Charles Dickens' Christmas

Just as Scrooge wanders London's streets on a cold Christmas night, Dan Snow follows the ghosts of Charles Dickens' past to discover the city that inspired his greatest works. With London-born tour guide David Charnick, they slip down hidden alleyways to find the old debtor's prison that the Dickens family once called home; a place that haunted a young Charles for the rest of his life. They find the old counting houses and graveyards that inspired the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge and the locations that appear in A Christmas Carol. With David's masterful guidance and atmospheric readings, this immersive episode takes you to the fireside of a London coaching inn as the sun sets outside on a late December afternoon. A warning: this episode contains references to historical suicides. Dickens' extracts are read by Robyn Wilson. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:03Speaker 02

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• 2:08Dan Snow?

  Welcome to Dan Snow's History at Christmas is approaching and what could be more Christmasy than Charles Dickens. So in this episode of History Hit, I hike around London. Me and the History Hit team, we took to the streets. I worked with the lovely London-born tour guide, David Charnick, and we visited the places that inspired Dickens's greatest works. We visited the prison where Dickens's father was thrown for indebtedness. We walked the mean streets where Ebenezer Scrooge has his counting house. We visited the graveyard where the ghost of Christmas future points to the grave in the corner that could be Ebenezer's unless he changes his ways. We went to the banks of the Thames to see where the mudlarkers and scavengers searched the murky waters for bodies to turn

• 2:53Dan Snow?

  over for profit. We finish up on Cornell, the street that Bob Cratchit went down the slide 20 times in honour of it being Christmas Eve. After this tour was over and we were freezing cold, team of History Hit went and we found an old medieval coaching inn, a place where Charles Dickens would have himself raised a glass. We toasted the great author, we toasted his works that have inspired and entertained so many generations that have come since, and we toasted London itself as the sun set early on a winter's day. Here is our tour around Dickens's London. Enjoy.

• 3:42Dan Snow?

  David, hello. Nice to meet you.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  And it's very good to meet you too, Dan. Thank you very much for coming along.

• 3:46Dan Snow?

  This is great. Right, we're in a little oasis. Is this a former cemetery in the heart of Southwark?

• 3:51Speaker 04

  This is really all that's left of the old churchyard of the Church of St George the Martyr. You can see it's a churchyard because if you look over, they've got gravestones against the wall. You may have noticed the odd tomb as we came in.

• 4:02Dan Snow?

  So first things first, Charles Dickens, like he's...

• 4:08Dan Snow?

  A Portsmouth man originally, I've got to say that because I'm from round there. But London is sort of central to his books, isn't it?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Oh, very much so. I mean, he came here as a child. But Dickens certainly tunes in to the rhythms of London. And if you read his work now, it still rings true. You have people doing what London people do now and saying what they say and thinking what they think. Although he is trapped essentially in the Victorian period, yet he also goes beyond it to get to the grips of what being a Londoner actually is.

• 4:41Dan Snow?

  And it seems like a different world. It's only 150 years ago or so, but it seems like just a different world. But we are in a space now, a little tiny hectare of ground that would have been recognisable to the great man.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Well, the reason we're here isn't for the churchyard or the garden. It's for that wall that you can see in front of you, running along the north side of the garden. That is the southern perimeter wall of the Marshalsea Prison. So the prison was actually on the other side of that wall. It was located here in 1811, the year before Dickens was born. And it illustrates one of the big problems that the Victorians addressed, which was imprisonment for debt. The thing about the Marshalsea was the population of the prison was dominated by debtors, people who owed more money than they could hope to repay. And so they were arrested at the suit of their creditors because they were a flight risk.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  And so they popped them in there to make sure that they either leaned on friends and family to get the money, or in some cases, a lot of people could carry on their trade from inside, you know. And so they would earn some money and it would sort of, as it were, focus their minds.

• 5:52Dan Snow?

  It seems so foreign to us today, that idea.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, imprisonment for debt goes back over many centuries. And what the Victorians did was to increase the availability of bankruptcy.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Because if you're a bankrupt, you put your affairs in the hands of a court of law, who appoints a receiver who takes your assets. And so it's all out of your hands now, and you're no longer a flight risk.

• 6:15Dan Snow?

