A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

21:27There are no churches in here. There are no, there's no scripture in here. And I can only imagine at the time how revolutionary that would have been. And one of the reasons it's endured, I think, is it does have a, it has the underlying sort of charity, give, you know, give unto the poor kind of stuff. The very like barefoot Jesus on the ground giving away stuff element. but without all of the other, I don't know, Anglican, Catholic, organized religion trappings that come alongside of it.

21:58Jeff:It had, at the time, it had white appeal and it didn't alienate anyone. And I think that's one of the primary reasons it continues to endure is that you can be a person who just sort of culturally observes Christmas. Yes. And you're fine with what happens in a Christmas carol, because while there is moral instruction, What does it mean to be a good person? That's not presented as inside the framework of a particular religion or religious practice. And that's, I don't know if Dickens was thinking about it strategically that way, or he was just that good. But it's a pretty impressive feat to pull off.

22:38Yeah. And it brings Christmas into the urban environment. You think of London, 1843, we're beginning to industrialize. We're not quite there yet, but it's starting to happen. We're at the end of the first part of the Age of Enlightenment. A lot of things are happening, including a skepticism of organized religion or spiritual thinking at all. But then you can see, literally, Scrooge is seeing ways of celebrating Christmas that are secular. That's literally what happens throughout the book. And he's like, that is cool to see people coming together, enjoying each other, and eating a bunch of food.

23:08It's also interesting to notice what's not there. There's no Santa Claus. There's no Christmas trees. There wasn't even electricity at this time. So we certainly didn't have any lights. We don't have stockings by the fire. Like this predates so much of what has become sort of standard target Christmas, for lack of a better term, that it's kind of surprising.

23:24Jeff:If you have affection for like the Louisa May Alcott, Little Women flavor of Christmas morning, you will find a lot to appreciate in the representations, especially of Christmas present here, that as the spirit takes Scrooge around, they see Bob Cratchit's family. they see what's happening at his nephew's house and that they're playing games and it's really lively and they go kind of all over the place in a much more wide ranging way than I remembered from my last reading. But Scrooge sees all of these, that the uniting factors are people coming together and that it's warm, that it doesn't have to be fancy, but that there is something about gathering together, being generous and appreciating the things that you do have.

24:08Yeah. So changing it from a secular, excuse me, a divine, sacred, church-oriented village farm festival to an urban, civic, secular, seasonal event. And I couldn't help but think about this. So John Stuart Mill wrote Utilitarianism just 20 years later. So Utilitarianism, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Kind of undefeated as a simple way of understanding how to be in the world, frankly. I know there's all kinds of wrinkles you could do. And Stuart Mill would have certainly have read Christmas Carol 20 years before. You can draw a straight line from Ebenezer Scrooge giving away so much of his things so that people are a little bit happier.

24:47And he is still happy, and yet they are happier. It's like utilitarianism almost 101. It's utilitarianism with snow-covered Victorian roofs. I was watching Home Alone with the family the other night, and a couple of things that struck me. Like Home Alone as a cultural phenomenon, I think is the closest thing in my lifetime to a Christmas story that went bananas. I don't know who out there was listening who was around in 1990. I was 12. It was viral before we called things viral, yeah. It was in theaters till June, Rebecca. Do you remember this? You're a little younger. But like that was a huge hit.

25:20And also you can see some similar structures to it. Not for nothing. The creepy neighbor is named Marley, right?

25:25Jeff:I have never clocked that. Yeah. I don't think I would have if I hadn't just been thinking about it. And I watched it this week with my kids. And he's this older kind of initially scary person that's there to impart a word of wisdom and perspective. And it also has this fable-like quality. It has this bittersweetness to it that's very similar. And Kevin doesn't really appreciate what he has. He's this cold, isolated, goes up to his room, and he gets a version of what his life is like without the people in his life. It is very much like a wonderful life. But A Christmas Carol introduces us to this non-Christian supernatural element embedded in some subsequent Christmas stories, I think is really fascinating.

26:04Do we get A Wonderful Life in Home Alone without A Christmas Carol? I don't think we do. I don't think they show up in those same ways.

26:10Jeff:One of the things you have in the notes as well related to this is that this is the introduction of this idea that Christmas is kind of melancholy and very sweet. And that there's maybe an underlying sadness. And we listen to a lot of the Sarah McLachlan Christmas album in my house. This is the vibe. I'll be home for Christmas is going to make me cry every time. That this is a complicated time of year. That it's weighty. That there is something really complex about a big celebration and family and gifts and warmth and food. But also the end of the year. And this is the dark season of the year.

26:49Jeff:And the passage of time, right? Like you can't go, even if the time was good. I mean, this is the thing that strikes me every Christmas. Like even, I have lots of wonderful Christmas memories, but they're also gone. You cannot access them. Like it's the real nostalgia part. The pain part of nostalgia is pain plus, or memory plus pain, essentially like that. Like that's the part that's baked into this. Now there's this other melody, you can do things into the future. And, you know, through the years we all be together, but you also can't go back. You can't go back to those moments. with Mr. Fezziwig, which is one of, you know, probably Scrooge's warmest moments when he's with the Ghost of Christmas Past, and he's working for Mr.

27:27Fezziwig. And Mr. Fezziwig is a version of Scrooge that he didn't understand he maybe should be emulating, which he's a boss, and you've got a great quote about boss that we should talk about a little bit later. But it's a version of it where it's like, it's nice, and it's great, but also he misses him, and Fezziwig is gone. And, you know, the love of his life is gone, and you can't get it back. And I think it adds, I've always thought it adds gravity to the holiday season that other holidays don't. Like no one gets nostalgic about the 4th of July. Like it's weird even to say that about Halloween or Thanksgiving.

