867, Dickens himself was a product. He wrote about this in his letters.

42:18The excitement of the readings continues unabated. The tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up. In one letter, he mentions a man who sold a ticket for$50, which is more than$1 ,000 today. There were often famous authors in the audience. The readings were covered in the national press. He was so famous, he couldn't move without people wanting to talk to him. If I stop to look in at a shop window, a score of passers-by stop. He also had photographs of himself taken that were sold by street hawkers and others at these venues of his readings.

42:59So it was very much the kind of 19th century equivalent of going to a Taylor Swift concert and finding, you know, all kinds of Taylor Swift memorabilia and T-shirts and bracelets, whatever else you can imagine, that would increase the devotion of the fans to Taylor, or in this case, to Charles. He will make plenty of money, there is no doubt. The New York Times. While we think of A Christmas Carol as something that is heartfelt and something that Dickens wanted to deliver as this kind of gift to the public, we mustn't forget that it was also a commercial venture and indeed one in which Dickens himself invested.

43:41It was as much a financial decision as it was this kind of humanitarian gift that Dickens was giving to the world. He was never completely a humanitarian. He was always the consummate businessman. Okay, so a little Bob Cratchit and maybe a little Scrooge. There were ways in which A Christmas Carol did seem like it was having the kind of impact Dickens had hoped for, or at least according to the lore. There's a story that he was giving a talk in Boston, giving a reading from A Christmas Carol, and in his audience was a factory owner from Chicago who had a Scrooge-like epiphany, who went back to Chicago and said that from that time on, all his employees would get Christmas Day off and every family who worked for him would be given a turkey every Christmas.

44:32But Lucinda Dickens-Hoxley, his great-great-great-granddaughter, says that Dickens also had a healthy dose of skepticism. That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture. But what about the 364 other days of the year? How were workers treated? Who looked out for the poor? Were things really changing for the better? Nothing was ever enough for Dickens. He was a campaigner all his life. He wrote journalism right up to the end. He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition, by political situations.

45:14Dickens left the United States in April of 1868. He'd made a lot of money off his readings. Tax inspectors had been chasing Dickens, trying to get a portion of the taxes he owed. Lucinda writes in her book that the sight of the tax inspectors on the harbor after their ship had already set sail cheered Dickens' soul.

45:44Dickens died in 1870, just a couple years after returning from his trip. Two weeks after his death, Christmas was made a federal holiday in the U.S. Dickens had always encouraged what he called A carol philosophy. A carol philosophy. Call it the Christmas spirit. Cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, so that's hypocrisy, jolly good temper, papers always in season, hat to the time of the year, and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to home and fireside. But modern Christmas is also undeniably about money. Giving it, sure, but also spending it.

46:42What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if he were alive today, would look like? If I knew that, I'd write it and make my fortune. You've got the name already.

46:59To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world. There is still a huge amount of child poverty. There's so much inequality of wealth. I mean, Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us. Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. Everybody needs to understand that actually nothing is going to change unless we do. We should become more familiar with our own past because the past has things to teach us. And I think that we all have a responsibility to the past. And we look towards the future, hopefully with bright hopes and with optimism.

47:49But at the same time, we have to be looking in both directions.

48:21Transcription by CastingWords I'm Dominic Gerrard. I was the voice of Charles Dickens in this episode. I'm an actor and musician, and I host a podcast called Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire. Voice over work in this episode was also done by Darian Woods, Devin Katayama, Irene Noguchi, and Helen De La Haye. Thank you to Johannes Durge, Tony Cavan, Stuart Harding, Nadia Lancey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

49:12Thanks for listening. you