  So creditors prisons appear a lot in Dickens?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, when Charles Dickens was twelve years old, in fact, just a fortnight after his twelfth birthday in February eighteen twenty four, his father, John, was imprisoned for debt here in the Marshalsea. And he was here for three months. And this is how Dickens gets an impression of what life is like for a debtor in a Victorian prison. Well, actually, a Georgian prison, sorry, the eighteen twenties.

• 6:43Dan Snow?

  And did Dickens go into prison with his dad?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Curiously enough, he was the mum member of the family who didn't. At that time, if you're in prison for debt, obviously, you're trying to save every penny. And we're talking about a time when everyone rented their homes, they didn't own them. And as a result, you would move the family in with you because that way you'd save the rent on the rooms where they were living. And so John Dickens moved his whole family in with him, except for Charles. Charles was twelve years old, as I say, and that was considered plenty old enough to be taken out of school and put to work. So famously, or infamously, from his point of view, he was put to work at Warren's Blacking factory down by Hungerford Stairs. So near Charing Cross Station now.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  And presumably because he would have been having to get up too early to go to work before the prison opened, he was actually accommodated nearby on Lant Street, which is just down to the southwest of here, in a house belonging to the parish.

• 7:40Dan Snow?

  And was this a deeply traumatic event? Because they'd had a sort of clerical, middle-class life, and he's suddenly thrust in, like David Copperfield, suddenly ripped out of school, thrust into, well, a very different kind of a world.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Well, as I'm sure you know, David Copperfield is riven with autobiographical elements. But yeah, it would have been a jar. Especially because it interrupted his life. I mean, he always resented the fact that he was taken out of school, because he loved school, because he had an inquiring mind. So he enjoyed being in school and having that taken away from him, he resented that. But worse than that, when he was in the blacking factory, basically wrapping and labelling bottles of boot polish, he was such a good worker that they put him in the window so people could see him work, how industrious he was. So he already felt the indignity of doing this manual work and now he was being put on display, as

• 8:35Speaker 04

  it were. So he was completely mortified by it. And it's said that he got a lot of resentment building up towards his mother because of it, because Warren, who owned the factory, was a cousin of his mother's and she got him the place, presumably thinking she was doing the right thing and obviously somebody needed to be earning some money. But Dickens never really saw it that way, by all accounts.

• 8:58Dan Snow?

  Let's go and take a close look at that wall.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and we can actually go through to the prison side of the wall, where Dickens's family once lived.

• 9:06Dan Snow?

  This is cool.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  So we go through the opening here, as I say, on to the prison side of the wall. As you can see, it's a-

• 9:16Dan Snow?

  It's nice of modern planners to make it feel so much like a prison still.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  We just have this narrow alley here, Angel Place, that's all that's really left. The prison closed in 1842 and then the following year, the land was sold off and so people moved in and over time it's been developed and redeveloped. Now, on the ground, you will see these paving stones, inscribed paving stones. And there's one just along at the end of the wall that I'd like to show you, if you'd like to come this way. So one of the inscribed paving stones, which you can see here, has this spiral inscription on it, which tells us that John Dickens, the father of Charles, was imprisoned here for just the three months, from February to May 1824. Basically, his mother died

• 10:05Speaker 04

  and so he inherited some money so he could clear his debts. Now, the thing is, it wasn't usual to spend a long time in debtors' prison. As I mentioned, sometimes you would be able to lean on friends or family to get money, especially family, you know, it's not good for the family name to have me in here, cough up some cash and we can get me out. But many prisons were much like open prisons today, so you could carry on your trade. And of course, your children would be sent out to work as well, like young Charles was. So there would be money coming in. Now, Little Dorrit, unsurprisingly, Little Dorrit is about the experiences of the Dorrit family. And the first Dorrit we meet is William Dorrit, who is the father of the family.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  And he is imprisoned in the Marshalsea, just like John Dickens was. And there's a lot about Little Dorrit, which is basically about imprisonment for debt, and large amounts of it are set here in the Marshalsea. And the thing about William Dorrit, though, is he's not here for a short period, he's for quite a long period. In fact, he's here for so long, he becomes known as the father of the Marshalsea. And this is largely because of William Dorrit's character, his lack of resolve, a lack of resource. When he's imprisoned here, he knows he owes more money than he can hope to repay, but he doesn't know why. But yet, he doesn't challenge the debt, he just accepts his fate.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And the first we see of him is him coming into the Marshalsea here, all grumbling and indignant that he should be imprisoned. But of course, he's doing nothing about it.

