The Scandalous Life of Charles Dickens | Christmas Special | 1

Think Dickens was all jolly carols and festive cheer? Not so. Behind the snowy scenes and spirit of goodwill, the so-called “Father of Christmas” was hiding a scandalous love life. Matt and Alice dive into the details with co-hosts of Wondery’s Legacy podcast, writer Afua Hirsch and historian Peter Frankopan. Plus, did Britain's most famous novelist really "invent" Christmas? Afua and Peter weigh in. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting https://wondery.com/links/british-scandal/ now. Do you have a suggestion for a scandal you would like us to cover? Or perhaps you have a question you would like to ask our hosts? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:20Alice Levine?

  Folkestone to London train, Kent, June the 9th, 1865.

• 0:26Alice Levine?

  Fifty-three-year-old Charles Dickens pulls his top hat over his eyes,

• 0:32Alice Levine?

  slips into the first-class carriage with a glass of sherry. He's determined to enjoy the last few hours of his train journey. He leans one arm on the wood-paneled wall to steady his feet before he ducks into the discreet, high-backed velvet seat in his compartment.

• 0:48Matt Forde?

  This is not Avanti West Coast.

• 0:50Alice Levine?

  This is the dream, isn't it? You've felt you've had a good train journey now, if the trolley still has twixts left.

• 0:55Matt Forde?

  And if you arrive within three hours of the scheduled arrival time.

• 1:00Alice Levine?

  His eyes settle on the young woman already seated in the compartment, sees her watching as he takes out his manuscript and lays it on the table. He's due to submit his latest installment of Our Mutual Friend in a day's time. He should be making final edits. Is that the great author's latest novel? He takes in her slender frame, her pale complexion, her long, dark hair. Perhaps I can make you a character? He sees her smile. He's about to offer her a few pages to read, but before he can, he's rocked forward in his seat as a loud thunk shakes the carriage. He looks across at her in concern. Oh, God, I do hope that wasn't a...

• 1:45Alice Levine?

  But before she can finish, he's violently thrown forward into the glass window as a second, deafening crash fills the carriage. He grips the armrest in panic as the entire carriage starts to lurch to its side. Christ! He stares out of the window as the train starts to tilt. He realises in horror that they're on a bridge. His eyes widen as he watches the entire back end of the train twist off its tracks and crash into the muddy waters of the river a few metres below. For a moment, he's convinced their carriage too will tip into the abyss, before it shudders to an ear-screeching halt. He blinks as dust and debris settle in the air, and a loud scream pierces the silence.

• 2:31Alice Levine?

  He pulls himself to his feet, races to the front, pushes through the doors, and steps out onto the cast-iron bridge, taking in the devastation. Half the train is dangling into the river. Bodies litter the water. Two bloodied limbs stick out from under hulking pieces of splintered metal. He can taste a terrible, earthy odour: iron mixed with salt and oil. He starts to run along the bridge to help, when he feels a hand grab his shoulder. Mr Dickens? He flinches at the sound of his name, turns to face the conductor, his ripped cap, his bloodied face.

• 3:12Matt Forde?

  I'm afraid you only booked an advanced single, and this has to be a super-advanced, off-peak single, so you are gonna have to pay the difference in the fare, I'm afraid.

• 3:21Alice Levine?

  I didn't realise you were travelling with us. I'm so sorry, I need to collect all the passenger details. Actually, I don't suppose you could help? He stares at the ledger in the conductor's hands. A few names already scrawled across the page. He looks up as the sound of sirens fill the air: Emergency Services. It will only be a matter of minutes before they, and the press, arrive. He feels a chill course through his body, as his thoughts turn not to the crash, but to the woman in his carriage. Because she's not just some woman. She is Ellen Turnan, the actress he met seven years ago, when she was just eighteen.

• 4:05Alice Levine?

  She is the secret reason his marriage ended.

• 4:10Matt Forde?

  Charles Dickens. What is he doing?

• 4:14Alice Levine?

  He thinks of his children, his reputation, his legacy.

• 4:19Matt Forde?

  You'll never end up on a tenner if you carry on like this, mate.

• 4:22Alice Levine?

  Or it might make no difference whatsoever.

• 4:24Matt Forde?

  That is also a fair point.

• 4:27Alice Levine?

  He realises he needs to get her out of here. He needs to scrub her name from the ledger, scrub her name from all the records. Because the world can never know that Charles Dickens, the greatest moralist of his age, has been having a seven-year affair with a woman younger than his daughters.

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• 5:28Speaker 03

  A dark night, a quiet house, but inside, danger was lurking.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Oh, not really. We have Xfinity Shield, so we're not worried. What if protecting your home and devices could be drama-free? Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Not available in all areas.

• 5:46Alice Levine?

  Right, Matt, I have a scandalous Christmas personality for you. It's one of the most famous people probably ever associated with this time of year.

• 5:55Matt Forde?

  Uh, Oliver Cromwell?

• 5:56Alice Levine?

  Good guess, actually. Band Christmas, bit of a wrong'un.

• 6:00Matt Forde?

  Bit of a wrong'un, invaded Ireland. No, I'm guessing it's not him.

• 6:05Matt Forde?

  Bob Geldof?

• 6:05Alice Levine?

  Oh, the Band-Aid controversy. No, I'm actually thinking about a man who many people say invented Christmas. I'm thinking of Charles Dickens.

• 6:16Matt Forde?

  Amazing, because I love his

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Work, I want to find out more about him, but given that this is British scandal, I'm worried now I'm going to end up hating him.

• 6:26Alice Levine?