27:58But Christmas has this. And I'm not sure that it doesn't have, either Dickens is tapping into something that was there or he surfaced it and brought it to the, it's reflective. Like the reflective season is super interesting.

28:11Jeff:And there's this like real underlying tension, especially for Scrooge here about generosity and what it means to give things away. And we think about that this time of year, but probably largely because Charles Dickens has made us think about it for the last almost 200 years. But Scrooge has lost a lot of things. He lost the love of his life because he kept telling her that they just didn't, he needed to make more money before they could get married. And she wasn't gonna wait around forever. He has lost friends. He's lost his business partner who was the one person who did hang around. Because as we know, Marley is dead as a doornail.

28:49And that, it captures a real dynamic

28:53Jeff:that people experience where when you have lost something, you might be afraid to give away anything else. And this is really a lesson for Scrooge, especially the ghosts of Christmas, the ghost of Christmas yet to come of, if you are trying to hold onto everything the rest of your life, like you're not going to have anything. You may have material wealth, but what good does it do you? And that generosity is generative in other ways. Like to paraphrase Fred, when he comes in to invite Scrooge to Christmas dinner, Scrooge is like, well, what good did Christmas ever do for anybody? And Fred says, well, there's, you know, I've gotten a lot of good from doing things that didn't profit me at all.

29:33Jeff:And that prompt to like, to think about what it is to like to live with an open hand and that it will come back around or like, you know, in today's parlance, we might talk about like an abundance mindset versus a scarcity kind of mindset. But that's like, wait, did Charles Dickens invent the abundance mindset versus the scarcity mindset discourse? I have also, did he invent the hurt people, hurt people discourse? Dickens invented it all. We all live, as someone said about Gogol, we all live in Gogol's overcoat. We all might live in Dickens' top hat. If you're out there looking for a topic for your master's thesis in Victorian literature, Sure.

30:11That's right.

30:12Jeff:There you go. We did some Dickens. We don't want to do all this. We talked about when he was 12, his father went to debtor's prison. He's the oldest of eight children, born in 1812. So when he writes this, he's only 30. He's not even 30 at this point. And notably, he loved the theater and wanted to be an actor. And he especially loved this early sort of master clown, which is a weird thing to say, but I think it matters if you read Dickens. He is maybe second only to Shakespeare in the Western canon, the great creator of character. I think he's the best namer, but second only in creation of character.

30:47He writes these slightly outsized characters in a slightly outside version of England and London, but they become so memorable and indelible drawn that you can, you know, the artful Dodger or Miss Havisham, like just the words, you probably have some sense of who they are. And that's Dickens at the same time. He's a reporter. He works in Parliament. He starts publishing stories. And really, by the time he writes this Pickwick Papers in 1837, we could do a whole thing about the Sam Weller phenomenon and the Pickwick Papers. It sounds wild to talk about. There's like merch around this one character.

31:21But really, from there, he's on one of the great heaters of all time. For decades. Dies at the age of 58 in 1870, and always engaged with charitable work. You can see in Great Expectations. You can see in David Coffinfield. You certainly see in Oliver Twist. it almost becomes a cliche for dickens to like look at people who are downtrodden look at the poor look at the the forgotten look at the people in the gutter and see what they do how they got there and what could be done about them he also invented rebecca you have here the reading tour he would go on these epic multi-year reading tours in america and abroad and through the countryside and one of the ways he made money because copyright was so hard to enforce and frankly, he seems like he got bad publishing deals.

32:06I was looking at the math around Christmas Carol. He should have made a lot more money.

32:09Jeff:Well, also, spreadge culture has always been with us because the first edition of A Christmas Carol is like leather bound and it has gilt edges and it has illustrations and it had a pretty high price tag, but those are expensive elements to produce in a book. So the profit margins were very low. And then shortly after it comes out, there's a bunch of copycat publications, and there are just full-blown illegal bootleg copies of it. Because it was expensive, because this is like a deluxe... People would be on TikTok today showing off their deluxe edition of A Christmas Carol. A lot of folks couldn't afford it, so other publishers start churning out illegal copies of it at cheaper price points.

32:52Jeff:A Christmas Carol with a Z. Actually, you didn't even need to do that in that. You could just call it A Christmas Carol. You could just call it A Christmas Carol. And then Dickens pushes his publisher to sue some of these folks who are violating the copyright by making these copies of it. They win in court, but his publisher goes bankrupt and he's left with the legal expenses. So he like, it takes Dickens a long time to make money on this. And he did not have nearly as much in the bank from A Christmas Carol as you would have expected because like all this stuff around it. But reading about the first edition, I was like, oh, this is this thing we're doing with like fourth wing is really not new.

33:31Not new at all. And so, yeah, he, the word celebrity wasn't invented yet, but it was invented. It started coming into the first mention, I think is 1850. And Dickens was maybe the first cultural celebrity. Austin was a more popular writer decades before, but she largely worked anonymously. She died later. It was a different situation. She didn't go on these big tours. Like there's this famous scene that I've always thought about where Dickens comes to America and It's the middle of the publication of one of his books. And people meet him on the dock asking what happens. And it's like if the Duffer brothers were just out there with like Stranger Things spoilers.

34:06And there's no equivalent to it, really. It's so hard to think about. If you're trying to think of a modern analog, the only one that's close is Stephen King. It's like Stephen King on steroids into where he fits in the culture. Are we ready to talk about our first exposure? Yeah, let's talk about it. Anything else you want to do on Dickens real quick? What was yours first?

34:23Jeff:I cannot remember a time when I did not know this story.

