Throughline - Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 19th-century London, the holiday went viral.Guests:Leon Litvack, professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters project.Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, author and historian of Victorian England.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Welcome back to ThruLines Winter Book Club. Today we're going to start by telling you a story. Once upon a time, Of all the good days in the year on Christmas Eve, Old Scrooge sounds. busy in his county house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy with all. And he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.

The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already. of Scrooge's counting house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk who in a dismal little cell beyond a sort of tank was copying letters Scrooge had a very small fire but the clerk's fire

was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal but he couldn't replenish it for Scrooge kept the coal box in his own room wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle Merry Christmas, Uncle, God save you!

cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach. Bah! Said Scrooge. Hubbug!

Christmas is a humbug, uncle? Said Scrooge's nephew. You don't mean that, I'm sure. I do. Said Scrooge. Merry Christmas. What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?

You're poor enough. come then returned the nephew gaily what right have you to be so dismal what right have you to be so morose you're rich enough scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of this moment said bah again and followed it up with humbug don't be cross uncle said the nephew what else can i be returned the uncle when i live in such a world of fools as this merry christmas out upon merry christmas what's christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money A time for finding yourself a year older but not an hour richer. A time for balancing your books and having every item in him through a round dozen of months presented dead against you. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding

and buried with the steak of Holly through his heart. Teased the season to be jolly. You've probably seen a version of a Christmas Carol. Since Charles Dickens first wrote it in 1843, there have been hundreds of adaptations, each one with its own twist. My personal favorites, Good morning, Mr. Duck. Bah Humduck, a Looney Tunes Christmas, and... Hello!

Welcome to the Muppet Christmas Carol. My name is Charles Dickens. And my name is Rizzo the Rat. Hey, wait a second, you're not Charles Dickens. I have two. No, a blue furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat. Absolutely. The basic story goes, it's Christmas Eve, and a miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge,

is visited by three ghosts who take him into the past, present, and future to teach him the value of kindness and generosity, the true spirit of Christmas. The book was an overnight. sensation. And Charles Dickens, already famous, became a legend. Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas. This is Leon Litback. He's a professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast, an editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project. There's a famous story that goes, a journalist at the end of the 19th century, after Dickens

had died, went to Covent Garden Market. And he encountered there, small girl who was selling fruits and vegetables, probably illiterate, and he said to her, well, Charles Dickens has died, and she says, oh, will Father Christmas die too? Before a Christmas Carol, the holiday wasn't as widely celebrated as it is today. Many people didn't even get the day off work. Dickens had already devoted his life to documenting Urban London's harsh realities. Dickensian has become a catch-all word for that world, a world of unfair working conditions, meager wages, homeless families, and hungry children. I think that even more than Christmas, Dickens is well known for his championship of social issues.

And he wrote a novel to represent what he saw. But of course, as the book's fame spread from England to the U.S. and around the world, Christmas took on a life of its own, a very different one than what Dickens might have imagined. When Jingle Bells starts playing in department stores pretty much as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. The soundtrack to a season of spending. Hey, jingle bells, jingle all the way. I am the ghost of Christmas.

I'm Ramtin Arablui. And I'm Rund Abd al-Fat-da. Coming up, how a Christmas carol changed Christmas. This is Rob from Yonkers, New York. You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always, get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial. When you think about the people you love, it's not the big things you miss the most. It's the details. What memories will your loved ones cherish when you're gone? At Dignity Memorial, the details aren't just little things,

they're everything. They help families create meaningful celebrations of life with professionalism and compassion. To find a provider near you, visit DignityMemorial.com. AI expert Alvin Grayland has worked in Silicon Valley and China's tech scene for over three decades. Talk of an AI arms race, he thinks it's a big mistake. When I hear this from people who are very influential

in the decision making in America, it feels a little bit ignorant and very scary. Ideas about AI in 2026 and beyond. Listen to the TED Radio Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Part 1. Great Expectations. My teachers at primary school, she said to the class, has anybody ever heard of Charles Dickens?

And I thought it was some weird joke being played on me by my parents or something. This is Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, a historian of Victorian England, author of a number of books about Dickens and Christmas, and Charles Dickens. great, great, great, granddaughter. I knew that he'd written Christmas Carol and I knew about Oliver Twist, but I think when you're that little,

you don't necessarily realize that that means that other people know who they are. Today, she's our ghosts of Christmas past. And our first stop is the year 1812. The Marquis and Marchioness Camden gave a magnificent ball and suffer at their seat in Kent. It was always reported in the newspapers here what the royals had given each other for Christmas.

