Pod Insights Throughline Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol About this episode Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 19th-century London, the holiday went viral.
Guests:
Leon Litvack, professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters project. Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, author and historian of Victorian England.
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Transcript 7,469 words · 18 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Welcome back to Throughline's Winter Book Club. Today, we're going to start by telling you a story.
1:30 Speaker 02 Once upon a time...
1:38 Speaker 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. 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.
2:06 Speaker 03 The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already.
2:13 Speaker 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.
2:39 Speaker 03 Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle.
2:46 Speaker 02 "Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice.
2:50 Speaker 03 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.
2:57 Speaker 02 "Bah!" said Scrooge. "Humbuck! Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "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!" returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be so dismal? What right have you to be so morose? You're rich enough!"
3:21 Speaker 03 Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of this moment, said, "Bah!" again.
3:26 Speaker 02 "Bah!"
3:27 Speaker 03 And followed it up with,
3:28 Speaker 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!"
4:16 Rund 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.
4:30 Speaker 04 Good morning, Mr. Duck.
4:33 Rund Abdelfatah? Bah Hum Duck, A Looney Tunes Christmas. And?
4:37 Speaker 04 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-furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat? Absolutely.
4:53 Rund 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.
5:19 Speaker 02 Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas.
5:24 Speaker 05 This is Leon Litvack. He's a professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast, and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project.
5:34 Speaker 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?
5:53 Speaker 05 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.
6:18 Speaker 02 I think that even more than Christmas, Dickens is well-known for his championship of social issues.
6:25 Speaker 05 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.
6:43 Rund Abdelfatah? When Jingle Bells starts playing in department stores, pretty much as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Halloween.
6:54 Rund Abdelfatah? The soundtrack to a season of spending.
7:07 Speaker 06 I am the ghost of Christmas past.
7:13 Speaker 05 I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
7:15 Rund Abdelfatah? And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Coming up, how a Christmas carol changed Christmas.
7:27 Speaker 07 This is Rob from Yonkers, New York. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.
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9:04 Speaker 10 Part one, Great Expectations.
9:11 Speaker 03 My teacher's 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.
9:20 Rund 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.
9:32 Speaker 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.
9:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Today, she's our Ghosts of Christmas Past.
9:46 Rund Abdelfatah? And our first stop is the year 1812.
9:49 Speaker 11 The Marquis and Marchioness Camden gave a magnificent ball and suffer at their seat in Kent.
9:55 Speaker 03 It was always reported in the newspapers here, what the royals had given each other for Christmas. Which duchesses had the most lavish parties?
10:02 Speaker 11 The preparations displayed uncommon taste and consisted of the usual brilliancy of light.
10:09 Speaker 03 What people were wearing, what people were eating.
10:11 Speaker 11 About one o'clock, the company stopped. At half past four, the party broke up.
10:19 Speaker 05 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.
10:27 Speaker 03 He had one older sister, Frances, but he was the oldest boy.
10:31 Speaker 05 His father, John, and his mother, Elizabeth, loved Christmas and each other.
10:36 Speaker 03 It was a very loving marriage, but they were both fairly irresponsible, particularly John, when it came to money.
10:42 Speaker 05 But they made sure to fill their home with the one thing that was virtually free.
10:50 Speaker 05 Music.
10:55 Speaker 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.
11:08 Speaker 05 The Dickens family embraced a festive Christmas. For many people, though.
11:12 Speaker 02 Christmas was almost a day like any other day of the year.
11:16 Speaker 05 The average person in Britain didn't even have the day off work.
11:19 Speaker 02 You might have gone to church for a church celebration, but that was really about the height of it.
11:25 Speaker 03 There is, however, mistletoe.
11:28 Speaker 05 And if two people found themselves under one, they were meant to kiss.
11:32 Speaker 03 Some people banned that in their houses because it was all associated with paganism.
11:36 Speaker 05 Keep in mind, one reason December 25th may have been chosen as Christmas Day was to coincide with the winter solstice, a pagan tradition.
11:51 Rund 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.
12:07 Speaker 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.
12:21 Speaker 02 How rapidly society was changing.
12:27 Speaker 02 You had a greater emphasis on commerce. Business was thriving.
12:34 Rund 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.
13:04 Speaker 12 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.
13:16 Rund 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.
13:32 Speaker 12 I was so young and childish and so little qualified. How could I be otherwise to undertake the whole charge of my own existence?
13:42 Speaker 03 I think he realized 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.
13:52 Rund Abdelfatah? Dickens later wrote about this experience.
