Dan Snow's History Hit - Charles Dickens' Christmas

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

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

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

scavengers searched the murky waters for bodies to turn over for profit. We finish up on Cornhill, the street that Bob Cratchit went down the slide 20 times in honour of it being Christmas Eve. After this tour was over and we were freezing cold, Team History Hit went and we found an old medieval coaching inn, a place where Charles Dickens would have himself raised a glass. We toasted the great author.

We toasted his works that have inspired and entertained so many generations that have come since. And we toasted London itself as the sun set early on a winter's day. Here is our tour around Dickens' London. Enjoy. David, hello. Nice to meet you. And it's very good to meet you too, Dan. Thank you very much for coming along. This is great. Right, we're in a little oasis. Is this a former cemetery in the heart of Southwark? This is really all that's left of the old churchyard of the Church of St George the Martyr. You can see it's a churchyard because if you look over, they've got gravestones against the wall.

You may have noticed the odd tomb as we came in. So first things first, Charles Dickens. He is a Portsmouth man originally. I've got to say that because I'm from around there. But London is sort of central to his books, isn't it? Oh, very much so. I mean, he came here as a child. But Dickens certainly tunes into the rhythms of London.

And if you read his work now, it still rings true. You have people doing what London people do now and saying what they say and thinking what they think. Although he is trapped essentially in the Victorian period, yet he also goes beyond it to get to the grips of what being a Londoner actually is. And it seems like a different world. It's only 150 years ago or so, but it seems like just a different world. But we are in a space now, a little tiny hectare of ground that would have been recognizable to the great man well the reason we're here isn't for the churchyard or the garden it's for that

wall that you can see in front of you running along the north side of the garden that is the southern perimeter wall of the marshalsea prison so the prison was the actually on the other side of that wall it was located here in 1811, the year before Dickens was born. And it illustrates one of the big problems that the Victorians addressed, which was imprisonment for debt. The thing about the marshalcy was the population of the prison was dominated by debtors, people who owed more money than they could hope to repay.

And so they were arrested at the suit of their creditors because they were a flight risk. And so they popped them in there to make sure that they either leaned on friends and family to get the money, or in some cases, a lot of people could carry on their trade from inside, you know, and so they would earn some money and it would sort of, as it were, focus their minds. It seems so foreign to us today, that idea. Absolutely. I mean, imprisonment for debt goes back over many centuries. And what the Victorians did was to increase the availability of bankruptcy.

Because if you're a bankrupt, you put your affairs in the hands of a court of law who appoints a receiver who takes your assets, and so it's all out of your hands now, and you're no longer a flight risk. So creditors' prisons appear a lot in Dickens. Yeah, when Charles Dickens was 12 years old, in fact, just a fortnight after his 12th birthday in February 1824, his father John was imprisoned for debt here in the Marshall Sea. He was here for three months.

And this is how Dickens gets an impression of what life is like for a debtor in a Victorian prison. Well, actually, a Georgian prison, sorry, the 1820s. And did Dickens go into prison with his dad? Curiously enough, he was the mum member of the family who didn't. At that time, if you're in prison for debt, obviously you're trying to save every penny. And we're talking about a time when everyone rented their homes, they didn't own them. And as a result, you would move the family in with you, because that way you'd save the rent on the rooms where they were living. And so John Dickens moved his whole family in with him,

except for Charles. Charles was 12 years old, as I say, and that was considered plenty old enough to be taken out of school and put to work. So famously, or infamously from his point of view, he was put to work at Warren's Blacking Factory down by Hungerford Stairs, so near Charing Cross Station now. And presumably because he would have been having to get up too early to go to work before the prison opened. He was actually accommodated nearby on Lant Street, which is just down to the south-west of here, in a house belonging to the parish.