Which duchesses had the most lavish parties? The preparations displayed uncommon taste and consisted of the usual brilliancy of light. What people were wearing, what people were eating. About one o'clock, the company supped at half-bust-four, the party broke up. Charles Dickens would have been way too young to appreciate all the gossip. He was just 10 months old. This was his very first Christmas. He had one older sister, Francis. but he was the oldest boy.

His father, John, and his mother, Elizabeth, loved Christmas and each other. It was a very loving marriage, but they were both fairly irresponsible, particularly John, when it came to money. But they made sure to fill their home with the one thing that was virtually free. Music. One Christmas, they postponed their Christmas party because they'd just moved house. And shock horror, the piano hadn't yet been delivered. So the party couldn't possibly happen. The Dickens family embraced a festive Christmas.

For many people, though, Christmas was almost a day like any other day of the year. The average person in Britain didn't even have the day off work. You might have gone to church for a church celebration, but that was really about the height of it. There is, however, mistletoe. And if two people found themselves, under one, they were meant to kiss.

Some people banned that in their houses because it was all associated with paganism. Keep in mind, one reason December 25th may have been chosen as Christmas Day was to coincide with the winter solstice, a pagan tradition. At this time, the world itself seemed to be changing meaning

at lightning speed. New machines were transforming, everything about how people lived and worked. When the railways first started, there are reports of people feeling that they just were unable to take the speed, which was far beyond the speed that they could travel on foot or by horse. How rapidly society was changing. You had a greater emphasis

on commerce, business was thriving. Steam power might have made the trains run, but all that commerce and business required a lot of manpower too. Though it wasn't just men working in the factories, women and children were also keeping the machines running. They worked 12-hour days under harsh conditions and were at the mercy of their employer. Labor was the heartbeat of the Industrial Revolution,

and profit was its king. The key of the house was sent back to the landlord who was very glad to get it, and I was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady, long known to our family. This wasn't theoretical for young Charles Dickens. One day in 1824, his father, short on money and having racked up a mountain of debt,

was suddenly taken away to debtor's prison. Charles was just 12 years old. I was so young and childish and so little qualified. How could I be otherwise to undertake the whole charge of my own existence? I think he realised quite early on that his parents didn't have a great sense of responsibility when it came to making sure that their children had enough to eat and clothes to wear and everything else. Dickens later wrote about this experience. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden. and market and stared at the pineapples.

Initially, it was just his father who went into the prison cell, but then his mother couldn't afford to pay rent for them. So she and her younger children all had to move into the prison cell because they didn't have anywhere else to go. As for Charles? They couldn't afford to pay his school fees. He was told that he had to leave school. So Charles Dickens ended up in a factory,

a factory that produced a liquid called Blacking. And it was used for things like, you know, coach hoods and boots and front steps, anything that needed a black colour to it. And he obviously thought he was never going to get to have the kind of life that he wanted. I know that I worked from morning to night with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been. for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond. Newspapers and magazines were beginning to be mass-printed

and becoming more widely affordable, which meant that they needed writers. And Dickens was determined to never end up back in a factory. So in the late 1820s, he decided to pursue a career in journalism. He became a freelance journalist, taught himself short, and started looking for work. His journalism looked at every level of the world around him, cab drivers and slum dwellers, bachelors and boarding houses,

parliament and the courts, hospital patients, and prisoners. And while working as a reporter, he started writing short stories. And these were his first works of fiction. He'd published them anonymously. So what you would do at the time, if you wanted to be published, you would put them through the door of a magazine and hope that they would publish them for free.

just you could see your words in print. His pen name was Boz. That was the nickname of his youngest brother, Augustus. And that collection of stories came to be known as sketches by Boz. They gave snapshots of daily life in London. And they were a hit. His stories were just very simple, often very funny, sometimes very sad. Matrimony is proverbially a serious undertaking,

like an overweening predilection for Brandean water. It is a misfortune into which a man easily falls and from which he finds it remarkably difficult to extricate himself. A little bit like stand-up comedians do observational comedy today where they pick up on a small element of something. And it's something that everybody can identify with and go, oh, I know someone who does that. Well, I've been in that situation myself.

So it spoke to the people in general. And pretty soon. He was commissioned to work on the Pickwick Papers. His very first novel. Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and, we will not say, fled. Firstly, because it is an ignoble term, and secondly because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat.

