When Christmas Went Viral

Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the book's tale of miserly Scrooge and the ghosts that transformed him transformed the holiday too, especially in the U. S. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 1:41Speaker 02

  Once upon a time,

• 1:49Speaker 02

  of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, Old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy with all.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  And he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open, that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who, in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  "Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!"

• 2:59Speaker 03

  cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  "Bah!"

• 3:08Speaker 03

  said Scrooge.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  "Humbuck! Christmas, a humbug, uncle!"

• 3:12Speaker 03

  said Scrooge's nephew.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  "You don't mean that, I'm sure!" "I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough!" "Come then!"

• 3:26Speaker 03

  returned the nephew gaily.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  "What right have you to be so dismal? What right have you to be so morose? You're rich enough!"

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of this moment, said, "Bah!" again.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  "Bah!"

• 3:38Speaker 03

  and followed it up with,

• 3:39Speaker 02

  "Humbuck! Don't be cross, uncle," said the nephew. "What else can I be?" returned the uncle. "When I live in such a world of fools as this. Merry Christmas! Out upon Merry Christmas! What's Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money? A time for finding yourself a year older but not an hour richer? A time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!"

• 4:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  You've probably seen a version of A Christmas Carol. Since Charles Dickens first wrote it in 1843, there have been hundreds of adaptations, each one with its own twist. My personal favorites.

• 4:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ba Hum Duck, A Looney Tunes Christmas. And?

• 4:48Speaker 05

  Hello. Welcome to The Muppet Christmas Carol. My name is Charles Dickens. And my name is Rizzo the Rat. Hey, wait a second. You're not Charles Dickens. I am too. No, a blue-furried Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat? Absolutely.

• 5:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  The basic story goes, it's Christmas Eve, and a miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts who take him into the past, present, and future to teach him the value of kindness and generosity, the true spirit of Christmas. The book was an overnight sensation, and Charles Dickens, already famous, became a legend.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  This is Leon Litback. He's a professor of Victorian studies at Queen's University in Belfast, and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  There's a famous story that goes, a journalist at the end of the 19th century, after Dickens had died, went to Covent Garden Market, and he encountered there a small girl who was selling fruits and vegetables, probably illiterate. And he said to her, "Well, Charles Dickens has died." And she says, "Oh, will Father Christmas die too?"

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Before A Christmas Carol, the holiday wasn't as widely celebrated as it is today. Many people didn't even get the day off work. Dickens had already devoted his life to documenting urban London's harsh realities. Dickensian has become a catch-all word for that world, a world of unfair working conditions, meager wages, homeless families, and hungry children.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  I think that even more than Christmas, Dickens is well-known for his championship of social issues.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And he wrote a novel to represent what he saw. But of course, as the book's fame spread from England to the US and around the world, Christmas took on a life of its own, a very different one than what Dickens might have imagined.

• 6:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Jingle Bells starts playing in department stores, pretty much as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Halloween.

• 7:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  The soundtrack to a season of spending.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I am the ghost of Christmas past.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 7:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 7:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, how a Christmas carol changed Christmas.

• 7:38Speaker 06

  This is Rob from Yonkers, New York. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.

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• 8:46Speaker 00

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• 9:11Speaker 00

  Part one, Great Expectations.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  My teacher at primary school, she said to the class, has anybody ever heard of Charles Dickens? And I thought it was some weird joke being played on me by my parents or something.

• 9:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Lucinda Dickens Hoxley, a historian of Victorian England, author of a number of books about Dickens and Christmas, and Charles Dickens' great, great, great granddaughter.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  I knew that he'd written Christmas Carol, and I knew about Oliver Twist. But I think when you're that little, you don't necessarily realize that that means that other people know who they are.

• 9:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today, she's our ghosts of Christmas past.

• 9:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  And our first stop is the year 1812.

• 9:57Speaker 06

  The Marquis and Marchioness Camden gave a magnificent ball and supper at their seat in Kent.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  It was reported in the newspapers here what the royals had given each other for Christmas. Which duchesses had the most lavish parties?