• 11:43Dan Snow?

  Does his father loom large? You think about Mr. MacOrbor as well in Dickens, you think about Mr. Dorrit. They're not unattractive characters, they're just completely useless. Is that, do you think that's old Mr. Dickens there, looming large?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Oh, quite possibly, yes. I mean, as I'm sure you appreciate, writers do tend to regurgitate lots of details and mix them all up together. So I'm not sure how likeable William Dorrit actually is, to be frank. But certainly, when we first meet him, he has this terrible lack of resolve. Dickens describes his settling down to the Marshalsea in terms that suggest that he knows he's now onto a good thing.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key, but the lock and key that kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart. But being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Relatable. So Dickens describes a man who realises that actually he's on to a good thing. He's safe in here, and that is no doubt why he stays so long. And of course he moves his family in with him. Mrs Dorrit, the prisoner's wife, she gives birth in the Marshalsea to Amy, who is little Dorrit, because she doesn't grow beyond a child's stature. And Amy Dorrit is eight years old when her mum dies, and they're still in the Marshalsea. And Amy Dorrit grows up in the Marshalsea. And so that's how long the Dorrits are in the prison. And this gives Dickens a chance to give his readership a vicarious experience

• 13:50Speaker 04

  of the life of the debtor in a Victorian, or Georgian, prison. We're going to move on to something which is very much a survivor from Dickens's time, and actually well before Dickens's time, as we head up Borough High Street.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  So we're in George Yard now, and as you can see, we have the George Inn here.

• 14:22Dan Snow?

  One of the great pubs of London, the world, the world.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Still, as you see, a functioning pub. This is Central London's only surviving galleried coaching inn.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  And the galleries are the two levels of balcony that you can see there.

• 14:38Dan Snow?

  Yes, we're standing on what used to be a cobbled courtyard. You've got bedrooms set back, you've got these very lovely, they've got wooden balustrades with columns. Like, just galleries are basically that people can access all the bedrooms from. And beneath it all, you've got the bar with its lovely twisted oak beams. And you just make you want to go in there and have a delicious mulled wine.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  We're going back to the days of the stagecoach trade. Borough High Street here being one of the main roads into the city of London. You would get there by stagecoach in the days before the arrival of the trains. So stagecoaching goes really back to the 17th century.

• 15:14Dan Snow?

  Tell me about Dickens's relationship with this place.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Well, Dickens will have used the inn. Don't forget, he was a journalist as well as being a novelist and essayist. And so he drank in most of the pubs of London. There is the story that there was a particular chair here that was Mr Dickens's chair. Although you have to treat some of those stories with a little bit of suspicion. I doubt that there was a chair where if you were sitting in it, everyone would come along. Get out of there, Mr Dickens's chair, he'll be along soon. But the George does also appear in Little Dorrit. And the thing about the George is it's an ideal setting for a reading from the posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club, which is Charles Dickens's first published novel.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  In the borough especially, there still remains some half dozen old inns, which have preserved their external features unchanged and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments for private speculation. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  The Dickens describes these inns as being antiquated. There's only about half a dozen of them left. They're all disappearing, but they're now a thing of the past. He says they furnish material for ghost stories. This is a time when most ghost stories were still Gothic, you know, leaning back to the Middle Ages and so on. So a ghost story brings with it the connotations of the past. They're already a thing of the past, even as the railways are starting to appear. So the days of the stagecoach inn and the stagecoach trade were already numbered even before Victoria came to the throne. But it was under the Victorians that the stagecoach trade was just pushed out completely. It doesn't come back to the 20th century with the internal combustion engine.

• 17:19Dan Snow?

  I love the idea that Dickens would have visited this exact pub and thought it was rather quaint, just like us.

• 17:28Dan Snow?

  Our tour through Dickensian London continues after this.

• 17:34Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 20:22Dan Snow?

  You've brought me to the riverside now. Can see the dome of St. Paul's there, which Dickens would have seen. We've got the river low tide, so the mudflats exposed. Got a few mudlakers looking for Roman coins and bits of glass and things on the mudflats there. What's going on here?