  I think you kind of should worry because today we are delving into the life of probably Britain's most famous novelist, but as you have suspected, Dickens wasn't just a jolly, happy, spray-on-snow-on-the-windows, fun-loving guy.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Okay, he wasn't just that, but that is a big part of who he is. And when you think of Dickens, you think of Christmas, you think of food, you think of wine, you think of more food. So I will also be bearing that in mind to make myself feel better.

• 6:54Alice Levine?

  I'm almost reluctant to tell you why he qualifies as a scandal protagonist, but of course, we wouldn't be talking about him if there wasn't something controversial. Just to give you a hint of where I'm going with this, as is a theme we see time and time again on this show, he didn't treat women very well at all.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Okay, well, I'm bracing myself for this. I'm going to try and live the maxim, love the art, not the artist, and, and really just try and focus on his love of Christmas.

• 7:23Alice Levine?

  I'm going to make that difficult for you, Matt, but to help us sift through all of the different contradictions that Mr. Charles Dickens throws up, we are today joined by historians and presenters of Wondery and Goalhanger Podcast Legacy, Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan. Afua and Peter, thank you so much for joining us. I should get the important stuff out of the way first. When it comes to Christmas, where are you on the scale of Matt Ford to Bar Humbug?

• 7:48Speaker 06

  If Scrooge is a zero and Matt's a 10, I'm like an eight or a nine.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Afua, hang on, how come you're an eight? I thought you're a solid nine and a half. Do you know where Dickens has ruined Christmas for me is that for me, I suspect like most people listening, you've got to be cold, right? So if it's not cold, it's not Christmas. So the tree's got to go up, that bit where you're blowing it's your hands when you're walking down the street. And that feels very Northern European and very unusual. So if you live somewhere that isn't freezing cold or near the Arctic Circle, it's great if you're living in Britain or Scandinavia, but that Christmas idea that chills to your bones, that's not something that's shared by most of the world. So I do feel that Dickens has framed a type of Christmas that means you've got to eat, you've got to put on excess weight because, you know, when it's freezing cold outside, you need a bit of extra, extra around you.

• 8:37Alice Levine?

  You're so right, we don't see enough cinematic performative handwarming anymore.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  Maybe it's my Instagram feed, I keep being pitched, and it's also my age, I keep being pitched, you know, hand warmers and gilets that have electric heating inside them. That tells you not about my algorithm.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  You forward those to me, please, Peter.

• 8:56Alice Levine?

  The algorithm just gives you what you've been asking for, so you've really told on yourself there, Peter.

• 9:01Matt Forde?

  You guys have done a legacy series on Charles Dickens, which is out now, and we love a story with twists. So, without giving too much away, when doing the research for this, was Charles Dickens what you expected?

• 9:13Speaker 06

  Yes and no. I knew, because he's an incredibly gifted writer, that he had to have a dark side. And I expected that, but I was unprepared for the scale of how dark his dark side was. So that's been a real journey for me. And the thing I always ask myself is, how connected are they? Without that inner torment, would he have been incapable of leaving the literary legacy he left us? Or is it possible to be a little bit less toxic and still be great?

• 9:45Alice Levine?

  Charles Dickens is seen as one of Britain's greatest writers. What is it about Dickens' work that is so appealing, do you think?

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Okay, well, I've got two ideas. One is that he's absolutely prolific. He has written so many books that are incredibly famous. So when Matt said, you know, when we were looking at Charles Dickens and we're going to look at him with a twist, you know, there's Oliver right there. But then on top of that, you've got David Copperfield, you've got Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Ten of Two Cities, you know, it's an incredible set of works. And Afewa and I, if you listen to us on Legacy, who would you guess we would compare his purple patch to when he was writing?

• 10:21Alice Levine?

  Matt looks very excited to answer this.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  80s pop music.

• 10:24Matt Forde?

  Oh, well, I was tempted to say Oasis, but I'm going to say The Beatles.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Both of those are probably better than what we came up with. We came up with early Wham.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Everyone's a winner. So Dickens is prolific. You know, he is a really, really, really hard worker. That's the first one. And the second one is he captures voices that don't normally get written about. Dickens was instrumental in changing the way that people thought about Britain in the Victorian period. And by focusing on people who were poor, who were malnourished, who were unhappy, you know, it was a different form of focus. And I think that was a really important way of of moving the focus away from elites.

• 11:02Matt Forde?

  And do you think when he's writing these books that part of his purpose is to shine a light? Is he an author who's also a social reformer? Or is this just the stuff that you thought made great books?

• 11:15Speaker 06

  He absolutely was a social reformer to his core. I mean, we could have a separate conversation about how radical his politics really were. But in terms of his genuine commitment to social reform, it's a huge part of his character. And he started off having a life that brought him in real proximity to the poor and destitute and exploited in London and in Britain. But he started his professional career as a court reporter who was actually seeing what was happening in the courts where people in extreme situations were fighting cases. He was reporting on Parliament where this was an era of great reform, where they were debating poor laws and how to manage the huge expansion of London's urban centres and the incredible proliferation in poverty that came with that. So before

• 12:00Speaker 06

  he was a novelist and storyteller in fiction, he was documenting in real time the changes that were happening around. And combined with his personal experience of what poverty really meant, that gave him a genuine drive to find a way of communicating to people and making them care about the suffering that was really happening at the time.

• 12:20Alice Levine?

  What did people think of Dickens whilst he was alive?