13:55 Speaker 12 When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden Market and stared at the pineapples.
14:02 Speaker 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.
14:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Oh, wow. As for Charles...
14:15 Speaker 03 They couldn't afford to pay his school fees. He was told that he had to leave school. So Charles Dickens ended up...
14:24 Speaker 03 In a factory, a factory that produced a liquid called blacking. And it was used for things like, you know, 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.
14:41 Speaker 12 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.
15:07 Speaker 05 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.
15:25 Speaker 03 Became a freelance journalist, taught himself shorthand and started looking for work.
15:31 Speaker 05 His journalism looked at every level of the world around him. Cab drivers and slum dwellers, bachelors and boarding houses, parliament and the courts, hospital patients and prisoners. And while working as a reporter.
15:45 Speaker 03 He started writing short stories. And these were his first works of fiction.
15:49 Speaker 05 He'd published them anonymously.
15:51 Speaker 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.
16:00 Speaker 05 His pen name was Boz.
16:03 Speaker 03 That was the nickname of his youngest brother, Augustus.
16:05 Speaker 05 And that collection of stories came to be known as sketches by Boz. They gave snapshots of daily life in London. And they were a hit.
16:15 Speaker 03 His stories were just very simple, often very funny, sometimes very sad.
16:20 Speaker 12 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.
16:35 Speaker 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.
16:51 Speaker 05 And pretty soon.
16:53 Speaker 03 He was commissioned to work on the Pickwick Papers.
16:55 Speaker 05 His very first novel.
16:58 Speaker 12 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.
17:14 Speaker 03 And then he wrote Oliver Twist.
17:16 Speaker 12 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.
17:26 Speaker 03 And Nicholas Nickleby.
17:28 Speaker 12 Memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better.
17:36 Rund 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.
17:46 Speaker 03 He just became incredibly famous.
17:50 Speaker 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.
18:09 Speaker 12 There is one broad sky over all the world, and whether it be blue or cloudy, the same heaven beyond.
18:18 Speaker 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.
18:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Because of new mass-printing machines, paintings like this one could be engraved, reproduced by the thousands, and then...
18:47 Speaker 02 could be circulated around the world, and people would become familiar with the image, the visual image of a person.
18:56 Rund Abdelfatah? Dickens's stories and his face were especially popular in the US. So in 1842...
19:07 Rund Abdelfatah? He set off on a ship.
19:09 Speaker 03 With very, very high hopes, expecting that he was going to absolutely love it.
19:15 Speaker 12 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.
19:23 Speaker 02 And he thought that this great American experiment could yield lessons for the rest of the world, particularly the United Kingdom. However, what he found was not quite to his liking.
19:38 Speaker 12 All that is loathsome, drooping, decayed is here.
19:41 Speaker 02 He found, unfortunately, that there was too great an emphasis on materialism, too great an emphasis on the love of money.
19:51 Rund Abdelfatah? And too great an obsession with celebrity.
19:55 Speaker 03 He was followed down the streets with people wanting to cut off locks of his hair.
20:00 Rund Abdelfatah? Once, on a boat traveling the Great Lakes, he awoke to a "party of gentlemen" peering through his cabin window.
20:07 Speaker 02 He found the manners of the Americans to be appalling.
20:10 Rund Abdelfatah? There was actually a lot he found appalling.
20:13 Speaker 12 Underhanded temperings with public officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields and hired pens for daggers.
20:23 Rund Abdelfatah? On one stop, he visited a prison outside Philadelphia.
20:26 Speaker 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.
20:39 Speaker 02 He also traveled to the American South and was appalled by slavery.
20:43 Speaker 12 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?
21:11 Speaker 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 has 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.
21:40 Speaker 02 He said in a letter to his friend back home, "It is not the republic of my imagination."
21:52 Speaker 05 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.
22:12 Speaker 03 And his publishers started to think that this was, you know, maybe, maybe he wasn't such a good bet after all.
22:17 Speaker 05 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.
22:31 Speaker 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.
22:42 Rund 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.
23:00 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, Charles Dickens dreams up a Christmas carol.
23:09 Speaker 13 Hi, my name is Jessie. I live in Santa Cruz, La Laguna, Guatemala. And you're listening to Blue Line from NPR.
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23:22 Speaker 00 Support for NPR and the following message come from Ollie. Matching outfits, extravagant birthdays, many nicknames, a few classic moves of a dog-obsessed parent. Ollie is obsessed with how obsessed you are with your pup, so they strive to give your dog the best. From fresh, human-grade dog food to in-app health check-ins to track your dog's well-being. Visit ollie.com/wolf and use code WOLF to get 70% off your welcome kit. Ollie: Feed the Obsession. This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool,
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24:33 Speaker 10 Part Two: A Tale of Two Cities.
