The Rest Is History - 132. A Christmas Carol

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Join Tom and Dominic in this festive special as they retrace the steps of Scrooge, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim in an episode dedicated to Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'. The boys traverse the City of London, visit Scrooge's old haunts and dissect the history and politics of one of the most adapted texts in the English language. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon change for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail well happy christmas everybody um that was dominic of course um reading the opening to a christmas carol and dominic here we are just before christmas professional quality and what could what could be more festive than to actually be out and about in the streets of this great capital of ours so i stand here and I see a sign that says, Motorcyclists, please do not start your engines. We're standing in what, untutored eyes, Tom, would seem like a sort of just a deserted yard.

But you're going to explain why you dragged me from my... All the way from the Cotswolds, your hobbit hole in the Cotswolds, all the way down into the very heart of London. And I have to say that you are looking absolutely full of festive fare. My face like thunder as I walked into the coffee shop before

the recording started. As you were walking here, ragamuffins were knocking your top hat off with snowballs. They could tell the Scrooge-like expression on your face full of christmas cheer there's nothing i like more than being summoned down to london by tom holland uh with a pandemic raging exactly well we so we're in we're in a place called newman court which is just off cornhill and cornhill is one of the main roads in the city of London. It leads from the Bank of England up towards Leadenhall Market but the reason we're here is that insofar

as we can tell Newman Court is the likeliest place for Scrooge's counting house. So Scrooge obviously the central character in A Christmasmas carol the kind of definitive canonical christmas text probably the most adapted christmas definitely well i mean probably the most the most adapted story in english maybe in the world yeah apart from the nativity itself yeah apart from that yes another word fiction so written in published in december 1843 by charles dickens the same the same year apparently as, as Christmas cards were first sent. Is that right? So, yeah, it's a great year for the Victorian Christmas. Very big year. Well, of course, Christmas has sort of been in the ether a little bit

for the Victorians for a few years before Christmas Carol comes out. You know, the amazing thing, actually, Tom, you know how old Dickens, obviously, you do know how old he was when he... Remind me. 31. Yeah. 31, and he'd already written six books. Well, I mean, I think the thing about Dickens, so when he's writing this, as you say, he's a young man. I mean, when you read about how he came to write Christmas Carol, what impresses you, as almost every detail of Dickens always does,

is the unbelievable sense of energy. Yeah. I mean, kind of terrifying terrifying almost demonic level of energy because as he it took him six six weeks to write christmas carol as he wrote it he would kind of laugh and cry and gurn and prance around the room whenever there was any but he's also doing these walks at night isn't he was walking 15 20 miles so he walks around london and then he relaxes by going for 50 miles across the city. He's sort of extraordinary.

But he does it partly because he needs money. So he's written, he's had some quite big name books. So Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby. But his most recent book, Martin Charlesowitz, has been a bit of a failure. His wife, I think, is expecting another baby. His publishers have basically told him they're nagging him yeah they've told him they're going to pay him less unless he basically improves and ups his game so obviously Christmas makes sense because he knows in this kind of domesticated Victorian

world middle-class world there are lots of people who are interested in Christmas as a kind of family holiday and are interested in kind of reviving some of the traditions that have been lost because that's a lot of what a Christmas character it's inventing and reviving Christmas traditions and Christmas seems to be incredibly important to Dickens so right from the beginning he's sketches by Boss his very first work there's a whole you know one of the sketches is of Christmas and right you know um the mystery of Edwin Drood which is his last unfinished novel. There's a kind of a murder that takes place

actually on Christmas. So it's a theme that runs right the way through. And I guess that, you know, I mean, people always, when they talk about Dickens' psychology, they always go back

to the trauma. The blacking factory. The blacking, you know, he gets sent to a blacking factory. His father goes to a debtor's prison. The sense in which, beyond the, you you know the comforts of a middle-class household yeah well ignorance and want who are the two children who um the ghost

of christmas future shows to um well the sort of coziness tom i think of dickens and of christmas depend upon the darkness absolutely you know yeah the fire is burning in the grates and stuff but outside the the wind is howling the snow is coming down or whatever you need both yeah for the sort of Christmas stories to really work yeah and I think that um a Christmas Carol just I mean why is it so successful I think I mean it it kind of partly does echo the kind of the rhythms of the original christmas story so you have three visitors rather like you know the three kings um scrooge goes to visit tiny tim the little little child rather like the the shepherds and the three kings go to visit the baby jesus so it it kind of brilliantly riffs on that without

