In Our Time - A Christmas Carol

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Dickens' novella, written in 1843 when he was 31, which has become intertwined with his reputation and with Christmas itself. Ebenezer Scrooge is the miserly everyman figure whose joyless obsession with money severs him from society and his own emotions, and he is only saved after recalling his lonely past, seeing what he is missing now and being warned of his future, all under the guidance of the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet To Come. Redeemed, Scrooge comes to care in particular about one of the many minor characters in the story who make a great impact, namely Tiny Tim, the disabled child of the poor and warm-hearted Cratchit family, with his cry, "God bless us, every one!"WithJuliet John Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City, University of LondonJon Mee Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of YorkAndDinah Birch Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of LiverpoolProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1843, Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a work which, like Dickens' reputation, has become intertwined with Christmas itself. He brought us Scrooge, the miserly every man,

cut off from emotion and society by his joyless obsession with money, his essence preserved in his grumbling oath, bar, humbug. And then there's his counterpoint the Cratchett family, as rich in fellow-feeling as they are poor financially, warm-hearted, among them Tiny Tim, who declares God bless us everyone. With me to discuss a Christmas carol by Charles Dickens are Julia John, Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City University of London, John Me, Professor of 18th Century Studies at the University of York, and Dinah Birch, pro-bice-Chancellor for cultural engagement and Professor of English Literature

at the University of Liverpool. Diana, where was Charles Dickon in his career as a writer when he wrote this? He was still a young man, 31 years old, but he'd been publishing fiction for 10 years, by no means a beginner. He had brought out Pickwick Papers,

Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge. It's quite a list. And they had all been very successful, so he was, an established author. But in 1842, he'd made a trip to America, not entirely successfully, not entirely pleased with what he had seen,

and he'd imported that theme into the book that he was writing, 1842, Martin Chuzzlewit. And that was not going so well. It had not been enthusiastically received, and sales were flagging. It was doing it in serial form, though. Yes, that's right. He was. So he was at something of a crossroads.

And a Christmas carol represented a different kind of writing for him. It was not published seriously. It was conceived, written as, as Dickens termed it, a little whole. So it came out as a complete book. That was different. And it was indeed very successful. He sold 6,000 copies before Christmas Eve in 1843. Came out December 19th, 1843, so that's pretty good going.

You might think he would have made a great deal of money, but it was not so. It was so beautifully produced, and it is a lovely little book. I wish we could show it to listeners with its red cover, it's embossed, golden, and its hand-tinted illustrations by John Leach, which were expensive. So he only made £137, not what he'd been expecting. But it was very warmly received. What do we know about the life of Dickens, briefly, that throws some light on this book?

It's a book very much about memory, and it has a focus on childhood. and Dickens at that crossroads in his life was thinking about his own childhood. What begins Scrooge's conversion from that unhappy miser that we see at the beginning of the book is the ghost of Christmas past taking him to look at his former self. Scrooge wept to see that neglected lonely boy as he had used to be. and that is the unlocking of his heart and the beginning of better things for Scrooge. And I think that's absolutely key to Dickens.

But the other thing that I think is perhaps less visible on the surface, but very important, is that preoccupation with money. Scrooge is obsessed with money. Dickens was very concerned with money. He'd already fathered four children. There was a fifth on the way. about to be born January 1844. He was anxious about the falling sales of Martin Chuzzlewit.

So there's a sense in which it's also self-examination. Have I lost my way? Have I lost sight of the things that really matter to me as a writer in worrying about those worldly affairs? And that's very important, I think, to the motive of the book. Dickens wanting to get back. to come to terms with his own childhood, but also to think about where he was in his personal and professional life.

Thank you very much. John Me, can you remind listeners briefly of the story, the three parts really of the Christmas Carol? Yeah, okay. I'll try and be succinct as possible. It's divided into five staves, the traditional divisions of a Christmas carol, in fact. And the first stave is the one where we're introduced to the miser. Scrooge. He seems to be some sort of money lender. I'm not exactly told what he does. He's miserable. He's working late on Christmas Eve

and he's forcing his clerk, Bob Cratchett, to work late with him in barely warmed offices. He's interrupted by a visit from his nephew, invites him to Christmas dinner. He turns out down. He just wants to join in. The nephew leaves the door ajar and people collecting with charity come in and try and remind Scrooge how many poor people there are

without anything to eat without any joy. in their lives. He sends them away. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? He says. There is a surplus population, he says. Finally, he lets his clerk go home for Christmas Eve, and he makes his own way after a melancholy dinner at a local tavern to his apartment. As he makes his way, as he's done many times before, into his home, the door-knocker seems to show Marley's face, the face of his ex-partner's seven years dead. And during the course of that evening, he's visited by Marley's ghost, who has a chain wrapped around him with all the things he's done and that sets off the rest of the novel as he's visited

by three other ghosts who's showing Christmas past, Christmas present and the Christmas yet to come give him the opportunity to mend his ways. It's a brilliant conceit, isn't it? I mean, we think it's so easy now, but it informs everybody's life. We all want to know what we were like then, what we're like now and what we might be like in the future.