And was this a deeply traumatic event? Because they had a sort of clerical, middle-class life, and he suddenly thrust in, like David Copperfield, suddenly ripped out of school, thrust into, well, a very different kind of a world. Absolutely. Well, as I'm sure you know, David Copperfield is riven with autobiographical elements. But, yeah, it would have been a jar,

especially because it interrupted his life. I mean, he always resented the fact that he was taken out of school because he loved school, because he had an inquiring mind. So he enjoyed being in school. And having that taken away from him, he resented that. But worse than that, when he was in the blacking factory, basically wrapping and labelling bottles of boot polish, he was such a good worker that they put him in the window

so people could see him work, how industrious he was. So he already felt the indignity of doing this manual work, and now he was being put on display, as it were. So he was completely mortified by it. And it's said that he got a lot of resentment building up towards his mother because of it, because Warren, who owned the factory, was a cousin of his mother's, and she got him the place,

presumably thinking she was doing the right thing and obviously somebody needed to be earning some money, but Dickens never really saw it that way by all accounts. Let's go and take a close look at that wall. Absolutely and we can actually go through to the prison side of the wall where Dickens's family once lived. This is cool. So if we go through the opening here, as I say, onto the prison side of the wall. As you can see, it's... It's nice of modern planners to make it feel so much like a prison still. We just have this narrow alley here, Angel Place.

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

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

Now, Little Dorrit, unsurprisingly, Little Dorrit is about the experiences of the Dorrit family. And the first Dorrit we meet is William Dorrit, who is the father of the family. And he is imprisoned in the Marshall Sea just like John Dickens was and there's a lot about little Dorrit which is basically about imprisonment for debt and large amounts of it are set here in the Marshall Sea and the thing about William Dorrit though is he's not here for a short period he's's for quite a long period. In fact, he's here for so long, he becomes known as the father of the marshalcy.

And this is largely because of William Dorrit's character, his lack of resolve, a lack of resource. When he's imprisoned here, he knows he owes more money than he can hope to repay, but he doesn't know why. But yet he doesn't challenge the debt he just accepts his fate and the first we see of him is him coming into the marshalcy here all grumbling and indignant that he should be imprisoned but of course he's doing nothing about it does his father loom largely you think about mr mccorber as well in dickies think about mr

dorrit they're not unattractive characters, they're just completely useless. Do you think that's old Mr. Dickens there, looming large? Oh, quite possibly, yes. I mean, as I'm sure you appreciate, writers do tend to regurgitate lots of details and mix them all up together. So I'm not sure how likeable William Dorrit actually is, to be frank. But certainly when we first meet him, he has this terrible lack of resolve.

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

Relatable. So Dickens describes a man who realises that actually he's onto a good thing. He's safe in here. And that is no doubt why he stays so long. And, of course, he moves his family in with him. Mrs Dorrit, the prisoner's wife, she gives birth in the Marshall Sea to Amy, who is little Dorrit, because she doesn't grow beyond a child's stature. And Amy Dorrit is eight years old

when her mum dies and they're still in the marshalsea and Amy Dorrit grows up in the marshalsea and so that's how long the Dorrits are in the prison and this gives Dickens a chance to give his readership a vicarious experience of the life of the debtor in a Victorian prison. We're going to move on to something which is very much a survivor from Dickens' time and actually well before Dickens' time as we head up Borough High Street. Tower of London! So we're in George Yard now, and as you can see, we have the George Inn here. One of the great pubs of London. The world.

Absolutely. Still, as you see, a functioning pub. This is central London's only surviving galleried coaching inn and the galleries are the two levels of balcony that you can see there yes we're standing on what used to be a cobbled courtyard you've got bedrooms set back you've got these very lovely they've got wooden balustrades with columns like just galleries are basically that people can access all the bedrooms from and beneath it all you've got the bar with its lovely twisted oak beams and it's making you want to go in there and have a delicious mulled wine we're going back to the days of the stagecoach trade uh borough high street here being one of the main roads into the city of london uh you would get there by stagecoach in the

days before the arrival of the trains so stagecoaching goes really back to the 17th century. Tell me about Dickens's relationship with this place. Well, Dickens will have used the inn. Don't forget he was a journalist as well as being a novelist and essayist, and so he drank in most of the pubs of London. There is the story that there was a particular chair here that was Mr Dickens's chair although you have to treat such some of those stories with a little bit of suspicion. I doubt that there was a chair where if you were sitting in it everyone would come along get out of there Mr Dickens's chair he'll be along soon but the George does also appear in Little Dorrit

and the thing about the George is it's an ideal setting for a reading from the posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club, which is Charles Dickens' first published novel. In the borough especially, there still remains some half-dozen old inns, which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments for private speculation. Great, rambling, queer old places they are

with galleries and passages and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories. enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories. The Dickens describes these inns as being antiquated. There's only about half a dozen of them left. They're all disappearing, but they are now a thing of the past. He says they furnish material for ghost stories. This is a time when most ghost stories were still gothic, you know, leaning back to the Middle Ages and so on. So a ghost story brings with it the connotations of the past. They're already a thing of the past, even as the railways are starting to appear.