making it too obvious but i think it is also fairytale quality too though absolute fairytale quality but it that there is it is also rooted in an absolute sense of how brutal life can be for the poor so um the two two um episodes in dickens's life just before he writes it that might have um influenced him one is he he's gone to america in 1842 so the year before he writes yeah martin chuzzlewit and he goes to this penitentiary in pittsburgh yes he goes into a cell and he writes to his friend uh john forster and he says i went into the cell and i was struck by the terrifying thought what if the convict in this cell is visited by ghosts you know that's part of the punishment yeah and that's obviously a kind of idea that's playing with him and the other is that he goes to a ragged school that's been set up in saffron hill which is um it's uh

um kind of by home and viaduct very you know yes so that's basically a school for urchins isn't it yeah but but it was absolute slum in this time it's where fagans um uh hangs out with all the the pickpockets in all of it also tom scrooge so scrooge is such an interesting figure because there's a bit of dickens in him dickens is very ambitious dickens is very concerned about money dickens is terrified of being lonely and abandoned obviously he's lost he lost his father for a time as a boy and some sort of dickens biographers have said there's a bit of the portrait of scrooge is the two sides that dickens sees in his own character there's the sort of hard the guy who's all about work and money squeezing retching gasping scraping clutching covetous old sinner yes exactly and then there's the sort of open-handed

oh go and get a turkey i love christmas and those those are the two sides of dickens's own persona that he's sort of exploring here anyway let's talk about the place so dickens so scrooge's counting house is pretty much it's pretty much the first location i think we we encounter isn't it in the book as far as i remember my my memory of christmas carol is slightly colored by the muppet christmas carol which i'm sure which is the one i'm most sure we'll come to how do we know where where the address of the counting house where it opens where um scrooge and his clerk bob cratchit are working on Christmas Eve. I mean, we're not given a precise address, but we're given various clues.

So we are told that nearby there is the ancient tower of a church whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall. And this church, we're told, becomes invisible and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. So the key detail there is it's a Gothic window. There are two or three churches in the city of London with Gothic windows. Most of them obviously got incinerated in the Great Fire. One of the churches is on cornhill st michael's cornhill okay um and that's a key detail because um you'll remember that bob cratchit yeah the clerk he goes he asks scrooge could he have you know can he have christmas day off and scrooge

is kind of very cross about that but then says yes okay you can um and we're told that when the clerk uh bob cratchit um leaves scrooge's office he goes out with the long ends of his white comforter so his um i guess that's his scarf really dangling below his waist for he boasted no great coat he went down a slide on cornhill at the end of a lane of boys 20 times in honour of it being Christmas Eve and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt to play at Blind Man's Bar.

That's a hell of a run. It is. That's quite a run. It's two or three miles. But he's obviously full of energy from having sat shivering. He's Kermit the Frog in the Muppet version.

Exactly. So you don't know at this stage, by the way, interestingly, that he's Bob Cratchit. No, that comes later. Yeah, that comes later. So if you put those details together, you've got the church, you've got the fact that Bob Cratchit goes out from the office

and he slides up and down Cornhill. Yeah. The likelihood is, you know, from the description, that it is this place here, which is a narrow, dark passageway coming off Cornhill. And as you say now, I mean, it's a very unromantic spot. Yes, there's some good air conditioning units but there's a kind of proper dickensian blackness to some of the brick work there is so just just for some of our overseas listeners we should say exactly where we are

because we're in the heart of the city of london which is not the london that most visitors see so the old city of london there's some things that visitors they might see some balls but generally people come they see the west end yeah they see this is this is not that this is the financial district now and it's the heart i mean it's the oldest center of london so we're actually standing on what was the forum in in the roman city that's a good fact i didn't know that and corn hill uh obviously it's a hill on which they saw corn. Yeah, they saw corn, right. And it runs parallel to Threadneedle Street, where tailors lived and where the Bank of England is. And there are quite a few of these sort of courts and alleys, aren't there? You never notice them when you're rushing past. They're often quite old, sort of Victorian.

There would have been all sorts of counting houses, offices. There would have been kind of rookeries and slums across the city of London. Yeah, I think fewer, fewer rookeries and slums here in the city. Maybe. Because it's, you know, it is a place as it always has been for finance and banks and counting houses and money. But it would have been much, I would say, less like the London of today and more like going to some great, huge, you know, Chinese city or something where rich and poor jumbled up together in this sort of chaos of people.