24:40 Speaker 14 I'm a trapper in the gorbah pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap 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.
24:59 Speaker 12 Sarah Gooder, aged eight years.
25:02 Speaker 05 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.
25:23 Speaker 12 Isabella Reed, 12 years.
25:26 Speaker 14 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.
25:37 Speaker 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.
25:47 Speaker 05 He started thinking about how.
25:53 Speaker 03 Dickens was very insomniac for much of his life, so a lot of his thinking was done walking around.
26:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking.
26:07 Speaker 03 It was the biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes from all over the world.
26:13 Rund Abdelfatah? A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the hungry 40s.
26:18 Speaker 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.
26:28 Speaker 02 A kind of migrant crisis.
26:30 Speaker 03 It was absolutely overcrowded.
26:34 Speaker 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.
26:50 Rund Abdelfatah? On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste.
26:57 Speaker 02 London did not have a proper sewer system, sanitation system, until the 1850s.
27:04 Speaker 03 It wouldn't have smelt good.
27:05 Speaker 05 And he would have known to avoid certain areas.
27:08 Speaker 03 I read one account of an area in a 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.
27:20 Rund Abdelfatah? He would have seen children without shoes, with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air.
27:27 Speaker 03 Children were just treated worse than animals. You know, they were hit. Working class children were often considered kind of just expendable.
27:35 Speaker 05 The days were dark and cold.
27:38 Speaker 03 And of course, there's only so many coins you can give out, so many individuals you can help.
27:42 Speaker 05 And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got. A story was forming in his mind.
27:49 Speaker 03 What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child.
27:56 Rund Abdelfatah? Unfortunately, his publishers weren't as enthusiastic about this new Christmas book.
28:02 Speaker 03 They thought it was a very uncommercial idea.
28:04 Rund Abdelfatah? But Dickens was willing to take the gamble.
28:07 Speaker 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.
28:18 Rund Abdelfatah? So he began to write.
28:25 Speaker 12 Once upon a time, of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house.
28:33 Speaker 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, known as Scrooge and Marley. And what we learn is that it's seven years to that day since Jacob Marley died.
28:52 Speaker 12 Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
28:55 Speaker 02 Dead as a doornail, says Dickens.
28:57 Speaker 03 And Jacob Marley was just like Scrooge.
28:59 Speaker 12 A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.
29:05 Speaker 03 Didn't care about anybody, had a lot of money and was a miser.
29:13 Speaker 12 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.
29:24 Speaker 03 The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Ebenezer Scrooge.
29:29 Speaker 12 "What do you want with me?" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
29:33 Speaker 15 "Much."
29:35 Speaker 12 Marley's voice, no doubt about it.
29:39 Speaker 03 And Scrooge kind of dismisses it. He refuses to believe in ghosts.
29:42 Speaker 15 "You don't believe in me."
29:45 Speaker 12 "Observe the ghost." "I don't," said Scrooge.
29:49 Speaker 02 Jacob Marley warns him.
29:51 Speaker 15 "No rest, no peace, incessant torture of remorse."
29:58 Speaker 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? And he tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts of Christmas.
30:14 Speaker 02 Each of which will teach him an important lesson.
30:18 Speaker 15 "Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one."
30:25 Speaker 03 Christmas past.
30:27 Speaker 15 "Expect the second on the next night at the same hour."
30:33 Speaker 03 Christmas present.
30:35 Speaker 15 "The third upon the next night, when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate."
30:44 Speaker 03 And Christmas yet to come, often called Christmas future in adaptations.
30:48 Speaker 15 "Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I trade."
30:55 Speaker 03 Scrooge says, "Oh, no. I don't really want that to happen, thanks very much." But of course it does happen.
31:09 Speaker 12 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.
31:25 Speaker 06 "Aye, aye, aye."
31:27 Speaker 12 "Who and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.
31:31 Speaker 06 "I am the ghost of Christmas past."
31:35 Speaker 12 "Long past?" inquired Scrooge.
31:37 Speaker 06 "No, your past."
31:41 Speaker 03 And he gets taken back to his own childhood by the first ghost.
31:51 Speaker 12 "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 odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts and hopes and joys and cares long, long forgotten.
32:12 Speaker 02 And teaches him that in his past, Scrooge celebrated Christmas much more fully.