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. I mean, we asked whether he's the first proper global superstar, you know, and he's someone who gets a proper celebrity following from Buckingham Palace and Queen Victoria kind of wanting to meet him through to being mobbed in the United States. I mean, the way in which he is received when he does a couple of trips to the US and the number of copies he sells. I mean, it's a bit like waiting for for Harry Potter books to be released, you're queuing outside. Dickens is is the kind of proper global mame at that time, probably as, you know, as famous, if not more famous than Napoleon, et cetera, et cetera, Duke of Wellington. So I think he does touch on lots of different nerves. And one of the things that Dickens understands so well is about him understanding his own value,

• 13:07Speaker 05

  both as a writer but also as a celebrity figure.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  But I would just add to that. It's always fascinating how that converts into someone's life experience, because even if you take A Christmas Carol, which by any metric, maybe his most successful work, the most influential, the most well remembered, when it came out, it was a success at the time, which is not the case for all of his works. But he was still struggling financially. When A Christmas Carol came out, he was still in debt. He only made about seven hundred pounds. And in the first year after that book came out, he was overdrawn. He had to take a loan. And that is partly because he tended to live above his means and had a huge and rapidly growing family. But it wasn't that his life was gilded, and there's a real disconnect between how celebrated he was becoming as a novelist

• 13:53Speaker 06

  and the reality of his unpaid bills, his financial pressures. And I think it's really important to remember that, that the appreciation for his work didn't always mean he had the kind of opportunity and release from financial worries that people might imagine.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  He's one of the few non-monarchs that gets to define an era. We often talk about Georgian times or Elizabethan times, and we do talk about Dickensian times. So what do the phrases Dickensian Britain and Dickensian times evoke for you? I think it's probably more local, actually. I think it's Dickensian London specifically. I mean, I think that that is the focus that we think of. You're absolutely right. In terms of giving your name to a period, you've got to have done something pretty special to have have done that. I mean, I'm hoping for Frank Pannion London or Hershey.

• 14:42Alice Levine?

  I've heard you're trying to get that off the ground. Yeah, that has reached us.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  It's not going so well. Very little impact, but Blue Sky is still in its early days, so you never know. But I think it's that he's capturing London at a time that London is urbanising incredibly rapidly. The qualities of living for most people are absolutely terrible, you know, smokestacks belching out whole, life expectancy being incredibly short. And because he's writing about everyday life, I think he is also sort of seen as a people's champion because he's writing about normal people rather than about people going on shooting weekends. He does capture a real zeitgeist at the time, and in fact, today as well. You know, if you're a younger person learning about Britain in the 19th century, it's probably a toss up about whether you call it Victorian Britain

• 15:27Speaker 05

  or Dickensian, I think certainly London. As a historian, for what it's worth, so few women get their legacies protected that I'm probably in favour of putting Victoria up in front. But I do think that Dickens captures something about social change, about poverty, about the frustrations, about life expectancy and about the precariousness of of life, particularly for young people, actually. And I mean, that's something we talk about too, about Dickens's own childhood and upbringing, about how that must have helped frame some of those questions for him.

• 15:57Alice Levine?

  I'm wondering what kind of person he must have been to have been so brilliant at capturing the human condition, translating what you've described as the everyday, the conditions of the time, into a compelling narrative. Was he particularly empathetic? Was he an outsider looking in? What kind of person was he? What space did he inhabit?

• 16:17Speaker 05

  It's a really good question. Being an outsider gives so many perspectives and lots and lots of drive. And in fact, I probably wouldn't have thought about it before we started our first series. So many of the great figures in history are the ones who've really left an imprint, for sometimes for horrific reasons, sometimes for their ingenuity, sometimes for their leadership and so on. So many of them seem to have either been on the outside, had to force their way in, or to have had sort of damage done to them in their childhood, either by being dispatched to brutal boarding schools, or, you know, whatever, whatever it was. So I think there is something in the outsider's appeal and vision. And Dickens has an incredibly difficult childhood. You know, his father spends time in debtors'

• 17:01Speaker 05

  prison. And even as Dickens gets older, his father keeps on borrowing money in his name. And eventually Dickens even takes out newspaper adverts to say, my father's debt's nothing to do with me. So I think that the the trauma of being young and poor and shamed plays a real role for Dickens in the kinds of ways he writes, as well as the kind of character he has. Don't you think that's right, Afwan?

• 17:27Speaker 06

  I completely agree. And it's coming from this very deep place of trauma and suffering and resentment, and lived experience and compassion for other people that are living that reality.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  And what do you think it had been like in company? Would we have all gotten with him?

• 17:42Speaker 06

  Well, he was an incredible entertainer. I mean, he was a frustrated actor. He was one of these people who was incredibly good at one thing, but really wished he could have been really good at another. And got involved in putting on plays and in acting. And, you know, would often at a dinner party, kind of give a performance or recital. He loved reading his works to an audience. This is still an age where, in the absence of the radio or TV, people still did read books to each other as a form of entertainment. So he was a real performer. I think it's probably not unfair to say he liked the sound of his own voice. And he was a big drinker as well. I mean, there's lots of references, if you read anything about his life, to his famous gin punch. Actually, it sounds quite delicious. I think there's a cold version for summer, a hot version for winter. So he sounds like he was

• 18:27Speaker 06

  Probably a kind of larger than life character and and definitely the life and soul. And he he liked a party. He would stay up late and he's just one of these overachievers who would be drinking heavily, socializing madly and then up early banging out pages and pages of these bestselling novels. So he he'd seem to have a big appetite for life and for entertaining for sure.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  So Af was much lovelier and kinder than I am. I mean, I think what we both know is that he's the he's the sort of person at Christmas time who insists on always doing charades. It's always him who's gonna do the next one. And it's like, can we please go to bed now? Then he opens up a bottle of wine. And then almost more annoying than that is that when you're sleeping it off and, you know, regretting the fact that you never didn't get a chance to try and act out Titanic because he was doing it. He's, you know, turns up at breakfast having written 2000 words. So I think that there are challenges about being an overachiever and so on. But he definitely loves a party and I think wants to try and generate that idea that people should have fun. And that's obviously not a bad thing, but the fact that he's always trying to do it probably is a kind of pathological response to

• 19:32Speaker 05

  not wanting to be alone, not wanting to be unhappy, not wanting to be poor, not wanting to be hungry. And I mean, I completely sympathetic to that.