34:29Jeff:And I'm also sure that I didn't read the whole text of it until probably college or early adulthood. I don't remember doing that. But I think I don't remember sitting down to read it in whole for the first time because I have always known the story in some form. It was there are so many versions of it. There are kids versions. I'm sure that my parents like told me some kids versions of it. We watched Scrooged in my house growing up like that was and that's a 1989 adaptation with Bill Murray, like kind of a translation of the story. But it's just in the water. Like it was just in the cultural water growing up in the 80s.

35:09Jeff:I think it's still in the cultural water today. Maybe to definitely. Yeah, maybe not like we don't have monoculture anymore. so maybe not quite as much. But yeah, I don't remember the first time that I encountered this idea. Do you? I don't really either. I think it was probably the 1983 Mickey Christmas Carol movie. I'm sure. I know I watched that. I was young, and I would be young enough to have absorbed it without having to remember seeing it. That's the age where you can remember things, but you don't actually remember watching them. It's just kind of installed on your firmware as you're booting up your neural network and memories are forming.

35:43I thought I had read this, but in reading it, I'm not sure that I have. Or maybe I read it when I was a long time ago, and then subsequent retellings have sort of washed it away. And the thing you were talking about for is the one that made me wonder was in The Ghost of Christmas Present, he takes them beyond just the London neighborhood of things Scrooge knows to the mines, to the lighthouse, further and further out away from the central core of London to show like there's two dudes on a ship in the middle of the sea and Christmas to them is just sort of turning to each other and talking about Christmas's past and I feel like I would have remembered that yeah that wasn't or maybe maybe an older Jeff struck struck on a more but I'm not sure that I had but I think it tells you something that you see in us adaptations that pick and choose that was the only thing that was really surprising that does like, oh, I can't believe they didn't have X or Y or Z.

36:36You start to look at sort of a cloud of adaptations. And in general, taken together, they capture the big ideas. And I guess as we get into what it's like to read this, the big ideas in the writing is not complicated. No, it's very straightforward. This is not, well, I was about to spoil some things we're going to talk about in the future. It's not Hamlet. It's just not one of these. It's not Pinching. It's not never let me go. So we talked about before, I think this actually comes up on an episode that's not out yet, books that answer questions and books that ask them. And this is more of a book that answers questions.

37:10We, you and I, tend to be more interested in the books that answer questions, or sort of ask them and sort of walk through them and think about them without sort of, and the answer to life is X. This is a little bit more than the answer to life is X. And I think that's one of the reasons people like it. And I think there's room for that. But it doesn't lend itself to like, you wouldn't do like a whole semester studying a Christmas carol, which you certainly could with some of the other things.

37:31Jeff:Yeah. And I think it works. Like, this is tricky to pull off this kind of moral instruction without sounding preachy. And I think it works because there are those moments of the ghost showing Scrooge these moments from his past, this vision of what his future could be like, and it invites the reader in an unspoken way to do that for yourself. What are people saying about me in rooms that I'm not in? How will I be remembered? When I die? If like, if I died tomorrow, would people be sad? Or would somebody say, well, I'll go to the funeral as long as there's free food? You know, like, what's like, what is my legacy going to be?

38:09Jeff:And that Dickens was able to pull that off at the time, but that it endures is the real illustration and testament of like, the level that he is working on. And it is straightforward. A book like this should be straightforward. If you're trying to tell people, hey, you got to pay attention to what's happening in the world around you, people are suffering. If you have extra, you should give some to the people who are suffering. You need to make that accessible and warm and as non-judgmental as possible. And Dickens does all of that. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

38:50Jeff:Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Who cares about your poops? Ollie does. That's why Oli's science-backed gut health lineup helps support your family's regularity. From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

39:31This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card. With unlimited 2 % cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited 5 % cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online, and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership.

40:05Terms apply. Learn more at go.mx.

40:07Jeff:That even the ghosts don't judge Dickens. They don't, or don't judge us. Scrooge, they don't tell him anything about himself. They let him come to his own conclusions. Yeah. So in terms of a reading experience, we haven't said this, it's quite short. I think I read it in 70 minutes. Yes, it's like 100-ish pages. You could linger on it. When Dickens used to read it aloud, I guess it took about three hours, which sort of tracks for that. It's a 200-year-old, well, not quite 200, 150, 160-ish-year-old work. It feels old, but you're not going to run against phrases or words you don't really understand.

40:39There's only one thing that I was confused by, actually, now I think about it, is Bob Cratchit is walking home Christmas Eve and does 20 slides with the boys. Do you remember this moment, Rebecca?

40:48Jeff:I did remember that. I did not know. What was that? I don't know. In the Muppet Christmas Carol, there's a moment of sliding around on ice. And I'm wondering if there was a slick section of sidewalk or a slow hill. I couldn't figure it out. And I looked around for it. No one was helping me there. But beyond that, everything's going to be familiar. You're not going to have any trouble with language. There's not a lot of vocabulary that's hard. So much dialogue, as you say here, it's quite funny. Dickens is quite witty. That's really enjoyable. And then the moments of the uncanny still kind of work, I feel like.

41:20The moments of pathos, they are on the nose. But I got to tell you, I guess my nose is ready because they hit me. They still hit me to look at the Cratchits or Fezziwig or the Young Scrooge. There is sort of an elemental fable-like quality that it is not super... Maybe it's sophisticated. It goes around simplicity to come back to sophistication, but it's not complicated. But also, you know, neither is the smell of a Christmas tree or cookies. Like, they still work. So I think there's a element to that here.