And then he wrote Oliver Twist. The boy was lying, fast asleep on a rude bed upon the floor, so pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death. And Nicholas Nickleby. Memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better. Eventually, he started publishing under his real name. And before he'd reached the age of 30, people all across the world began to know Charles Dickens.

He just became incredibly famous. One of the things that made Dickens more popular than other writers was that his works dealt not just with the upper classes, which is what most authors of that time had done. And what Dickens did was he wrote about everybody from aristocracy down to street sweepers and everybody could identify with him. There is one broad sky over all the world and whether it be blue or cloudy the same heaven beyond.

There's a very famous painting of Dickens on quite a plush upholstered chair and he is sitting at a table and he's got very long, flowing, dark-colored hair, and he has this youthful appearance. He wears a gold tie-pin, and he looks fabulously impressive and wealthy. Because of new mass printing machines,

paintings like this one could be engraved, reproduced by the thousands, and then... ...could be circulated around the world, and people would become familiar with the image, the visual image, of a person. Dickens' stories and his face were especially popular in the U.S.

So in 1842, he set off on a ship. With very, very high hopes, expecting that he was going to absolutely love it. No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores with a stronger faith in the republic than I had when I landed in America. And he thought that this great,

American experiment could yield lessons for the rest of the world, particularly the United Kingdom. However, what he found was not quite to his liking. All that is loathsome, drooping decade is here. He found, unfortunately, that there was too great an emphasis on materialism, too great an emphasis on the love of money. And too great an obsession with celebrity. He was followed down the streets with people wanting to cut off locks of his hair. Once on a boat traveling the Great Lakes, he awoke to a, quote, party of gentlemen peering through his cabin window. He found the manners of the Americans to be appalling. There was actually a lot he found appalling. Underhanded tamperings with public officers cowardly attacks upon

opponents with scurrilous newspapers for shields and hired pens for daggers. On one stop, He visited a prison outside Philadelphia. And he was absolutely horrified to see that black people and white people were treated completely differently, even though they were all in prison. He also traveled to the American South and was appalled by slavery. Now, I appeal to every human mind imbued with the commonest of common sense and the commonest of common humanity. And ask, can they? have a doubt of the real condition of the slave? Or can they for a moment make a compromise between

the institution or any of its flagrant, fearful features and their own just consciences? They got as far as Richmond, Virginia, and they were on a train and there were two slave owners bartering over a family. And Dickens's listened to the crying as the father was taken away. So the father was in one train carriage waiting to leave the rest of his family. His wife and children were in another train. He wrote very poignantly that he was grateful that he had not been a baby in a slave rocked cradle, which is a line that still gets to me every time. He said in a letter to his friend back home, It is not the Republic of my imagination.

On top of all of that, he wasn't even making much money in the US because his work was being pirated, left and right. And when he got back to London, he decided to write down his observations in a book called American Notes. Americans hated it. And then his next novel kind of tanked. And his publishers started to think that this was, you know, maybe he wasn't such a good bet after all.

He had a wife and four kids by this point, with another one on the way, and was on the verge of falling into debt, the thing that haunted him most from his childhood. He desperately needed a new idea to get him out of the red. So he was struggling, and that was one of the things that would have been feeding his own anxiety, his fear of his own children ending up as he and his siblings had done. With the memories of his childhood replaying in his mind, Diggins found himself coming back to one thing, Christmas. It had always been a special time for his family, despite all the hardships they faced.

Coming up, Charles Dickens dreams up a Christmas carol. Hi, my name is Jesse. I live in Santa Cruz, La Laguna of Guatemala, and you're listening to you soon. from NPR. Part 2. A Tale of Two Cities. I'm a trapper in the Gorba Pit. It does not tire me, but I have to track without a light, and I'm scared. I go at 4 and sometimes half past 3 in the morning and come out at 5 and half past. I never go to sleep.

I would like to be at school far better than in the pit. Sarah Gooder. age date years. Back in London, after his trip to the U.S. and contemplating what his next book should be about, Dickens was sent a parliamentary report that he couldn't get out of his mind. People had been collecting hundreds of testimonials

from children working in Great Britain's mines and factories. It said that Dickens wept when he read them. Isabella Reed, 12 years. I have to stoop much and creep through the water, which is frequently up to the calves of my legs. When the weather is warm, there is difficulty in breathing, and frequently the lights go out. And then he thought, well, who's going to read this?