I mean, although already you're starting to get the way in which it's the rich bankers. So it's Scrooge who lives actually in the centre, as we'll find out. And Bob lives further out. Bob Cratchit lives further out. So he's already, I mean, he's having to walk. That's true. He's having to commute. But that said, the streets are still littered with urchins with beggars i mean we have lots of

references to that yes yeah absolutely which is obviously not the case now because we're here on a working day admittedly in the middle of a pandemic but the place is practically deserted in many ways yeah yeah but the back the backdrop is absolutely of wealth for those who have it. It's domestically centred. It's behind the doors of grand houses. And then out on the streets, there's poverty and suffering and want. Absolutely. All right. Well, shall we move on to our next location, Tom? Right. So Bob Cratchit, he's gone home to Camden. Yeah.

And Scrooge, we're told, goes out for a rather grim and unhappy meal. And I think that we should go next to the place where, the most likely place where he had this meal. For a grim and unhappy meal. For a grim and unhappy meal. I look forward to it. So, Dominic, we've come to Bengal Court, which is another of these kind of amazing side alleys. It's a lovely kind of warren, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely warren. It's a little warren of kind of alleys and courts. Of Cornhill.

So if you're walking down Cornhill and you didn't go down this kind of warren of streets, you have no idea they were here. But the reason we've come here is we're following're following scrooge who has left his counting house uh and in christmas carol we're told that he took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern and having read all the newspapers and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's book so he knows how to party went home to bed very soundbroke uh that's that's notbrook at all. So there are a couple of candidates, aren't there? There are a couple of pins we've walked past. There was Simpsons.

There was an old Jamaica or something like that. Jamaica. But this one, I think, is... The George and the Vulture. Yes. And they have a bust, don't they? Which we are standing beside. Yes.

Of the great man. And actually... That's Dickens, not Scrooge, by the way. I feel like a ragamuffin pressing my nose to the window and gazing because it is a very very dickensian scene there are kind of tables laid well it's all laid for christmas glasses for christmas and this bust of dickens gazing out over it um and apparently this is where um every year just before christmas members of the dickens family congregate in a room.

Even now. Yes, in a room upstairs to toast Dickens himself. So, of course, there is a kind of mood of Dickensian jollity here. But for Scrooge, this is all about gloom and misery. He's obviously having kind of a miserable meal, doesn't have any friends. It's Christmas Eve. Yes. And then he goes home.

And again, we don't know. Dickens doesn't tell us where his home is. But again, presumably it's off Cornhill because all the action. It's down one of these courts, isn't it? And he lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. There are gloomy suite of rooms and a luring pile of building up a yard where it had so little business to be, though one could scarcely help fancy it must have run there

when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses and forgotten the way out again. Exactly. So we know because in due course he will order a turkey from Leadenhall Market, which is just around the corner. His counting house is here. His likely place of supper is here. So I think the likeliest candidate is a place called white lion court which again is off corn hill uh has an 18th century house and the description you just read it

said you know it's an old house right so we we don't know it's entirely fictional but let's go there because that is and look at the door on which perhaps marley's face appears as Scrooge goes up to the door on Christmas Eve. And can we talk while we're doing that, Tom? Do you think that's reasonable? I think we should talk about Scrooge. Okay, let's do that. Because what strikes me about Scrooge is that he's obviously a sort of repulsive

and grasping and greedy figure, but he's sad, isn't he? Even from the beginning, he's sad having his dinner on his own. Well, there's the awful, and we're slightly jumping the gun here but when the ghost of christmas past comes and shows him um his memories the very sad description of him um at his school well everyone's gone home of course he's alone at his desk yeah with no friends the loneliness is a huge

part of the story i think i think that's one reason why it appeals. Because there's a bit of Scrooge. There's a bit of Scrooge in all of us. That sort of deliberately cynical, miserable, because we feel lonely or left out or whatever. Do you not think? Yes, Dominic. Well, I mean... I'm thinking of you, actually, Tom. I'm thinking of you.

I'm just trying to be nice to you. As you say, Dominic, there's a little bit of Scrooge in all of us anyway so we're now we've come back out we've come back out from the Warren of Raisin

we're going past beneath St. Michael's Cornhill with the Gothic window it is indeed a very high tower so this is the church right it's Christopher Wren Church

unusually for a Wren Church it has these Gothic windows so it's not a Wren Church like you know that you would traditionally expect not a classic and church that you would traditionally expect. No, not a classic. And we're back on Corn Hill.

Some nice drilling in the background. We're walking up Corn Hill from the Bank of England towards what is the highest point in the whole city of London. But you'd barely know it. So it's one of the three hills of London. It's not really a hill, is it? I mean, it's barely an incline. Tower Hill, Ludgate Hill, on which St. Paul stands, and this, Corn Hill.