41:49Jeff:The Christmas morning scene that the ghost of Christmas present shows him in the Cratchits home is just indelible and one of the all-timers. Like, they're all, it's very merry. They're all together. Like, it's warm in the house. Everybody's working on cooking something. They're waiting for dad to come back with Tiny Tim from wherever he has been. It's like, it's just lively. And there's stuff happening. And mom is worried about the pudding that she's made. And I did remember when I was reading this that like, I was way older than I should have been when I figured out that pudding here was not like jello pudding.

42:23Jeff:That pudding is - Americans, we have a horrible time as a kid understanding what they're talking about with desserts. That pudding is dessert. And like, now as the baker in my household, I got it. of like the dinner is over and you are delivering this dessert that you have baked and you're worried. Like, is it good enough? Is it too simple? Is it going to turn out? Is the whole thing going to cave in when I take it? Like, I'm guessing she makes some kind of souffle basically because she's worried that like it's going to crash. And I think it's a regular old steamed pudding. And if you don't get it right, you turn it out and just collapse it on itself.

42:51I'm guessing. Just a mess.

42:53Jeff:Just a mess, yeah. But that scene is just so like warm and lovely. And I hope that every reader and everybody listening to this has some equivalent holiday memory to call upon, or it's your dream of what a holiday moment could feel like. I still think this is, for a lot of people, especially as it gets sort of corporatized and commodified, the elemental scene of a secular holiday Christmas tradition is a bustling house with a lot going on. and there's a warm, frenetic liveliness, a conviviality, I guess would be the single best word. And it's not sitting around staring at each other. There's stuff to do, but we're all kind of doing it together.

43:40And it's not the journey. It's not the destination. It's the journey. Like the meal is important, especially when you're super poor to have a goose and everything, but it's the making of it and the togetherness of it and it's warm in there and we've just come in from the cold. I think that still works, Rebecca. I don't think that's gone away. Yeah, I think there's like a make Christmas great again push.

44:01Jeff:It's as people are imagining times like this and that it wasn't about, you know, having been standing out in the cold on the day after Thanksgiving, trying to get access to the latest hot toy. But that you're coming together with the people that you love in a spirit of generosity, in a spirit of caring that no matter how little you have there, you can give something of yourself. Yeah, right. But in the money can't buy happiness, you need to be connected to people, you need warmth, like, that's gone nowhere. That feels more relevant than ever. Call me jaded or call me old, but like, that feels like it hasn't aged a day.

44:36In a lot of ways, current manifestations are more, even more intense.

44:40Jeff:Yeah. And just our responsibilities to each other, the ghost of Christmas past, who is telling Scrooge like about his own mistakes and how he has ended up being a ghost, being a spirit like this says mankind was my business the common welfare was my business charity mercy forbearance and benevolence were all my business the dealings of my trade were about a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business and he didn't realize that until it was too late and he's telling dick he's telling scrooge like you gotta catch on to this now this is your shot yeah i mean essentially scrooge has gotten it backwards we think the the ends of a life are to have money in a business where that's a means to an end, right?

45:20Which you do those things so you can have these other things and give away and be part of a social network. In another kind of way, you made a really smart note, I thought here, about having your own words and actions reflected back to us. I mean, really to see the truth of you through other people's eyes. So often in life, and Scrooge has the same, it's just exaggerated here, like no one really tells him the truth of what he's doing because he is powerful and they are subject to him. But once you can sort of hide behind the curtain of a ghost or you intercept a text or a straight comment. One of the reasons where you hear someone say something about you that they don't mean for you to hear is powerful is because we believe the truth of that in a different kind of a way.

45:58And Scrooge is certainly there. He hears other people talking about none of, I don't know what we think Scrooge thinks of people, people think of him at the beginning. I guess we think -

46:09Jeff:I don't think he's ever thought about it. He's never thought about it, right? He sort of is just happy with his, or he is existing with his candle in the dark. He is so afraid of losing that he doesn't want anything so that it can't be lost. But to see that other people get away with revel in benefit from being connected to other people, even if they don't have all the money in the world. Those moments where the spirits turn his own words back on him. There's a little bit where he sees people suffering and Scrooge turns to the spirit and is like, is there no help for them? And the spirit says, what are the prisons not open?

46:44Yes. Yeah. And also you have here too, and I didn't really catch on to this, and I don't know in the history of sort of character. This is not something that Greeks would have thought about, just to put it in context. It's like, I can change. I am not subject. My intellect, my emotional intelligence can change how I move through the world. I'm sure there are other places like this, but you have the quote, Why show me this if I am past all hope? and the implication there is it's not too late for any of us.

47:19Jeff:Yeah, and by the time the second spirit shows up, Scrooge has become the ideal student. He tells the ghost of Christmas present, tonight if you have ought to teach me, let me profit by it. And he's ready. It's a quick conversion for Scrooge into paying attention to what these spirits have to say to him. It wasn't quite a hot take. I think it's in my straight thoughts of like, they sold past the clode pretty hard. If he goes home after the first ghost, I think we're good. Right? He's like saying, okay, well, and there's like two more ghosts. It's really, really selling past the kids. It's kind of funny.

47:51Jeff:You really want to make the point, why do one ghost when you could have three? Come on. I guess I was thinking about the 1843-ness of it all in terms of how to understand it and what it meant. In 1843, if you did not go into other people's homes, you had no idea how people lived. There's no TV, there's no movie, there's no photographs. And there's a straight line between Scrooge's isolation, unhappiness, and miserliness that's more about just knowing what other people could, what he could do. Yeah. He's not like choosing against it. He just didn't even know it's possible because he's so, literally he's going up the room, the stairs in his own house on Christmas Eve, only lighting a candle.

48:28There's no lights. It's just him in the dark with one candle. The smallest unit of like being alive is what Scrooge has done. And as he just sort of pulls back the curtains of what other people are doing, like it's such a revelation to him because there's no mass media. He has no way of knowing. And sort of, there's just a little bit of like going into other people's rooms and being there for a minute is a revelation to him. It's kind of that simple in a way.