It's one of the central, essential conceits, isn't it? There's a sense as well that he's repressed his past. He's wanted to forget everything that happened to him, as Diana said, that childhood. And when he's first shown by the ghost, the scene of him being isolated, left at school by his parents all alone, which may be the basis of his future behaviour, a little tear forms on his cheek. And the ghost asks him, you know, are you crying? And he says, no, it's just a pimple. And over the sequence of the three visits, he kind of slowly accepts what he has been, what he's become, and what he might become.

and finally takes the opportunity to reclaim himself, as he puts it. And also the love of far as has with this young woman who she turns him down because all he's interested in is gain. And she's very firm about that and just pushes him away. And then when he returns to him much later, there's this woman with a family, happy, and he's missed that as well. Yes. She tells him that she's been replaced in his heart by another idol,

but she denies. She thinks she's talking about another woman. She says, no, it's man. And then the ghost shows him herself in the future with a family around her. And her husband comes in and says he's just seen, he's just seen Scrooge through the window all alone, locked away in his office, doing his accounts. And he gets a sense of a future that he's lost, that he never will again. Yes. Dionne's talked a bit about this, but is there any more you can say about the impact on the publication?

1843 because 6,000 copies sold seems okay. but we now live in a time when big bestsellers in America sell, I know. Ridiculous, six-figure sums, six-figure numbers, that sort of thing. What did 6,000 mean to him? Well, he didn't mean what he'd hoped. He didn't make as much money to say.

But he ended up taking out an injunction because so popular did it become. He was very quickly reinvented as a contemporary turn and was very quickly re-serialized in magazines with various changes to make it more popular. And by February 1844, so two months after it had come out. There were eight theatrical productions.

Eight. Yes, eight theatrical productions. Many of which, like many adaptations since I've done, had added songs. Some of them added more low-life cockney characters to make it a bit more like the musical Oliver, I imagine. And it was hugely successful. Interestingly, you took the injunctions out against the magazines.

He went to some of the theatrical performances and seems to have quite enjoyed them. So that very, very quickly, it became a tale. that was shared by large parts of the culture that couldn't actually afford this very beautifully produced a special book that comes out with its red cover and its gold trimmings.

Why was there such an appetite for the story? In the theatre, being appetite, we saw it in the book, but as well in the theatre, was the time ready for it or did he create the appetite? Well, I think the appetite was, there was a question about what Christmas had become.

There was a lot in the early 19th century, memory of an old rural Christmas which was associated with manor houses, baronial feasts. And one of the things he does is make Christmas an urban celebration. Both the good and bad Christmas is shown. Very much Christmases in the city, a relatively nuclear family around a feast.

So I think there's an appetite to a reinvention of this time of warmth in what was seen as increasingly darkening times. And the early reception was very much that it was a tale for the times. At times that less than 10 years before the new polar had been passed, there were workhouses. The urban poor were a very visible phenomena. And there's an attempt to create a notion that there might be some space for more human relationship

in a world that seems to be increasingly defined by getting and spending. Julia, John, why was Christmas so important to Dickens? We've been edge around it. Why was it so important to him? I think there are a few key reasons. It's interesting. The first one I was going to mention, it hasn't yet been mentioned so far, I don't think,

and that's Christianity, which people very often, particularly today, forget is really important to the story. Dickens actually wore his Christianity lightly in his life and in a Christmas Carol, I think, but it was important to him. So, for example, in his will, he advised his children to adhere to the New Testament, but only in its broader spirit, not in the narrow construction of the letter. And I think in a Christmas Carol, what we see is these key to Dickens Christian themes of charity, compassion and selflessness, almost repackaged in an accessible story for the Victorian era. Obviously, Dickens was very, very keen on family and community. And a Christmas Carol and Christmas itself for Dickens is a celebration of these things. And as Dinah and John have mentioned, the importance of the child. is key. For Dickens, the child should be at the centre of Christmas. And it was also, I think,

more a time also for adults to be children to rediscover their innocence, to indulge, and just to throw away, I suppose, the usual cares. I think what's interesting is that Dickens knew that, in a sense, Christmas involved a willed suspension of reality or scepticism. And he wants everybody, if you like, to agree to put time on hold for just that one day. And it contracts very much what John was talking about a few minutes ago. The 1840s was a time of

hunger. Can you tell us what you find or what Dickens found objectional about Scrooge and how he got that over? Well, I'm tempted to say everything because Scrooge in himself, he is an excessive, extreme character. I mean, you remember the initial description

of Scrooge, about, I don't know, eight or nine adjectives. So, you know, he's a misanthrope. He elevates money over people. He doesn't value human life or have any sort of empathy. He doesn't value family, community, the things at the centre of the text. I suppose more symbolically, he embodies a view of life where there's nothing more sacred than what Thomas Carlyle called the cash nexus.

So, you know, he is a sort of extreme embodiment of the worst things about capitalism. Also, he is part of Dickens' critique of utilitarian values of political economy. We've got that direct comment from Malthus, the quote that Scrooge uses about decreasing the surplus population. So there's nothing really to like. Well, let's move on quickly, but I know Dan wants to come in here. Just to pick up Juliet's point, which I think is absolutely right, there is nothing to like about Scrooge.