With these colossal kind of financial towers now overshadowing it. So the language of money, I mean, it absolutely dominates, obviously, Christmas Carol. It's all about the Bank of england exchange bills of exchange ledgers all that kind of stuff and as we as we walk up to um towards leadenhall towering over us are the heirs of well they are i mean there's like scrooges counting house there's the sort of what's that is that the that the Lloyd's building? Yeah, the Lloyd's building is further down. The Lloyd's building, further along. The cheese grater.

We've got the gherkin behind that. If you ever watch those fantastic kind of recolourised, you know, sort of newsreel and things, kind of early film visions of Edwardian London or early 20th century London, the demographic mix is very different from how it is today it's a lot older it's a lot more socially variegated than you know when we walk around these streets yeah but there's only one kind of people here yeah although I mean we're going to be doing uh an episode aren't we in the new year on 1922 we are as the year in which modernity is born um and that's the year in which the wasteland is is published. And Elliot gives this kind of terrifying description of...

The people sweeping across the... Yeah, the people crossing London Bridge, the dead. I had not thought death had undone so many. Yes. Anyway, so we have come to one of the many candidates for where Scrooge's house might have been. Oh, this looks perfect, Tom. This genuinely looks absolutely perfect. So it's White Lion Court, and there's an old house.

It looks rather handsome now. It's painted in a bright kind of purple. There are a couple of lions stuck outside. So very much cheerier than it might have been if this had been Scrooge's house. But it could once have looked fantastically dreary. You could make it look fantastically dreary, couldn't you? Absolutely. So what is it, probably Georgian house, judging by the sort of windows?

Yeah, so it's an 18th century house. But I guess you could imagine a door knocker on those doors and it kind of warping. So tell us about the door knocker, Tom. So Scrooge comes up to it, knocks on it, sees Marley's face. Marley is his partner who's died. And he, humbug, humbug, goes upstairs and has a festive... This is the first hint isn't there of the supernatural that and our producer was saying to us as we were walking over that um that's one of the elements

that makes this such a great story it's not just the lesson it's not just the sentiment but it's also that it's quite scary and particularly it's interesting because now it's often thought of as quite a children's story so you can buy it as a puffin children's classic and obviously thanks to the muppets it's become a kind of family you know a sort of family and it's kind of stages pantomimes and things yeah but not at the time that it's not a children's story at all at the time is it i mean dickens is writing for adults absolutely so so so famously So famously, Scrooge retires for the night and he hears a clanking and a dragging. Yeah. And into his room walks the ghost of Jacob Marley.

And Jacob Marley is dragging behind him ledger books and chains and all the appurtenances of his long career as a banker and perhaps the most chilling detail of all he has a cloth wrapped around um his underneath his jaw and over his head and at one point he removes it and his jaw drops off that's right like rob spear that's what happens at rob spear so all the obviously all the muscles and everything that are holding the jaw have have frayed away while he's been in the grave so that's that's that's very frightening and marley says i'm going to be sending you three ghosts basically to pep you up yeah so marley teach you the meaning of christmas he's john the baptist here isn't he he's not the messenger himself but he's the sort of well he's a messenger isn't he he's the angel announcing the yes the ghosts that are going to come um

but i mean so dickens's attitudes to ghosts i mean he does i think see them as i mean he has he's a 19th century man he's skeptical about them he he you know ostensibly doesn't believe in them but you can see from the anecdote of him being terrified in in the pittsburgh and he wrote the century which is one of the great ghost stories ever yeah brilliant and actually the 70s TV adaptation with Denholm Elliot, absolutely superb. So Dickens is, like all Victorians, fascinated by death, by memory,

by the spiritual, all those kinds of things. And I think that one of the things about living through the pandemic at the moment is it does take us back to the kind of world in which death was a constant present yeah in life uh and that one of the reasons why christmas is so important to dickens is precisely that the streets are stalked by pestilence and um yes that's that thing about the darkness and the cozy right yeah you need that the darkness makes the bright seem all the brighter. Yeah. So Marley retires and Scrooge is left alone. Marley says, you don't believe in me, do you?

And Scrooge says, I don't believe you at all. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are. There's more gravy than of grave. That's such a great line. But that's kind of brilliant, me, Dickkenzi and having his cake and eating it you know doubting that it exists and yet it's kind of horrible yeah and terrifying at the same time so marley withdraws and then these three ghosts yes come um so the ghost of christmas past

first of all yeah so we're digging into scrooge's own past here aren't we so it starts i think with that tremendous scene that you mentioned of scrooge he's basically a boarding school everybody else has gone home for the holidays he is on his own this sort of a solitary child neglected by his friends he's left there still and that you see that's the thing that when i said i know you thought it was hilarious when i said there's a bit of scrooge and all that's rather like richard nixon um but well richard nixon's not unlike scrooge actually uh but that sort of thing of being the one child who's left behind i mean there are very few listeners who went empathized with that some you know weren't the last we picked up after the party or whatever and and that's that's very dickens yeah that