48:52Jeff:Yeah. And that people are like, yeah, the people are living with like differently than he is with warmth and with light and with some joy. It's really the eye opener. Yeah. So he's describing Fezuig's party here. This is the quote, the consequences were uproarious beyond belief, but no one seemed to care. On the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily and enjoyed it very much. And the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands and most ruthlessly, what I would have not given to be one of them. So it's sort of a scene, as soon as he sees people have a good time, that's all it takes.

49:24This is possible and this is how he can be. Another reason I'm not sure that I actually did read this or didn't think it at all is the ghosts are much stranger than most contemporary representations of them are. Like the ghost of Christmas past has a hat on that if you take it off, shoots like a beam of supernova light into space. And Scrooge is like continuing, and like other representation, it's like a white, bright thing, but I don't think it captures the weird old baby strangeness of that thing. And here's the Ghost of Christmas Presents description. For as its belt sparkled and glittered, now in one part and now another, and what was light one instant and another time dark.

50:02What is that? I have no idea. So the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness. So it's becoming like blurry and you can't see it being now one thing with one arm and now with one leg and now with 20 legs. Now a pair of legs without a head and now a head without a body of which dissolving parts no outline could be visible in a dense gloom wherein they belted away. Like, why is that, Rebecca? It is weird. It is. It is weird.

50:26Jeff:It is weirder than you remember for sure. Yeah. Okay. We talked about the other scenes, the mines. Here's the quote. This is from the ship at sea. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had his kinder word for one another on that day than on any other day in the year, and had shared some extent its festivities, and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known they delighted to remember him. So even the people who have to work on the boat have people they can remember and think fondly of, and know in their heart that that person may be thinking of them similarly somewhere, wherever they are.

51:01a lot of stray thoughts for this because it is it had they just sort of connected with so many

51:05Jeff:parts of culture rebecca why don't you go through i mean i just you don't want to be on dickens's shit list absolutely not the descriptions of people are sharp and he's not pulling any punches and like you just you don't want to be described by charles dickens like just try to not be perceived by him in general but you really don't want to be on his shit list um i was really thinking about the image of when marley comes to him scrooge sees that marley's chains are made of like cash boxes and it's clear like marley is in a prison of his own making like this spirit is trapped in a prison of his own making and i was trying to think about what the origin point of this archetype the inferno maybe maybe like some analog there like characters in mythology and fiction that like that are trapped in chains of their own making or prisons of their own making their tarot cards where this comes up like this is a thing um and it's an it's an old idea but that dickens makes it quite literal the chains are made of the cash boxes yes yeah was really interesting to me and then like on a couple funny what are they doing here points like why don't we have bed curtains anymore?

52:19Jeff:This seems so cozy. Like Scrooge is worried about people opening the bed curtains in the ghost of Christmas yet to come. He sees that if he keeps living the way he lives, now he's going to die and that people will be like pillaging his home before his body has even been buried. And one of the things they're going to take is his bed curtains with the rings still attached. Like, why don't we have bed curtains? I want those back. I saw your note here and my only thought is that a couple things one is it may be more Relevant when you want to keep your body heat. Yeah, like it's like a little tent But the other thing too is if you have a certain class and you have a bunch of servants They're coming in out of your room and you might just want to like have a private you have a private space within that Right, I just like I remember like, you know You go to a castle and like you go to Versailles or something There's the bedroom and there's like the chamber within the bedroom and then there's like the private like Just how public even the bedrooms Yeah, I think about this every time I rewatch the West Wing and people are in and out of the president's bedroom at inopportune moments.

53:20Jeff:I'm like, who's sleeping in full pajamas? Get the man some bed curtains. They need some bed. That's a that's a really good point. I like it a lot. Even the key people. Dark. Yeah, just like have get yourself some bed curtains. And then there's a note when we're seeing the flashback to the big party at Fezzi Wigs that the apprentices at the end of the party, everybody like takes the decorations down, folks are going home and the apprentices stay because they have beds under the counter at Fezzi Wigs. And I was like, where do they shower? Rebecca, I've got bad news here about hygiene in mid 19th century London.

53:54Showers hadn't been invented yet. So we're maybe washing our pits every other week. Okay. Maybe. So nowhere is the answer. They weren't worried about that.

54:03Jeff:I was feared of that, but it's just notable that it was like, yeah, they're just going to go to bed at the counter. I've got real bad news about what the streets were like in horse-drawn carriage London in the spring and winter. That's another situation. That's a critical part of the tour of Pompeii that I will not forget quickly. Yes. Yes. Here are mine. This is not original by any stretch of the imagination, but Dickens is the greatest character namer of all time. All-timer. And it's not particularly gross. Fezziwig, Cratchit, Scrooge, Ebenezer Scrooge. Is Ebenezer Scrooge the best named character of all time?

54:33And I think he is. I think it has to be. Yes, I think he has to be. Can you think of anyone close?

54:37Jeff:There's this like onomatopoeic quality to all of the names. Or like almost synesthity. Ebenezer, geezer. Like what is Ebenezer? Like did he invent that word? Where does Ebenezer come from? No, Ebenezer is a name. It's a name. Ebikonezer I know is in the Bible. Maybe it's a derivation of that. I think for any time you're reading something that's quite a bit older or historical fiction, It's easy to notice what is there, but I think it's also helpful to think about what's not there. What's not here? Christmas trees. Presents at all? Stockings? Santa Claus? Carols? Oh, no, there are carols. There's a carol there.