So the days of the stagecoach inn and the stagecoach trade were already numbered even before Victoria came to the throne. But it was under the Victorians that the stagecoach trade was already numbered even before Victoria came to the throne. But it was under the Victorians that the stagecoach trade was just pushed out completely and it doesn't come back to the 20th century with the internal combustion engine. I love the idea that Dickens would have visited this exact pub and thought it was rather quaint, just like us.

Our tour through Dickensian London continues after this. Our tour through Dickensian London continues after this. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Well you've brought me to the riverside now, you can see the dome of St Paul's there which

Dickens River has seen. We've got the river low tide so the mudflats exposed. We've got a few mudlarkers looking for Roman coins and bits of glass and things on the mudflats there. What's going on here? The reason I brought you to this part of the river is because Charles Dickens' last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, opens right here. The opening lines talk of a small boat

being rowed along this stretch of the river between the two bridges. You can just see London Bridge over to the right and then to the left we have Southwark Bridge although nowadays it's obscured by the Cannon Street Railway Bridge which wasn't there at the time that Our Mutual Friend was being written it was 1864 to 65. As I mentioned we have a little boat being rowed backwards and forwards there were two people in it one of them a man called Jesse Hexham known as Gaffer Hexham. He's at the rear of the boat, he's got his hand on the tiller steering the boat but he's scanning the

river looking for something and the boat is being rowed by his daughter Lizzie and she's rowing along and suddenly Gaffer sees what he wants and he puts the tiller hard over to turn the boat so lizzie amends her sculling so that she can turn the boat more easily and they come alongside what gaffer has seen and he leans over the back to tie it to the back of the boat with a piece of rope but he's over there for a bit of a time before suddenly he comes back into the boat. It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the boat. His arms were wet and dirty and he washed them over the side.

In his right hand he held something and he washed that over the side. In his right hand he held something, and he washed that in the river too. It was money. He chinked it once, and he blew on it once. For luck, he hoarsely said, before he put it in his pocket. So he's got some coins. Obviously coins don't float, but they do if they're in something that floats. And what he has seen is a corpse, and that is what he has tied to the back of his boat.

He is one of a number of people who are described on the river as going out to find dead bodies, and they bring them ashore so they can hand them in in the hopes that there'll be a reward. But on the way, of course, they help themselves to whatever they find that's useful in the pockets, and money, of course, is always useful. I mean, it's a powerful opening, isn't it? It's got kind of a hardscrabble life, looking for corpses, stealing from the dead,

a young daughter having to do hard manual labour with her dad. I mean, he sets out his stall early in that book. Absolutely. I mean, the Hexhams, the father Gaffer and his two children, they live in a little hovel down by the river, and that's how Gaffer Hexham gets his living, or tries to scratch a living. He's a waterman, someone who would ferry people up and down the river

and across the river, but by the 1860s, improvements in transport means that the watermen aren't getting quite the work that they used to do hence he needs to supplement his income and he represents the scavenger economy that you get in victorian cities where people go out to find things you mentioned mudlarking well nowadays people do it as an interest but it used to be a way of life people would scavenge for specific things so mud lockers would go down to the riverbed at low tide and they would find things that they could sell and if they couldn't sell them they could keep them and use them so they wouldn't have to

buy things you would have people in this area especially who would collect the pure and if you've come across collecting the pure, it's basically dog excrement. And you would pick it off the streets and you'd put it in a bag and when you had enough, you would take it to the tanners where they made the leather. And just to the slightly down river here, just to the east, we have the area of Bermondsey, which was very much part of the leather-creating area.