• 19:39Matt Forde?

  We mentioned his success earlier, but how did he handle fame?

• 19:43Speaker 06

  He wanted it. He wanted not so much fame, but he wanted recognition and he was disappointed when some of his books didn't do well. For example, Martin Chuzzlewit, he thought was a great masterpiece and it fell a little flat. And but he didn't necessarily want fame in the conventional sense. He went on this famous tour to America and actually refused to meet the US president because he just thought he was really boring. So, yeah, he wasn't somebody who was wowed by invitations to the White House or glamorous settings. He also refused to meet Queen Victoria, who was a huge fan of his work and kept inviting him. He eventually did meet her, but as somebody who was a Republican and very ambivalent and critical towards the monarchy,

• 20:24Speaker 06

  he was quite happy to turn down those kind of invitations. So I wouldn't say he was kind of seeking status and prestige and fame at any cost. Having said that, he did have this real class complex, maybe not surprisingly for someone who grew Up in a very ambiguous class position, you know, his father was had quite a respectable job that that then ended up in a debtors prison. He could have been weather educated, but ended up working in a factory. He always wanted to be accepted as a gentleman that didn't quite have in the incredibly rigid class system of Victorian Britain, didn't quite have the pedigree. And he can never quite get over his inner desire to be accepted

• 21:03Speaker 06

  by the upper classes. So like everything else in his in his psyche, it was quite a complex relationship with fame, status and celebrity, I would say.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  And I think you can tell that because apart from the fact he likes to surround himself with actors and, you know, other famous people. He rubs people up the wrong way. So John Stuart Mill, who I think wasn't most famous for his sense of humour anyway. Sort of takes against Dickens, you know, just thinks he's too much of a smart arse and, and, you know, too pleased with himself and too successful. And and I think that that kind of being trying to be cut down to size by people, which is an exhaustion. As I'm sure that both you, Matt and Alice know, when you do a successful podcast, you know, not not everybody in the world is thrilled with success. You know, that then people, you know, you can judge someone by that by their enemies. And I think Dickens, because he becomes such a global name, because he becomes so famous, because he makes so much money, although, as Afra says,

• 21:53Speaker 05

  I mean, we we slightly struggled to work out how he spent as much as he did. But I mean, he obviously spent it on something.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Champagne oysters, Peter.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, champagne oysters. How many of those can you get? A lot is obviously the answer. And also ten kids doesn't help. But I think that there are people who are kind of turning their nose up at him and thinking he's sort of too successful and too much for his own good. And and some of those reviews, I think they're more more deserved than otherwise. But some of it, I think, is just the price of being the public eye that that you you get people lining up to take a shot at, take a chunk out of you. And, you know, Dickens, I don't think is particularly upset. He does get angry about bad reviews. Not surprisingly, because they get read by everybody, but he keeps on going. So, I mean, his thick skin, I think, is is quite helpful in providing that sort of the motor to keep on running.

• 22:37Alice Levine?

  I think you're right. I think the enemies that Matt and I have made is really because of the champagne and oyster habit rather than the content. So that's what I'm going to tell myself.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  If you hadn't made them already, Alice, you just have now. We're sitting here, I should say, in in a golden palace, eating oysters and champagne while recording this podcast.

• 22:52Alice Levine?

  I can hear you shocking as we speak.

• 22:57Speaker 03

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  By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men. So he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress to the enemy

• 24:41Speaker 03

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• 24:53Matt Forde?

  Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 25:02Alice Levine?

  Afua and Peter, sorry to be a broken record, but we simply must talk about Scandal, and that brings us to Dickens' personal life. As with so many people that we cover in British Scandal, he was a bit of a love rat, to use the parlance of the day. What do you know about his marriage to Catherine Hogarth?

• 25:18Speaker 06

  I think this is one of the darkest stains on his legacy. He met his wife, they were in their early twenties, and there's nothing to suggest that it wasn't a kind of good faith romance in the beginning, although he had been snubbed by the woman he really wanted to marry because he wasn't from the right social pedigree. She was his kind of second choice, Catherine, who he ended up marrying. And I think it was fine at first, but the problem started to happen when she started to get pregnant and have his children. And he was pretty ambivalent about parenthood, mainly because he had such a difficult relationship with his own parents, who he really resented and blamed for having sent him to work in this traumatic factory and not having valued his education. And

• 26:02Speaker 06

  he was kind of okay when his first child, Charles, was born, but then the children just kept coming. And what I find, as a woman particularly, and as a mother, really hard to process about him, is that he kind of blamed his wife for the fact that he got her pregnant. He ended up talking much later in his life about how the heartbreak of his first relationship having not worked out led him to repress his feelings and not feel safe, I guess we would say in today's language, not feeling safe expressing affection for fear of rejection. And that really impacted both his relationship with his wife, but also his children. But as she had more and more children, he started to enjoy her company less and less. And it's that incredibly cliched thing of, as she started to age and put on

• 26:46Speaker 06

  weight and be worn down by all these childbirths and raising this family, he started to find her less interesting and start to be more interested in a younger woman. So the most unoriginal story ever in that respect.

• 27:00Alice Levine?

  And to put it in context, 10 children in total.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  A lot of children.

• 27:04Alice Levine?

  So a lot of lunchboxes to pack.

• 27:06Matt Forde?

  I mean, the diet, the family, the desire for success. He sounds like, sounds like a Victorian Boris Johnson.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  That's very good, Matt. We should get you to come on. Also, you know, the London, the chaos season. Johnson, Boris Johnson is absolutely his Dickensian character, 100%.