But I think it's also really important to the book that in spite of that fact, we are on his side. And we're on his side. I'm on his side. I'm on his side. I think, yes. I think we are on his side because it's his story. And because he is, in spite of those repellent characteristics. And linguistically energetic, he makes jokes.

You know, he is at the heart of our experience of the story. Which jokes would you bring to mind? Well, there's a wonderful one where he says to the, he says to Marley's ghost, can I not have them all at once to get it over with when he says you'll be visited by three ghosts on successive diets? And he says, well, can I not just have more at once? And then he also says to Marley's ghost, how do I just know you're not just indigestion? You're not just a piece of cheese that's not digested. So he is this slightly waggish and miserable, is a sort of droll, which I think a lot of adaptations miss.

It's quite hard to do, I think, in adaptation. And there is a little bit of Scrooge in almost everyone. And there was a little bit of Scrooge in Dickens himself, Bar Humbull. Who hasn't felt? Here we go again. Christmas, can't be doing with it, presents, enforced geniality. And Dickens wants you to feel that so that he can take you with him with Scrooge as you see that really that is a fundamental mistake.

And I think that's really important to the dynamic of the book. Yeah, but get back to, absolutely right, and I think the nuances you're putting there are very illuminating. But still, it's a wonderful, he screws, and maybe Scrooge comes from screws, he screws Scrooge down, doesn't he? And he won't let him breathe. I mean, this is his miserable one piece of coal.

I think Cratchit gets a half a piece of coal. Everything is done like that. and that's tremendously well done. He fortifies this man's misery and meanness for the first part of the book very seriously. I think that's right, almost to a point where he becomes a grotesque and he has that quality of, as it were, abundance in misery.

It's the reverse of that abundance that we were talking about earlier. And that's why the process of conveyor. version is so spectacularly appealing to the reader. To pick up something Diana said before about you said sympathy but also being with him. We are with him in the sense that Dickens says that I'm at the reader, you're the reader's side like a ghost and we're also shown what Scrooge is shown. So although our feelings about him develop and I think you're right, we get more sympathetic towards him.

We are also with him. We're kind of at his shoulder when we're shown. a book that is very much like a series of magic lantern slides. So we watch with Scrooge. And Scrooge is out... I would ask you and Juliet, did he get the idea of there being ghosts from someone, from somewhere, from another book, from something?

Did he make it up? Well, those three ghosts are in part, returning to a point that Juliet's made and a really important point, I think, about it's being a Christian text. They are in part a side reference to the three wise men. And there are lots of specific Christian prompts in the story. Some of them coming from Scrooge himself,

because Scrooge is our guide as readers. Peter Cratchett, you remember, the Cratchett family who represent those Christian values, reads from the Bible. He took a child and set him amidst them. And Scrooge says, what follows? Why doesn't the boy go on? But Dickens expects his readers to recall that the next verse is,

whosoever receives such a child in my name receives me. So that becomes that very specific Christian reference, and it comes from Scrooge. So we see Scrooge's evolution. Again, it's subtextual. We don't get that second verse, but it is running through the entire. book. And I do think Juliet's point about the Christian framework of the book is essential to the work that Dickens wants it to do.

John Ruskin said wrongly that a Christmas carol was all about mistletoe and pudding and not about the resurrection of the day. Had he read it? He had. He had. He had read it and he was wrong about that. It is absolutely about the resurrection of the dead. Scrooge, dead to humanity, and of course literally dead before our eyes towards the end of the book, and Tiny Tim at the heart of the book. Dead in a future that has yet to happen. Exactly. That's a different sort of dead, isn't it?

But it is still a form of death that is overturned. Scrooge, redeemed, Tiny Tim, restored to life. And in that sense, profoundly Christian text. But I also think that Dickens realized that for ordinary people, sometimes institutionalised forms of religion, were quite off-putting. And as I mentioned previously, he was a strong believer, I think, in the importance of fantasy for educating for people, for involving their whole spirit and their whole soul.

So the kind of childhood reading that he really enjoyed, things like Ali Barber, very often non-realist texts, if you like. Thank you, John. Can I come to you for just one comment, really. Dan has explained very clearly about his lonely, seeing the lonely child, at Christmas car, and his own.

Have we said enough there about Dickens' loneliness as a child? Well, I mean, it famously, it's the thing that Dickens seems to have wrestled with throughout his career and starts to write into the later, some of the later novels quite explicitly, this experience he had

when his parents sent him to work in a blacking factory, Warren's Blacking Factory. What was he doing that? He was basically putting boot polish into jars and surrounded. I mean, Dickens not altogether a Democrat, even though he has lots of democratic things about him. He thought he was better than the people who'd been left to work with.

