Dan Snow's History Hit - Dan's Dickensian Christmas

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

Dan Snow is treated to a range of Dickensian Christmas delights courtesy of historian Pen Vogler, from mince pies to Charles Dickens' favourite punch.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Hope your Christmas was good. Hope you had a good time.

I had a really nice time. It was a real treat to spend time with my kids and my wife. What a treat it was after this busy year of being away, out of town, out of home, so much. Gosh. And we've got a great episode for you. We got a christmasy episode i'm repeating two years ago i went and cooked a dickensian christmas fair with pen vogler the wonderful historian who's been on this podcast um several times before she and i cooked i was suffering from a crushing hangover from a history hit christmas party the night before but i soldiered on i said that's why you pay the big bucks folks this episode episode is also a TV show. You can see what we actually cooked on History Hit TV. If you want to go to History Hit TV,

you want to watch the best history channel on this earth, on this beautiful planet that we're lucky enough to inhabit, the best history channel on it is available. HistoryHit.tv. Available in every country around the world, pretty much. You can historyhit.tv use the code january because the january sale has begun it's december doesn't matter it's january sale has begun and use code january get a month for free and you get 80 off the first three months you'll believe it so please go and check that out in the meantime everyone enjoy pen vogler and our dickensian Christmas. I've come to meet up with food historian Pen Fogler. She's going to talk me through how Christmas was marked in the 19th century through food and drink.

And, of course, we're going to talk about the most Christmassy novelist of all time, Charles Dickens. Hello. Hello. How are you? Hi. Good to see you. Happy Christmas. Thank you. Merry Christmas to you. Hi. Come on in. Have a drink. Well, if you insist? Hi. Good to see you. Happy Christmas. Thank you. Merry Christmas to you. Hi. Come on in. Have a drink. Well, if you insist.

It's that time of year. In fact, make a drink. Okay. Well, how? Well, I thought we could start off with some smoking bishop. Because in a Christmas carol, the reformed Scrooge says to Bob Cratchit, we will discuss your affairs over a bowl of smoking bishop. Well, let's discuss our affairs over some smoking bishop.

How do we smoke the bishop? So, we smoke the bishop. Here's a little one we've made earlier. We will discuss your affairs over a bowl of Smoking Bishop. Well, let's discuss our affairs over some Smoking Bishop. How do we smoke the bishop? So we smoke the bishop. Here's a little one we've made earlier. We smoke the bishop. It's mulled port, basically. OK, lovely. It's like mulled wine. There's a bit of a mulling thing going on in here, which is very easy.

It's just water and sugar and then some nice spices. So cinnamon, mace, allspice, and some ginger and orange and lemon yeah and then to that we add a bottle of pork which maybe you could okay i mean i was out drinking on site with team history hit for a season so this can do it might go one of two ways this will be the hair of the dog that sets you i don't know the whole bottle yeah put the whole bottle okay and then if what i quite often do with this is either drink it or I sometimes make it into a jelly because the Victorians love their jellies.

Oh, of course. And so if you want a slightly sort of boozy end to your dinner party, you can... We could do it, actually. I've got one in the fridge. You can unmould a jelly. It's rather good. Well, the port is in.

Yeah, and that's all we do. So we let it warm up, let some of the alcohol evaporate, but not all. So why do we associate Christmas, with all the great novelists and poets in English language, why do we associate Christmas with Charles Dickens? I think it's just because of A Christmas Carol, or mostly because of A Christmas Carol, because there are Christmassy scenes in Pickwick and in Great Expectations,

but that book just had such a hold on people's imaginations. And was it an instant success at the time? It was an instant success. It sold out in five days, I think, and it's never been out of print since. And, of course, many film adaptations, things like that. So, with Dickensens was he a sort of Christmassy person? Do we know if he liked hosting big Christmases and things or was it just accidentally he became a socialist? No he loved Christmas it was really important to him

and his daughter Mamie when she was sort of thinking back on him she said she he loved Christmas for its joys as well as its deep significance and it did have a really profound significance to him because he had this... He was haunted all the time by this fairly wretched childhood. And so through things like Christmas and through dinner parties, he sort of made up for that, I think, psychologically speaking. Those abilities to have a wonderful time, to bring people together over food and drink,

became incredibly important to him. So his material comforts were important to him after that childhood of occasionally real poverty. Complete poverty. I mean, when he was 12, his father went into the Marshall C. Detters prison with his mother, the younger children. This 12-year-old kid was left to fend for himself.