• 27:21Matt Forde?

  So as well as him blaming his wife for the 10 children and that putting a huge strain on the relationship. And there were rumours about infidelity, a lot of which focus on Nellie Turner. So tell us a bit about Nellie.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  She was an actress he met when he was 45 and she was 18. And she was part of this family of actors with her sister and mother in Doncaster that he met on the stage. And he kind of became the patron of the whole family. He'd kind of helped all of the women and pay for their travel and buy them things. I mean, there is evidence that he was quite fixated on Nellie from the outset. And we know that he wanted to seduce her, but failed at first. And the evidence points to the fact that he basically fixated on her, pursued her for a long time, until eventually she kind of was pressured into or felt that she had to repay his favour, really, with some kind of relationship. And there is evidence

• 28:18Speaker 06

  that she may have got pregnant by him and had a child and that he went to then great lengths to hide the relationship because much as Victorian Britain was as scandalous a place as any, there was such pressure to hide those kind of extramarital relationships that it would have really casted him out of polite society if it was known that he was having this fully consummated relationship. And he may have wanted to protect her as well. And I think like any relationship where there's a big power imbalance, it's not necessarily that he didn't have genuine feelings for her. It's just that there was such a big age gap. She was vulnerable. He used his money and influence in a way to control her, whether he intended that or not. And it seems like it was the obsession of a man who was

• 29:01Speaker 06

  unhappy in his own marriage and his own life and really yearning for that kind of youthful love affair that he'd never quite had, because the one he'd hoped to have before he got married didn't work out. And he never had that level of passion for his own wife. But... I think the evidence does point towards the fact that he and Nellie Turner did end up having a relationship and that it wasn't really what she wanted but may have had to get into.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Some people think that Dickens got gonorrhea. I mean, I think the challenge is that the information is so patchy and there's so there's lots of projection and Dickens is, I think, not the only figure in history from whom sometimes biographers claim a sort of special right to be able to guess what's going on. So, I mean, some of Dickens' biographers claim that his relationship with Nellie was absolutely platonic and pure and she's a sort of in a virgin bride or virgin girlfriend who he likes just walking around holding your hands with. Others take a slightly more downbeat view on what's actually going on between a 45-year-old man and an 18-year-old girl who he keeps paceful to live in quite some style. So it's very hard to work through what the reality is. I think it's quite hard

• 30:10Speaker 05

  to stand in the way of the fact that this is obviously a sexual relationship of some kind, but exactly what that trade-off is and, you know, what Dickens is doing, it's odd. I mean, he has strange relationships with women and the way he portrays women in his books is something we talk about because they're all very one-dimensional.

• 30:27Alice Levine?

  Is it fair to say that the marriage to Catherine wasn't just distant and eventually broken, but actually abusive?

• 30:34Speaker 06

  100%. I mean, initially, it doesn't seem to have been, but as he began to resent her more, he became really cruel to her. And when he decided he didn't want to be married to her anymore, he physically created a partition in their bedroom without consulting or warning her. He had someone put up a physical barrier. Imagine in your bedroom with your husband.

• 30:56Alice Levine?

  That's ambiguous. Come on now, Afua. You're being inflammatory.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  It could have been interpreted so many ways.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, don't give my wife ideas.

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Kills her all in the middle of the room and says, you're on that side and this is my side and, you know, you won't come into contact with me anymore. And when he does formally leave her and she moves out of the home, he has doctors visit her to try and diagnose her with mental illness. Now, this is the Victorian era where male doctors pronouncing on a woman's insanity.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  Could very easily and frequently did lead to a woman being incarcerated for life without hope of release in a mental asylum. So it's almost condemning someone to death or a lifetime prison sentence. And to wield that kind of power over somebody who you've been married to and had 10 children with, I just think is incredibly cruel and such an abuse of power. And it's one of those things, you know, that nightmarish scenario that if somebody tells you you're mad and you protest that you're not mad, it only confirms their, their theory. So he spread it about that she was insane. He told people that she wasn't fit to be a mother, that the children hated her, none of which there's any evidence for. And, and his children mainly sided with him. I don't think they felt like they had a choice. He was the one with the money and the resources.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  He was in charge of their education and, and their budgets. And one of his daughters later, after he was dead, said that she really regretted having sided with him over their mother and that she, she felt forever guilty about the cruelty that she was complicit in towards their mother. It was an unforgivable thing that he did to Catherine and she never really recovered.

• 32:33Speaker 05

  And of course, the irony is that so much of Dickens's books, or so many, so many of his ideas are about people being exploited. And you know, Dickens is, you know, as a novelist is, is really the champion of those who are downtrodden, who are taken advantage of and abused. And so in that sense, you know, the way in which he handled his own personal relationship with his wife, it's not just, I mean, hard to read and understand, you know, it sort of seems unforgivable that a man who is trying to explain how these kinds of abuses happen is so blind to his own character failings. But, you know, he's not the first man to, and sadly to behaved in that way of getting intoxicated on his own fame, success, power to, to hurt people around him, almost without realising.

• 33:17Matt Forde?

  And then once he and Catherine have split up, how does he treat her after that?

• 33:22Speaker 06

  He has no contact with her and just cuts her off completely. And also tries to pressure and bully his children into also having no contact with her. Imagine having 10 children and not having any access to them. And then having it put about that you were a terrible mother whose children hate you. And you know, for somebody, I mean, a Victorian woman for whom your identity is basically wife and mother, you're not really able to develop any other interests or careers. That's just catastrophic. And so that was the end of the relationship. And it happened gradually. It wasn't overnight, but you know, from having put up the wall in the room to then having this, to Catherine, very humiliating relationship with Nellie Turner,

• 34:03Speaker 06

  which, you know, she knew about eventually was incredibly callous. So that was it. And she wasn't at his funeral when he died, which kind of says it all.