• 10:10Speaker 06

  The preparations displayed uncommon taste and consisted of the usual brilliancy of light.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  What people were wearing, what people were eating.

• 10:19Speaker 06

  About one o'clock, the company stopped. At half past four, the party broke up.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Charles Dickens would have been way too young to appreciate all the gossip. He was just 10 months old. This was his very first Christmas.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  He had one older sister, Frances, but he was the oldest boy.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  His father, John, and his mother, Elizabeth, loved Christmas and each other.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  It was a very loving marriage, but they were both fairly irresponsible, particularly John, when it came to money.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  But they made sure to fill their home with the one thing that was virtually free.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Music.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  One Christmas, they postponed their Christmas party because they'd just moved house and, shock horror, the piano hadn't yet been delivered, so the party couldn't possibly happen.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  The Dickens family embraced a festive Christmas. For many people, though.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Christmas was almost a day like any other day of the year.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  The average person in Britain didn't even have the day off work.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  You might have gone to church for a church celebration, but that was really about the height of it.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  There is, however, mistletoe.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And if two people found themselves under one, they were meant to kiss.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Some people banned that in their houses because it was all associated with paganism.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Keep in mind, one reason December 25th may have been chosen as Christmas Day was to coincide with the winter solstice, a pagan tradition.

• 11:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  At this time, the world itself seemed to be changing meaning at lightning speed. New machines were transforming everything about how people lived and worked.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  When the railways first started, there are reports of people feeling that they just were unable to take the speed, which was far beyond the speed that they could travel on foot or by horse. How rapidly society was changing.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  You had a greater emphasis on commerce. Business was thriving.

• 12:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Steam power might have made the trains run, but all that commerce and business required a lot of manpower, too. Though it wasn't just men working in the factories. Women and children were also keeping the machines running. They worked 12-hour days under harsh conditions and were at the mercy of their employer. Labor was the heartbeat of the Industrial Revolution, and profit was its king.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  The key of the house was sent back to the landlord, who was very glad to get it. And I was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady long known to our family.

• 13:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  This wasn't theoretical for young Charles Dickens. One day in 1824, his father, short on money and having racked up a mountain of debt, was suddenly taken away to debtor's prison. Charles was just 12 years old.

• 13:40Speaker 06

  I was so young and childish and so little qualified. How could I be otherwise to undertake the whole charge of my own existence?

• 13:49Speaker 03

  I think he realised quite early on that his parents didn't have a great sense of responsibility when it came to making sure that their children had enough to eat and clothes to wear and everything else.

• 13:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dickens later wrote about this experience.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden Market and stared at the pineapples.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Initially, it was just his father who went into the prison cell. But then his mother couldn't afford to pay rent for them. So she and her younger children all had to move into the prison cell because they didn't have anywhere else to go.

• 14:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, wow. As for Charles...

• 14:23Speaker 03

  They couldn't afford to pay his school fees. He was told that he had to leave school. So Charles Dickens ended up in a factory, a factory that produced a liquid called blacking. And it was used for things like coach hoods and boots and front steps, anything that needed a black colour to it. And he obviously thought he was never going to get to have the kind of life that he wanted.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  I know that I worked from morning to night with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Newspapers and magazines were beginning to be mass printed and becoming more widely affordable, which meant that they needed writers. And Dickens was determined to never end up back in a factory. So in the late 1820s, he decided to pursue a career in journalism.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Became a freelance journalist, taught himself shorthand, and started looking for work.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  His journalism looked at every level of the world around him: cab drivers, slum dwellers, bachelors, and boarding houses, parliament and the courts, hospital patients, and prisoners. And while working as a reporter...