He had to earn all his money at a blacking factory, which he was totally humiliated by, completely hated, and learn, basically, to feed learn basically to fend you know to feed himself to fend for himself and to be hungry and i i guess it's that hunger it's like that physical hunger that he really knew as a child as well as that profound psychological emotional hunger for security you know we talk about food security these days, thinking, oh, it's all about supply lines and, you know, food coming into the country. But actually, food security for children means knowing where your next meal is coming from and having an adult to make it for you who you can trust. It's a deeply kind of emotionally significant thing.

And he knew what being hungry was. He knew what being hungry was like. And you can really see that in all his very hungry kids. Oh. Oh. Yeah. When Oliver Twist is looking through that bakery window. In fact, it's there that he meets the artful Dodger, isn't it? Yes, that's right. That is looking through the window.

Yes, exactly. And, you know, little Joe the Crossing Sweep, who's possibly the most pathetic character in Dickens. That's something against some pretty stiff competition. He's got some quite stiff competition, but he's kind of uneducated. He keeps on being moved on. What does he do? He sits on a doorstep and eats a piece of dirty bread. And for me, that's a very profound thing, because people talk now about clean eating and clean food, and you think, really, when a child eats a piece of dirty bread, that puts all that into perspective

for me. And Dickens knew what it was like, really, to be hungry, not to know where your next meal was coming from. And then we've got the beginning of Tale of Two Cities, haven't we, where the wine cask get burst all over the street and people sort of attack it. It's such an extraordinary scene, isn't it? And he says it's like the blood running through the streets

of Paris. It prefigures it. But you get a sense of their desperation, don't you? Their their desperation one of the most incredible descriptions of hunger in a very kind of quite sophisticated quite urban city dickens has you know saying there was nothing on the bakery shelves except a bit of dead dog preparation there was not even a drop of oil to fry a husky kind of potato chip. And he's really describing hunger. And it has quite an interesting conversation because in Great Expectations, the other hungry adult male in Dickens, you have Magwitch, the convict.

Oh, yes, the convict. He's really hungry, so he gets picked to steal food for him. And Dickens, in a way, is saying, if you don't feed people, this is what happened. You get riot and revolution. You know, you're so right. I remember reading Great Expectation at school. There's the way he... I can almost remember the...

I haven't read it for years, but the way he attacks that bread and he eats those... He's got a word... Whittles. That's right, it's all coming back. And it's such a powerful scene. It's tactile, isn't it? Yes, yes, he's shoveling it down his throat

in a way that seems to go against biology because it seems to raw mincemeat seems to go down his throat right speaking of going down throat we should have so if we're going to serve this in a fairly Dickensian way we would

how do you describe this it's a lovely punch bowl we would bowl, obviously. Yes. Putting punch in it. We would put our smoking bishop in it. It's so wonderful. Pick it up and pour it in. Let's just hope it doesn't splash everywhere.

Very good. That's the tricky thing about a pour. You've got to connect to it, haven't you? You've got to be a bit more assertive than that. And then this goes in. So the orange with cloves cloves sticking out of it and there we could put it on the table lovely so there's our lovely bowl of smoking bishop not stinking bishop which people quite often when i serve this people say oh stinking bishop that's a cheese i just inhaled a bit too much i'm sort of feeling slightly...

It hits the back of your throat. You don't have to... Come on now, I feel confident. Yeah, I think you'll be all right. Those nice big heavy glass goblets, quite 19th century as well. Yes. Thank you very much. So a little bit of...

And like I say, anything we don't drink can get made into a jelly. Waste not, want not. Definitely. Cheers. Just think of all those rioting people in France and what they'd have given for a... Exactly. That's why we're not rioting. That's why we're not rioting.

We're just relaxing in a nice semi-touched house in London. Even though Brexit's happening. Yes, keep the hangovers going and that'll keep your... Absolutely. Keep your population supine. What would a salutation be in the 19th century? Do we know in Dickens? Would you drink someone's health?

You drink somebody's health. Your health? Yes, your health, your good health. That's a big improvement on port, actually. Funnily enough, it's quite... It's quite dinkable. Much less for the jelly. So let's just quickly go through Dickens.

Everyone's heard of him. During his lifetime, did he enjoy the kind of phenomenal success that we associate with his legacy? It happened quite early, actually. In his 20s, he started to write Pickwick papers. And as soon as he brought Sam Weller onto the scene, all these early books were published episodically. As soon as he brought Sam Weller onto the scene, it just took off.

And what's Sam Weller? Sam Weller was Mr Pickwick's manservant. And he was very funny. He was a sort of, in that tradition of Jeeves and Worcester. How funny, OK. I've never heard of Pickwick. Very funny and just very wry and always has a kind of the perfect little response. So, for example, he's taking Mr Pickwick,

he's guiding him through Whitechapel to go and get a coach off to East Anglia. And he notices there's all these oyster sellers down the street in Whitechapel where there would now be fried chicken shops. There are people selling oysters. And he says, oh, it's funny how you notice that poverty and oysters always seem to go together. You know, when a man's desperate with hunger, he rushes out and can't get enough oysters. So that's a kind of, that's a sort of Wellerian expression.