• 34:14Alice Levine?

  Wow. How did his actions with Nellie and with Catherine impact Charles Dickens' public image? It can't have been a good look for a man who was celebrated as a man of moral virtue.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  Well, he worked quite hard to keep it out of the press. You know, he was a powerful man. Having said that, I don't think Dickens paid a huge amount of attention to public opinion. I mean, you know, he wasn't interested in the fact that the Queen Victoria admired his work and wanted to read it. So I don't think he cared too much, but he was quite, I think he was sensitive to the fact that he didn't want people gossiping. So he managed his own image carefully, you know, and managed access and was, you know, was very happy being adored by everybody and giving public readings about his latest work and taking the praise. But I think he was as discreet as he could be. I mean, he kept popping back and forwards to France, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of times. So he sort of, I think, found ways of finding ways to get up to what he wanted to without being in the public eye.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  I think there's one story that does speak to the extent to which he did want to hide the relationship. And that's in 1865, they were caught in a train crash. Dickens, Nellie Turner and her mother, they were at Staplehurst in Kent on this train. And at the time, it was a famous crash. The train crashed and plunged into a river. And the three of them were unharmed, but other people died in the crash. And then the press was on the scene. It was a big event and Dickens. First thought when they survived this train crash was to have Nellie and her mother couriered away before anyone could see them all together, in case it emerged that the three of them were together and people then began to speculate about why

• 35:52Speaker 06

  they were in a train carriage together. And it was only after they were taken away that he then began to help the injured and give them brandy and all the kind of benevolent things that Dickens would also do. But he did, even in that, you know, life-threatening situation, think immediately about protecting his reputation. So, you know, again, just the contradictions of the man who didn't really care what people thought on the one hand, but wanted to be respected and part of respectable society on the other, and who was kind and thinking of injured passengers in a train crash, but also preoccupied with his self-interest of managing the scene from his reputational standpoint.

• 36:31Alice Levine?

  Ghosts aren't real. At least, that's what journalist Tristan Redmond always believed. Sure, odd things happen in his childhood bedroom, but ultimately, he shrugged them off. Until he discovered that he wasn't alone, that everyone who lived there after him also had bizarre experiences they couldn't explain. And it gets even weirder. It just so happens that his wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door. Is this ghost somehow connected to her murder? He decides to go where no son-in-law should, digging up a cold case and asking questions that nobody wants answered. Like, could his wife's great-grandfather have gotten away with the perfect crime? This is a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming

• 37:13Alice Levine?

  coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. For the best bingeable series like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 37:31Matt Forde?

  In the summer of 1881, US Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley and 24 other men embarked on an ambitious scientific mission to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic. But despite several triumphs of discovery, the men would soon face tragedy. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, after Adolphus Greeley and his men arrive at their destination, more than 1,000 miles above the Arctic Circle, they get to work collecting scientific data and exploring the frigid landscape. But when resupply ships fail to reach them two summers in a row, they're forced to set

• 38:13Matt Forde?

  out on a desperate search for rescue, and not all of them will make it home. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers: Greeley Arctic Expedition early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 38:38Alice Levine?

  We should return to where we began, Matt's favorite subject, Christmas. It is said that Dickens invented Christmas. Is that true? And if so, what was Christmas like pre-Dickens?

• 38:50Speaker 05

  Well, call me a pedantic historian, but I'm pretty sure Jesus Christ invented Christmas and those around him.

• 38:56Alice Levine?

  Controversial.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  But I think what's interesting is that the Christmas we now think of today of snow and Father Christmas and groaning Christmas tables and lots of wine and families is something that's reasonably speaking, modern, as in the 19th century. I mean, I think there's lots of people like Washington Irving who had written about, who Dickens knew of and in fact knew, had written about the kind of scenes of getting everybody together and getting charades and all that, the food going. But Dickens, I think with Christmas Carol, I think the bit that he injects is not just the fact about carol singing and other things that were coming and going. Prince Albert, the consorts of Queen Victoria, he brought over the idea of Christmas trees and all that sort of thing.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  Sort of stuff. But where Dickens, I think, was, you know, does encapsulate it is that in In A Christmas Carol, the very famous story, and many of listeners will have seen the epic Muppet Christmas Carol, one of the all time great movies, is that the story of redemption, of forgiveness, of compassion, of kindness, of looking out for people who are unfortunate and of a total bastard, if I'm allowed to say that on your podcast.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  Please.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Realising that there's a purpose in life that doesn't just involve money and there's a purpose in in in charity and in kindness is something that Dickens captures better than I think anybody else has done. And because he does it so well in Christmas Carol, that's the now seminal movie that we watch at this time of the year. And and sort of knockoff versions of it, like It's A Wonderful Life, which is a knockoff, obviously, of A Christmas Carol with James Stewart. But I think I think that that is what people are really trying to get to with Christmas. I mean, we we lose it with Mariah Carey and Michael Buble and all the things that Matt likes.

• 40:39Speaker 06

  Tread carefully now, Peter, tread carefully.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  No, unless you're careful to remember why as we do it. And those those bits that Dickens is trying to remind us about about how to treat other people and how to share and whatever, I think are incredibly fundamental Christian messages that that do link back to an idea that is much purer and softer than than some of the hard sells that we get in shopping malls up and down the country in the approach to to twenty fifth of December.