32:20 Speaker 12 Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs. All these boys were in great spirits and shouted to each other until the broad field was so full of merry music that the crisp air laughed to hear it.
32:39 Speaker 06 "The school is not quite deserted," said the ghost.
32:43 Speaker 02 He's also given the opportunity to visit himself as a schoolboy.
32:48 Speaker 06 "A solid creature, neglected by his friends, is left there still."
32:54 Speaker 12 Scrooge said he knew it.
32:57 Speaker 12 And he sobbed.
33:01 Speaker 02 He's kind of lonely and destitute. And I think that that also is a kind of autobiographical reflection on something within Dickens.
33:13 Speaker 02 As Scrooge grew into an adult, he began to evolve into a miser.
33:20 Speaker 12 He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a morning dress, in whose eyes there were tears.
33:27 Speaker 02 Which upset his love interest.
33:30 Speaker 12 "You fear the world too much," she answered gently. "I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, gain, engrosses you, have I not?" She left him, and they parted.
33:46 Speaker 02 And he's left at the end of the Ghost of Christmas Past visit, disturbed by what he has found and what he's turned into.
33:55 Speaker 12 "No more," cried Scrooge, "no more! I don't wish to see it, show me no more!"
34:06 Speaker 07 "I am the ghost of Christmas present. Look upon me!"
34:12 Speaker 03 Second ghost is the ghost of Christmas present, which of course is the ghost of Christmas 1843.
34:17 Speaker 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.
34:27 Speaker 03 Well, he could be enjoying.
34:29 Speaker 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.
34:38 Speaker 12 "Holly, mistletoe, redberries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit and punch."
34:51 Speaker 12 All vanished instantly.
34:55 Speaker 02 He also takes Scrooge to the residence of Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit is Scrooge's clerk, who works for a very meager wage.
35:05 Speaker 03 Scrooge is reluctant to give Bob Cratchit any time off at Christmas.
35:10 Speaker 12 "What, has ever got your precious father then?" said Mrs. Cratchit. "And your brother Tiny Tin? And Martha weren't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour?"
35:18 Speaker 02 And so he's part of the working poor, of which there were many, of course, in Victorian London.
35:24 Speaker 12 "Here's Martha, mother," cried the two young Cratchits.
35:30 Speaker 03 We see Martha coming home from work and all the family being around the table together.
35:36 Speaker 12 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."
36:12 Speaker 12 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."
36:30 Speaker 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.
36:40 Speaker 12 "Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if tiny Tim will live."
36:49 Speaker 07 "If these shadows remain unobliged by the future, the child will die."
36:56 Speaker 12 The chimes were ringing the three-quarters past eleven at that moment.
37:00 Speaker 02 At the end of that stave, they're called, the different sections of the carol.
37:05 Speaker 12 "I see something strange," said Scrooge.
37:08 Speaker 02 The ghost of Christmas present presents Scrooge with these two children that he produces from beneath his cloak.
37:15 Speaker 03 "Two children named ignorance and want."
37:17 Speaker 12 "Wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable." They knelt down at its feet. And clung upon the outside of its garment.
37:29 Speaker 03 And the ghost says to Scrooge.
37:31 Speaker 12 They are men's.
37:32 Speaker 03 They are mankind's children.
37:34 Speaker 02 And they serve as an example of the depths to which society has sunk, particularly in how it treats its children.
37:43 Speaker 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.
38:06 Speaker 12 The bell struck twelve. Scrooge looked about him for the ghost and saw it not.
38:20 Speaker 12 As the last groan ceased to vibrate, he beheld a solemn phantom draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.
38:31 Speaker 03 A very silent, scary ghost who's often identified with the Grim Reaper.
38:35 Speaker 12 I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim, shall we?
38:40 Speaker 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.
38:52 Speaker 12 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.
39:14 Speaker 02 And then we're shown an image of a house that is cold.
39:20 Speaker 12 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.
39:32 Speaker 12 Am I the man who lay upon the bed? He cried upon his knees.
39:37 Speaker 02 And it turns out that this is Scrooge's own house after Scrooge has died.
39:41 Speaker 12 No, spirit. Oh, no, no!
39:44 Speaker 02 Nobody mourns him, and at that point, Scrooge breaks down completely.
39:49 Speaker 12 Spirit, he cried, tight clutching at its robe. Hear me. I am not the man I was. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirit of all three shall strive within me.
40:09 Speaker 02 And then he wakes up, and we see him at the end, calling out the window to a boy.
40:16 Speaker 12 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?
40:25 Speaker 02 By the biggest turkey that he can.