• 20:37Speaker 04

  The reason I brought you to this part of the river is because Charles Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, opens right here. The opening lines talk of a small boat being rowed along this stretch of the river between the two bridges. You can just see London Bridge over to the right, and then to the left we have Southwark Bridge, although nowadays it's obscured by the Cannon Street Railway Bridge, which wasn't there at the time that Our Mutual Friend was being written. It was 1864 to 65. As I mentioned, we have a little boat being rowed backwards and forwards. There were two people in it. One of them, a man called Jesse Hexham, known as Gaffer Hexham.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  He's at the rear of the boat, he's got his hand on the tiller, steering the boat, but he's scanning the river, looking for something. And the boat is being rowed by his daughter Lizzie. And she's rowing along, and suddenly Gaffer sees what he wants, and he puts the tiller hard over to turn the boat. So Lizzie amends her sculling, so that she can turn the boat more easily. And they come alongside what Gaffer has seen, and he leans over the back to tie it to the back of the boat with a piece of rope. But he's over there for a bit of a time, before suddenly he comes back into the boat.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the boat. His arms were wet and dirty, and he washed them over the side. In his right hand he held something, and he washed that in the river too. It was money. He chinked it once, and he blew on it once. "For luck", he hoarsely said, before he put it in his pocket.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  So he's got some coins. Obviously coins don't float, but they do if they're in something that floats. And what he has seen is a corpse, and that is what he has tied to the back of his boat. He is one of a number of people who are described on the river as going out to find dead bodies. And they bring them ashore, so they can hand them in, in the hopes that there'll be a reward. But on the way, of course, they help themselves to whatever they find that's useful in the pockets, and money, of course, is always useful.

• 23:02Dan Snow?

  And it's a powerful opening, isn't it? It's got kind of a hardscrabble life, looking for corpses. Stealing from the dead, a young daughter, and to do hard manual labour with her dad. I mean, he sets that stall early in that book.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, the Hexhams, the father Gaffer and his two children, they live in a little hovel down by the river. And that's how Gaffer Hexham gets his living, well, tries to scratch a living. He's a waterman, someone who would ferry people up and down the river and across the river. But by the eighteen sixties, improvements in transport means that the watermen aren't getting quite the work that they used to do. Hence, he needs to supplement his income. And he represents the scavenger economy that you get in Victorian cities, where people go out to find things. You mentioned mudlarking. Well, nowadays, people do it as an interest, but it used to be a way of life. People would scavenge for specific things. So mudlakers would go down to the riverbed at low tide,

• 24:00Speaker 04

  and they would find things that they could sell. And if they couldn't sell them, they could keep them and use them, so they wouldn't have to buy things. You would have people, and this area especially, who would collect the pure. And if you've come across collecting the pure, it's basically dog excrement. And you would pick it off the streets, and you put it in a bag. And when you had enough, you would take it to the tanners, where they made the leather. And just to the, slightly down river here, just to the east, we have the area of Bermondsey, which was very much part of the leather-creating area. In fact, most of the tanneries in London were down that way. And basically, the tanners would rub this excrement over the skins to dry it before it was tanned, called purifying the leather.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  That's why it's called collecting the pure, which being short for purify.

• 24:48Dan Snow?

  I have had the misfortune of doing that in a reconstructed medieval tannery, and the smell is horrific, and the effluent is extraordinary. That would have entered the Thames just here. It is December day, we're both shivering, we're looking down that brown river, and the people, even today, mudlarking on either side of it, it would have been a grim existence, wouldn't it?

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely, literally scratching a living from what they could do. And this was a working river, of course, so... You would have had ships coming up here, the lightest, the little barge-shaped boats would be transferring cargoes to the riverside wharves and so on. And this is one of the ways that bodies ended up in the river. Because you'd get these sailors coming ashore, who would be engaged for the voyage only, they'd be paid off. Of course, the first thing they're going to do is head to the pub, for companionship and alcohol, and maybe a bit of sex as well. And they would come out of the pub, having drunk more than they'd been drinking for a long while. They'd be all hot from the pub, all hot from the bodies and everything, and a little loose

• 25:52Speaker 04

  on their legs, suddenly in the river, freezing cold river, alcohol, as you may know, reduces your resistance to the cold, heart attack. So that's how you would get some of the bodies in the river, but of course, a number of them would be through other means, including suicide.

• 26:19Dan Snow?