I mean, I'll remember it. So let's pursue this because it's not many talks about it. So he was sitting there putting blacking into jars with lots of other people in probably a cold place. How long did he stick that out? Not for very long, but it left a lot. real scar on himself and he felt more generally neglected I think especially by his father who was a kind of micawber mr micawber kind of figure and the micawber being you know something will turn up you know not very

improvident and and putting his family at risk by behaving like that we don't see that we don't see scrooge's father so that's not part of this narrative but what is is that sense of being perhaps abandoned by a father figure and left to find solace in an imaginative inner life with books and that's why the point where he sees is the Scrooge sees his child himself reading Alibaba and seeing the characters from Alibaba and seeing Robinson Crusoe. And he comes alive as a person when he sees those scenes. And that sense of inner life. And that's one of the places actually where we've been talking about Christianity,

but it has to be said that despite the fact the three ghosts, it's not but very interested in the afterlife in many ways. It's not a supernatural Christianity. It's an ethical Christianity, I think. I think that's right. And I think just to pick up the point that Juliet's made, and John, about the role of fantasy and fiction in his model of redemption, it's really important that it's a Christmas book set, of course, in midwinter. It is the season for ghost stories. There is a centuries-old tradition of ghost stories in midwinter. And Dickens picks up that sense of midwinter, the lowest point of the year.

year. It's darkness, the difficulty of seeing, the fog, that recurrent Dickens' preoccupation. And with Christmas Day comes the turning of the year, comes light. And it's a book that's really interested in the return of light. Juliet, we've got the Cratchett family, and Bob Cratchett works for Scrooge, a mingo salary. And the key person in that family in one way is Tiny Tim, they seem to get Christmas right. What did they get right about Christmas? In Dickens' eyes, they seem to get everything right about Christmas. So you have the child at the centre, you have the love of family,

you have the love for each other, care for each other, the embrace of family values. But I think what's most interesting actually about the Cratchits is their shared effort to look on the bright side of life and to count their blessings. As I referred to earlier, I think Dickens, he's sometimes, sometimes accused of sentimentality, but I think he was very, very conscious

that what he was putting forward as a version of Christmas that people should embrace, what was in itself something that involved an element of will and an element of fantasy. So, for example, he wrote an earlier story about Christmas, a Christmas dinner,

in the 1830s, and in that he's extremely clear that a happy Christmas is a choice involving a sort of tacit agreement to only put the best of humanity out there in a family, in a community situation. Interestingly, that story also features a dead child. You mentioned sentimental in a derogatory way. Why has sentimental got to be derogatory?

I don't think it does have to be derogatory. Well, it's always mentioned, isn't it, by my, I'm not going to say just by academics. Of course I'm not, but I saw them, ma'am. I mean, sentimental is a sort of lower form in some way. Why is it? I'm interested. Can you tell me why? I think there are lots of complex reasons for that,

but I think you're right in the sense that academically, that sentimentality can have a bad press. I mean, I think partly because it's a kind of extreme form of emotion, which isn't particularly regulated and in English culture. Pardon? Why does emotion have to be regulated? It doesn't, but I think in English culture, I say that as a Welsh person.

And actually in, I think, intellectual culture from modernism onwards, there was a distrust of unfiltered unfit emotion. And there was, as you say rightly, an association between sentimentality and the lower classes and a lack of education and a lack of restraint. Dickens himself actually wrote very interestingly about these issues in Oliver Twist. He said, you know, essentially if you feel that something is artificial or real or whatever,

depends on how immersed or not you are in that particular experience. So if you're reading a text, you're really involved, you're really immersed, then it's not going to seem too artificial. It's not going to see sentimental to you. So a lot is in the telling, really. Diana, can you tell us about Dickens' portrait of Christmas present? We've mentioned the cratchets, obviously. We mentioned the family.

Pop comes back with it and so on. Can you just flesh it out a bit more? I think one mistake that it's easy to make about Christmas Carol is that it is in any way a gloomy book. So the ghost of Christmas present shows a celebration of many different kinds, often in difficult circumstances. So we see Christmas celebrated on board a ship and isolated cottages. But that's really important to what,

the ghost of Christmas present with his blessing, scattering blessing as he goes, up and down the land that Dickens wants us to remember. But it does focus, as indeed we've all said, it focuses on Christmas Day at the Cratchits. And it focuses repeatedly, and I think this is really important to the story, on food. So one of the many things, yeah, absolutely,

one of the many things the Cratchits get, right is the pudding. It's a perfect pudding. The roast goose is small for such a large family, but nobody mentions that. It is a perfect goose. And hunger, literal hunger, not just emotional hunger, but literal hunger, haunted the streets of London, the streets that Dickens knew. Ignorance and want those two desolate children that emerge from the robes, the ghost of Christmas present. Also part, alas, says Dickens, of Christmas. Yellow, meagre, scowling, ragged.

And they are the counterpart to that abundance in the shops, on the tables, the parties, the celebrations. Dickens does not want us to forget ignorance and want, and they go hand in hand. Ignorance and want are not separate. John, Dan has just... mentioned a few adjectives. It is adjective, adjectively rich, isn't it? And most people, many people nowadays

would say, oh dear me, too many, but he makes it work. Yeah, it's very highly coloured. It wants to convey that sense of richness. It's interesting, I'm to go back to something that was said earlier about the pre-Christian sense of plenitude. It's interesting that the ghost of Christmas present is a jolly green giant. You know, his robe is of living green. There's that sense of him bursting out all over. And he does a very Dickensian thing, which is that there's an old cliche about Dickens's grotesque, which is he describes people as things and things as people.