But so Dickens was becoming famous in his 20s. And these were written week by week, you'd buy a periodical or a magazine. Yes. And there'd be a Dickens chapter in it. There'd be a Dickens chapter. And sometimes there'd be two going on simultaneously. And he was a journalist and he was editing. He was a phenomenal, probably slightly manic, slightly insomniac. All the best ones are, unfortunately. That's why I've never hit greatness. Yeah, if you need sleep,

then none of us are probably going to get Dickens' output. But he wrote so much over his lifetime, you know, it would probably take... You know, I haven't read all of Dickens. Most people couldn't read all of his kind of journalism and everything. And so he was very, very popular at the time. We associate him now with the growing understanding that challenges of the Industrial Revolution,

these massive new cities, this underclass has been created. Was he an activist as well? Or did he just express that through his writing? What was his sort of politics like? His politics was... That's a very interesting question because he, I think he realised that the most good he could do would be to carry on writing. So for example, slightly towards the end of his life, he was asked to

stand for Parliament and he said thank you very much, but in fact I think being a novelist is going to have more influence. But he did work very closely with an heiress called Angela Bedeck-Coutts, and together they sort of cooked up schemes to... They had a scheme called Urania Cottage, which was a place for reformed ladies of the night, reformed women who'd fallen on hard times, become prostitutes, to go and learn sort of the domestic virtues, learn needlework, learn cookery, learn how to look after a house,

and managed to put themselves back on their feet through that door. And he ran, as well as doing all his other journalism, he was very involved in running that at the time. And on the whole, I think his view is that the most good he could do was through dramatising and characterising the big problems of the day. And what is it about Dickens that has drawn you to him as a food historian, not just a lover of literature? He writes about food so much in his novels. And in his novels, food is an expression of status,

it's an expression of aspiration, it's an expression of relationships between people. I think there was a lot going on in Victorian lives. You know, you get this thing about the cash nexus, you know, that Carlisle was so worried about, that, you know, these relationships between people were being taken over by other things. And Dickens was almost saying, no, there are times which food brings us together and it shows you how people relate to each other

and it shows you where you are in your life. And it also shows you know I mean so little Dorrit for example Flora Finching who's little Dorrit's sort of friend and protégé she's always pushing a sort of little leg of you know leg of those fowl or something so she wants to care for her she wants to look after her and little Dorrit never eats she's probably an anorexic it's not a word he uses but he's observing somebody who's been so damaged by her early childhood. Growing up in prison, she has a very strange relationship with food. Can't eat in company, for example.

Wow. And then, of course, we've got the classic moment. Oliver Twist goes up to the front. And again, it's very... The descriptions of food, the place of food in that that poor the workhouse or the orphanage again from childhood i remember the table would be laden wouldn't it for the staff or that horrible man what's he called mr something in charge of the orphanage and mr bumble that's right and he was sort of fat and he was glowing the adults are often fat yes yes and then and then oliver walks up to the front and says please please, I can have some more, and that's the big moment.

He says, please, I want some more, and he was reckless with hunger and desperate. And he was reckless because, in fact, there was quite strict rules in workhouses, in some workhouses, about whether you're allowed to have more or not. And so he's drawn the short straw, he has to go and ask for more. And his punishment is draconian, but quite probably realistic. And, yeah, so he's showing food about...

And how adults who should be feeding kids, these adults who are in charge of these children's welfare, are starving them and exploiting them, actually often making money out of them, like the horrible schoolmaster, Wackford Squares and Nicholas Nickleby, who is getting money from these poor little boys' parents to kind of look after them in a school.

And his wife gives him brimstone and treacle. You know, brimstone is sulphur, to ruin their appetite, to make them cheaper to feed. Oh, I don't remember that. That's beautiful. And then, we've got to stop swapping anecdotes, but they're all coming to me now. David Copperfield gets sent away to school by that horrible stepfather of his.

Yes, Mr Murdstone. Mr Murdstone. Yes, back then. And he becomes quite popular, doesn't he? Because he spends all the money he's been given on sweets, and they all sit round in a circle and eat them. On almond cakes. Almond cakes, yes.

So Dickens, as a result of his childhood, he liked the material things, he liked to be comfortable. What would have happened? Because there's amazing stories of dinner parties where you've got Dickens and Trolley, you've got the most brilliant people of the world all gathered around, aren't there? I mean, you must love reading accounts of those. I love reading accounts of his dinner parties.