  So now we're set, we've got London Bridge, we've got the old trains coming to London Bridge now behind us, we're in a kind of covered walkway. It feels a bit Dickensian, this.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely, I mean Dickens's London was full of little nooks and crannies and so on that have disappeared mainly because of Victorian development. But the reason we've come to London Bridge, we're going back to Little Dorrit here, and we are going to address something that was quite a point of concern in the eighteen twenties, which was prostitute suicides. In the eighteen twenties, there were a number of recorded suicides into the Thames, mainly actually from Waterloo Bridge, so just upriver from here. In fact, Thomas Hood, who was a Victorian poet with quite a social conscience, he wrote

• 27:11Speaker 04

  a poem about this called The Bridge of Sires, and so Waterloo Bridge for a while was known as the Bridge of Sires, but London Bridge had its share. Now, in Little Dorrit, Amy, who, remember, is quite short, which is why she's called Little Dorrit, she has a friend called Maggie. And Maggie is tall. Maggie and Amy are out of the Marshalsea, visiting Amy's friend Arthur Clennam. The thing is, that they get back to the Marshalsea too late and it's closed. And Amy tries to make herself heard, and she can't. So they have to sit it out. As you can imagine, it gets really cold at night. Also, of course, disreputable types keep coming past, so they keep having to get up and go for a walk.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  About half past three in the morning, they're up on London Bridge. And they're walking along, and Dickens tells us that this young woman, a prostitute, comes up onto the bridge, and she is going to throw herself into the river. But she sees Amy and Maggie from behind. And she forgets her own troubles for a moment. She's so indignant that what she thinks of as a mother, taking her child around the streets of London in the small hours. She's so indignant at that, that she goes over to try and sort of remonstrate with this mum. And she accosts Maggie. Maggie is not really up to that kind of conversation. So the girl says, "Where are you going?" She goes, "Where are you going yourself?"

• 28:36Speaker 04

  So the young woman bends down to speak to Amy, who she thinks is a child, and takes Amy's hands and rubs them to warm them up.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  "Kiss a poor, lost creature, dear," she said, bending her face. "And tell me where she's taking you." Little Dorrit turned towards her. "Why, my god," she said, recoiling. "You're a woman." "Don't mind that," said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that had suddenly released hers. "I am not afraid of you." "Then you'd better ad be," she answered. "Have you no mother?" "No." "No father?" "Yes, a very dear one. Go own to him, and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night." "I must thank you first. Let me speak to you as if I really were a child." "You can't do it," said the woman.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  "You are kind and innocent, but you can't look at me out of a child's eyes. I never should have touched you, but I thought that you were a child." And with a strange, wild cry, she went away.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Now, Amy wants to talk to this young woman, but the young woman just feels the isolation of her trade.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  However benevolent Amy is, and of course she's very benevolent because she's a Dickens heroine, but as far as the young woman's concerned, nobody who is an adult could look on her and not see what she does for a living. Only a child who doesn't know of such things could see her just as a young woman for who she actually is. And that encapsulates the isolation and the insecurity and fear of these women trapped in this situation. And it was something that a number of Victorians were trying to address. You may know that the age of consent for sex used to be 12, and it wasn't raised until 1875.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  It was raised to 13, then in 1885 it was raised to 16, which it is now, to try and combat child prostitution by making it illegal. There were various efforts, some more well thought out than others. And Dickens himself was involved in a venture which opened in 1847 called Urania Cottage. He got alongside Angela Burdett Coots, who was a very important Victorian philanthropist, and they started this venture where they would help rehabilitate girls. They would get them out of prostitution and teach them accomplishments and how, basically, to run their lives in a more stable way. The only thing about it which is strange to our eyes

• 31:26Speaker 04

  is that those who actually stayed with the programme would then be shipped off to Australia. And you can understand if you look at it from the Victorian point of view. Australia, since the early 19th century, was actually developing from a penal colony to proper colonies where people were going voluntarily. And it gave you the opportunity of a fresh start when no one would know you. And, you know, if they stayed in London, they would be far too vulnerable. And going outside London for a Londoner in those days was more or less like going abroad anyway. So it was giving them an opportunity. As I say, strange one to our eyes, but at the time seemed to make sense.

• 32:13Dan Snow?

  So we're in the city proper now. This is, we're in the heart of it.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  So what we're going to do is actually move north off of Lombard Street. We've just come into George Yard here and we're going through the little archway. We've got St Michael's Alley in front of us, Bengal Court off to the left. These little, what we would see as side streets, but which were actually ordinary streets in medieval London. So this is part of the old London that was spared and was rebuilt after the Great Fire, but spared Victorian development.

• 32:46Dan Snow?