In fact, most of the tanneries in London were down that way. And basically, the tanners would rub this excrement over the skins to dry it before it was tanned, called purifying the leather. That's why it's called collecting the pure, which being short for purifying. I have had the misfortune of doing that in a reconstructed medieval tannery, and the smell is horrific, and the effluent is extraordinary that would have entered the terms just here it is december day we're both shivering we're looking down that brown river and the people even today mudlarking on either side of it it it would have

been a grim existence wouldn't you absolutely literally scratching a living uh from what they could do and this was a working river, of course, so you would have had ships coming up here. The lighters, the little barge-shaped boats, would be transferring cargoes to the riverside wharves and so on. And this is one of the ways that bodies ended up in the river because you'd get these sailors coming ashore who would be engaged for the voyage only.

They'd be paid off. Of course, the first thing they're going to do is head to the pub for companionship and alcohol and maybe a bit of sex as well and they would come out of the pub having drunk more than they'd been drinking for a long while they'd be all hot from the pub all hot from the bodies and everything and a little loose on their legs suddenly in the river freezing cold river alcohol as you may know reduces your resistance to the cold heart attack so that's how you would get some of the bodies in the river but of course a number of them would be through other means

including suicide So now we've got London Bridge, we've got the old trains coming into London Bridge now behind us. We're in a kind of covered walkway. It feels a bit Dickensian, this. Absolutely. I mean, Dickens' London was full of little nooks and crannies and so on that have disappeared mainly because of Victorian development. But the reason we've come to London Bridge, we're going back to Little Dorrit here,

and we are going to address something that was quite a point of concern in the 1820s, which was prostitute suicides. In the 1820s, there were a number of recorded suicides into the Thames, mainly actually from Waterloo Bridge, so just upriver from here. In fact, Thomas Hood, who was a Victorian poet with quite a social conscience, he wrote a poem about this called The Bridge of Sighs, and so Waterloo Bridge for a while was known as the Bridge of Sighs. But London Bridge had its share.

Now, in Little Dorrit, Amy, who, remember, is quite short, which is why she's called Little Dorrit, she has a friend called Maggie, and Maggie is tall. Maggie and Amy are out of the Marshall Sea visiting Amy's friend Arthur Clenham. The thing is that they get back to the Marshallsea too late and it's closed. And Amy tries to make herself heard and she can't. So they have to sit it out.

As you can imagine, it gets really cold at night. Also, of course, disreputable types keep coming past. So they keep having to get up and go for a walk. About half past three in the morning they're up on london bridge and they're walking along and dickens tells us that this young woman a prostitute comes up onto the bridge and she is going to throw herself into the river but she sees amy and maggie from behind and she forgets her own troubles for a moment she's so indignant that what she thinks of as a mother taking her child around the streets of london in the small hours she's so indignant at that that she goes over to try and sort of remonstrate with this mum and she accosts

maggie maggie is not really up to that kind of conversation. So the girl says, where are you going? She says, where are you going yourself? So the young woman bends down to speak to Amy, who she thinks is a child, and takes Amy's hands and rubs them to warm them up. Kiss a poor lost creature, dear, she said, bending her face. And tell me where she's taking you. Little Dorrit turned towards her. Why? My God, she said, recoiling. You're a woman. Don't mind that, said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that had suddenly released hers.

I am not afraid of you. Then you better add B, she answered. Have you no mother? No. No father? Yes, a very dear one. Go on to him and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night. I must thank you first. Let me speak to you as if I really were a child. You can't do it, said the woman. You are kind and innocent, but you can't look at me out of a child's eyes. I never should have touched you, but I thought that you were a child. And with a strange wild cry, she went away. Now, Amy wants to talk to this young woman, but the young woman just feels the isolation of her trade. However benevolent Amy is, and of course she's very benevolent

because she's a Dickens heroine, but as far as the young woman's concerned, nobody who's an adult could look on her and not see what she does for a living. Only a child who doesn't know of such things could see her just as a young woman for who she actually is. And that encapsulates the isolation and the insecurity and fear of these women trapped in this situation. And it was something that a number of victorians were trying to address you may know that the age of consent for sex used to be 12 and it wasn't raised until 1875 it was raised to 13

then in 1885 it was raised to 16 which it is now to try and combat child prostitution by making it illegal there were various efforts some more well thought out than others. And Dickens himself was involved in a venture which opened in 1847 called Urania Cottage. He got alongside Angela Burdett-Coutts, who was a very important Victorian philanthropist, and they started this venture where they would help rehabilitate girls they would get them out of prostitution and teach them accomplishments and how basically to run their lives in a more stable way the only thing about it which is strange to our eyes is that those who actually stayed with the program would then be shipped off to australia and you can understand if you look at it from the Victorian point of view,