Can you give a listen to an example? Well, there's a lovely description of a Spanish onion, which he says is bursting out like a fat Spanish friar and winking at the girls as they go past and leering at the... Leering's my word, not Dickens is to be fair to, but leering at the girls as they go past and looking then at the mistletoe.

And there's quite a few of those moments where things that are inanimate are given this kind of life. Why do you think he does that? It really does have this sense of a living universe, a universe of plenitude, that if you look at things, if you look at things carefully, you can see them as more than dead objects,

this wonderful sense of a universe of life, of an imaginative world. And in part, is getting away from the dead universe of empirical counting, that Scroo's at the beginning, to see that it's a universe, that things are more than just countable units out there, they're things with their own life,

and that's a very Dickensian thing to get at. Julia, John, in the past, in the part which deals with Christmas yet to come, which distresses Scrooge so much, can you talk a bit about that and bring in Tiny Tim here? I think the main fear for Scrooge is obviously of his own mortality, which he's not come face to face with before. And what he's presented with is a visualization of the meaninglessness of his life, literally alone, stripped bare, without really a penny because he's actually robbed on his deathbed in one of the visions.

And he also has nobody who loves him, nobody who cares. And there's a very clear contrast with Tiny Tim who had nothing in life but has everything in terms of the love, the love that people are sharing for him and projecting onto him. And his life has meant something and it's carried on into the life of the family afterwards. that's really why the ghost of Christmas yet to come terrifies Scrooge but also there's something very interesting about the technique of those scenes in that we don't actually see the face of the ghost and it's a kind of well-worn terror technique if you don't see something

you actually do your worst to imagine what that face looks like and I think we're almost with Scrooge fearing he doesn't even want to look at his own face he doesn't want to look at the face of the man on the deathbed which I think is really really interesting Sorry, it's one of the points of real brilliance in this story, and there are many, that Dickens has it both ways. He takes us through the deep pathos and sadness of Tiny Tim's death,

the consequences of that death, and the horror of Scrooge's death. Let's keep reminding us. The death, as the ghost tells him, will happen in the future if he carries on like that. Exactly. But then the story turns, and Scrooge's. is redeemed, Tiny Tim is restored to life, so that we, with Scrooge, go through that narrative momentum of grief, loss, fear to be replaced by very different emotions. And I think that works fantastically well from the reader's point of view. The dead child, who is not dead? Tiny

Tim did not die. Scrooge is given a second chance. One of the most heartbreaking part of the book, I think, is when you go up with Bob to the child's bedroom and he's been brave in front of his family and he, on his own. Yeah, Bob Cratchett goes upstairs. He sees the crutch in the corner and then he goes up to the death by the child I think he's still on the bed and just breaks down

and then pulls himself back down together and goes back downstairs to the family around the table. But you go with him and you come back down with him and you're shown that scene very sentimental if you like but heartbreaking, I think. Interesting that you have to go. qualify sentiment. I'm quite interested in this was sentimental at the moment.

Anyway, never mind. This business of going into the future and snapping back works extraordinarily well and he carries us all along with him. Well, one thing to say about it, it is very visual. I mentioned the magic lantern before. It is like

you are shown a series of scenes that he cuts between and he doesn't just use crew cuts. You know, the Marley Indochry is a kind of dissolve. There's a point where he swoops over the sea to take you first to the lighthouse keepers and then to the people on board ships.

So he uses what we now think of of different kind of camera techniques to move us around this text that uses forms of cinematic connection. They're much beyond a simply a series of magic lantern slides. It's one of the things that the Russian filmmaker Kerser Eisenstein pointed out about Dickensers' narrative style.

Strangely, perhaps Eisenstein didn't talk about Christmas Carol, but it's all exemplified there. All these different kind of cinematic, if you like, devices before cinema exists and moving us from one part of the story to the next. They're quite brilliantly done. Changes of tempo, moving between the different scenes, all exploring. There's a point when he's on his own in the school, the point when you move from him being an isolated child to where his sister comes and collects him for school,

the room cracks and splinters as we move into the future. We have a kind of temporal acceleration in a kind of movie camera way. And the room expands in Texas to another place. Those things are brilliantly handled, that kind of pacing in the story. You can see why it has worked so well in filming adaptations. Dickens has done so much of the work for those filmmakers. It is intensely visual, but the characters too are so strongly marked, not necessarily rich and complex,

but they have their catchphrases, Bar Humbug has lifted itself out of the text really and become a kind of shorthand for a certain way of thinking about Christmas. You can see why it worked in popular theatre because I think they added more in, but Bar Humburg, God blesses everyone. Those kind of things,

the way that Dinah mentioned earlier, the repetee that I think a lot of adaptations drop out between Scrooge and the Ghost where he says, can't have them all at once and etc, etc. Those things are all there and all work. Juliet, can you tell us what you make of Scrooge's redemption? Do you find it convincing?