  This is now, today, this is a little piece of London that looks like walking through somewhere like, I don't know, Venice where there's little alleyways, too small for cars. But it's sort of been normal back then.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  It would. Shall we actually go in?

• 32:56Dan Snow?

  Let's go in.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Have a look.

• 32:57Dan Snow?

  Let's go into the Warren of Alleyways here.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  To the left.

• 33:01Dan Snow?

  That's magical, isn't it? I mean, there's this Warren of little streets, pedestrian only, pubs, tailors. You do get a sense of a lost London here.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 33:10Dan Snow?

  I love it. The Jamaica Wine House.

• 33:16Dan Snow?

  We'll be back with more Christmas history after this.

• 33:22Speaker 03

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• 33:54Speaker 01

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• 34:29Speaker 04

  Now, this is Bengal Court, just off of George Yard, and as you can see, it's quite narrow.

• 34:34Dan Snow?

  So it's about, well, I'd say it's about three metres wide. If I lay down, it's about one and a half mees.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's only a couple of paces across. One of the reasons, of course, why the great fire spread like it did, because people were crowded into these streets, trying to put the fires out in buildings, and you couldn't get the little fire engines in, and that sort of stuff. So, what's the connection, though, with Scrooge? Well, Ebenezer Scrooge has a counting house, so he has a couple of rooms in an ordinary house which he rents for his business, which he carried out with his business partner Jacob Marley until the previous year, when Marley died. And so Scrooge has got two rooms: he's got a proper-sized room for him, a little teeny room, more like a box room really, for his clerk and sole employee,

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Bob Cratchit, who has a very thin time of things overall.

• 35:28Dan Snow?

  He has a very sickly little son.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  A very sickly little son, Tiny Tim, yeah, absolutely. To our eyes, it can get a bit saccharine, but they do represent the grinding poverty that some people had to put up with. Now, the thing about Scrooge, though, is where he lives. Much of the action of A Christmas Carol, which was written and published for the Christmas market in 1843, is Scrooge leaves, however reluctantly, his business, as Christmas Eve goes on towards the evening. And Bob Cratchit runs home to his home at Camden Town, and Scrooge makes his way back to the rooms where he lives. And this is where it's important to understand the counting house culture,

• 36:12Speaker 04

  because Scrooge took over the rooms where Jacob Marley used to live. He died the previous Christmas Eve, a whole year ago. And these are in a house which is given over to counting houses. It's a big house, down the alleyways, and a little court, but although it's big, it's empty, because apart from Scrooge's rooms, no one lives there. All the other rooms are counting houses. So when Scrooge gets there, he's going to an empty...

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Quiet, freezing cold, dark house. And we can imagine him getting there. I mean, I'm sure you know the story, it's a very familiar one, but he puts his key in the keyhole and suddenly the knocker transforms into the face of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, just for a moment, and then comes back to a knocker again. And so Scrooge, not got a great deal of imagination about him, but even he is a little unsettled. And so when he opens the door, he has a look round the back to see if the back of Jacob Marley's head is sticking out of it. When he opens that door, remember, this is a big house and it's a cavernous, cold house, because there's nobody there now, all the businesses have shut up for the day and gone home.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  It's pitch dark, because there's no one there to light anything, so he lights a little candle by the door to see his way up the stairs. Freezing cold, because all the fires have gone out, nobody there to keep the fires up, and it's silent, because again, there's no one there. And he lights his little candle, it gives him a pinpoint of light, as he goes up the stairs towards his rooms. And he shuts himself in, locks himself in, has his little bit of supper, and then he sits down in an armchair. And as he does, a bell catches his eye, one of these communicating bells on the wall, that links up with a room a few floors above him, and it's been disused for so long, no

• 38:08Speaker 04

  one actually knows why it was put there in the first place. But as he sits there, something happens.