Australia, since the early 19th century, was actually developing from a penal colony to proper colonies where people were going voluntarily. And it gave you the opportunity of a fresh start when no one would know you. And if they stayed in London, they would be far too vulnerable. And going outside London for a Londoner in those days was more or less like going abroad anyway, so it was giving them an opportunity.

As I say, a strange one to our eyes, but at the time, it seemed to make sense. So we're in the city proper now. We're in the heart of it. So what we're going to do is actually move north off of Lombard Street. We've just come into George Yard here, and we're going through the little archway. We've got St Michael's Alley in front of us,

Bengal Court off to the left. These little, what we would see as side streets, but which were actually ordinary streets in medieval London. So this is part of the old London that was spared and was rebuilt after the Great Fire, but spared Victorian development. This is, now today, this is a little piece of London. It looks like walking through somewhere like, I don't know, Venice, where there's little alleyways too small for cars.

But this would have been normal back then. It would. Should we actually go in? Let's go in. Let's go in for the Warren of alleyways here. That's magical, isn't it? I mean, this is a Warren of little streets, pedestrian only, pubs, tailors. You do get a sense of a lost London here. Absolutely.

I love it. The Jamaica Winehouse. We'll be back with more Christmas history after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Now, this is Bengal Court, just off of George Yard, and as you can see, it's quite narrow. So it's about, well, I'd say it's about three metres wide. If I lay down, it's about one and a half me's. Yeah, it's only a couple of paces across. One of the reasons, of course, why the Great Fire spread like it did,

because people were crowded into these streets trying to put the fires out in buildings and you couldn't get the little fire engines in and that sort of stuff. So, what's the connection, though, with Scrooge? Well, Ebenezer Scrooge has a counting house, so he has a couple of rooms in an ordinary house which he rents for his business which he carried out with his business partner Jacob Marley until the previous year when Marley died and so Scrooge has got two rooms he's got a proper sized room for him a little teeny room more like a box room really for his clerk and sole employee, Bob Cratchit, who has a very thin time of things overall.

And who has a very sickly little son. A very sickly little son, tiny Tim. Yeah, absolutely. To our eyes, it can get a bit saccharine, but they do represent the grinding poverty that some people had to put up with. Now, the thing about Scrooge, though, is where he lives. Much of the action of A Christmas Carol, which was written and published for the Christmas market in 1843,

is Scrooge leaves, however reluctantly, his business as Christmas Eve goes on towards the evening. And Bob Cratchit runs home to his home at Camden Town. And Scrooge makes his way back to the rooms where he lives. And this is where it's important to understand the counting house culture. Because Scrooge took over the rooms where Jacob Marley used to live. He died the previous Christmas Eve, a whole year ago. And these are in a house which is given over to counting houses it's a big house down the

alleyways and a little court but although it's big it's empty because apart from Scrooge's rooms no one lives there all the other rooms are counting houses so when Scrooge gets there, he's going to an empty, quiet, freezing cold, dark house. And we can imagine him getting there. I mean, I'm sure you know the story. It's a very familiar one, but he puts his key in the keyhole and suddenly the knocker transforms into the face of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, just for a moment, and then comes back to a knocker again. of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, just for a moment, and then comes back to a knocker again.

And so Scrooge, not got a great deal of imagination about him, but even he is a little unsettled. And so when he opens the door, he has a look round the back to see if the back of Jacob Marley's head is sticking out of it. When he opens that door, remember this is a big house

and it's a cavernous, cold house because there's nobody there now. All the businesses have shut up for the day and gone home. It's pitch dark because there's no one there to light anything, so he lights a little candle by the door to see his way up the stairs. It's freezing cold because all the fires have gone out, nobody there to keep the fires up, and it's silent because, again, there's no one there.