• 15:52Speaker 03

  He started writing short stories. And these were his first works of fiction.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  He'd publish them anonymously.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  So what you would do at the time, if you wanted to be published, you would put them through the door of a magazine and hope that they would publish them for free, just so you could see your words in print.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  His pen name was Baz.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  That was the nickname of his youngest brother, Augustus.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And that collection of stories came to be known as sketches by Baz. They gave snapshots of daily life in London. And they were a hit.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  His stories were just very simple, often very funny, sometimes very sad.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  Matrimony is proverbially a serious undertaking, like an overweening predilection for brandy and water. It is a misfortune into which a man easily falls and from which he finds it remarkably difficult to extricate himself.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  A little bit like stand-up comedians do observational comedy today, where they pick up on a small element of something. And it's something that everybody can identify with and go, oh, I know someone who does that. Well, I've been in that situation myself. So it spoke to the people in general.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And pretty soon.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  He was commissioned to work on the Pickwick Papers.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  His very first novel.

• 17:05Speaker 06

  Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and, we will not say fled, firstly because it is an ignoble term, and secondly because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  And then he wrote Oliver Twist.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  The boy was lying, fast asleep on a rude bed upon the floor, so pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  And Nicholas Nickleby.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world- And a better.

• 17:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Eventually, he started publishing under his real name. And before he'd reached the age of 30, people all across the world began to know Charles Dickens.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  He just became incredibly famous.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  One of the things that made Dickens more popular than other writers was that his works dealt not just with the upper classes, which is what most authors of that time had done. And what Dickens did was he wrote about everybody, from aristocracy down to street sweepers. And everybody could identify with him.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  There is one broad sky over all the world, and whether it be blue or cloudy, the same heaven beyond.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  There's a very famous painting of Dickens on quite a plush upholstered chair. And he is sitting at a table and he's got very long flowing dark colored hair. And he has this youthful appearance, he wears a gold tie pin, and he looks fabulously impressive and wealthy.

• 18:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Because of new mass printing machines, paintings like this one could be engraved, reproduced by the thousands. And then.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Could be circulated around the world and people would become familiar with the image, the visual image of a person.

• 19:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dickens's stories and his face were especially popular in the US. So in 1842,

• 19:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  he set off on a ship.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  With very, very high hopes, expecting that he was going to absolutely love it.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores with a stronger faith in the republic than I had when I landed in America.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And he thought that this great American experiment could yield lessons for the rest of the world, particularly the United Kingdom.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  However,

• 19:42Speaker 02

  what he found was not quite to his liking.

• 19:47Speaker 06

  The decayed is here.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  He found, unfortunately, that there was too great an emphasis on materialism, too great an emphasis on the love of money.

• 19:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  And too great an obsession with celebrity.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  He was followed down the streets with people wanting to cut off locks of his hair.

• 20:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Once, on a boat travelling the Great Lakes, he awoke to a, quote, "party of gentlemen" peering through his cabin window.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  He found the manners of the Americans to be appalling.

• 20:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  There was actually a lot he found appalling.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  Underhanded temperings with public officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields and hired pens for daggers.

• 20:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  On one stop, he visited a prison outside Philadelphia.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And he was absolutely horrified to see that black people and white people were treated completely differently, even though they were all in prison.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  He also travelled to the American South and was appalled by slavery.

• 20:51Speaker 06

  Now, I appeal to every human mind imbued with a commonest of common sense and the commonest of common humanity and ask, can they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave? Or can they for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of its flagrant fearful features and their own just consciences?

• 21:18Speaker 03

  They got as far as Richmond, Virginia, and they were on a train and there were two slave owners bartering over a family. And Dickens is listened to the crying as the father was taken away. So the father was in one train carriage waiting to leave. The rest of his family, his wife and children were in another train. He wrote very poignantly that he was grateful that he had not been a baby in a slave-rocked cradle, which is a line that still gets to me every time.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  He said in a letter to his friend back home.