• 38:19Speaker 05

  It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset, that it scarcely made a sound, but soon, it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house. This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks of the wine merchant seller. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  The cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight towards his door. "It's humbug still," said Scrooge, "I won't believe it." His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame of the fire leapt up, as though it cried, "I know him, Marley's ghost," and fell again.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  So the apparition of the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner, Jacob Marley, dead business partner, which has been recreated so many times, on television, on cinema, on stage, I mean, the Muppets have done it for goodness sake. We're so familiar with it now, we tend to lose the sense of terror and the frisson of chill that the original readership would have had when they read that moment. But nowadays, I mean, when we leave work, we go home, and we go either to a house in a street, or a flat in a block, and even if we don't connect with our neighbours, they're there, there are always people around. The equivalent to Scrooge's experience would be if we went home to an empty office block,

• 40:22Speaker 04

  and we lived in one of the offices, and everybody else has gone, and all the powers off and everything, you know. We don't appreciate how alone he is, and one of the strengths of the ghost's story comes from the vulnerability of the subject. You're on your own, there's no one to help you, there's no one even to see what you're seeing, and there's no one there to help Scrooge. And so, that terrible vulnerability, we lose, I think, because we've seen it reenacted in so many times, but also because we don't know what the counting house culture was like.

• 40:57Dan Snow?

  Okay, here we go.

• 41:00Dan Snow?

  Right, where are we? We're still in this little warren of streets here, aren't we? We're not far from Ebenezer Scrooge.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  We've left Bengal Court, we came along St Michael's Alley and here we are in the churchyard of St Peter Corn Hill. The churchyard here wouldn't have been landscaped as the garden that it is now. It would have been a disused, derelict burial ground, uncared for, with the tombstones starting to lean over. You will have noticed that we've actually come up above street level into the churchyard. A similar situation back at the churchyard at St George the Martyr where we started. And this is because of overcrowding. Not by the living, but by the dead. London was growing in the early 19th century, increasing numbers of people coming in, and

• 41:47Speaker 04

  with an increasing density of living population, you get, in due course, an increased number of dead people to be buried. But where are you going to bury them? You've only got the churchyards and dissenting burial grounds and Quaker burial grounds, that kind of thing. Very small, designed for a medieval city. So, what you would do is you would bury as many people as you could, then you would go to the old graves, people haven't visited for ages, remove the gravestone, dig down to the coffin and jump up and down on it, and smash the coffin and the remains into the ground. And then you cover it with soil.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  As far as anyone knows, it's just an ordinary grave, and the coffin goes in there. Trouble was, after a while, there's a limit to the amount of times you could do that, and the coffins weren't in the ground long enough, so they started building up on top of each other. So, they decided to put graves between graves, and there are stories of grave diggers digging down and knocking the side of a coffin off with their spade, and an arm starts swinging out. And they haven't got time to put it back together, so they just chop the arm off with their spade, bundle it in, and then just shove the side of the coffin back on, and then carry on digging their grave. But inevitably, the graves between the graves were getting quite close to the surface as well.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  So, they started raising the level of the churchyards to get some soil between all these bodies and the open air. But inevitably, with that amount of corpses in there, decomposing away like nobody's business... You can imagine what is filtering up, percolating through the soil, and the health hazard that was causing, especially as these vapors start to condense on the buildings around the churchyards. This was another thing the Victorians had to address. And from 1852, within the space of about thirty years, you get thirteen Burials Acts passed. And what they do is they stop buryings in the city and central London, and they start bringing it under control. And that is when you get the big cemeteries around

• 43:55Speaker 04

  what were then the edges of London: Highgate, Tower Hamlets, Abney Park, Brompton and so on, what were later to become known as the Magnificent Seven. And of course, the big necropolis at Brookwood, near Weybridge in Surrey, which had its own dedicated railway line. So, getting rid of that health hazard of burials, overburials. And we can actually, through Dickens's word, get a feeling of what those graveyards were like. Because they're mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit, but of course, they're also mentioned in A Christmas Carol. Because after the visit of Jacob Marley, Scrooge is visited by three more ghosts: the ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present,