And actually, there's this fantastic account by two different people of the same dinner party. One is Mrs Gaskell. He was having a dinner party to kind of introduce her to London society after she went Mary Barton. And she said it was just very nice. And we went and saw his study and there were some nice little Dickens children. It was also sweet. And then the other one is Jane Carlyle. And Jane Carlyle is very waspish. She's very funny. And she says, oh, the dessert was far too overloaded. It was far too lavish, you know, for a for a literary man. And he should have kept himself more in his place.

And she describes what's going on on the table. You know, there's a candle coming out of an artificial rose, for example, and much, much too much dessert, you know, too many kind of figs and raisins and things. And so you get this lovely descriptions of people. Zachary as well was quite... That's right, Zachary. Yeah, Zachary, because he was... Zachary was quite...

Well, they were good mates, but Zachary was quite aristocratic and he was quite down on Dickens for being a bit of a kind of self-made man. And he says... Oh, really? Yeah, every so often there's a description of him coming across Catherine and Charles Dickens at an evening do. And he says, Catherine was resplendent and pink satin and Charles in ring at an evening do. And he says, Catherine was so splendid and pink sat in, and Charles in ringlets and a geranium.

Which is not good. Yeah, but he's writing to his mother. I think that probably sells you quite a lot of outtakes. But Thackeray, isn't it? But that's an interesting relationship, because arguably the greatest ever novel in the English language, but Dickens' average mean much higher. So which would you go for? Well, if you had just complete works, you'd go for Dickens. Well, of course, but if you had average mean much higher. So which would you go for?

Well, if you had just complete works, you'd go for Dickens. Well, of course, but if you had to go for the one novel, Thackeray might be on the chance. As a food historian, I'd always go for Dickens. Of course you would. I mean, that's not... Yes, yes, for fun. And so we'd have gone to Dickens' house. We know that the table would have been over lavish, there'd have been too much food. There'd have been a lot of food.

Right. And we know a lot about what they ate because his wife, Catherine, although they famously had this very horrible separation later in their marriage, when they were together and happy, she was clearly a very good housekeeper. And she published this little book in 1851 called What Shall We Have for Dinner? And it's a book of what she calls bills of fare, so menus and a few recipes. And she said this is what you'd have if you're, you know,

a small family party of two or three people. And on the whole, it's kind of lots of mashed potato and, you know, stodgy puddings. And she said this is what you'd have for a dinner party of up to 20. And they're quite lavish. You know, for a middle-class family, it's very aspirational. There are four courses, there's several dishes in each course, a lot of meat, very kind of, you know, elaborate jellies,

Charlotte Roos, creams and things for pudding. Rather delicious, actually. I bet. Now, as a food historian, what are the biggest differences between the Victorian table and taste and ours? I think the biggest difference for me is mutton, because that was the most common meat, probably for most of the kind of middle classes,

and that's kind of disappeared. I cook it quite often. Dickens' favourite dish was probably leg of mutton stuffed with oysters, which is amazing. It's very good. But I had to get my mutton from Yorkshire. Swaledale, very good. So being very stupid, what's the difference between mutton and lamb?

Mutton is a sheep over two years old. Over one year old, it's called a hoggart, but nobody really uses that term. And then under one, it's a lamb. And it just means that since Dickens' time, sheep have been reared in a very different way. They've been bred so that they fatten up quickly. And they've been marketed so we think lamb is the thing.

So mutton is one thing that's gone a lot. And there are a few tastes that... Mace is quite a Victorian taste that, you know, it's not that easy to get a hold of. But I think most of their food was what we think of now as kind of classic Sunday lunch kind of food. That's when, in the sort of early 19th century, our sort of palette of kind of Sunday lunch family food,

that's when it was being laid down. But you've really given me a powerful image of this man who grew up with genteel aspirations but in total poverty. And it makes so much sense now. He's old, he's famous, he's wealthy, and he's just eating in this lovely, lavish, quite rich, almost ostentatious food. I think so, but it's also what is incredibly important for him was companionship.

So as he grew older, he wrote some autobiographical fragments which he gave to his biographer, John Forster. And they're so similar to David Copperfield, it's really remarkable. But what he says is when he was this poor little scrap of, you know, 11 or 12, living by himself, what he missed most was the companionship of boys of his own age. And I can really see that in those dinner parties,

that's what he's doing, he's pulling his friends, particularly his male friends, to him. And if you look at his invitations to them, they're very specific. He'll say, come for dinner, a turtle and a steak, 4.30, or 4.30 for five prompt. He's very punctual. And he doesn't say, just drop in, please come for dinner. He sort of issues instructions.