55:14Jeff:I'm sorry. Modern Christmas. Like, no modern, secular sort of Christmas carol stuff. That's interesting. Here's an unanswerable question. Why did Scrooge get this opportunity and Marley did not? there's no there's no why like this is not presented as something that normally happens to people that somewhere along the way they're going to get a chance to see for like storytelling purposes somebody has to be the cautionary tale but like most modern stories there'd be some explanation of a wish or it just happens and he doesn't seem to deserve it right it's not like we get no glimmer of well you know what we've got a we've got a sinner here that if we just get him with the right message.

55:55I don't know that it matters. I just think in modern storytelling, there's so much over explanation of like the supernatural and the why. It's striking to see like, so Marley has to go live and change forever. And Scrooge doesn't. And Marley, what's Marley's? It's just very strange. I don't mind it, but I did notice it.

56:15Jeff:Did not occur to me. I think this is another dark moment that doesn't appear in other... I don't remember it appearing any version I've seen. I think, if I remember right, this is the ghost of Christmas present saying that there's a couple of beings in his, you know, I guess one of the times he has fewer than 20 legs. There's these other beings there that Scrooge is asking about. And this is the ghost of Christmas present explaining who they are. He says, and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is ignorance. This girl is want. Beware of them both and all of their degree. But most of all, beware of the boy for on his brow, I see that written, which is doom, unless the writing will be erased.

56:54Deny it, cried the spirit, stretching out his hand towards the city. Slander those who tell it to you. Admit it for your own factious purposes and make it worse and bide the end. So I think this is fascinating, right? Like, I guess what Dickens is saying there, these are the sources of our unhappiness, of our sort of cultural and societal malaise and brokenness. Want, like that there's not enough. but the real bad one is ignorance because that leads to doom and that ignorance and we're at the age of the end of enlightenment here I don't know, I found it interesting I'm not sure what to do about it but that's like an underplayed part it's more complicated than the rest so I think it gets cut when people are adapting it or trying to figure out what to do with it any takes on that Rebecca?

57:40Jeff:It's really dark and that Scrooge is engaged in a kind of willful ignorance up until this point you know like anybody who's saying like well people are poor so let them go to debtor's prison and isn't that some kind of relief for them, has to know, you know, that that's not actually a solution. Right, right. And that he's... Like plausible deniability is a more modern term for us. Yeah, and that willful ignorance is the path to doom is really interesting. But I do think that's... And this is maybe the most or the closest that Dickens comes to rendering judgment in the text is also what gives it some spikes, I think.

58:19notable quotes i mean this has god bless us everyone bah humbug which is only said twice in the text yeah it's amazing i will keep christmas throughout the year but sort of outside of the cliche stuff rebecca where do you want a good boss is priceless

58:35Jeff:when he's thinking when he's a remembering fezzy wig he said he has the power to render render us happy or unhappy to make our service light or burdensome a pleasure or a toil say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up. What then? The happiness he gives us is quite as great as if it cost a fortune. And this is also Scrooge realizing he has been a terrible boss and doesn't deserve any of Bob Cratchit's generosity or patience, which he has received and sort of having that moment of perspective on himself. But this stays true.

59:13Jeff:This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19 ,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs. So you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Where is Territor? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? We're gonna take this city back.

59:53In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney+.

59:56Jeff:They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again, now streaming only on Disney+. Pandora jewelry brings the sparkle to your summer Now with even better prices Enjoy up to 50 % off select styles From personalized pieces to must-have favorites Made for the summer Timeless designs that shine with you through every moment Wherever the summer takes you Shop in-store or online Now through July 5th Terms and conditions apply Visit pandora.net for details Yeah, let's see Where else do we want to go? We've covered some of these before.

1:00:41This is, I believe, his nephew. But I'm sure I've always thought of Christmas time when it has come around apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and its origin. So outside of the Jesus stuff, if anything belonging to you can be apart from that as a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. The only time I know of in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open up their shut up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they were really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

1:01:15I mean, that's great. It's good stuff. Quite moving. It's really quite moving. I also have here. Oh, I think this is yours, but I'd mark this. It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things that while there is infection and disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. Do you think Dickens was fun at parties? It seems like he would be a good time.

1:01:37Jeff:Yeah, I think he would have been a good time. And this quote happens when Scrooge is seeing, I think it's when he's seeing what's happening at the Cratchit's house, that they're poor, they don't have much, and it kind of blows his mind that they're having this lovely day. Like that they have nothing, none of the things that really matter to Scrooge or that he thinks matter, but that they have laughter and good humor and that that's really what it's all about. For you if, maybe not if, Rebecca? What do we want to say? I mean, I think it's for you, especially if you're curious about the context for a story that if you grew up in the US and in Judeo-Christian culture, you've heard versions of this forever, but to get the original recipe is really interesting.

1:02:19Jeff:if you're cool with some moral instruction on the page or you're curious about how Dickens executed that. And then I like your note here also that this is a really good on-ramp to Dickens. Like a lot of Dickens is very long because at least - You see them on the shelf and you're like, oh my God, that's an undertaking. Dude was paid by the word for quite a long time. So he had good incentive. What gets measured gets managed. Yeah, but if you want an on-ramp that is not a 500 page big novel, I do think this is a good introduction. And it will be validating maybe for like, it's the language is not difficult.

1:02:56Jeff:It's pretty straightforward. It feels Victorian, but it's not a challenge to read it. And that might make you feel more confident to pick up one of the novels. I don't really, we didn't really have a maybe not if. I think it's just short enough that you were at all interested. It's worth 70 minutes of your time. Yeah, you can get it for free. You know, you can get a, you could get an ebook or the library, they're all over the place. So the ask is pretty low if you're at all interested. The immortal questions that are asked, which are primary here. Here there are contenders. What is the good life?