40:26 Speaker 12 Is hanging up there now? replied the boy. Is it, said Scrooge? Go and buy it!
40:31 Speaker 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.
40:46 Speaker 02 We hear at the end of the story from the narrator that Scrooge keeps Christmas in his heart.
40:53 Speaker 12 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.
41:14 Rund 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.
41:37 Speaker 05 Coming up, Christmas takes off.
41:47 Speaker 16 Hi, this is Adam Saper calling from Woodland Hills, California. And you're getting smarter because you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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43:10 Speaker 10 Part Three: A Thousand and One Humbug.
43:20 Rund Abdelfatah? When it came out in 1843, A Christmas Carol was a sensation.
43:26 Speaker 02 The first edition sold out almost immediately.
43:29 Rund Abdelfatah? 6,000 copies in just a few days, leading up to Christmas Eve.
43:34 Speaker 03 It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success.
43:39 Rund Abdelfatah? And by the time of Charles Dickens' second US visit in 1867...
43:44 Speaker 03 A Christmas Carol had just become legendary.
43:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Dickens traveled 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.
44:02 Speaker 10 With an elastic step, he ascended the platform and moved quickly to his crimson throne.
44:11 Speaker 10 The applause, meanwhile, spreading and deepening.
44:18 Speaker 10 Till the whole audience joined in one universal and enthusiastic plodding, which continued for several minutes.
44:30 Speaker 03 Everything he did just sold out.
44:35 Speaker 02 There are stories of people who would wait on the street overnight in order to obtain entry to his readings.
44:43 Speaker 02 People felt that they could sympathize with the characters. People spoke about the pathos that Dickens had inserted into Tiny Tim.
44:52 Speaker 12 God bless us, everyone.
44:54 Speaker 03 For the poorer people, it was, "I'm finally being talked about."
44:58 Speaker 12 "I'll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family."
45:02 Speaker 02 People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into the holiday.
45:07 Speaker 12 "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."
45:15 Speaker 02 "Christmas Carol" became kind of the do-it-yourself manual, or how to do Christmas.
45:21 Speaker 05 And people were doing Christmas, like, for real.
45:27 Speaker 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.
45:47 Speaker 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.
46:07 Speaker 05 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.
46:29 Speaker 05 He wrote about this in his letters.
46:31 Speaker 12 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.
46:41 Speaker 05 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.
46:54 Speaker 03 He was so famous, he couldn't move without people wanting to talk to him.
46:58 Speaker 12 If I stop to look in at a shop window, a score of passersby stop.
47:04 Speaker 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.
47:32 Speaker 10 He will make plenty of money, there is no doubt. The New York Times.
47:38 Speaker 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.
48:08 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, so a little Bob Cratchit and maybe a little Scrooge.
48:15 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
48:24 Speaker 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.
48:46 Rund 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?
49:08 Speaker 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.
49:27 Speaker 05 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 he owed. Lucinda writes in her book that "the sight of the tax inspectors on the harbor after their ship had already set sail cheered Dickens' soul."
49:58 Rund 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.
50:12 Speaker 05 Dickens had always encouraged what he called
50:16 Speaker 02 "a carol philosophy."
50:18 Speaker 05 A carol philosophy.
50:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Call it the Christmas spirit.
50:23 Speaker 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.
50:42 Speaker 05 But modern Christmas is also undeniably about money. Giving it, sure, but also spending it.
50:56 Rund Abdelfatah? What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if he were alive today, would look like?
51:03 Speaker 03 If I knew that, I'd write it and make my fortune.
51:07 Rund Abdelfatah? You've got the name already.
51:12 Speaker 03 To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world.
51:20 Speaker 03 There is still a huge amount of child poverty.
51:24 Speaker 03 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.
51:43 Speaker 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.
52:17 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abid Fattah.
52:21 Speaker 05 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
52:25 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
52:27 Speaker 05 And me and. Lawrence Wu.
52:30 Speaker 17 Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
52:35 Speaker 12 Devin Kadyama.
52:39 Speaker 12 I'm Dominic Gerard. I was the voice of Charles Dickens in this episode. I'm an actor, a musician, and I host a podcast called Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire.
52:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Voiceover work in this episode was also done by Darian Woods, Devin Katayama, Irene Noguchi, and Helen De La Haye.
52:59 Speaker 05 Thank you to Johannes Durkey, Tony Cavan, Stuart Harding, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
53:07 Rund 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
53:18 Speaker 15 Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.
53:21 Speaker 17 Anya Mizani.
53:26 Speaker 05 Thanks for listening.
53:34 Speaker 08 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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