He writes these invitations, so they're very warm, they're very funny, but they're almost impossible to refuse. And you can see the sort of compulsion in him to just draw people around his table. Well, middle-aged men have got a problem with loneliness and depression. I think we should all learn from Charles Dickens. I should see more of my friends. And your ten children, maybe.

I see plenty of them. I see plenty of my kids If you were 12 and students. I see plenty of my kids, and they're fine. Right, well, you've got some ingredients out, so should we get some Christmassy food in us, as well as all this booze? Well, I thought, since it's Christmas, a very typical thing is some mince pies. When I was looking for a kind of nice Dickensian recipe, I found this very interesting recipe from an old Scottish manuscript called

a Florentine, which is a sort of old word for a mince pie. An early mince pie or an early Florentine would have had meat in, you know, chopped meat, and we lost that. Around Dickens' time, it was becoming sort of optional, and now when we make mincemeat, we don't put it in at all. So I've got a nice Florentine recipe which is mincemeat with um chestnuts that's the thing that makes it ever so slightly different but i thought we could make that um with some pastry and then see how we get on do that thank you very much land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge

beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man Thank you. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth, now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Okay, so put me to work. Great. Well, we'll make some mince pies. So I've made some pastry. It's quite hard. It's been in the fridge. Well, I'll give it some welly so if you just sprinkle some flour on this rather

rickety table and just it's lovely making things yourself and it does give you a bit of an insight into what life was like for a scullery maid well she wouldn't have been allowed on the pastry of course she'd have had all the washing up to do.

But, yeah, there were recipes, for example, in the 18th century saying, beat this cake mixture for an hour. For an hour? Yeah, and you can just imagine those cooks with their lovely beard, muscly arms going, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. So if you turn it so you get a nice... And we want it. OK, so...

A nice square. OK. Great. A normal middle-class house, I don't even know what that is, but in a sort of white-collar professional job in Victorian London, how many staff might they have had? That's such an interesting question. The Dickens, when they started off their married life in Doughty Street,

they had three. Now, for a middle-class family, that's actually quite good going. You know, they had a cook, they had a nursemaid and they had a scullery maid. And people think that the Victorian middle classes had a lot of servants. Actually, it was a sort of mark of status how many servants they had. And, you know, a kind of aspiring middle-class housewife might have just had one scullery maid. OK. We might need a bit more flour

i thought at the time no um needs to go underneath and you know a lot of these poor little scullery maids they might have been workhouse kids like 12 year old girls who probably possibly never even grown up in a house and what have they done they're thrown into a house told to kind of cook for the family clean up get up at six go to bed at ten, you know, and they probably have no idea how a house even works. And Dickens writes about some of these poor kids in his novels. You know, you get the marchioness in the old curiosity shop who is kept in a basement and almost starved

and kind of ritually bullied and humiliated who gets well we got we got uh oliver twist is working that coffin shop you get a sense of that don't you yeah exactly oliver twist who goes from workhouse to uh apprenticeship supposedly yeah that's lovely yeah that's good and it's a bit thinner okay now we would say three millimetres we would say three millimetres a Victorian cook might say the depths

of a two pea piece or a shilling or something so because if you think about our little pies that's really good you know

you can come round and roll my pastry any time you are looking at a prep chef in 1998 I am it was my summer job

was it I can't cook but I can prep it's very odd it's very useful I can wash dishes, but I can prep. It's very odd. It's very useful. I can wash dishes, too. It's very, very... What are we thinking there?

Is it still...? I think that's pretty good. Maybe a tiny... Okay, tiny. It's enough. Yeah, no, I think that's very good. Let's not give ourselves a hard time. It's very nice.

Lovely. Okay. Right. But every time I cook like this, I just bless the people who invented non-stick, I bless the people who invented, you know, all these kind of things that we use. We're lucky to be alive today.

Oh, we're lucky to be alive today. But Dickens was interesting because he wrote quite a lot about what went on in kitchens. You know, it's unusual for a Victorian man to know how to prepare food, know know about kitchen equipment but for him the kitchen was a sort of essential part of your moral life in a funny kind of way you had to kind of know about domesticity you had to attach some weight to domesticity and it was something he struggled with clearly because he he wanted to kind of live this moral domestic life,

and yet he was also always trying to kind of escape it. You know, he was always travelling, he was going off to America on reading tours or living in France or Italy. So there's quite a... Hang out with his mistress. Hang out with his mistress in later life, of course. But his mistress is interesting because, again, obviously I don't want to relate everything to food and chickens,