• 41:06Speaker 06

  It's funny that you emphasise the Christian message, Peter, because for a long time, I mean, centuries, Christmas was a very heavily pagan festival in Europe. I mean, obviously centred on the birth of Christ, but it was all about as well incorporating these pagan rituals for midwinter. And what I find so fascinating is how kind of diminished Christmas was during the Industrial Revolution. And that really speaks to just how exploited workers were, that the idea of taking a public holiday to celebrate Christmas just fell completely out of favour. People were expected to work. They got no time off, not even Christmas. And that is where I think Dickens did play a role, because combining that message of compassion towards the poor, combating the exploitation of workers.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  And injecting the Christian message of forgiveness and compassion with that is really what helped shape the Christmas that we have today. And I think Dickens did play a huge role in that. And actually, partly as a result of Christmas Carol, that a few years later, Christmas became a national holiday in Britain for the first time. And do you think Dickens is consciously trying to reframe or reinvent Christmas?

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Or is it just a good backdrop for that story? I think it could be both. I think he was always on the lookout for a good story. You know, he has a fantastic turn of phrase. You know, he's not just selling ideas and getting books to fly out the door. And the opening line of A Christmas Carol is, you know, Molly was dead, colon, to begin with. And I think that he, by doing that, is challenging readers to use their imagination, which is after all what all god not good novelists do. So I think, you know, whether he'd have realised that he was going to really put something special into pizzazz, into Christmas in future years, I don't know. But what he did recognise is that there was a

• 42:53Speaker 05

  hook there. So he keeps coming back to Christmas time, maybe because he's trying to exploit book buyers and people want to buy gifts. But he recognises that Christmas does have a kind of particular moment that it can gather families together. Christmas Carol is his most successful Christmas story. But he's definitely, I think, got an idea that there's some magic in the air.

• 43:14Alice Levine?

  One of the things that we haven't mentioned, and to use a word which a lot of people balk at, is I feel like he was a foodie. I feel like he was the OG food influencer, not just any old Christmas dinner, a Dickens Christmas dinner. Would we have the M&S Christmas adverts without him? Is that the greatest legacy of all? Obviously, because of his incredible way with words, that's a kind of part of the Christmas picture that we associate with him.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  Gosh, he's probably rolling in his grave at being credited.

• 43:40Alice Levine?

  Exactly.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  What for M&S, John Lewis, bad Christmas.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Quite slowly, because he put the food away. He was quite a big unit.

• 43:47Speaker 06

  He was definitely an eater. He definitely liked his food and drink. And I think his whole attitude towards feasting in general, Christmas in particular, is also connected to his childhood He had these family Christmases, but they were a bit miserable, you know, they were, they never had enough money. He talked about how cold it was. And, you know, he's created a Christmas for us where it snows and there's frost on the windows. But in the version he's imagined, there's a really like roaring fire and everything is glorious. But I think that speaks to the way he wants to reimagine the Christmases he experienced. So they had the ingredients, they had a family in a beautiful setting, but they were cold, they didn't have the food they wanted. So he turned into an adult who really enjoyed the finer things that he

• 44:32Speaker 06

  felt he couldn't have when he was young. And I think he genuinely did enjoy them. I mean, he really did speak in romantic terms about his gin punch and his oysters. And I know we keep going on about them, but that's because he loved them that much.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, one of the things I think we don't think about too much about Victorian, the Victorian era, wherever you are in the world, is that it's a time of enhancing and growing globalizations of all kinds. And of course, exploitations of people, ecologies and so on. But that's really important when it comes to things like food. So food availability typically in the beginning of 19th century is what you can grow locally. And in Britain at the time, you know, the diet was not great. But food and feasting have always been a really important part of celebration. And as as middle classes grow in Victorian England, Dickensian London, as people have got a bit more disposable income, as connections across the oceans to different parts of the world start to bring new kinds of foods and availability, then then I think

• 45:31Speaker 05

  that idea of how do you show off your wealth? How do you celebrate with other people? Food plays such an important part in that. And we sort of take that for granted today.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  I just want to add to that. I think this is really important, that Dickens is one of the reasons that we think of Victorian Britain as a place that had all of this income inequality, you know, the rich having this incredible lifestyle, very exotic access to all these cosmopolitan foods and experiences and fabrics, and the poor really suffering in the industries. But he also kind of erased. From his work, the reason for that, which is that Britain had an empire. Britain was subjugating colonies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East. And so what we get is this picture of Britain that's super powerful, that's industrialising because of the wealth it's extracting from the world.

• 46:24Speaker 06

  But we don't actually see that process of the exploitation and extraction. And you know, that's an erasure that we're still living with because we separate in our imagination, this kind of Victorian Dickensian England from the reality that it was connected and it was part of this global picture. And it was exploiting not just poor people in Dickensian London that we see, but all over the world. And there are little references to that in Dickens's work. In Bleak House, there's Mrs. Jellaby, who makes all her sons give all their pocket money to poor Africans. And there are various really irritating characters who do all this like well intentioned, but ludicrous philanthropy in the Congo. It's, it's a, it's a kind of caricature of the ways people thought about Africa in a very stereotypical way.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  But he doesn't really interrogate that stereotype. He just shows it in tiny glimpses. But that is a huge part of the world that Dickens lived in, and he never really showed us that.

• 47:20Matt Forde?

  So what is his enduring legacy as a man, as a writer and a huge fan of Christmas?

• 47:27Speaker 05

  I think he's a, he's a global superstar. He's the George Michael, you know, take your pick.

• 47:32Matt Forde?