So he did what he could do best, which was to turn it into a work of fiction. He started thinking about how. Dickens was very insomniac for much of his life, so a lot of his thinking was done walking around. Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking. It was the biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes from all over the world.

A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the Hungry 40s. There were famine starting, the big Irish famine hadn't quite happened, but there were early signs of what would come. And many, many migrants were coming from Ireland to England. A kind of migrant crisis. It was absolutely overcrowded. In this society, where things are allowed to progress without controls, without those kinds of social nets in which to catch the people who happen to fall through,

what you're leaving behind is a trail of destitution. On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste. London did not have a proper sewer system, sanitation system, until the 1850s. It wouldn't have smelled good. And he would have known to avoid certain areas. I read one account with an area known as Seven Dials, one of the worst slums at the time. And it was said that if you went there and you weren't from there, you could expect to get your throat cut.

It was a very violent society. He would have seen children without shoes with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air. children were just treated worse than animals. You know, they were hit. Working-class children were often considered kind of just expendable. The days were dark and cold. And of course, there's only so many coins you can give out so many individuals you can help. And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got.

A story was forming in his mind. What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child. Unfortunately, his part. Publishers weren't as enthusiastic about this new Christmas book. They thought it was a very uncommercial idea. But Dickens was willing to take the gamble. It's almost like he was possessed with this desire to get this story out there, just get those feelings into it, this feeling of his anger with the world.

So he began to write. Once upon a time, of all this, good days in the year. On Christmas Eve, Old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. The story of Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve, and we see Ebenezer Scrooge, who's in his counting house, so his place of work. He lends money to people, and he's part of his firm than is Scrooge and Marley. And what we learn is that it's seven years to that day since Jacob Marley died. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Dead as a doornail, says Dickens. Jacob Marley was just like Scrooge.

A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Didn't care about anybody. He had a lot of money and was a miser. Let any man explain to me if he can how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw Marley's face. The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Ebenezer Scrooge What do you want with me? said Scrooge Caustic and cold as ever Much

Marley's voice No doubt about it And Scrooge kind of dismisses it He refuses to believe in ghosts You don't believe in me Observe the ghost I don't said Scrooge Jacob Marley warns him

No rest no peace incessant torture of remorse forced to walk the earth wrapped in these chains chains and cash boxes the sign of the money

all his life he's been accruing what can he do with it in the next life and he tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts of Christmas each of which will teach him an important lesson expect the first tomorrow when the

Bell tolls one. Christmas passed. Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. Christmas present. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of 12 has ceased to vibrate. And Christmas yet to come, often call Christmas future in adaptations. Without their visits, you cannot hope to show. The path I trade.

Scrooge says, well, no, I don't really want that to happen, thanks very much. But of course it does happen. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. Are you the spirit who's coming? was foretold to me, asked Scrooge. I am. Who and what are you? Scrooge demanded. I am the ghost of Christmas past.

Long past, inquired Scrooge. No, your past. And he gets taken back to his own childhood by the first ghost. Good heaven, says. said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked about him. I was bred in this place. I was a boy here. He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air. Each one connected with a thousand thoughts and hopes and joys and cares, long, long forgotten.

And teaches him that in his past, Scrooge celebrated Christmas much more fully. Some shaggy ponies now were seen. trotting towards them with boys upon their backs. All these boys were in great spirit and shouted to each other until the broad fields were so full of merry music that the crisp air laughed to hear it. The school is not quite desired, said the ghost. He's also given the opportunity to visit himself as a schoolboy.

A solace richard, neglected by his friends, He's left dead still. Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed. He's kind of lonely and destitute. And I think that that also is a kind of autobiographical reflection on something within Dickens. As Scrooge grew into an adult,

he began to evolve into a miser. He was not alone. but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a morning dress, in whose eyes there were tears. Which upset his love interest. You fear the world too much, she answered gently. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.

Have I not? She left him, and they parted. And he's left at the end of the Ghost of Christmas Pass visit, disturbed by what he has found and what he's turned into. No more, cried Scrooge. No more. I don't wish to see it. Show me no more.