And he lights his little candle. It gives him a pinpoint of light as he goes up the stairs towards his rooms. And he shuts himself in, locks himself in, has his little bit of supper. And then he sits down in an armchair. And as he does, a bell catches his eye, one of these communicating bells on the wall that links up with a room a few floors above him and it's been disused for so long no one actually knows why it was put there in the first place but as he sits there something happens it was with great astonishment and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin

to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound, but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house. This might have lasted half a minute or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks of the wine merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains. The cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight towards his door. It's humbug still, said Scrooge. I won't believe it. His colour changed though, when,

without a pause, it came on through the heavy door and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame of the fire leapt up as though it cried, I know him, Marley's ghost, and fell again. So the apparition of the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner, Jacob Marley, dead business partner, which has been recreated so many times on television, on cinema, on stage. I mean, the Muppets have done it, for goodness sake. We're so familiar with it now, we tend to lose the sense of terror and the frisson of chill that the original readership would have had when they read that moment. But nowadays, I mean, when we leave work, we go home and we go either to a house in a street or a flat in a block.

And even if we don't connect with our neighbours, they're there. There are always people around. The equivalent to Scrooge's experience would be if we went home to an empty office block and we lived in one of the offices and everybody else has gone and all the power's off and everything, we don't appreciate how alone he is. And one of the strengths of the ghost story comes from the vulnerability of the subject. You're on your own. There's no one to help you. There's no one even to see what you're seeing. And there's no one there to help Scrooge.

And so that terrible vulnerability we lose I think because we've seen it re-enacted in so many times but also because we don't know what the counting house culture was like okay here we go right where are we still we're still in this little warren of streets here aren't we we're not far from Ebenezer's Grouche. We've left Bengal Court, we came along St Michael's Alley, and here we are in the churchyard of St Peter Corn Hill. The churchyard here wouldn't have been landscaped as the garden that it is now.

It would have been a disused, derelict burial ground, uncared for, with the tombstones starting to lean over. You will have noticed that we've actually come up above street level into the churchyard. A similar situation back at the churchyard at St George the Martyr where we started. And this is because of overcrowding, not by the living, but by the dead. London was growing in the early 19th century, increasing numbers of people coming in, and with an increasing density of living population, an increasing density of living population, you get, in due course,

an increased number of dead people to be buried. But where are you going to bury them? You've only got the churchyards and dissenting burial grounds and Quaker burial grounds, that kind of thing. Very small, designed for a medieval city. So what you would do is you would go to the... You'd bury as many people as you could.

Then you would go to the old graves. People haven't visited for ages. Remove the gravestone, dig down to the coffin, and jump up and down on it and smash the coffin and the remains into the ground. And then you cover it with soil. As far as anyone knows, it's just an ordinary grave. And the coffin goes in there.

Trouble was, after a while, there's a limit to the amount of times you could do that. And the coffins weren't in the ground long enough. So they started building up on top of each other. So they decided to put graves between graves. And there are stories of grave diggers digging down and knocking the side of a coffin off with their spade and an arm starts swinging out.

And they haven't got time to put it back together, so they just chop the arm off with their spade, bundle it in, and then just shove the side of the coffin back on and then carry on digging their grave. But inevitably, the graves between the graves were getting quite close to the surface as well. So they started raising the level of the churchyards to get some soil between all these bodies and the open air. But inevitably, with that amount of corpses in there, decomposing away like nobody's business, you can imagine what is filtering up

percolating through the soil and the health hazard that was causing especially as these vapors start to condense on the buildings around the churchyards this was another thing the victorians had to address and from 1852 within the space of about 30 years you get 13 burials acts passed. And what they do is they stop buryings in the city and central London, and they start bringing it under control. And that is when you get the big cemeteries around what were then the edges of London. Highgate, Tower Hamlets, Abney Park, Brompton, and so on. What were later to become known as the Magnificent Seven.

And, of course, the big necropolis at Brookwood, near Weybridge in Surrey, which had its own dedicated railway line. So getting rid of that health hazard of burials, over-burials. And we can actually, through Dickens' word, get a feeling of what those graveyards were like. Because they're mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit, but of course they're also mentioned in A Christmas Carol. Because after the visit of Jacob Marley, Scrooge is visited by three more ghosts.

The ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present, but then the feared ghost of Christmas yet to come. Shrouded in black, you can't see the face. All you can see is this exposed hand with a pointing finger that it uses to communicate. It doesn't say a word, it just points. It takes Scrooge through the city of London, showing him scenes connected with the death of a businessman

who is unmourned and despised by all. And he thinks, well, this is obviously the example I'm being shown. who is unmourned and despised by all. And he thinks, well, this is obviously the example I'm being shown. I must change my ways to live in a different way from this man. And then the ghost takes him to the churchyard so that he can find out who this businessman actually is. A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place.

Walled in by houses, overrun with grass and weeds. The growth of vegetation's death, not life. Choked up with too much burying fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place. So he describes the churchyard as full of vegetation, the growth of vegetation's death. So many nutrients in the ground from these decomposing bodies that all these vines and what have you,

and creepers are twining around each other, choking each other out. And he talks of the graveyard as if it's a living thing. It's fat with repleted appetite. Now, repleted appetite, that's what you get when you go to the buffet restaurant, the all-you-can-eat restaurant, and you have that dangerous last plateful. And then you get out in the street and it all settles down and you realise you should never have touched that last one.

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

We've left St Peter's Churchyard now. We've come up St Peter's Alley onto Corn Hill, the street along which Bob Cratchit slid 20 times on an ice slide in honour of Christmas Day. And we've come up here to Threadneedle Street and we're round the back of the Royal Exchange. So across the road we have the Bank of England. These are two institutions that are at the heart

of the City of London's financial story. And so we are in the traditional financial district of the old city, although the city itself now is a financial district in its own right. But we're not here for business. We're here for this sculpture here, the statue of George Peabody. Now, Peabody was a businessman. He was a merchant banker from Danvers in Massachusetts in the United States, a self-made man. But he came over and settled in London in 1837, the year that Victoria ascended the throne. And he is known not for his business ventures,

but for his philanthropy. He became known as the father of modern philanthropy. And in this city, in London, he is known for Peabody's housing. The trust fund that he set up in 1862 as the first proper attempt to address the terrible housing crisis that we had in the 19th century. It was a time when profiteering landlords and developers were filling their homes with families who could only rent a room at a time. Central government, local authorities had no interest in addressing this issue. So Peabody got involved. So a philanthropist.

Dickens was a journalist as well as being a novelist and he knew of the sharp practices and hard hearts of the City of London. But he was also well acquainted with philanthropy, with people who used their resources for good. He was a friend of Angela Burdett-Coutts, a granddaughter of Thomas Coutts, who founded Coutts Bank. And he also knew another philanthropist, a fictional philanthropist, Ebenezer Scrooge.

We tend to forget that side of Scrooge. We think of the unreformed character. But Dickens gives us an example of how a businessman could actually operate in a good way, because he sees the three ghosts, the Christmas ghosts, and he wakes up the next morning, finds out that it's only Christmas Day, and he can now put things right. He's a reformed character. Now the most immediate recipients of his benevolence and his philanthropy is of course the Cratchit family and the following day, Boxing Day, when Bob Cratchit turns up for work he's greeted with the unusual announcement that his salary is going to be raised and that Scrooge is going to help him

and help his family and they sit down over a bowl of smoking bishop which is a kind of heated punch and Dickens sums up Ebenezer Scrooge the reformed character in this way. He became as good a friend as good a master and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe for good at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset so people do good they seek to, and people think they're fools.

And Ebenezer Scrooge is taken for a fool, no doubt, by many of his business colleagues and associates, but that doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter what people think of him. What matters to him is that he is helping, he's redeeming his time, and that he's helping out. And so it matters that you help it matters that you are there for people irrespective of what others think of you which i'm sure is the thought that

we all share today well thank you very much that was a wonderful tour thank you very much And that brings us to the end of my Origins of Christmas series. Well, you might say, well, sure. Dan didn't talk to us about Stuart Christmas, or Christmas in the 20th century, or Plantagenet Christmas, or early medieval Christmas. Well, don't worry. Trying to save some content back for next December.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoyed this series, spread the Christmas cheer and leave us a review, or have you listened to your podcast? Thank you. I'm Dan Snow, and this series was produced by Merindey Forge and edited by Dougal Patmore. Happy Christmas, folks. you you