taking somebody boys into the blacking factory yeah to their childhood roots that's that's very Dickens. Yeah. Taking somebody boys into the blacking factory to their childhood roots. That's where it all went wrong. You know, the mean spiritedness of your nature is rooted in sadness and solitariness and all those things. Yeah. And then the ghost of Christmas past takes us through Scrooge's memories. And there is a description of an absolutely kind of classic Dickensian Christmas knees up yeah um Mr Fezziwig Fezziwig or Fozziwig as he is in the Muppets version he's Fozzibear um and it's uh it's a wonderful um there's a kind of wonderful illustration

um by John Leach who did the early illustrations of Mr fezwig dancing it's a welsh wig mr fezwig i don't know what a welsh wig yes and they strike up um sir roger de coverley which was an english dance right named after a character in the spectator and spectator yeah no i i think the early 18th century spectator rather than the uh boris johnson edited spectator um but i've always i've always wondered, you know, I felt that that's a bit that's been missing from my Christmas. You like to do a bit more dancing? I'd like to do Sir Roger de Covelly.

I have no idea what it is. I'm not going to go with you now. Any of the listeners out there have any idea what Sir Roger de Covelly sounds like, you know, let us know. I'd love to hear it. Yes, maybe they can let us know on the Discord chat if they're members of the Rest Is History Club.

An ideal Christmas present, and it is not too late to go to restishist hear it. Yes. Maybe they can let us know on the Discord chat. If you're a member of the Restless History Club, an ideal Christmas present, and it is not too late to go to restlesshistorypod.com. Yes, if you want to come in out of the darkness and the cold into our... That's brilliant promotional work. I thought that was completely seamless. Very Scrooge-like. Well, I've got my ledgers with me. So, yes.

So basically, Scrooge has shown the process by which this this young boy who um who you know he might have married he might have had a family but he decides not to because he chooses to marry his ledger book that's right because his sort of his sweetheart abandons him is she called bella yes yeah she she says you care about money more than me and he says humbug yeah exactly and he's absolutely right so the ghost of christmas um the past goes scrooge wakes up he's well he's a bit discombobulated yeah but still not entirely convinced and then the ghost of christmas present arrives and the ghost of christmas present is absolutely fantastic because he appears he's like a feast in human form he does and he's he he's a kind of giant colossal bearded man but he has a great throne

which consists entirely of festive food so turkeys geese game poultry brawn great joints of meat sucking pigs long wreaths of sausages mince pies plum puddings barrels of oysters red hot chestnuts cherry-cheeked apples juicy oranges luscious pears immense 12th cakes and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam my my christmas dinner that's exactly how i imagine the sanbrook household exactly over christmas yeah absolutely you with a great horn of plenty toasting ragamuffins exactly turkeys out left right and center to the poor. Throwing shillings to urchins.

Exactly. That's how I imagine it. Anyway, so the Ghost of Christmas Present then shows Scrooge what's going on. Well, they go to the market, don't they? Isn't that the first thing where people are kind of all... They're basically doing their Christmas shopping. Yeah, and they're all happy. And everyone in Dickens loves doing Christmas shopping.

Yeah, it's very, very unlike the reality. So wholly implausible and fictional. Yeah. They all absolutely adore it. The sort of stressed people, like, juggling wrapping paper, desperately fighting for the last pigs in blankets and Tesco. Yes. And then he is shown his nephew, who we should have mentioned earlier,

had come in. So Fred has previously said, why don't you come and join us for Christmas? And Scrooge has said, bar humbug. Yeah, he has said bar humbug. So Scrooge has shown them all kind of saying what a miserable old stick Scrooge is. Well, they play some sort of game, don't they, where they have to guess who he is. I'm a sort of animal. Yes, a kind of miserable old terrifying creature, monster.