I am the ghost of Christmas present. Look upon me. Second ghost is the ghost of Christmas present, which of course is the ghost of Christmas 1843. He's a much more jolly kind of spirit. And his job is to show Scrooge how Christmas is celebrated in his own time. Well, he could be enjoying. And so he takes him, for example, to different parts of the world,

to lighthouses and mines and various other places where Christmas is celebrated. Holly, mistletoe, redberries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brown, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch. all vanished instantly. He also takes Scrooge to the residence of Bob Cratchett. Bob Cratchett is Scrooge's Clark, who works for a merry meager wage. Scrooge is reluctant to give Bob Cratchett any time off at Christmas. What, has ever got your precious father, then? said Mrs. Cratchett. And your brother, Tiny Tim? And Martha weren't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour?

And so he's part of the working. of which there were many, of course, in Victorian London. Here's Martha, mother, cried the two young cratchits. We see Martha coming home from work and all the family being around the table together. These young cratchits danced about the table, and in came little Bob, the father, and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas, for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame. And how did little Tim behave? asked Mrs Cratchett. Oh, as good as gold, said Bob, and better.

He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made Lane Beggers walk and blind men see. Chestnuts on the fire, sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed, a Merry Christmas to us all, my dears, God bless us. Which all the family re-echoed. God bless us, everyone, said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

And he shows Scrooge that even in a household that doesn't have very much money, Christmas can still be celebrated with great joy and with great fervor. Spirit, said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before. Tell me, if Tiny Tim will live. If these shadows remain unlawed by the future, that a child will die. The chimes were ringing the three-quarters past eleven at that moment. At the end of that stave, they're called, the different sections of the carol.

I see something strange, said Scrooge. The ghost of Christmas present presents Scrooge with these two children that he produces from beneath his cloak. Two children named ignorance and want. Etchid, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment. And the ghost says to Scrooge, They are men's.

They are mankind's children. And they serve as an example of the depths to which society has sunk, particularly in how it treats its children. Dickens said of the two of them, ignorance and want. ignorance was the one that must be feared more than anything because if you leave a child to grow up in ignorance without any understanding of how to care for themselves or care for other people or care for the world,

you create all the villains that Dickens wrote about. The bell struck 12. Scrooge looked about him for the ghost and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him. A very silent, scary ghost who's often identified with the grim reaper. I am sure we shall none of us forget, poor tiny tin, shall we? So amongst the things that the ghost of Christmas yet to come shows Scrooge

are the situation in the Cratchett household where the Cratchett's young child, Tiny Tim, has now died. When we recollect how patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it. And then we're shown an image of a house that is cold. He lay in the dark, empty house, would not a man, a woman, or a child to say that he was kind to me and this or that. Am I the man who lay upon the bed? He cried upon his knees.

And it turns out that this is Scrooge's own house after Scrooge has died. No, Spirit. Oh, no. Nobody mourns him, and at that point, Scrooge breaks down completely. Spirit, he cried, tight, clutching at its robe. Hear me. I am not the man I was. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future.

The spirit of all three shall strive within me. And then he wakes up, and we see him at the end. calling out the window to a boy. What's today, my fine fellow? Today, replied the boy. Why, Christmas Day. Do you know whether they've sold that prize turkey that was hanging up there? By the biggest turkey that he can.

He's hanging up there now? Replied the boy. Is it? said Scrooge. Go and buy it. And deliver it to the Cratchits as their Christmas dinner as a kind of apology for not just how he's treated his clerk, but I suppose in a way how he's treated all of human. We hear at the end of the story from the narrator that Scrooge keeps Christmas in his heart. It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge.

May that be truly said of us and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us everyone. In just six weeks, Dickens had finished his book. He called it a Christmas carol. His publisher was sure it was going to flop. And with his debts stacking up, Dickens personally invested in publishing 6,000 copies of the book. Then he held his breath and waited for the first reviews to come in. Coming up, Christmas takes off.

Hi, this is Adam's paper calling from Woodland Hills, California, and you're getting smarter because you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. A Thousand-One Humbugs. When it came out in 1843, a Christmas carol was a sensation. The first edition sold out almost immediately. 6,000 copies in just a few days leading up to Christmas Eve. It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success. And by the time of Charles Dickens' second U.S. visit in 1867... A Christmas Carol had just become legendary.

Dickens traveled by train from as far south as Washington, D.C., and as far north as Maine, hosting hundreds of readings, hitting up major cities like New York and Boston. With an elastic step, he ascended the platform and moved quickly to his crimson throne. The applause, meanwhile, spreading and deepening. Till the whole audience joined in one universal and enthusiastic plotted, which continued for several minutes. Everything he did just sold out. There are stories of people who would wait on the street overnight in order to obtain entry to his readings.