I do find it convincing within the story that we're being told because this is clearly not a realist story, so we're immersed in a certain dynamics. This is an allegory, it's a fairy tale. So, yes, I do. I find it really interesting in the sense that the mechanism of the conversion is very typical of Dickens. What we have is a sort of traumatic epiphany.

Scrooge comes to this realization that most of us in life don't because he's been shown a series of scenes. There's a critic called Barbara Hardy who pointed out that change or character transformation in Dickens often happens as a response to a staged scene rather than through a sort of therapy style. introspection. So in some ways you could see it as anti-Froidian. On the other hand, I think as John mentioned earlier, you could actually see the whole text as about the sort of return of the repressed

that, you know, Scrooge is able to change because he has lifted the veil on his childhood on some of the dark things that might have happened to him. You know, it's notable, for example, there's even a little glimmer of childhood abuse in Scrooge's story where it's mentioned that his father was particularly unkind and so on. So what we have with the visualisations is that Scrooge is forced, if you like, to immerse himself in these painful memories. So yes, I do because of the apparatus, which at the same, in one way it's fantastical, it's allegorical, but on the other hand, there clearly is an interest in the psyche

and in investigating the deepest parts of the psyche and of childhood. And one of the really important aspects of its appeal is that solid conviction that Dickens always had that people can change. Not every novelist has that. Charlotte Bronte doesn't. She doesn't really believe that people can radically change. But Dickens does and does from the start, it is one of the features of his Christian interpretation of life, not sectarian, as we've said, and not theological. Scrooge goes to church on Christmas Day, but we don't learn anything about what happens in the church.

But that notion that people can be redeemed and restored to new life, I think you can respond to that without any Christian faith of your own. I think that appeal is enduring. And of course it is wonderfully dramatic. Again, something that actors love, that transformation from Scrooge, the miser, grimly miserable figure to the exuberantly joyful figure at the end is just such an invitation for any actor. Transformation was also a really normal and popular device on the 19th century stage. Pantamime,

in particular, used transformation as a sort of key tool. It was very, very popular with working classes. And also, I mean, so you can look at it through that lens that actually are kind of post-fronation. Freudian preference for a sort of gradual evolution of the self wasn't something that Dickens necessarily shared, nor did the popular culture of his time. But picking up also on what Dinah said about the Christianity in the text, I think it's really interesting that Scrooge holds his hands up in prayer after seeing the ghost of Christmas yet to come. And then his life moves on to the more positive festive Scrooge. So there is that moment of prayer before change happens. Diana, did that work affect the way that we in this country celebrated Christmas?

I believe it did. It has had a lingering influence. I won't pretend that it single-handedly transformed Christmas because, as John mentioned earlier, there was a lot of thinking going on about Christmas. Christmas was changing, the royal family, for instance, Albert's importation of the Christmas tree, there are all sorts of things beginning to happen. But that sense at the heart of a Christmas carol, that it is not just mistletoe and pudding, but is that spirit of generosity, compassion, charity, the day in which it is, as Scrooge himself comes to agree, a shame on us to quarrel and to give way to our peevishness and our selfishness and our miserliness.

That I think has lingered. And even in more practical ways, we talked about that roast goose on Christmas Day. The first act of charity for Scrooge in his converted self is to order a giant turkey for the cratchets. And everyone remembers that preposterous turkey. And I do think it's one of the reasons why turkey is still now so much part of our sense of Christmas.

Goose was the traditional Christmas bird, now Turkey is, I think a Christmas carol, is one reason for that. And there have been, and we all have experienced this, so many adaptations. So many brilliant adaptations because it works so well on stage, on screen, on television, so people know about the story without necessarily having read it. and they do miss something for not having read it. There's no doubt about it because it is such a word-driven story. But it works well in adaptation, so it is embedded in our sense of Christmas. I mean, it's embedded in the sense that Dynas already mentioned,

I think, in that people know the story. They know the characters, they know the shape of the story who have never read it, possibly never even watched an adaptation all the way through. It's just become embedded in the way people think, the idea of being a Scrooge. People might not even know where it comes from, but people have that idea of being a Scrooge, and I think it's particularly attached to Christmas.

If you think of a wonderful life, which Americans still, I think, routinely watch on Christmas Eve, you wouldn't have a wonderful life. It's a wonderful life without a Christmas carol. Frank Capra was obsessed with Dickens. He was a Dickens collector of first editions. And although the roles of Scrooge and are kind of distributed between different characters,

that idea, and it's only a single angel who visits, that narrative arc is completely taken from Dickens. So the mythology is, I think especially Western capitalist countries, because in a way it is a story, we've talked about Christian values, but it's also a story about trying to find a light within this market-driven world. And it can seem unconvincing from some points we're about that. But it is trying to find a way to tell us there must be a way to relate to each other, which is not just about market forces.

and I think that hope is retained. Thank you. Thanks to Dinah Birch, Julie John and John Me, and to our studio engineer Sue Mayo. Next week, it's the Hittites, 1600 to 1200 BC, one of the great powers of the late Bronze Age until, and mysteriously, they disappeared. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It was great. I loved it. Yeah. This is such a good book. I wish you'd been withers, Julia. I wish I had been. He missed the body language.