1:03:26What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Like sort of obviously one and two. What is the good life and what do I owe my neighbor and how connected they are? I think maybe that's the most interesting. Those are not separate questions in the world of Dickens.

1:03:43Jeff:Yeah, that the good life is one in which you are like doing your duty. to your neighbor and you're in you're in community how to deal with the certainty of death like kind of but it's more that he like the presence the reality that he will die forces a reflection on how to live it's not so much a wrestling with the fact of death in itself and i don't think this is not about good and evil yeah it's not about good and evil and it's not a what else might there be really like it's this is not an existential query It's really about how do you live on earth. Yeah, one of the things you get by making the supernatural elements non-divine, non-religious, not sort of heaven and earth and how the universe is put together, is it refocuses the import on the terrestrial, corporeal, lived, mortal coil.

1:04:37Whereas a lot of Christian stuff, it's like if someone comes from heaven or hell, it's very easy to solve for that. That makes sense. and maybe it would be instrumental to do so. This is turning back toward the human, you know, using these supernatural devices here. Are we sure this is about art and writing? This might be one of the few that's not. Yeah, it's not. It's actually not about art and writing. It's not. There's a little meta stuff in the beginning that he's doing like writerly flourishes, but it's really not about art and writing. Rebecca, could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation?

1:05:11Jeff:You sure can. and you have like hundreds literally of adaptations to choose from there are so many adaptations of a christmas carol that there's a separate wikipedia page just to keep track of hundreds hundreds and i watched a muppets christmas carol for the first time this week because that was not in my millennial childhood and even that like you really do get the gist it is like a lot of the text is straight up on the page it's darker than kids stories that we would tell today which like that's a separate conversation, but you can't even get the whole gist of this from The Muppets. Yeah, a movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets, all of them have been done.

1:05:49They've been done. The Muppets musical movie. That's like three out of the four right there, which people beloved. I find it, the only flaw with Muppets Christmas Carol, and close your ears for Stans out there, the music is terrible. The songs are bad, Rebecca.

1:06:04Jeff:It was what it was. They don't rhyme. They don't even rhyme. They scan terribly. It's embarrassing. I'm sorry. we get Michael Caine's great and the Muppets are elite I mean very famously Brett Goldstein loves a Muppets Christmas Carol from Ted Lasso so can like can we get him on remaking this with some new songs let's see I you have you have some notes about other adaptations I mean there are so many adaptations and obviously I haven't seen nearly all of them but like if we can adapt Shakespeare into all kinds of times and settings why don't we do this more with a Christmas Carol like as I was reading this, I was thinking so much about like, billionaire tech bros who could solve world hunger, who could solve world hunger, like, without really feeling it in their bank accounts, and are not.

1:06:54Jeff:And like, how much this made me want a version like a modern version with Jeremy Strong, who's like, so what that they're lonely and poor, they have AI to keep them company. Yes. Like, who's gonna do this for us? Yeah, because it's notable that Scrooge is wealthy, but he's not a lord, right? Like he has one employee. The scale of an individual's wealth would have been unfathomable to, I guess, maybe king. I don't even know how like the king of England's wealth in 1843 compares to how much money Elon Musk has. I really don't understand. Maybe it's completely different and there's land control, I understand.

1:07:30But there are thousands of billionaires that have the ability not to change the world, but they could certainly transform a city and neighborhood and other things that are more than just giving out turkeys. Scrooge does what he can, but he can't change the world. But there's some people that maybe could. Interesting. We do get modern adaptations. The abomination of the Will Ferrell-Rynell Reynolds thing that appeared a couple years ago. Is that called spirited? Yeah, it's quite poor. It's quite poor. I'd take a sequel. I'd take a sequel. Yeah, I would take a sequel. This is an unbelievable take for you.

1:08:02Jeff:One of my stray thoughts was what actually happens the next day? Like, we find out that, you know, Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning. He sends a big turkey over to the Cratchits' house. But, like, does he tell somebody about these visitations? How do they react if he tells them? Even if he doesn't tell them, we are given to understand that Scrooge is, like, going. It's like Paul on the road to Damascus. He goes forward as a new man. So, like, what are they saying behind his back? Do people notice that Scrooge is not so Scrooge-y anymore? I would love to see the aftermath of A Christmas Carol.

1:08:41I think that's a good one. It's a sweltering August day. Is Scrooge still light as a feather? Hard to say. We've done a lot of our supplementary stuff. Wrote it in six weeks. Would he have sold more copies if he had started in November? We know more about the publishing season now. But on the other hand, we didn't have the Christmas book buying season. because Christmas hadn't been invented yet as we know it. So there's that.

1:09:06Jeff:Dickens invented that. We've hit on that Christmas Carol is responsible for popularizing the use of Merry Christmas and the catchphrase of Bah Humbug, which somehow becomes a catchphrase, even when it only shows up in the text twice. This is also largely responsible for making turkey the bird of choice at Christmas. That goose was more popular at the time and more affordable. But, you know, Scrooge sends the Cratchits that turkey and it becomes like a symbol of generosity and celebration. And then all sorts of little cultural influences and touch points. Like 40 years later, in 1889, Van Gogh tells his brother that he's been rereading Dickens' Christmas books and says there are things in them so profound that one must read them over and over again.

1:09:52Jeff:Yeah, just all everybody ends up reading A Christmas Carol. And if you pick up, like I got the Penguin Classics edition. If you pick that up or some of the other versions that have deeper introductions, you'll get to see those references to all of the writers at the time and artists who came after that were influenced by it. There's a movie called The Man Who Invented Christmas starring Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge, but it also has the Dickens frame story. Like Dickens, people want to do this. And I think because the story of A Christmas Carol is now as interesting as A Christmas Carol itself.