• 21:50Speaker 06

  It is not the republic of my imagination.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  On top of all of that, he wasn't even making much money in the US because his work was being pirated left and right. And when he got back to London, he decided to write down his observations in a book called American Notes. Americans hated it. And then his next novel kind of tanked.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  And his publishers started to think that this was, you know, maybe, maybe he wasn't such a good bet after all.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  He had a wife and four kids by this point, with another one on the way, and was on the verge of falling into debt, the thing that haunted him most from his childhood. He desperately needed a new idea to get him out of the red.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  So he was struggling, and that was one of the things that would have been feeding his own anxiety, his fear of his own children ending up as he and his siblings had done.

• 22:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  With the memories of his childhood replaying in his mind, Dickens found himself coming back to one thing: Christmas. It had always been a special time for his family, despite all the hardships they faced.

• 23:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Charles Dickens dreams up a Christmas carol.

• 23:17Speaker 03

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• 24:36Speaker 06

  I'm a trapper in the Gorbah Pit. It does not tire me, but I have to track without a light, and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. I would like to be at school far better than in the pit. Sarah Gudde, aged eight years.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  Back in London, after his trip to the US and contemplating what his next book should be about, Dickens was sent a parliamentary report that he couldn't get out of his mind. People had been collecting hundreds of testimonials from children working in Great Britain's mines and factories. It's said that Dickens wept when he read them.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  Isabella Reed, 12 years. I have to stoop much and creep through the water, which is frequently up to the calves of my legs. When the weather is warm, there is difficulty in breathing, and frequently the lights go out.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  And then he thought, well, who's going to read this? So he did what he could do best, which was to turn it into a work of fiction.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  He started thinking about how.

• 25:48Speaker 03

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

• 25:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  It was the biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes, from all over the world.

• 26:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the hungry 40s.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  There were famines starting. The big Irish famine hadn't quite happened, but there were early signs of what would come. And many, many migrants were coming from Ireland to England.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  A kind of migrant crisis.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  It was absolutely overcrowded.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  In this society where things are allowed to progress without controls, without those kinds of social nets in which to catch the people who happen to fall through, what you're leaving behind is a trail of destitution.

• 26:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  London did not have a proper sewer system, sanitation system, until the 1850s.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  It wouldn't have smelled good.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  And he would have known to avoid certain areas.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  I read one account of an area known as Seven Dials, one of the worst slums at the time. And it was said that if you went there and you weren't from there, you could expect to get your throat cut. It was a very violent society.

• 27:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  He would have seen children without shoes, with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Children were just treated worse than animals. You know, they were hit. Working class children were often considered kind of just expendable.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  The days were dark and cold.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  And of course, there's only so many coins you can give out, so many individuals you can help.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got. A story was forming in his mind.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child.

• 27:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Unfortunately, his publishers weren't as enthusiastic about this new Christmas book.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  They thought it was a very uncommercial idea.

• 28:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Dickens was willing to take the gamble.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  It's almost like he was possessed with this desire to get this story out there. Just get those feelings into it, this feeling of his anger with the world.

• 28:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  So he began to write.

• 28:20Speaker 06

  Once upon a time, of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, Old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  The story of A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve and we see Ebenezer Scrooge, who's in his counting house, so his place of work. He lends money to people and he's part of his firm than is Scrooge and Marley.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  And what we learn is that it's seven years to that day since Jacob Marley died.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Dead as a doornail, says Dickens.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  And Jacob Marley was just like Scrooge.

• 28:54Speaker 06

  A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Didn't care about anybody, had a lot of money and was a miser.

• 29:08Speaker 06

  Let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw Marley's face.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Ebenezer Scrooge.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  What do you want with me? said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. Much, Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  And Scrooge kind of dismisses it. He refuses to believe in ghosts.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  You don't believe in me, observed the ghost. I don't, said Scrooge.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Jacob Marley warns him.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  No rest, no peace, incessant torture of remorse.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Forced to walk the earth, wrapped in these chains. Chains and cash boxes, the sign of the money all his life he's been accruing. What can he do with it in the next life?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  And he tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts of Christmas.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Each of which will teach him an important lesson.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Christmas past.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  Expect the second on the next night at the same hour.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Christmas present.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  The third upon the next night, when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  And Christmas yet to come, often called Christmas future in adaptations.