And it's Scrooge, and Scrooge's gut is when he finds out that they're laughing at him behind his back and then they are taken to camden and to bob cratchit's house where all the various cratchit children are feasting on a goose which is a very small goose and there's a very small christmas pudding but because they have the spirit of christmas they're happy never was such a goose bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked it's tenderness and flavor size and cheapness with the themes of universal admiration and is there a particular child dominic who perhaps you've made play with in a advert for beer on our podcast see the producers this time finds this absolutely hilarious because he wrote it he wrote it he wrote it

Tiny Tom I will perhaps save a glass of beer 52 I hope they pay us extra for this in episode advertising for Tiny Tom yeah so

Tiny Tim so Tiny Tim now Tiny Tim is kind of Little Nell isn't he really so Little Nell was the character in the old Curiosity Shop

who had famously I hesitate to spoil it for people but she dies and there had been universal kind of weeping and waiting all those listeners who are just just three quarters of the way through the old curiosity how many such listeners do you think there are i'm sure there are lots actually ruined people in america had famously kind of you know being at the quayside waiting for the next heart of stone not to laugh. But Tiny Tim is kind of little Nell. He's a sentimental martyr figure with his crutches

carried on Bob Cratchit's back. Bob is incredibly long-suffering and will run with Tiny Tim and Tiny Tim can do no wrong. And he toasts Scrooge. He does. To Mr. Scrooge who made it possible. And his wife, who's Miss Piggy in the Muppet version says, Scrooge, if he was To Mr. Scrooge who made it possible. And his wife, who's Miss Piggy, in the Muppet version, says, Scrooge, if he was here, I would

give him that box of his ears or whatever. And, um... But Bob is so... Bob is such a sort of fine fellow. But he won't hear a word against Scrooge. Even if Scrooge treats him like dirt. And Tiny Tim is obviously a chip off the old block, because he has his famous toast,

God bless us all, everyone. God bless us everyone, yes. It's very moving, Tom. I think it's very moving. Yeah, it is. Well, that's what I found about Dickens is that when I was young and I read him, I was, you know, youthful and cynical and contemptuous of his sentimentality. Whereas now, in middle age, I just sob. Yeah, no, I agree with you. I've become far more attuned to it i think um i think it's almost too tempting to sort of poke fun at dickens well so last last last christmas in the depths of the

lockdown i read quite a lot of dickens and i read um uh tale of two cities which i hadn't read since school right when i really hadn't enjoyed it that's terribly moving at the end it's so good and i was i was literally in tears at the end yeah i read the children's version of that's terribly moving at the end it's so good and i was i was literally in tears at the end yeah i read the children's version of that's my son and it was a bit like a boyish tear it was a bit like when no he was completely different but it was a bit like when i read the lion the witch and the wardrobe there were bits where i kind of choked up i was like what's wrong with you why can't you carry on reading no anyway back so back to uh back to to scrooge so he's very moved by this um very worried about tiny tim you know is tiny tim going

to be all right yes um and then the ghost of christmas present vanishes and we we get the appearance of the most terrifying ghost of all who is the ghost of christmas to come so he's sort of a jk rowling star dementor isn't he or a nazgul or a nazgul or i suppose i mean he's he's the grim reaper isn't he's a figure of utter dread so he's he's black cloaked you can't see his face he never talks yeah he only never talks only shows but i think that we should um we we should talk about the third ghost. Yes. Not here. Oh.

But in a graveyard, which is where the ghost ends up taking Scrooge. Not least because there's a lot of banging and drilling in the background, which the listeners may well have heard. So let's head to our next destination on our Christmas Carol pilgrimage. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

So, Tom, where are we now? Okay, we have come to St. Peter upon Cornhill, which, as the name suggests, we're still in Cornhill um and this church actually i mean quite aside from dickens is a very interesting church you you could walk along cornhill and barely notice it well it's because it's in one of the it's warren of this maze of courts but if you yeah so if you come off cornhill uh you know you you see the the graveyard um and you see the back of the church and this reputedly is the oldest church in britain amazingly supposedly founded by that well-known historical figure king lucius right in the second century uh ad yeah i don't remember him in there he's he's mentioned by bead um as as being you know a very early christian who founded this church so that probably do the romans know of him

unlikely unlikely but it's mentioned by john stowe who's the great um the the great tudor writer about london at the end of the 16th century um and he cites a tablet um claiming that king lucius had founded this church it was obviously destroyed in the great fire rebuilt by wren um the weather vane has a key in the shape of saint peter's, letting people into heaven. But, I mean, that's all by the by. The reason why I've brought you here is that it is probably in this graveyard that the final climactic scene in Scrooge's experience with the three ghosts occurs. So, where the ghost of Christmas past.

The ghost of Christmas future. Oh, sorry. Yes, ghost of Christmas future. Oh, sorry. Yes. Ghost Christmas future. And the ghost shows what is likely to come. And he shows Scrooge a kind of rag and bone man in a squalid area of London, parceling up the goods of an obviously deceased man. Nobody cares for them. Nobody wants them. They're just being dispelled. Then he takes Scrooge to the city and various bankers and financial luminaries that scrooge knows are walking a lot through the streets talking about someone who's died in a tone of absolute kind of they don't care they only want

to go to the if there's going to be a free lunch exactly yes yes nobody cares nobody cares and that and all the time scrooge is saying who is this person i mean he's either being yeah he doesn't want to face up to the possibility of who it might be then they go And all the time Scrooge is saying, who is this person? I mean, he's either being very obtuse. He doesn't want to face up to the possibility of who it might be. But then they go back to Camden, don't they? They go to Camden. Yeah. And they go to the Cratchits' house.