You realised that. We've been eating turkey years. Absolutely. I was very tempted to end by saying, God bless us one and all. So was I. I decided that was your prerogative. No, no, no, no, no, I wasn't going to do that. I think I should have done.

I should have the guts of my own sentimentality. The sentimentality, I think, is really interesting. Yes, I think I've always always interested. And actually, there has been a bit of a turn in the academic world, in that we do take sentiment, sentimentality much more seriously. Oh, good, I like that. So this is going on the podcast. Right, that's fine.

Right, that's right. Yeah, because you're absolutely right, Melvin, for years, decades. Sentimentality was a dirty word, and it still is in some quarters, you know, people are a bit nervous about it. But critics, scholars, readers, more recently have taken all that very much more seriously, the power of feeling in the way in which it does manipulate readerly responses. It's no longer scorned in quite the way that in the period, say, of high modernism and sins, I mean, people like Ezra Pound, for instance, wanting a cold, hard literature,

those days have passed and the wheel has turned. So I think that the Dickensian model is no longer as unpopular or as unfashionable, even in academic circles. Of course, it's never been unpopular among readers. No. I think that's quite important, actually. Sorry, Juliet. You've done very well. You were here. We saw your ghostly present. The ghost of Juliet was very strong.

The ghost of Juliet presents. I love that green. I love that green robe, be aware. Explain to listeners that we're doing this in this sort of cock-eyed way because of all these illicences. Juliet is not in the studio with us, but has made her presence very strongly felt from her home. Right. Sorry, Julia. I interrupted you. Sorry, what I was just going to say is that I think Dickens was, you know, in a way ahead of the modernists,

in thinking about ordinary readers and the way ordinary people would respond to emotion in art. because he loved sentiments and he also loved melodrama for which he was disparaged. But these things ironically, a little bit like his supposedly two-dimensional characters, these are the things that have actually kept his reputation alive and overshadowed in terms of legacy and cultural impact and so on, some of the novelists of his own day who are held in much higher esteem.

I mean, arguably George Eliot, for example. Yeah. And Christmas Carol has never been out of print since the moment of its publication in 1843, it has always been in print. And there aren't many Victorian novels of which that can be said. And it is now absolutely part of our cultural currency. The fifth gospel, really. It's been described as a secular gospel.

It's seen as part of the Christmas story really now for our society. And I said earlier that their own democratic sides of Dickens. But what he was a complete democratic, a Democrat about was his underwere understanding of feeling and the way feeling work and how important it is. And to say that, you know, the cratchets can feel as deeply as anybody, you know, however meagre their Christmas is, it's as meaningful to them and their feelings are as meaningful to them as they are 20 million. And at that level, he's a great Democrat, I think.

But it's never all sentiment, is it? I mean, there's something else that perhaps we didn't talk very much about. It's very important in the novel is the importance of money. and Scrooge is getting it wrong in his miserliness and his obsession with gain. He's nevertheless making a point about Bob Cratchett's weekly wage. It's not enough. Fifteen shillings a week. One of the things that Dickens keeps returning to.

We need to pay people properly. We need to take our responsibilities to the poor, to want an ignorance properly. And one of the early things he does is to increase Bob Cratchezer. One of the very first things he does. So there is that undercurrent about the proper use of money. Now, capitalism, John talked about this, the way in which capitalism can be turned to a force for good. Later in his career, he gets a little bit more suspicious,

skeptical of the power of charity to make a real difference to the lives of the poor. But at this point in his career, he still believes in. Definitely, a pump primer. Yeah. Because it's not, in some ways, it's that, you know, Dickens or, I mean, Scrood should release his money so people can spend it. And it's often been pointed out by critics that it's not entirely against consuming. In fact, it's very much against, it's very much in favour of consuming and giving people the power to assume. And one of the ways it's very populist is it's saying, you know, don't tell people not to consume.

Don't say, this is the time of death, you can't have it. You have the right and you should be given the wherewithal to be able. Exactly. Giant turkeys and Christmas presents. Another reason for its popularity. There is a certain irony, though, isn't there, to the legacy. There is a certain irony to the legacy of Dickens' of Christmas, if you like, because on the one hand, yes, he did want people to forget about limits and to indulge in excess and so on, but you do wonder what he would make

of the sort of modern capitalist Christmas where you can go into a shop in September and things are already on the shelves. I do think there is a certain irony about that that the whole book is about not letting money get out of control and then Christmas has become this giant sort of capitalist festival of you like. Christmas has become politically holy. You listen to the news and say, but, oh, you know, bombs are going off. On and on and we go, and they bang on about it,

but we might not get Christmas right. That's true. And you just think, what? I mean, oh, you know. Right. And now, solitary online shopping. That is something that would certainly have made Dickinson. But one of the ways permeated court, the day after I got the fan call about during the show,

I saw at least three adverts. One was for a supermarket that I won't name. One was for an insurance company. Used Scrooge and used references to a Christmas carol. So it's interpenetated itself with that version of a consumerist Christmas. And I agree, that's not what Dickens means by consuming. Dickens meant Christmas should be forgiving, not just. just consuming, but really for giving.