but all his descriptions of older women in his novels, the older housekeepers, they're nearly all lacking. You know, they're nearly all not doing the job they're supposed to do, which is look after the kids in their care. You know, you think of Mrs Jellaby in Bleak House and what she's supposed to do. She's supposed to look after her children who are tumbling downstairs,

her husband's going hungry to work. And what does she do? She writes letters and drinks coffee. I think because of this early experience that Dickens had when his mother wasn't there to look after him. had when his mother wasn't there to look after him. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge

beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age Thank you. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth, now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I think he just didn't trust older, you know, older housekeepers. Interesting. He loved the image of the young housekeepers, so probably Catherine, his wife, when they were young, he loved that image of her looking after him and looking after the family. And you see all those lovely images of the young housekeeper, like Bella Wilfer,

trying to kind of learn to cook for her new husband. He loved all that. Oh, yes, David Cockfield, yeah. Now, so what about Christmas more generally? I mean, do the Victorians give us this modern phenomenon of this kind of world-stopping Christmas? It's when everyone puts down their tools, we give each other presents, it's become a kind of festival of buying and eating and drinking and partying. Or is that timeless?

I think it was changing all the time. I think one of the reasons that Dickens wrote about Christmas so sort of passionately was because there was a sense amongst him and some of his contemporaries that Christmas was kind of being let to sleep. And actually it was a really important thing and we needed to celebrate it and celebrate particularly those bonds between people. So there was that sense of responsibility that a landlord would have,

for example, when we were mostly an agricultural nation at christmas landlords no matter how terrible they were they might have they probably would have been responsible for somebody in there for all their tenants to get some kind of meat for example you know some chicken or a tart or something and dickens is trying to show with a Christmas Carol that although those bonds are broken, you need to revive them in these new urban industrial cities. And that's one of the things he's showing Scrooge does. He learns that he cannot be unresponsible. So Christmas is, and we still have that today,

Christmas is a time for giving and community. So we read a lot about Christmas charities and Christmas social awareness know, Christmas sort of social awareness. Yeah. Around homelessness or something. So that was around in the other case. Yeah, I think that was around. And I think not just around, but I think Dickens was aware that it needed to, you know,

we needed to remind people of it. Yeah, and so that's one of the things that A Christmas Carol does. It tells people about their responsibility to the people who are working for them. And families would get together at Christmas. It was a big, it would reunite, would they? Or was Christmas time for friends and neighbourhoods in Victorian? I think before A Christmas Carol, before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had that massive focus on the family, Christmas was probably a little bit more neighbourly. It was probably more about bigger families coming together.

So Dickens has this older Christmas in Pitwick Papers where he shows a big sort of country house and the servants come in and they all dance together and they all drink wassail together and all the visitors come in. And then at Carroll he's showing this kind of small nuclear family and that's what queen victoria did as well show a kind of nuclear family and i think we moved from a sort of much more communal sense of christmas to a much more sort of family sense around you know the mid part of the 19th century so the vict Victorians gave us that. They also gave us these mince pies.

Well... The mouth is watering. Actually, the... Yeah, the Victorians... Did they give us mince pies? Mince pies are quite an old thing, yes. Quite Tudor. Yes, I've had a Tudor mince pie. You've had a Tudor mince pie.

Did it have meat in it? I don't remember. Well, a proper Tudor mince pie would have had meat in it. Probably a fig. And the Victorians were beginning to kind of rethink the meat thing. I thought, well, maybe we don't need sirloin steak in our mince pies. But sometimes they put it in. If you did some little stars, you'll have some nice stars on top.

So I'm sort of packing it in here. And so this is a slightly different recipe. It's got chestnuts in, and it comes from an old Scottish recipe calling itself a Florentine rather than a mince pie, which again would be a pie, you know, with a kind of mixture of meat sometimes and what they call sweet meats. So all these good things.

And they also obviously called cur currents and everything plums. So plum pudding. Oh, it's actually... It doesn't actually have plums in it. Well, you know, I've always wondered about that. It doesn't have plums in, but, you know, these are just plums because they're the plum part of the... You know, you have that expression, the plum.

The plum. The plum, you know. OK, that's good. It's quite fast with two. Yeah, we're pooling our sovereignty. Perfect. Great, let's get them in the oven. Goodness, I feel so Christmassy.

Yeah, yes. OK, you go and then behave yourselves. Burn. Shall we make something to drink to go with them? Yes, definitely. This is Dickens' punch and genuinely his own recipe. He loved punch. It was the thing that he really felt kind of made a party go off with a bang.