  He loved Christmas too.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  He loved Christmas, exactly. Christmas number one, year after year. And Dickens was aware of his own worth, you know, so he constantly went back to renegotiate with publishers. So he kind of helped the idea of trying to get all authors and writers to think about how they would monetise better what they do. I think in that sense, he's the kind of grandfather of Substack that you can find both me and F1 these days. Or even podcasting, you know, it's, how do you find, how do you find a platform that can deliver your message? And how do you, how do you do that in a way that picks up themes that people are actually going to be interested in? As well as trying to stay true to what you want to be saying. So I think he really taps into modernity and, you know, Dickens is alive at a time when there are high levels of literacy.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Train lines means that publications can be distributed quicker and faster and cheaper than ever before. And so I think he's really aware of what his own value is. And I think that in that sense, he's not just a sort of global superstar and famous. He's also someone who understands how the mechanics behind celebrity works. And I think that's something we recognise in today's world, whether it's writing, or music, or film, or whatever, people who have got a high profile, often are very good at brand management and trying to work out how to position themselves. And you know, I really take my hat off to how joined up Dickens's thinking was that, at least in his public life.

• 48:57Speaker 06

  But you know, I think it's easy now to forget how radical his writing seemed at the time. There's a famous quote, "The works of Dickens were more subversive than Karl Marx's Das Kapital." I mean, you can agree or disagree with that, but the fact that it was perceived that way shows how big a deal it was to centre the experiences of the poor and excluded. But at the same time, as I said, Dickens wasn't necessarily a radical himself. And in a way, I think part of his legacy is he just invented a new genre of literary ideology. He was really genuinely interested in social reform and told us these stories because he wanted us to care about the people and the poverty and the suffering that we don't

• 49:40Speaker 06

  see, even though we're part of it in some way. But he also has given us some of the most traditional and conservative ideas about Englishness that there are through A Christmas Carol, through this kind of gaze on Victorian London. And as we were saying, he loves traditions himself. And he didn't want a social revolution. He wanted reform and improvement. So he kind of sat almost in a category of his own, in a world where there were the conservatives and traditionalists, and there were these radicals. And he Kind of appealed to both. And I think that's one of the reasons that he was able to break through in such a huge way, both in Britain and America and around the world, in Russia and in Europe. There was something very relatable about that. People knew there

• 50:22Speaker 06

  was something wrong with the status quo, but they were also afraid of wholesale revolution. And so ironically, there's something kind of radical in that, that ability to stay true to his views about social reform and social justice, but also do it in a way that was so mainstream and brought such huge audiences along with him.

• 50:41Matt Forde?

  I just had a real moment because my A level history coursework was the birth of the Labour Party owes more to the work of Charles Dickens than the work of Karl Marx.

• 50:50Speaker 06

  Now go away.

• 50:51Alice Levine?

  It's in your inboxes now.

• 50:53Speaker 05

  Of course, Matt, you did okay in that paper.

• 50:55Matt Forde?

  Yes, I did. I got an A.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  The real legacy of Dickens is Matt's A level history paper.

• 51:01Alice Levine?

  His legacy is Substack, M&S ads and wham and that. Afwa, Peter, thank you so much. I feel like I've been in a kind of choose your own adventure live version of your podcast. It's been such a pleasure.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  Thank you, guys. We're real fans of what you do, so keep up the good work.

• 51:16Alice Levine?

  Merry Christmas.

• 51:17Matt Forde?

  Alice, have you ever wondered why the Mini is so small?

• 51:21Alice Levine?

  The skirt or the Magnum?

• 51:23Matt Forde?

  Well, I meant the iconic British car because in 1956, Britain's oil supply was suddenly cut off. Petrol rationing was brought in and the car industry was scrambling around for a vehicle that hardly used any fuel. Enter the Mini.

• 51:37Alice Levine?

  Interesting, but actually not technically British scandal series material.

• 51:42Matt Forde?

  Well, the reason they had to save petrol is because the Prime Minister started a war and lied about why.

• 51:48Alice Levine?

  Okay, scandal siren going off.

• 51:50Matt Forde?

  I'm Matt Ford.

• 51:51Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 51:52Matt Forde?

  And our latest British scandal series involves a secret meeting in a French villa, a Prime Minister running on amphetamines.

• 51:58Alice Levine?

  An Egyptian president that everyone fancied, the end of the British Empire, and at the heart of it, a canal.

• 52:05Matt Forde?

  This is the story of the Suez Plot.

• 52:08Alice Levine?

  Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Audible.

• 52:18Alice Levine?

  You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. Thirty chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You've lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limit. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next.

• 52:36Matt Forde?

  Then it's over. The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible. Stories that speak to you.

• 52:51Alice Levine?

  From Wondery and Samus dot audio, this is a special festive edition of British Scandal.

• 52:56Matt Forde?

  If you want to find out more, then you can listen to the full Legacy series on Charles Dickens from Wondery and Goalhanger Podcast.

• 53:02Alice Levine?

  We will be back next time with our series on the man that spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Was he a freedom fighter or was he a terrorist? Well, find out because we are going to tell you the story of the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

• 53:19Matt Forde?

  British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford.

• 53:21Alice Levine?

  And me, Alice Levine. Written by James Maniac. Additional writing by Alice Levine, Matt Ford, Afew Hirsch and Peter Frankopan. Sound design by Rich Evans. For Samus Dat, our producer is Chika Ayers. Our assistant producer is Redsey Bernard. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitzena. For Wondery, our senior producer is Theodora Leludis and our senior managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Vaughan, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.

• 54:07Matt Forde?

  Imagine you're reading Pride and Prejudice, except you're not reading it. Harris Dickinson and Marissa Abella are reading it to you on Audible. Her barbs sting you. His coldness sends a shiver up your spine. Your heart aches. Your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible. Stories that speak to you. Hey, I'm Cassie Depeckle, the host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In each

• 54:41Speaker 06

  Episode we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who lived to tell the tale. In our latest series, we tracked the story of Hugh Glass, the real-life revenant that inspired the 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1823, Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear in present-day South Dakota and left for dead. His survival depended on trekking through 350 miles of wilderness alone with grave injuries. But he was driven by his thirst for revenge. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.