• 30:43Speaker 06

  Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I trade.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Scrooge says, "Oh, no, I don't really want that to happen, thanks very much." But of course it does happen.

• 31:04Speaker 06

  The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. "Are you the spirit whose coming was foretold to me?" asked Scrooge. "Aye, aye, aye." "Who and what are you?" Scrooge demanded. "I am the ghost of Christmas past." "Long past?" inquired Scrooge. "No, your past."

• 31:37Speaker 03

  And he gets taken back to his own childhood by the first ghost.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  "Good heaven," said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked about him. "I was bred in this place. I was a boy here." He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts and hopes and joys and cares long, long forgotten.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  And teaches him that in his past, Scrooge, uh, celebrated Christmas much more, uh, fully.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs. All these boys were in great spirit and shouted to each other until the broad field was so full of merry music that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  The school could not quite be that. Said the ghost.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  He's also given the opportunity to visit himself as a schoolboy.

• 32:43Speaker 06

  A solid creature, neglected by his friends, is left there still. Scrooge said he knew it.

• 32:53Speaker 06

  And he sobbed.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  He's kind of lonely and destitute, and I think that that also is a kind of autobiographical reflection on something within Dickens.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  As Scrooge grew into an adult, he began to evolve into a miser.

• 33:15Speaker 06

  He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a morning dress, in whose eyes there were tears.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Which upset his love interests.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  "You fear the world too much," she answered gently. "I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, game, engrosses you, have I not?" She left him, and they parted.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And he's left at the end of the Ghost of Christmas Past's visit disturbed by what he has found and what he's turned into.

• 33:50Speaker 06

  "No more," cried Scrooge, "no more! I don't wish to see it, show me no more!"

• 34:01Speaker 06

  I am the ghost of Christmas present. Look upon me!

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Second ghost is the ghost of Christmas present, which of course is the ghost of Christmas 1843.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  He's a much more jolly kind of spirit, and his job is to show Scrooge how Christmas is celebrated in his own time.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Well, he could be enjoying.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  And so he takes him, for example, to different parts of the world, to lighthouses and mines and various other places where Christmas is celebrated.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  Polly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  All vanished instantly.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  He also takes Scrooge to the residence of Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit is Scrooge's clerk, who works for a very meager wage.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Scrooge is reluctant to give Bob Cratchit any time off at Christmas.

• 35:06Speaker 06

  What has ever got your precious father then, said Mrs. Cratchit, and your brother Tiny Tim? And Martha weren't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  And so he's part of the working poor, of which there were many, of course, in Victorian London.

• 35:19Speaker 06

  Here's Martha, mother, cried the two young Cratchits.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  We see Martha coming home from work and all the family being around the table together.

• 35:32Speaker 06

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

• 36:07Speaker 06

  Chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed, "A merry Christmas to us all, my dears, God bless us", which all the family re-echoed. "God bless us, everyone", said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  And he shows Scrooge that even in a household that doesn't have very much money, Christmas can still be celebrated with great joy and with great fervour.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  Spirit, said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before. Tell me if Tiny Tim will live. If he shall remain awed by the future, that a child will die.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  The chimes were ringing at three quarters past eleven at that moment.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  At the end of that stave, they're called, the different sections of the carol.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  "I see something strange," said Scrooge.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  The ghost of Christmas present presents Scrooge with these two children that he produces from beneath his cloak.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Two children named ignorance and want.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  Wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  And the ghost says to Scrooge. They are men. They are mankind's children.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  And they serve as an example of the depths to which society has sunk, particularly in how it treats its children.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Dickens said of the two of them, ignorance and want. Ignorance was the one that must be feared more than anything, because if you leave a child to grow up in ignorance, without any understanding of how to care for themselves or care for other people or care for the world, you create all the villains that Dickens wrote about.