Oh, it's a terrible scene. Is Tiny Tim still there? No, Tiny Tim is dead. Bob has just visited the grave, hasn't he? And he says it's very green and you'd like it. And they all talk about how they'll remember Tiny Tim and what a lovely fellow he was. And they'll behave in a more Christian way now

when they think of Tiny Tim. And the crutches are by the fire. It's very moving. Very, very moving. Well, you know, if you're 17, you laugh at this. Or if you're Oscar Wilde. But if you're a bit older. Yeah.

With a child of your own. Yes, you do find it moving. Yes, absolutely. And then? And then? Well, then they reach an iron gate and i shall read from the book it says he paused to look around before entering a churchyard here then the wretched man whose name he had now to learn lay underneath the ground it was a worthy

place walled in by houses as as it is now walled in by houses, overrun by grass and weeds, which it isn't, but overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life, choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite, a worthy place.

The spirit leads Scrooge into this graveyard and he points towards a grave. Tell us what's written on the grave well following the finger he read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name and dickens puts it in capital letters ebenezer scrooge do you know where ebenezer scrooge the name come came from no uh apparently dickens had visited a grave in edinburgh i think by a man called ebenezer scroggie who turned out was a very jovial man a great philanderer man with an eye for the ladies and a kind of laugh a minute party goer but i'm glad you didn't call him scroogie no

i wouldn't work at all scroogie wouldn't work anyway so so, so Scrooge wakes up from this, finds that it's all been a dream and that it's all happened over the course of Christmas morning. Yes. And he calls out to a passing boy, you know, what morn is it? And the boy says, it's Christmas morning. And Scrooge tells him to go and buy a turkey.

And the boy rushes off to Leadenhall Market market which is just around the corner where we're going to head now a delightful boy excellent boy the first christmas i spent in london i came to leadenhall market and i bought a goose a goose not a turkey no i bought a goose because i thought it was more decency well it is more like bob cratchit was a bit disappointed to have a turkey at the end rather than a goose and i carried it the whole way back to our little Bob Cratchit type flat and it was a brilliantly Dickensian experience now so Dickensian Christmases Tom there's light and shade in them yeah and let's bring in a bit of the shade because you have had an experience haven't you with a turkey yes uh which always i'm sorry

to say it was slightly amuses me did you not once buy a turkey and have it stolen out to the back of your car yes i did christmas on christmas eve yeah it was on christmas eve um because i didn't have room and we had a very small fridge uh and this was a kind of um scrooge type turkey of an enormous size and we uh yeah we so so we you know we didn't want it to we wanted to keep it cold so we kept it in the um in the in the boot of the car and some some wanker are you allowed to say that in the christmas podcast i think so some wanker broke into the car and uh nicked it so we we just had all the trimmings it was very nice it was the best christmas ever oh yeah god bless us everyone tiny tom yeah tom we're in a very we're in a splendid location now so tell us where we are so we are now in leadenhall market um and there's been um

a market here from the 14th century it's actually on the site of the roman basilica and there's the only chunk of the roman basilica is to be found in the barber shop that is over there it's in the basement um and it's a legal requirement i think of the planning but um if you want to go and see this chunk of the basilica you have to have your haircut no they have to let you in oh really they have to let you in so you go down and see it but this this particular incarnation was was built in 1881 and it's very very victorian i mean it's so this isn't the one that uh that scrooge would have named but it still gives a very victorian it's a bit more late victorian isn't it there are reeds everywhere there's kind of

christmas trees it's all very very very festive and this is yeah and so this is where dickens buys his uh sorry dickens that's a significant slip uh scrooge buys this enormous turkey yeah he takes it to bob cratchit so this is interesting doesn't it it gets screwed everybody thinks that scrooge pitches up at the cratchit's house and comes down but he doesn't he goes to fred's house yeah he does astonishes everybody by pitching up at fred's yeah so michael kane at the end of the muppets he he goes to both he does both yeah but that's not right yeah he should not go to visit Miss Biggie because the twist is the next morning when Bob Cratchit comes in late because he's had such a great time what with all his

punch and everything yeah and Scrooge pretends to be the miserable old skin that he'd always been and he says Bob Cratchit I'm going to give you a raise. Yes, exactly. And it's non-stop polarity and Scrooge then basically becomes a second father to Tiny Tim who doesn't die

and they all, you know, always festive and well. Now here's an interesting thing about Tiny Tim not dying. It was only added at a very late stage in the printing presses.