• 44:39Speaker 04

  but then the feared ghost of Christmas yet to come. Shrouded in black, you can't see the face. All you can see is this exposed hand with a pointing finger that it uses to communicate. Doesn't say a word, just points. It takes Scrooge through the city of London, showing him scenes connected with the death of a businessman who is unmourned and despised by all. And he thinks, well, this is obviously the example I'm being shown. I must change my ways to live in a different way from this man. And then, the ghost takes him to the churchyard so that he can find out who this businessman actually is.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place, walled in by houses, overrun with grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life, choked up with too much burying fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  So he describes the churchyard as full of vegetation, the growth of vegetation's death. So many nutrients in the ground from these decomposing bodies that all these vines and what have you, and creepers are twining around each other, choking each other out. And he talks of the graveyard as if it's a living thing. It's fat with replete appetite. Now, replete appetite, that's what you get when you go to the buffet restaurant, the all-you-can-eat restaurant, and you'd have that dangerous last plate full. And then you get out in the street and it all settles down and you realise you should never have touched that last one. That's being fat with replete appetite. And that's what these places are like.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  They've swallowed down so many corpses. And that is one of these little wretched burial grounds, surrounded by buildings, tucked away down a little courtyard where that businessman is buried, who of course, as we've come to learn, is Scrooge himself. That is where he's going to end up.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  We've left St Peter's Churchyard now. We've come up St Peter's Alley onto Corn Hill, the street along which Bob Cratchit slid 20 times on an ice slide in honour of Christmas Day. And we've come up here to Threadneedle Street and we're round the back of the Royal Exchange. So, across the road, we have the Bank of England. These are two institutions that are at the heart of the City of London's financial story. And so we are in the traditional financial district of the old city, although the city itself now is a financial district in its own right. But we're not here for business, we're here for this sculpture here, the statue of George Peabody.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Now, Peabody was a businessman, he was a merchant banker from Danvers in Massachusetts in the United States, a self-made man. But he came over and settled in London in 1837, the year that Victoria ascended the And he is known not for his business ventures, but for his philanthropy. He became known as the father of modern philanthropy. And in this city, in London, he is known for Peabody's Housing. The trust fund that he set up in eighteen sixty-two as the first proper attempt to address the terrible housing crisis that we had in the nineteenth century.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  It was a time when profiteering landlords and developers were filling their homes with families who could only rent a room at a time. Central government, local authorities, had no interest in addressing this issue. So Peabody got involved. So a philanthropist. Dickens was a journalist as well as being a novelist, and he knew of the sharp practices and hard hearts of the city of London. But he was also well acquainted with philanthropy, with people who used their resources for good. He was a friend of Angela Burdette Coots, a granddaughter of Thomas Coots, who founded Coots Bank.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  And he also knew another philanthropist, a fictional philanthropist, Ebenezer Scrooge. We tend to forget that side of Scrooge. We think of the unreformed character. But Dickens gives us an example of how a businessman could actually operate in a good way. Because he sees the three ghosts, the Christmas ghosts, and he wakes up the next morning, finds out that it's only Christmas Day, and he can now put things right. He's a reformed character. Now, the most immediate recipients of his benevolence and his philanthropy is, of course, the Cratchit family.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  And the following day, Boxing Day, when Bob Cratchit turns up for work, he is greeted with the unusual announcement that his salary is going to be raised and that Scrooge is going to help him and help his family. And they sit down over a bowl of smoking bishop, which is a kind of heated punch. And Dickens sums up Ebenezer Scrooge, the reformed character, in this way.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  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. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  So, people do good, they seek to help, and people think they're fools. And Ebenezer Scrooge is taken for a fool, no doubt by many of his business colleagues and associates, but that doesn't matter to him. Doesn't matter what people think of him. What matters to him is that he is helping, he's redeeming his time, and that he's helping out. And so it matters that you help, it matters that you are there for people, irrespective of what others think of you, which I'm sure is the thought that we all share today.

• 51:35Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you very much, that was a wonderful tour.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 51:46Dan Snow?

  And that brings us to the end of my Origins of Christmas series. Well, you might say, well, sure, Dan didn't talk to us about Stuart Christmas, or Christmas in the 20th century, or Plantagenet Christmas, or early medieval Christmas. Well, don't worry, trying to save some content back for next December. Thanks for listening, and if you enjoyed this series, spread the Christmas cheer and leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts, thank you. I'm Dan Snow, and this series was produced by Marin de Forge and edited by Dougal Patmore. Happy Christmas, folks.

• 52:36Speaker 01

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• 53:04Speaker 03

  Verizon Fios celebrates the holiday hostess with the mostest. When the whole family's over, you've got Verizon Fios Whole Home Wi-Fi. Fast, reliable, 100% fiber internet in every room. So your little nephews can blast video games on full volume. Your daughter can stream football under the dinner table. And Grandpa can turn on the same movie for the third time. A full house with full Wi-Fi coverage. So everyone can do their own thing together. 100% fiber internet for 100% holiday hosts. Switch to Verizon Fios today. All home Wi-Fi included with all Fios gig plans. Availability varies.

• 53:37Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week. And as always, something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com/subscribe.