• 38:01Speaker 06

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

• 38:16Speaker 06

  As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  A very silent, scary ghost who's often identified with grim reaper.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  I am sure we shall none of us forget, poor Tiny Tim, shall we?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  So amongst the things that the ghost of Christmas yet to come shows Scrooge are the situation in the Cratchit household, where the Cratchit's young child, Tiny Tim, has now died.

• 38:47Speaker 06

  When we recollect how patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  And then we're shown an image of a house that is cold.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  He lay in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that.

• 39:27Speaker 06

  "Am I the man who lay upon the bed?" He cried upon his knees.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And it turns out that this is Scrooge's own house after Scrooge has died.

• 39:36Speaker 06

  "No, spirit! Oh, no, no!"

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Nobody mourns him, and at that point Scrooge breaks down completely.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  "Spirit!" He cried, tight clutching at its robe. "Hear me. I am not the man I was. I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirit of all three shall strive within me."

• 40:04Speaker 02

  And then he wakes up, and we see him at the end calling out the window to a boy.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  "What's today, my fine fellow? Today?" replied the boy. "Why, Christmas Day. Do you know whether they've sold that prize turkey that was hanging up there?"

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Buy the biggest turkey that he can.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  "It's hanging up there now?" replied the boy. "Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it!"

• 40:26Speaker 02

  And deliver it to the Cratchits as their Christmas dinner as a kind of apology for not just how he's treated his clerk, but I suppose in a way how he's treated all of humanity.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  We hear at the end of the story from the narrator that Scrooge keeps Christmas in his heart.

• 40:48Speaker 06

  "It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone."

• 41:09Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Coming up, Christmas takes off.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Hi, this is Adam Saper calling from Woodland Hills, California. And you're getting smarter because you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley. And we are here with a new show to tell you all about it. That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry. You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Terry Gross. When I was celebrating my 50th anniversary hosting Fresh Air, I asked my guest roast

• 42:26Speaker 00

  master general Jeff Ross to roast me. Terry Gross, a barely living legend.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Still at it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you. Part three, 1,001 humbugs.

• 43:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  When it came out in 1843, A Christmas Carol was a sensation.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  The first edition sold out almost immediately.

• 43:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  6,000 copies in just a few days, leading up to Christmas Eve.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success.

• 43:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  And by the time of Charles Dickens' second US visit in 1867...

• 43:30Speaker 03

  A Christmas Carol had just become legendary.

• 43:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dickens travelled by train from as far south as Washington DC and as far north as Maine, hosting hundreds of readings, hitting up major cities like New York and Boston.

• 43:48Speaker 06

  With an elastic step, he ascended the platform and moved quickly to his crimson throne.

• 43:56Speaker 06

  The applause, meanwhile, spreading and deepening.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Till the whole audience joined in one universal and enthusiastic plodding, which continued for several minutes.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Everything he did just sold out.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  There are stories of people who would wait on the street overnight in order to obtain entry to his readings. People felt that they could sympathize with the characters. People spoke about the pathos that Dickens had inserted into Tiny Tim.

• 44:38Speaker 06

  "God bless us, everyone."

• 44:40Speaker 03

  For the poorer people, it was, "I'm finally being talked about."

• 44:43Speaker 06

  "I'll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family."

• 44:47Speaker 02

  People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into The Holiday.

• 44:53Speaker 06

  "I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future."