Right, well, hang on, I can now ask you, what is punch? So what is punch? In here is, it's not a light drink, you know, it's got quite a bit of poke to it. Rum and cognac. Lemon, both the rind and the juice. Sugar. Wow. But you're probably right, if everyone's drinking the same thing,

everyone's in the same mood. Everyone's in the same mood. And there's this lovely bit in David Copperfield where Mr Macorber, who's the very impecunious Mr Macorber, who's supposed to be based on Dickens' father. Charming but useless. Charming but useless. Charming but useless. Can't live within his means to save his life.

And he comes round to David Coffield's house and he's downcast because his water has been cut off because he can't pay the bill. And to cheer him up, David sends him to make some punch and he says it transformed him. The odour of burning rum, the smell of lemons and the steam just transformed him into one of the happiest of men. Well, transform me into a happy man. How should we do that?

Let's be transformed. So because it's Dickens' recipe, it won't surprise you to know it's quite dramatic, it's quite alcoholic. And he wrote this to a friend of his, and he said, this will make you a beautiful punchmaker for the next 90 years, I hope. So what you do is you get the alcohol warm, and then you light it.

Ice it? You light it, and it kind of flames up. And he writes these very long, very kind of detailed descriptions and talks about, at this crisis, you put the lid on. But it was a great way. If you imagine a cold Victorian streets, you've gone to somebody's house and they welcomed you with a glass of punch. You know, it'd be a great way to kind of bring colour back to your cheeks

after a long, cold walk. And also, those houses were probably much colder than ours anyway. Definitely needed the kind of internal heating. You're right, because now we have ice and we have cold beers or gin and tonic on ice. That's the sort of the grand thing to do. Whereas, in fact, what is nicer than an air temperature drink is actually a sort of lovely hot concoction. Yeah, a lovely hot concoction. But interestingly, actually, around, you can see things changing over the century

and all these things like hot punch, smoking bishop, all those kind of warming drinks, they feel quite Georgian in origin. And I think as the century progressed and people became much more kind of, well, very, very sort of socially conscious, they felt they were a little bit old-fashioned, a little bit de classe,

and they started to have more champagne, claret, French wines. You know, there was a big difference between the way that sort of aristocratic, you know, Victorians lived or wanted to live and eat and the way that Dickens did. And that's one of the things I like about him, that he hosts in the way that dickens did and that's one of the things i like about him that he's he hosts in the way that makes him happy and he doesn't really care very much about status they they sing you know he'll sing comic songs they'll dance they'll play games i'll have the kids there it isn't a big stick sounds heavenly yeah so we let this um it's the beginning to fill

this kitchen you won't smell this at home it's beginning to fill this kitchen. You won't be able to smell this at home, but it's beginning to fill this kitchen with a wonderful aroma. Yeah, quite a... Rum. Rum and cognac, quite a heady aroma. Rum and cognac? Yeah, yeah. You could write a history of the 18th century, rum and cognac. Rum and cognac, yeah. Yeah, the sugar plantations and the slave trade and our relationship to France.

That was a very interesting part of what we think about food. OK, right, that's getting quite hot. I think that's probably hot enough for us to risk the great conflagration. So we need a ladle. Do you want to light it? Yes. So exciting. So we need to have that ready. And hopefully, if you light this part... Whoa!

Lovely, yeah. What? I like that. Charles Dickens. And sometimes the flames... I think it depends how strong your booze is. Sometimes they really leap up. I actually slightly prefer it when they don't really leap up.

It's a bit less alarming. OK. What now? OK. So once you feel it's burnt enough yes and you feel you want to keep some of the alcohol you put the lid on starved of oxygen starved of flames go out and the flames why did we just burn it to get rid of some of the alcohol and to just for the i think the taste of slightly burnt rum so there is a reason for it as well as just a spectacle?

I think there's some reason for it, but I think it's a lot to do with spectacle. The smell has changed a lot. It has definitely, I think it's changed its nature a bit. Yeah, I think so. It's basically, it has cooked it. And like Dickens says in, you know, David Copperfield and Mr. McCorvin makes it, it's the odour of burning rum. And so he's clearly thinks that that's an integral part of making it. We then put some water in it. You might be pleased to know. So I'll give it about...

You'll water it now? Yeah, we'll give it about a litre of boiling water. A litre? Oh, OK. This is quite a tame drink. Now, oh, hang on, I need to check my timer here. Yeah. Holy Moses. Ten minutes, ten minutes and 35 seconds we've had.

I think they're quite happy. Are we good? Yeah, I think they're quite good. And tell me, Christmas Day, was it a lunch or a dinner? Or is there just one giant afternoon meal that sort of encompasses both? Lunch wasn't a very big thing in those days. Dinner tended to be at four o'clock, five o'clock, maybe six o'clock. And what time you had dinner depended a lot on kind of where you were in the kind of social hierarchy.