People felt that they could sympathize with the characters. People spoke about the pathos that Dickens had inserted into Tiny Tim. God bless us, everyone. For the poorer people, it was, I'm finally being talked about. I'll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family. People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into the holiday. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future.

Christmas Carl became kind of the do-it-yourself manual or how to do Christmas. And people were doing Christmas, like, for real. So people realize this is the time for family and friends, it became fashionable to have the kind of Christmas parties that were described in a Christmas Carol, inviting lonely people as he's attempted to invite Uncle Scrooge. Also, we have Christmas carols, the songs that is associated with Christmas.

They call up for people those memories that they have of the songs that are sung at Christmas. That's still the case, of course, because whenever you go into a store, in any place in the world virtually, you will hear Christmas music. The commercial side of Christmas was growing too. The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year a Christmas Carol published. The first in-store Santa appeared in Macy's department store in the 1860s, and on that U.S. trip in 1867, Dickens,

himself was a product. He wrote about this in his letters. The excitement of the readings continues unabated. The tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up. In one letter, he mentions a man who sold a ticket for $50, which is more than $1,000 today. There were often famous authors in the audience.

The readings were covered in the national press. He was so famous. He couldn't move without people wanting to talk to him. If I stopped to look in at a shop window, a score of passes-by stop. He also had photographs of himself taken that were sold by street hawkers and others at these venues of his reading. So it was very much the kind of 19th century equivalent of going to a Taylor Swift concert and finding all kinds of Taylor Swift memorabilia and t-shirts and bracelets, whatever else you can imagine that would increase the devotion of the fans to Taylor, or in this case, to Charles. He will make plenty of money. There is no doubt. The New York Times.

While we think of a Christmas Carol as something that is heartfelt and something that Dickens wanted to deliver as this kind of gift to the public, we mustn't forget that it was also a commercial venture and indeed one in which Dickens himself invested. It was as much a financial decision as it was this kind of humanitarian gift that Dickens was giving to the world. He was never completely a humanitarian. He was always the consummate businessman. Okay, so a little Bob Cratchett and maybe a little Scrooge. There were ways in which a Christmas carol did seem like it was having the kind of impact Dickens had hoped for,

or at least according to the lore. There's a story that he was giving a talk in Boston, giving a reading from a Christmas Carol, and in his audience was a factory owner from Chicago, who had a Scrooge-like epiphany, who went back to Chicago and said that from that time on, all his employees would get Christmas day off, and every family who worked for him would be given a turkey every Christmas.

But Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, his great, great, great-granddaughter, says that Dickens also had a healthy dose of skepticism, That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture. But what about the 364 other days of the year? How were workers treated? Who looked out for the poor? Were things really changing for the better? Nothing was ever enough for Dickens.

He was a campaigner all his life. He wrote journalism right up to the end. He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition, by political situations. Dickens left the United States in April of 1868. He'd made a lot of money off his readings. Tax inspectors have been chasing Dickens, trying to get a portion of the taxes he owed. Lucinda writes in her book that the site of the tax inspectors on the harbor after their ship had already set sail

cheered Dickens' soul. Dickens died in 1870, just a couple years after returning from his trip. Two weeks after his death, Christmas was made a federal holiday in the U.S. Dickens had always encouraged what he called a carol philosophy. A carol philosophy. Call it the Christmas spirit. cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, so that's hypocrisy, jolly good temper, paper's always in season, hat to the time of the year,

and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to home and fireside. But modern Christmas is also undeniably about money, giving it, sure, but also spending it. What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if you were alive, today, would look like? If I knew that, I'd write it and make my fortune. You've got the name already. You know what I mean? To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world.

There is still a huge amount of child poverty. There's so much inequality of wealth. I mean, Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us. Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. Everybody needs to understand that actually nothing is going to change unless we do. We should become more familiar with our own past because the past has things to teach us. And I think that we all have a responsibility. to the past.

And we look towards the future, hopefully with bright hopes and with optimism. But at the same time, we have to be looking in both directions. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabed Fattah.

I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu. Julie Kayne. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Edisina Kim.

Devin Katayama. I'm Dominic Gerard. I was the voice of Charles Dickens in this episode. I'm an actor and musician. And I host a podcast called Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire. Voiceover work in this episode was all. Also done by Darian Woods, Devin Katayama, Irene Noguchi, and Helen De La Hay. Thank you to Johannes Durgey, Tony Kavan, Stuart Harding, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvie, Show Fujiwara, Anya, Mizon, Misan. Thanks for listening.