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Christmas Carol became kind of the do-it-yourself manual for how to do Christmas.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  And people were doing Christmas, like, for real.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  So people realized this is the time for family and friends. It became fashionable to have the kind of Christmas parties that were described in A Christmas Carol. Inviting lonely people, as he's attempted to invite Uncle Scrooge.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Also, we have Christmas carols, the songs that is associated with Christmas. They call up for people those memories that they have of the songs that are sung at Christmas. That's still the case, of course, because whenever you go into a store, in any place in the world, virtually, you will hear Christmas music.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  The commercial side of Christmas was growing, too. The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year a Christmas carol published. The first in-store Santa appeared in Macy's department store in the 1860s. And on that US trip in 1867, Dickens himself was a product. He wrote about this in his letters.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  The excitement of the readings continues unabated. The tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  In one letter, he mentions a man who sold a ticket for $50, which is more than $1,000 today. There were often famous authors in the audience. The readings were covered in the national press.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  He was so famous, he couldn't move without people wanting to talk to him.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  If I stopped to look in at a shop window, a score of passersby stopped.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  He also had photographs of himself taken that were sold by street hawkers and others at these venues of his readings. So it was very much the kind of 19th century equivalent of going to a Taylor Swift concert and finding, you know, all kinds of Taylor Swift memorabilia and T-shirts and bracelets, whatever else you can imagine, that would increase the devotion of the fans to Taylor, or in this case, to Charles.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  He will make plenty of money, there is no doubt. The New York Times.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  While we think of A Christmas Carol as something that is heartfelt and something that Dickens wanted to deliver as this kind of gift to the public, we mustn't forget that it was also a commercial venture and indeed, one in which Dickens himself invested. It was as much a financial decision as it was this kind of humanitarian gift that Dickens was giving to the world. He was never completely a humanitarian. He was always the consummate businessman.

• 47:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  OK, so a little Bob Cratchit and maybe a little Scrooge. There were ways in which A Christmas Carol did seem like it was having the kind of impact Dickens had hoped for, or at least according to the lore.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  There's a story that he was giving a talk in Boston, giving a reading from A Christmas Carol, and in his audience was a factory owner from Chicago who had a Scrooge-like epiphany, who went back to Chicago and said that from that time on, all his employees would get Christmas Day off and every family who worked for him would be given a turkey every Christmas.

• 48:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Lucinda Dickens Hoxley, his great-great-great-granddaughter, says that Dickens also had a healthy dose of skepticism. That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture, but what about the 364 other days of the year? How were workers treated? Who looked out for the poor? Were things really changing for the better?

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Nothing was ever enough for Dickens. He was a campaigner all his life. He wrote journalism right up to the end. He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition, by, you know, political situations.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Dickens left the United States in April of 1868. He'd made a lot of money off his readings. Tax inspectors had been chasing Dickens, trying to get a portion of the taxes.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Lucinda writes in her book that "the sight of the tax inspectors on the harbor after their ship had already set sail cheered Dickens' soul."

• 49:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dickens died in 1870, just a couple of years after returning from his trip. Two weeks after his death, Christmas was made a federal holiday in the US.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Dickens had always encouraged what he called

• 50:01Speaker 02

  A carol philosophy.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  A carol philosophy.

• 50:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Call it the Christmas spirit.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, so that's hypocrisy, jolly good temper, papers always in season, hat to the time of the year, and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to home and fireside.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  But modern Christmas is also undeniably about money, giving it, sure, but also spending it.

• 50:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if he were alive today, would look like?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  If I knew that, I'd write it and make my fortune.

• 50:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  You've got the name already.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  There is still a huge amount of child poverty. There's so much inequality of wealth. I mean, Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us. Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. Everybody needs to understand that actually, nothing is going to change unless we do.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  We should become more familiar with our own past because the past has things to teach us. And I think that we all have a responsibility to the past. And we look towards the future, hopefully with bright hopes and with optimism. But at the same time, we have to be looking in both directions.

• 52:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 52:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  And me, and?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Lawrence Wu.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Kristina Kim. Devin Katiyama.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  I'm Dominic Gerard. I was the voice of Charles Dickens in this episode. I'm an actor and musician, and I host a podcast called Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire.

• 52:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Voiceover work in this episode was also done by Darian Woods, Devin Katiyama, Irene Noguchi, and Helen De La Haye.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Thank you to Johannes Durkey, Tony Cavan, Stuart Harding, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 52:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Gilli Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes? Navid Marvi.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 53:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  And if you're looking for a gift for your loved ones this holiday season, consider getting them a Throughline tote bag or T-shirt. You can find them at shopnpr.org. Don't be a Scrooge. Get one today.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.