So originally, they didn't say that explicitly, because it's quite a sentimental touch. Tiny Tim, who did not in capitals die. I mean, that's a bit of fan service, I think, as they would call it now, isn't it? Yeah. And Scrooge, he became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.

Yes. Now let's talk a bit about just a bit about the meaning of A Christmas Carol, because Tony, our producer, who is this sort of glowering shadow throughout our recording. Yes. Pointing on it, taking off his flat cap and looking disapproving at various points yes pointing out that it it's made by a hat maker uh by appointment to the duke of edinburgh while simultaneously grumbling about trade unions so very very exactly very split very much in a kind of Dickensian way yeah that's very much the uh the modern labor party some might say um anyway he has pointed out quite rightly that in some ways a christ A Christmas Carol is a very conservative book. Because basically, the argument of

A Christmas Carol is there are tremendous, I mean, the context of these tremendous inequalities, poor and rich living cheap by jowl, but sort of not meeting. But the answer to this is individual philanthropy. We'll buy everyone a turkey. And there were people who literally did that. So there was,

I think there was someone in a factory in owner in boston who read it and was he gave everyone the day off and bought them all turkeys that's right yes um and i think somebody there was a comment in the times or something to the to the effect of ever since it's been published people are just rushing around buying turkeys for people um so that is essentially dickens's solution to to want individual self-improvement and philanthropy and so on which now people would perceive as in some ways quite a that's right message i would say well so um lenin a few years after the russian revolution went to a staging of one of dickens's christmas Christmas stories and was so appalled by its borderline morality that he walked out midway through.

Lenin walked out of a production of Dickens. Yeah. That's a play in itself, isn't it? Yeah, it's brilliant, isn't it? Yeah, kind of Orlando Annucci doing something with that. Yes. But I suppose that's part of the fascination with Dickens. Dickens is simultaneously appalled by the kind of costs

of Victorian progress and so on. with dickens the dickens is simultaneously appalled by the by the kind of costs of you know victorian progress and so on and yet he's he's a moralist isn't he's a concern as many moralists are he tends to be quite conservative because he brings everything back to the the the virtue or vice of the individual rather than of society at large he i mean he feels horror at the institutionalization of the kind of inequalities in victorian britain so scrooge is notorious you know are there not workhouses yes are there not prisons yeah uh you know why don't people die to to lower the surplus population so anti-malthus isn't it anti-malthus political economists uh again? Anti-Malthus, political economists. Again, it's the ledger book. It's the idea of reducing people to statistics, to figures in an accountancy book.

That fills him with horror. And the counterpoint to that is, yeah, is kind of personal joy, I guess, and personal benignity. The buying of turkeys for people. Well, that's arguably why One Reason Why Christmas Carol is so successful and so popular. I mean, it was written for a very middle-class audience, for a literate middle-class audience. And that's probably the audience that it still reaches because it's not a politically radical book in a troubling way.

It's a book that says, give a little bit more to charity at christmas and i think that's why people that's why that's how we say affluent respectable well-off people love it because it makes you feel it doesn't make scrooge feel bad about being rich but i think it's also i mean as we said the beginning it's although it it does have this kind of quite strong political seedbed it it also has a kind of it has the quality of fairy tale of folk tale almost of myth or of legend and that makes i mean i'm sure that's one of the reasons why it must rank as the most adapted story certainly in english is that you can do almost anything with

it so you can you know obviously when i said that we were doing this show lots of people wrote and said you must mention the muppets as the best and we have given i think lots of lots of airtime to the muppets but also you know you've had scrooge mcduck the you know the disney version of it scrooge bill murray screw yes so so it's come in many many shapes and forms and i think that that that reflects the fact that it is infinitely malleable and infinitely parodable infinitely adaptable and as we said in our christmas podcast that we did at this time last year christmas is in many ways dickens's and the victorians creation isn't it yeah the turkey the goose the trimmings the carols the cards the tree these things date from dickens's lifetime um So we're still kind of, you know,

we are almost self-consciously re-enacting a Victorian Christmas every time we celebrate Christmas. And I think, Dominic, that that is the perfect note on which to end. You look like you're gearing up for a reading, Tom, are you? No, I'm going to say happy Christmas to everyone. Festive best wishes. And God bless us. god bless us god bless us everyone everyone from me and from tiny tom happy christmas happy christmas thanks for listening to the rest is history. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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