So the earlier you had dinner, probably the more sort of conservative or rural or backwards you were. OK. The later you had dinner, the more aspirational. Busy, busy, busy. You were. Stuff to were. OK. The later you had dinner, the more aspirational. Busy, busy, busy. You were. Stuff to do. Yeah. Because if you were rural, you'd have dinner at four or five and then you're in bed by eight or something.

Well, you'd have, I mean, in the kind of turn of the century, you'd have dinner, then you'd have the evening. If you were sociable, then you'd have the evening, then you'd have supper. You'd have dinner, then tea, and then supper later in the evening. Light supper. But then as dinner goes later, tea hops back, goes to the middle of the afternoon, so around the 1840s.

So probably in Dickens' time, they'd be having dinner 4, 5, 6 o'clock at night. And lunch probably wasn't such a big meal. So Christmas dinner was the thing to have. Yeah, Christmas dinner. Right. So I'm going to give these another couple of minutes. 12 minutes. They've had 12 minutes.

Ooh. It's a big attack. They look quite happy, don't they? They look very happy to me. Another two. Another two, roger that. Okay, 14 minutes and 20. 14, 20, is that when Henry V died?

Somewhere around there. Right, how's it looking down there? Yeah, that's... Ooh, very good, very bubbly. Ooh! Let's get them out. Isn't that a little sizzle? Very sizzly, the little stars. This is going to be quite a mouth-burning occasion

if we're not careful, steamy. And what's changed? I mean, so Christmas is a big deal in the 9th century, big deal now. It feels quite recognisable. Is there anything that's very, very different? I think the biggest difference is we've sort of lost Twelfth Night, which I think is a shame,

because we used to have the 12 days of Christmas. You'd celebrate with your friends and your family throughout it. You're being very stupid here. 12 days of Christmas starts on Christmas. How do you work backwards? You know, that's such a good question. So it finishes on the 6th of January. Exactly.

So 12th night is actually the 5th of January, 6th of January. No, the 6th of January. And then... So it starts on Christmas Eve. It's Christmas Eve, isn't it? Anyway, somewhere around there. So it's the lovely week to Christmas and New Year's when everyone's just lying around doing nothing.

12 days of Christmas. And it sort of got squeezed in Victorian times. So that's when you used to have the cape. It's the capitalists saying, we do want to be closed for 12 whole days. So maybe you can get a boxing day off, but come back after boxing day. But it was also, it had a bit of a reputation

for being a bit wild, Twelfth Night. Queen Victoria didn't approve. It was kind of taken out of the official gazette of holidays in about the kind of later, in about kind of 1870-ish. And it just sort of fell away. But there were fantastic descriptions of kind of Dickens' Twelfth Night. Peeps Day has wonderful descriptions of, you know, cutting the cake and playing charades or playing the king or queen for the night.

In Dickens' day, you'd have had a little character to play and, you know, Mr Tom Tittlemouse or something, and you'd have played him for the whole evening. And it was a family game and, you know, very, you know, great fun. And I actually think it's a really nice way of ending Christmas. So when you take your cards down, instead of thinking, oh, this is a bit sad, you take your cards down, take all your decorations down, and then have a bit of a party.

And then go back to work. I agree. Yeah, exactly. Then have some punch and some Christmas cake, you know, or Twelfth Cake, as it used to be called. So, shall we have a go at one of these? Let's do it. Right. I am looking forward to this. If you get a plate down from there.

And we'll do one for you and one for me and then the others we'll do a bit later. We have two glasses. So, this is a very Dickensian. This is literally Charles Dickens' punch, invented by the great man. Well, it was his recipe. I think many people ate punch at the time,

but we know that he drank it and liked it, so that's good enough. Your health. Your health. Thank you, and Merry Christmas. And Merry Christmas. Wowee. One who's a great writer. Yes.

It's got quite a lot of engine to it, hasn't it? Well, that's a good way to get the party started. Wowee. I feel a novel rising inside me. Oh, several all at once. I'm under the journalism. That pastry is so well rolled. The perfect thickness and consistency.

Brilliant. Delicious. Thank you. Very good. It's quite a light mincemeat because it's got chestnuts in and sort of some lemon and things. It's a little bit more delicate. Well, thank you so much for hosting me in your lovely house. And really, I'm going to stride out of here with a new spring in my step.

Thanks. And there's some glow in your cheeks, I hope. There's some glow in my cheeks. Dickensian. You can't see it on the podcast, but I'm glowing. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.

hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast most of you are probably asleep so i'm talking to your snoring forms but anyone who's awake it would be great if you could do me a quick favor head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review it makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you