And that's a different impulse. Charitable giving, family giving, and emotional giving. One of the things that's made it stick is that it's endlessly kind of fungible, repurposeable, for being a message of the times. And it's interesting how some of the things we've talked, but would translate, I'm sure somewhere somebody's doing a green Dickens adaptation. Yes. And what, you know, but in politics now will partly be about accepting the limits to what we can have.

and think it's been interesting to see what a green version of a Christmas carol would be because I think it's doable, but he would have to have its emphasis in certain kinds of places. It's a really interesting point because as you mentioned this, John, that people conceived as Christmas as an essentially rural phenomenon for a long time. Of course, a Christmas carol is intensely urban. It's a London story. We didn't talk about that. But it really is very heavily focused on the life of the city. But there are different impulses in it towards that. In some ways, Scrooge could be, the Scrooge pre-conversion could be a model for us all

because he doesn't actually have that many belongings. We see him eating gruel. Yeah, I can see a revisionist version of Scrooge coming along. Could you talk about the style in which he writes this book? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important because even though we've talked about the way in which the text has travelled around the world, it's been adapted, etc. That wouldn't have happened just because of the plot. And I think that it's a brilliant, brilliant artwork and it's much more sophisticated and complex than some of the adaptations can convey.

I mean, from the very first line, Marley was dead to begin with. I mean, that's brilliant. What he's doing is playing philosophical games with big questions of time, of knowledge, of memory, of truth. And these run through the entire text. I mean, in some senses that we've talked about the theatrical techniques, we've talked about the filmic techniques, but it's also incredibly poetic. So you have an excess in language from that very first description of Scrooge as sort of squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.

And then you have, you know, that's very obvious. That's very excessive, but it's beautiful. It's really enjoyable. But you also have poetic patterns throughout of sort of warm and cold, light and darkness. He plays sophisticated games with these. You have magic realist techniques. You have what we now call special effects. And that's all there in the writing.

And as John said originally, you also have this amazing and really interesting construction in terms of staves. the idea of music as a sort of popular form that could emote, which is constructing the whole text. And it's very short. I mean, that's probably why it's on the GCSE curriculum at the moment. To do all that in such a concentrated space is quite remarkable. Can I see if John's got, there's anything left to say that John wants to say?

You know what I'm going to come in too? I'm going to say a word for sentiment. I'm going to say a good word for sentiment. It's about time. I mean, one of the things about sentiment in the 18th century is it marks, it emerges as a word for people who's talking. going to see that we relate to and know our world through our feelings about it,

that we perceive through feelings. And Dickens is brilliant at making his experience the story through our emotional responses. That's what he's the great magician at, taking us with him, taking us to places, and then putting his foot down a little bit more on the pedal. Can you give us some instance how he does that?

Is it by superlatives and hyperbole and pressing? Have you been intimated? I think it's by power of language. I think it is, by the manipulation of point of view, as we said, taking us, when it's showing us what the character sees, getting us to look through the eyes of the characters. It is, it's Gillian, it's by this wonderful kind of poetic language.

It is, by these changes of scene, by these dramatic effects. I can't remember. Dinah and Juliet both pointed out that it may not have novelistic psychology, but it has scene changes that are dramatic. And it gives us the sort of, like a pantomime audience, when you gasp with surprise at a reveal, at the scenes of the,

That's the sort of thing you're getting in Dickens. Naina, do you think before you, do you think that it doesn't have a psychology? I think it does have psychology. Not necessarily on that Freudian model, but I think that the point that we keep returning to, and I think it is at the heart of the story, the return to childhood

and the need to come to terms with your own sense of loss or trauma or deep injustice. that response that John talked about to the experience in the Blacking factory, that is very much what drives the story, and I think it is a psychological impulse. But I think that both Julia and John absolutely right about its sophistication, terms of narrative technique,

and also the power of its sentiment, and I would say the power of its sentimentality, I don't think that that is a negative thing in the story, But the final point that I make is the extraordinary skill with which Dickens creates and manipulates our relations with the central character, Scrooge. He is both repellent and yet oddly appealing from the start. We join him on that journey. We go back with him to childhood. We experience the cratchits through his eyes.

And therefore his conversion and the joy which is performed in the final pages of this short text, a thing a novelist rarely attempts. Happiness, yes, contentment, yes. Joy is a thing hard to evoke in fiction. And we have Christmas joy in Scrooge is getting up, Christmas morning, the brilliance of the Christmas light, struggling to get his clothes. on because he's too happy. It's a wonderful, wonderful passage. And it's a wonderful place to end. Thank you very much. I thought that was terrific.

Thank you. Thank you. That was great. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Sideways is back for another season, with stories of incredible feats of endurance. Mountain climbers, we plod onward through avalanches and snowstorms and occasional yanker. I'm Matthew Side, and in Sideways, you'll hear stories of bold thinkers and amazing lives, stories of seeing the world differently. Subscribe to Sideways on BBC Sounds.