1:10:25I think that title is probably overstating it, but not by a whole lot in terms of how we understand a modern secular celebration of Christmas. The figure of death with a cloak had been around since the 14th century, but it's not a coincidence. I don't think that the first years of the term Grim Reaper was in 1847, just three years after the ghost of Christmas future here. so I think Dickens was taking that figure doesn't have a scythe in this version but has everything but sort of the silent darkly cloaked the Muppets Christmas Carol Ghosts of Christmas Future has like this dark hole face thing that's quite terrifying

1:11:03Jeff:it's like a prototypical Dementor almost yes yes the Mickey Christmas Carol grave scene is terrifying it scared the crap out of me when I was a kid when I was five or six and did not care for that at all I have one hot take and I said this a little bit before. I think Dickens invented that Christmas is a little sad and that dynamic infuses most of the really good Christmas stuff. Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Like they say in British Bake Off, you need some sharpness to cut the sweet. And I think that Dickens did that. And that might be the single genetic material that's manifested itself in ways that are hard to trace back to the first example of a species there.

1:11:49Jeff:I mean, even like all the Hallmark holiday movies have this. There's something kind of melancholy about something in that dynamic before the people find each other. And I think it is, it's there in like the original Christmas story, right? Like it's macabre to think about like, we're celebrating the birth of this kid that eventually is going to grow up, that we're going to say he's going to die for our sins. I mean, there's also an inversion of that, right? Because Tiny Tim is sort of this Christ-like figure. Like no one's a purer soul than Tiny Tim. And you could see a version of this where Tiny Tim dies so that Scrooge may like, you know, have a reckoning or a resolution.

1:12:25But in this one, Scrooge gets ahead of him. He's like, I don't, you know what, Jesus, you didn't have to die. If we just got our stuff together, you wouldn't have to die for our sins.

1:12:32Jeff:Interesting related to that in the first version of it, in the first manuscript, Tiny Tim was named Fred. And like, does this hit nearly as hard if he is not named Tiny Tim? And also in the first manuscript, Dickens did not reveal that Tiny Tim would live. And the editors and whatever the Victorian version of the beta readers were like, you have to tell us. What is the fate of Tiny Tim? This book is not going to hit like you want it to. Even if Scrooge converts and Tiny Tim's crutch is there by the fire and everyone is weeping. You've got to know he's okay in the long run. There's no read-alike.

1:13:05I mean, the whole world, there's no one-on-one. Like, Farida likes to go into the world and consume things, and you'll get some Christmas Carol. Cocktail party crib sheet, I have one for you here.

1:13:16Jeff:This is incredible shit. I'm just going to clear out and let you do this. If you're looking for who first took the Christ out of Christmas, it's our pal Chuck D, which I like to imagine is what his friends call Charles Dickens. Just. That's it. A plus. Well done. No notes. A final beat is zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Historical importance, readability, current relevance, essential questions, book, nerd, read, cred, oh, damn factor. This is a lopsided one, because I think it scores super high on one, two, and three, and almost zero on four and five, because it's so familiar there.

1:13:52Historical importance, like, how is it not a 10? It has to be a nine or a 10, yeah, it's high. It has to be. It has to be a nine or 10. I mean, listen, it's not a 10, because we reserve that for, like, Shakespeare and the Bible, right? And like a whole. Or in the Greeks, in the Greeks, yeah.

1:14:08Jeff:Yeah, so it's a nine. If you're not that, so it has to be a nine. Yeah. Readability, it's not a 10 because it's not super modern, but it's like eight and a half, nine. Eight and a half, yeah, eight and a half is good. Current relevance of central questions, 14. That's a 10, yeah. 75, yeah. 75. Book nerd read cred. This is one I have no sense of. I don't think anyone cares if you've read A Christmas Carol. No, I don't think so either. I think the read cred is pretty low, precisely because - Three? You know, I actually read the original. You get to do that. But there's nothing there to say. And you'll be surprised to hear that it's exactly like a Muppet Christmas Carol.

1:14:42Jeff:You've got the gist. Yeah. Oh, damn factor. I think it's hard to look at straight because it's so familiar. Yeah, I do too. This one's hard to be objective about. I could get to like a seven maybe. He's doing a lot of things. It is more complex than the cultural representations of it. It's funnier. Like there's more of gravy than the grave to you is hysterical. That's some Shakespeare stuff. Yeah. Five or six is okay. I could get behind that. All right. All right. Anything else, Rebecca? I think we did it pretty well there. Yeah. I'm glad that we had an excuse to do this. Yes. So thank you again to all the listeners who rated and reviewed the show that your gift to us this season was that we got to read a Christmas carol and talk about it with each other.

1:15:26Yeah. You can go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for detailed show notes. You can find that in your podcatcher and click on it there. For our free newsletter and membership options, you can also begin. We just spun up our Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. They are all at Zero to Well Read Podcast. So if you want to be ready for when we start posting stuff over there, it could happen any day. Who knows? Be ready over there.

1:15:50Jeff:This podcast is coming to video in 2026. Yeah, that's a real ghost of Christmas present moment for some of us. Email us at ZeroToWellRead at BookRiot.com. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you. And for all the listening, I hope you can find a goose, whatever that might mean for you in a family moment this holiday season.

1:16:29It's like the father of all shipping services. It shows up to the airport way too early just to play it safe. It's overprotective about all the things that truly matter. And it's always prompt, especially to be with family. Make it your first choice to celebrate your dad. Ship UPS Air with our money-back guarantee. Exclusively at the UPS Store U.S. retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com slash air shipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply.