Charles Dickens' Christmas

Summary

Dan Snow's History Hit: Episode Summary – "Charles Dickens' Christmas"

Release Date: December 25, 2024

In the heartwarming episode titled "Charles Dickens' Christmas," historian Dan Snow delves deep into the Victorian era, exploring the life and legacy of one of England’s most cherished authors, Charles Dickens. Hosted by History Hit, this episode intricately weaves together historical exploration with literary analysis, offering listeners a vivid journey through Dickensian London.

Exploring Dickensian London

Dan Snow, accompanied by London-born tour guide David Charnick, embarks on a comprehensive tour of London’s streets that inspired Dickens’s most iconic works. Their journey begins at the Church of St. George the Martyr and the adjacent Marshalsea Prison, a pivotal location in Dickens’s life and literature.

Marshalsea Prison: A Personal Connection At 04:43, David Charnick introduces the Marshalsea Prison, which was predominantly used for imprisoning debtors. This institution deeply influenced Dickens, as his father, John Dickens, was incarcerated here when Charles was just twelve years old. The historian elaborates:

Dan Snow [05:07]: "When Charles Dickens was 12 years old, his father John was imprisoned for debt here in the Marshalsea."

This personal experience left an indelible mark on Dickens, shaping his portrayal of debtors and the oppressive nature of Victorian society. The episode highlights how A Christmas Carol and Little Dorrit reflect these themes, illustrating the struggles of individuals trapped by poverty and societal expectations.

The Streets That Shaped a Masterpiece

The tour progresses to Cornhill and the Borough High Street, areas bustling with the life of Victorian London. Here, Cratchit’s ice slide and Scrooge’s counting house come to life, connecting the physical spaces with their literary counterparts.

George Inn: The Heart of Dickens’s Stories At 13:12, the team visits the George Inn, London’s only surviving galleried coaching inn, which Dickens frequented both as a journalist and a novelist. The historian notes:

Unknown Historian [14:08]: "Dickens will have used the inn. The George does also appear in Little Dorrit."

The inn’s authentic architecture provides a tangible link to the era, allowing listeners to envision the settings of Dickens’s narratives.

Life Along the River Thames

The exploration continues to the River Thames, where Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend opens with a poignant scene. At 18:55, the historian describes:

Charles Dickens [20:21]: "It was money. He chinked it once and he blew on it once. For luck, he hoarsely said before he put it in his pocket."

This scene underscores the harsh realities of survival in Victorian London, highlighting the scavenger economy and the grim conditions faced by the marginalized.

Graveyards and the Ghostly Tales

A significant portion of the episode delves into the churchyards of London, particularly St. Peter Cornhill, illustrating the overcrowded burial practices of the time. At 39:23, the historian explains:

Unknown Historian [43:40]: "So he describes the churchyard as full of vegetation, the growth of vegetation's death."

These descriptions provide a chilling backdrop to Dickens’s ghost stories, including the famous apparition of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. The historian draws parallels between the physical decay of the churchyards and the moral decay depicted in Dickens’s works.

Ebenezer Scrooge: From Miser to Philanthropist

The episode meticulously unpacks the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge. Starting as a miserly figure, Scrooge's encounters with the three Christmas ghosts lead to a profound personal metamorphosis. At 36:36, a pivotal moment is recounted:

Charles Dickens [37:55]: "The apparition of the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner, Jacob Marley... we tend to lose the sense of terror and the frisson of chill that the original readership would have had."

Dan Snow emphasizes the enduring relevance of Scrooge’s redemption, aligning it with modern values of empathy and social responsibility.

Philanthropy and Social Reform

Concluding the tour, the focus shifts to George Peabody, a prominent philanthropist in Dickens’s London. At 44:13, the historian discusses Peabody’s influence:

Unknown Historian [48:39]: "So people do good, they seek to help, and people think they're fools. And Ebenezer Scrooge is taken for a fool... What matters to him is that he is helping, he's redeeming his time, and that he's helping out."

This segment underscores the interplay between literature and real-world social reforms, highlighting how Dickens’s works mirrored and influenced philanthropic efforts of his time.

Legacy of Dickensian London

Throughout the episode, Dan Snow masterfully bridges the gap between historical fact and literary fiction, allowing listeners to traverse the very streets that inspired Dickens's timeless tales. By visiting significant landmarks and integrating direct quotes from Dickens’s works, the episode offers a rich, immersive experience that brings Victorian London to life.

Notable Quotes:

• Charles Dickens [11:21]: "Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it..."
• Charles Dickens [20:21]: "It was money. He chinked it once and he blew on it once..."
• Charles Dickens [37:55]: "The apparition of the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner, Jacob Marley..."

Conclusion

"Charles Dickens' Christmas" is a compelling exploration of how Charles Dickens's personal experiences and the socio-economic landscape of Victorian London profoundly influenced his literary masterpieces. Through engaging storytelling and meticulous historical analysis, Dan Snow provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of Dickens's enduring impact on literature and society.

For those unfamiliar with the episode, this summary offers a comprehensive overview of the key discussions, insights, and conclusions drawn during the tour of Dickensian London. Whether you’re a history buff, a literature enthusiast, or simply curious about the man behind the classic Christmas tale, this episode is a treasure trove of information and enlightenment.

Transcript

[Dan Snow]

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[Dan Snow]

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

[David Charnick]

We went to the banks of the.

[Dan Snow]

Thames, see where the mudlarkers and scavengers searched the murky waters for bodies to turn over for profit. We finish up on Cornhill, the street that Bob Cratchit went down the slide 20 times in honour of it being Christmas Eve. After this tour was over and we were freezing cold, Team History Hit went and we found an old medieval coaching inn, a place where Charles Dickens would have himself raised a glass. We toasted the great author. We toasted his works that have inspired and entertained so many generations that have come since. And we toasted London itself. As the sun set early on a winter's day, here is our tour around Dickens London, enjoying.

[David Charnick]

David, hello. Nice to meet you and it's very.

[Unknown Historian]

Good to meet you too, Dan. Thank you very much for coming along.

[David Charnick]

This is great. Right, we're in a little oasis, it's this, a former cemetery in the heart of Southk.

[Unknown Historian]

This is really all that's left of the old churchyard of the Church of St. George the Martyr. You can see it's a churchyard because if you look over, they've got gravestones against the wall, you may have noticed the odd tomb as we came in.

[David Charnick]

So, first things first. Charles Dickens, like he is a Portsmouth man originally, I've got to say that, because I'm from around there. But London is sort of central to his books, isn't it?

[Unknown Historian]

Oh, very much so. I mean, he came here as a child, but Dickens certainly tunes into the rhythms of London. And if you read his work now, it still rings true. You have people doing what London people do now and saying what they say and thinking what they think. Although he is trapped essentially in the Victorian period, yet he also goes beyond it to get to the grips of what being a Londoner actually is.

[David Charnick]

And it seems like a different world. It's only 150 years ago or so, but it seems like just a different world. But we are in a space now, a little tiny hectare of ground that would have been recognizable to the great man.

[Unknown Historian]

Well, the reason we're here isn't for the churchyard or the garden. It's for that wall that you can see in front of you running along the north side of the garden. That is the southern perimeter wall of the Marshalsea Prison. So the prison was actually on the other side of that wall. It was located here in 1811, the year before Dickens was born. And it illustrates one of the big problems that the Victorians addressed, which was imprisonment for debt. The thing about the Marshalsea was the population of the prison was dominated by debtors, people who owed more money than they could hope to repay. And so they were arrested at the suit of their creditors because they were a flight risk. And so they popped them in there to make sure that they either leaned on friends and family to get the money, or in some cases, a lot of people could carry on their trade from inside, you know, and so they would earn some money and it would sort of, as it were, focus their minds.

[David Charnick]

It seems so foreign to us today, that idea.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely. I mean, imprisonment for debt goes back over many centuries. And what the Victorians did was to increase the availability of bankruptcy, because if you're a bankrupt, you put your affairs in the hands of a court of law who appoints a receiver, who takes your assets. And so it's all out of your hands now and you're no longer a flight risk.

[David Charnick]

So creditors, prisons appear a lot in Dickens.

[Unknown Historian]

Yeah. When Charles Dickens was 12 years old, in fact, just a fortnight after his 12th birthday in February 1824, his father John was imprisoned for debt here in the Marshalsea. And he was here for three months. And this is How Dickens gets an impression of what life is like for a debtor in a Victorian prison. Well, actually a Georgian prison, sorry, the 1820s.

[David Charnick]

And did Dickens go into prison with his dad?

[Unknown Historian]

Curiously enough, he was the mum member of the family who didn't at that time. If you're in prison for debt, obviously you're trying to save every penny and we're talking about a time when everyone rented their homes, they didn't own them, and as a result, you would move the family in with you because that way you would save the rent on the rooms where they were living. And so John Dickens moved his whole family in with him, except for Charles. Charles was 12 years old, as I say, and that was considered plenty old enough to be taken out of school and put to work. So, famously, or infamously, from his point of view, he was put to work at Warren's blacking factory down by Hungerford Stairs, so near Charing Cross Station now. And presumably because he would have been having to get up too early to go to work before the prison opened, he was actually accommodated nearby on Lant street, which is just down to the southwest of here, in a house belonging to the parish.

[David Charnick]

And was this a deeply traumatic event because they had a sort of clerical, middle class life and he suddenly thrust in, like David Copperfield suddenly ripped out of school, thrust into, well, a very different kind of world.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely. Well, as I'm sure you know, David Copperfield is riven with autobiographical elements, but, yeah, it would have been a jar, especially because it interrupted his life. I mean, he always resented the fact that he was taken out of school because he loved school, because he had an inquiring mind, so he enjoyed being in school and having that taken away from him, he resented that. But worse than that, when he was in the blacking factory, basically wrapping and labelling bottles of boot polish, he was such a good worker that they put him in the window so people could see him work, how industrious he was. So he already felt the indignity of doing this manual work and now he was being put on display, as it were. So he was completely mortified by it. And it's said that he got a lot of resentment building up towards his mother because of it, because Warren, who owned the factory, was a cousin of his mother's and she got him the place, presumably thinking she was doing the right thing. And obviously somebody needed to be earning some money. But Dickens never really saw it that way, by all accounts.

[David Charnick]

Let's go and take a close look at that wall.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely. And we can actually go through to the prison side of the wall where Dickens family once lived.

[Dan Snow]

This is cool.

[Unknown Historian]

So if we go through the opening here, as I say, onto the prison side of the wall, as you can see, it's nice of modern planets to.

[David Charnick]

Make it feel so much like a prison still.

[Unknown Historian]

We just have this narrow alley here, Angel Place, it's all that's really left. The prison closed in 1842 and then the following year the land was sold off and so people moved in and over time it's been developed and redeveloped. Now on the ground you will see these paving stones, inscribed paving stones. And there's one just along at the end of the wall that I'd like to show you if you'd like to come this way. So one of the inscribed paving stones which you can see here, has this spiral inscription on it which tells us that John Dickens, the father of Charles, was imprisoned here for just the three months from February to May 1824. Basically his mother died and so he inherited some money so he could clear his debts. Now the thing is, it wasn't usual to spend a long time in debtors prison. As I mentioned, sometimes you would be able to lean on friends or family to get money, especially family. You know, it's not good for the family name to have me in here, cough up some cash and we can get me out. But many prisons were much like open prisons today, so you could carry on your trade and of course your children would be sent out to work as well, like young Charles was, so there would be money coming in. Now, Little Dorrit, unsurprisingly, Little Dorrit is about the experiences of the Dorrit family. And the first Dorrit we meet is William Dorrit, who is the father of the family. And he is imprisoned in the Marshalsea just like John Dickens was. And there's a lot about Little Dorrit which is basically about imprisonment for debt. And large amounts of it are set here in the Marshalsea. And the thing about William Dorrit though is he's not here for a short period, he's for quite a long period. In fact, he's here for so long he becomes known as the father of the Marshalsea. And this is largely because of William Dorrit's kill character, his lack of resolve and lack of resource. When he's imprisoned here, he knows he owes more money than he can hope to repay, but he doesn't know why. But yet he doesn't challenge the debt, he just accepts his fate. And the first we see of him is him coming into the Marshalsea here all grumbling and indignant that he should be imprisoned, but of course, he's doing nothing about it.

[David Charnick]

Does his father loom? Largely, you think about Mr. McCorber as well in Dickens, think about Mr. Dorrit. They're not unattractive characters, they're just completely useless. Is that. Do you think, that's old Mr. Dickens there, looming large?

[Unknown Historian]

Oh, quite possibly, yes. I mean, as I'm sure you appreciate, writers do tend to regurgitate lots of details and mix them all up together. So I'm not sure how likable William Dorrit actually is, to be frank. But certainly when we first meet him, he has this terrible lack of resolve. Dickens describes his settling down to the Marshalsea in terms that suggest that he knows he's now onto a good thing.

[Charles Dickens]

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

[David Charnick]

Relatable.

[Unknown Historian]

So Dickens describes a man who realizes that actually he's onto a good thing. He's safe in here, and that is no doubt why he stays so long. And, of course, he moves his family in with him. Mrs. Dorrit, the prisoner's wife, she gives birth in the Marshalsea to Amy, who is little Dorrit, because she doesn't grow beyond a child's stature. And amy Dorrit is 8 years old when her mum dies and they're still in the Marshalsea. And Amy Dorrit grows up in the Marshalsea, and so that's how long the Dorrits are in the prison. And this gives Dickens a chance to give his readership a vicarious experience of the life of the debtor in a Victorian or Georgian prison. We're going to move on to something which is very much a survivor from Dickens's time and actually well before Dickens time. As we head up Borough High Street, Tower of London. So we're in George Yard now, and as you can see, we have the.

[David Charnick]

George Inn here, one of the great pubs of London. The world. The world.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely still, as you see, a functioning pub. This is central London's only surviving galleried coaching inn. And the galleries are the two levels of Balcony that you can see there.

[David Charnick]

Yes. We're standing on what used to be a cobbled courtyard. You got bedrooms set back. You've got these very lovely. They've got wooden balustrades with columns, like just galleries, basically, that people can access all the bedrooms from. And beneath it all you've got the bar with its lovely twisted oak beams. And he's making you want to go in there and have a delicious mulled wine.

[Unknown Historian]

We're going back to the days of the stagecoach trade. Borough High street here being one of the main roads into the City of London. You would get there by stagecoach in the days before the arrival of the trains. So stagecoaching goes really back to the 17th century.

[David Charnick]

Tell me about Dickens relationship with this place.

[Unknown Historian]

Well, Dickens will have used the inn. Don't forget he was a journalist as well as being a novelist and essayist. And so he drank in most of the pubs of London. There is the story that there was a particular chair here that was Mr. Dickens chair. Although you have to treat some of those stories with a little bit of suspicion. I doubt that there was a chair where, if you were sitting in it, everyone would come along, get out of there. Mr. Dickens chair. He'll be along soon. But the George does also appear in Little Dorrit. And the thing about the George is it's an ideal setting for a reading from the posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club, which is Charles Dickens first published novel.

[Charles Dickens]

In the borough especially, there still remain some half dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments for private speculation. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories.

[Unknown Historian]

The Dickens describes these inns as being antiquated. There's only about half a dozen of them left. They're all disappearing. But they are now a thing of the past. He says they furnish material for ghost stories. This is a time when most ghost stories were still Gothic, you know, leaning back to the Middle Ages and so on. So a ghost story brings with it the connotations of the past. They're already a thing of the past, even as the railways are starting to appear. So the days of the stagecoach inn and the stagecoach trade were already numbered, even before Victoria came to the throne. But it was under the Victorians that the stagecoach trade was just pushed out completely. And it doesn't come back to the 20th century with the internal combustion engine.

[David Charnick]

I love the idea that Dickens would have visited this exact pub and thought it was rather quaint, just like us.

[Dan Snow]

Our tour through Dickensian London continues after the this.

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[Kate Lister]

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[David Charnick]

Well, you brought me to the riverside. Now I can see the dome of St. Paul's there, which Dickens would have seen. We've got the river, low tide, so the mud flats exposed. Got a few mud larkers looking for Roman coins and bits of glass and things on the mud flats there. What's going on here?

[Unknown Historian]

The reason I brought you to this part of the river is because Charles Dickens last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, opens right here. The opening lines talk of a small boat being rowed along this stretch of the river between the two bridges. You can just see London Bridge over to the right and then to the left we have Southwark Bridge, although nowadays it's obscured by the Cannon street railway bridge, which wasn't there at the time that Our Mutual Friend was being written. It was 1864-65, as I mentioned, we have a little boat being rowed back backwards and forwards. There were two people in it, one of them, a man called Jesse Hexam, known as Gaffer Hexam. He's at the rear of the boat. He's got his hand on the tiller, steering the boat, but he's scanning the river looking for something. And the boat is being rowed by his daughter Lizzie, and she's rowing along. And suddenly Gaffer sees what he wants and he puts the tiller hard over to turn the boat so Lizzie and mends her sculling so that she can turn the boat more easily. And they come alongside what Gaffer has seen and he leans over the back to tie it to the back of the boat with a piece of rope. But he's over there for a bit of a time before suddenly he comes back into the boat.

[Charles Dickens]

It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the boat. His arms were wet and dirty and he washed them over the side. In his right hand he held something and he washed that in the river too. It was money. He chinked it once and he blew on it once. For luck, he hoarsely said before he put it in his pocket.

[Unknown Historian]

So he's got some coins. Obviously coins don't float, but they do if they're in something that floats. And what he has seen is a corpse, and that is what he's tied to the back of his boat. He is one of a number of people who are described on the river as going out to find dead bodies and they bring them ashore so they can hand them in in the hopes that there'll be a reward. But on the way, of course, they help themselves to whatever they find that's useful in the pockets. And money, of course, is always Useful.

[David Charnick]

I mean, it's a powerful opening, isn't it? It's got kind of a hard scrabble life, looking for corpses, stealing from the dead. A young daughter do hard manual labour with her dad. I mean, he sets that stall early in that book.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely. I mean, the Hexams, the father gaffer and his two children, they live in a little hovel down by the river. And that's how Gaffer Hexam gets his living. Well, tries to scratch a living. He's a waterman, someone who would ferry people up and down the river and across the river. But by the 1860s, improvements in transport means that the watermen aren't getting quite the work that they used to do. Hence he needs to supplement his income. And he represents the scavenger economy that you get in Victorian cities where people go out to find things. You mentioned mudlarking. Well, nowadays people do it as an interest, but it used to be a way of life. People would scavenge for specific things. So mudlarkers would go down to the riverbed at low tide and they would find things that they could sell and if they couldn't sell them, they could keep them and use them so they wouldn't have to buy things. You would have people in this area especially who would collect the pure. And if you've come across collecting the pure, it's basically dog excrement. And you would pick it off the streets and you put it in a bag and when you had enough, you would take it to the tanners where they made the leather. And just to the slightly downriver here, just to the east, we have the area of Bermondsey, which was very much part of the leather creating area. In fact, most of the tanneries in London were down that way. And basically the tanners would rather rub this excrement over the skins to dry it before it was tanned. Called purifying the leather. That's why it's called collecting the pure, which being short for purifier.

[David Charnick]

I have had the misfortune of doing that in a reconstructed medieval tannery. And the smell is horrific and the. The effluent is. Is extraordinary. That would have entered the Thames just here. It is December day. We're both shivering. We're looking down that brown river and the people, even today, mud larking on either side of it. It would have been a grim existence, wouldn't it?

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely. Literally scratching a living from what they could do. And this was a working river, of course, so you would have had ships coming up here. The Lighters, the little barge shaped boats would be transferring cargoes to the riverside wharves and so on. And this is one of the ways that bodies ended up in the river because you get these sailors coming ashore who would be engaged for the voyage only and they'd be paid off because the first thing they're going to do is head to the pub for companionship and alcohol and maybe a bit of sex as well. And they would come out of the pub having drunk more than they'd been drinking for a long while. They'd be all hot from the pub or hot from the bodies and everything and a little loose on their legs. Suddenly in the river, freezing cold. River alcohol, as you may know, reduces your resistance to the cold heart attack. So that's how you would get some of the bodies in the river. But of course a number of them would be through other means, including suicide.

[David Charnick]

So now we're set, we've got London Bridge. We've got the old trains coming to London Bridge now behind us. We're in a of a covered walkway. It feels a bit Dickensian.

[Unknown Historian]

Yes, absolutely. I mean, Dickens's London was full of little nooks and crannies and so on that have disappeared mainly because of Victorian development. But the reason we've come to London Bridge, we're going back to Little Dorrit here and we are going to address something that was quite a point of concern in the 1820s, which was prostitute suicides. In the 1820s there were a number of recorded suicides into the Thames, mainly actually from Waterloo Bridge. So just upriver from here, in fact, Thomas Hood, who was a Victorian poet with quite a social conscience, he wrote a poem about this called the Bridge of Sighs. And so Waterloo Bridge for a while was known as the Bridge of Sighs, but London Bridge had its share. Now, in Little Dorrit, Amy, who remember is quite short, which is why she called Little Dorrit, she has a friend called Maggie and Maggie is tall. Maggie and Amy are out of the Marshalsea visiting Amy's friend Arthur Clennam. The thing is that they get back to the Marshalsea too late and it's closed and Amy tries to make herself happy and she can't, so they have to sit it out. As you can imagine, it gets really cold at night. Also, of course, disreputable types keep coming past, so they keep having to get up and go for a walk. About half past three in the morning, they're up on London Bridge, they're walking along and Dickens tells us that this young woman A prostitute comes up onto the bridge and she is going to throw herself into the river. But she sees Amy and Maggie from behind and she forgets her own troubles for a moment. She's so indignant that what she thinks of as a mother taking her child around the streets of London in the small hours. She's so indignant at that that she goes over to try and sort of remonstrate with this mum and she accosts Maggie. Maggie is not really up to that kind of conversation. So the girl says, where are you going? Where are you going yourself? So the young woman bends down to speak to Amy, who she thinks is a child, and takes Amy's hands and rubs them to warm them up.

[Charles Dickens]

Kiss a poor lost creature, dear, she said, bending her face, and tell me where she's taking you. Little Dorrit turned towards her. Why, my God, she said, recoiling. You're a woman. Don't mind that, said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that had suddenly released hers. I am not afraid of you. Then you better add me, she answered. Have you no mother? No. No Father. Yes, a very dear one. Go home to him and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night. I must thank you. First, let me speak to you as if I really were a child. You can't do it, said the woman. You are kind and innocent, but you can't look at me out of a child's eyes. I never should have touched you, but I thought that you were a child. And with a strange wild cry, she went away.

[Unknown Historian]

Now Amy wants to talk to this young woman, but the young woman just feels the isolation of her trade, however benevolent Amy is. And of course she's very benevolent because she's a Dickens heroine. But as far as the young woman's concerned, nobody who is an adult could look on her and not see what she does for a living. Only a child who doesn't know of such things could see her just as a young woman for who she actually is. And that encapsulates the isolation and the insecurity and fear of these women trapped in this situation, and something that a number of Victorians were trying to address. You may know that the age of consent for sex used to be 12, and it wasn't raised until 1875. It was raised to 13. Then in 1885, it was raised to 16, which it is now, to try and combat child prostitution by making it illegal. There were various efforts, some more well thought out than others, and Dickens himself was involved in a venture which opened in 1847, called Urania Cottage. He got alongside Angela Burdett Coutts, who was a very important Victorian philanthropist. And they started this venture where they would help rehabilitate girls. They would get them out of prostitution and teach them accomplishments and how basically to run their lives in a more stable way. The only thing about it which is strange to our eyes is that those who actually stayed with the program would then be shipped off to Australia. And you can understand, if you look at it from the Victorian point of view, Australia, since the early 19th century was actually developing from a penal colony to proper colonies where people were going voluntarily. And it gave you the opportunity of a fresh start when no one would know you. And if they stayed in London, they would be far too vulnerable. And going outside London for a Londoner in those days was more or less like going abroad anyway. So it was giving them an opportunity. As I say, strange one to our eyes, but at the time seemed to make sense.

[David Charnick]

So we're in the city proper now. This is it. We're in the heart of it.

[Unknown Historian]

So what we're going to do is actually move north off of Lombard Street. We've just come into George Yard here and we're going through the little archway. We've got St. Michael's Alley in front of us. Bengal Court off to the left. These little, what we would see as side streets, but which were actually ordinary streets in medieval London. So this is part of the old London that was spared and was rebuilt after the great Fire, but spared Victorian development.

[David Charnick]

This is now today. This is a little piece of London. It looks like walking through somewhere like, I don't know, Venice, where this little alleyway is too small for cast. But this would have been normal back then.

[Unknown Historian]

It would. Should we actually go in?

[David Charnick]

Let's go in and have a look. Let's go into the warren of alleyways.

[Unknown Historian]

Here to the left.

[David Charnick]

It's magical, isn't it? I mean, there's a warren of little streets, pedestrian only pubs, tailors. You do get a sense of a. Of a lost London here.

[Unknown Historian]

Absolutely.

[David Charnick]

I love it. The Jamaica Wine House.

[Dan Snow]

We'll be back with more Christmas history after this.

[Kate Lister]

I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bed sheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets are podcast by History. Hit because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, warts and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues. The nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets. To find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bed pan.

[Unknown Historian]

Now, this is Bengal Court, just off of George Yard, and as you can see, it's quite narrow.

[David Charnick]

So it's about. Well, I'd say it's about three meters wide. If I lay down, it's about one and a half mes.

[Unknown Historian]

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

[David Charnick]

Who has a very sickly little son.

[Unknown Historian]

A very sickly little son. Tiny Tim. Yeah, absolutely. To our eyes, it can get a bit saccharine, but they do represent the grinding poverty that some people had to put up with. Now, the thing about Scrooge, though, is where he lives, much of the action of A Christmas Carol, which was written and published for the Christmas market in 1843, is Scrooge Leaves, however reluctantly, his business. As Christmas Eve goes on towards the evening and Bob Cratchit runs home to his home at Camden Town, and Scrooge makes his way back to the rooms where he lives. This is where it's important to understand the counting house culture, because Scrooge took over the rooms where Jacob Marley used to live. He died the previous Christmas Eve, a whole year ago. And these are in a house which is given over to counting houses. It's a big house down the alleyways and a little court. But although it's big, it's Empty, because apart from Scrooge's rooms, no one lives there. All the other rooms are counting houses. So when Scrooge gets there, he's going to an empty, quiet, freezing cold, dark house. And we can imagine him getting there. I mean, I'm sure you know the story, it's a very familiar one. But he puts his key in the keyhole and suddenly the knocker transforms into the face of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, just for a moment, then comes back to a knocker again. And so Scrooge not got a great deal of imagination about him, but even he is a little unsettled. And so when he opens the door, he has a look round the back to see if the back of Jacob Marley's head is sticking out of it when he opens that door. Remember, this is a big house and it's a cavernous, cold house because there's nobody there now. All the businesses have shut up for the day and gone home. It's pitch dark because there's no one there to light anything. So he lights a little candle by the door to see his way up the stairs. Freezing cold because all the fires have gone out. Nobody there to keep the fires up. And it's silent because again, there's no one there. And he lights his little candle. It gives him a pinpoint of light as it goes up the stairs towards his rooms. And he shuts himself in, locks himself in, has his little bit of supper, and then he sits down in an armchair. And as he does, a bell catches his eye. One of these communicating bells on the wall. The links up with a room a few floors above him, and it's been disused for so long, no one actually knows why it was put there in the first place. But as he sits there, something happens.

[Charles Dickens]

It was with great astonishment and with a strange, inexplicable dread that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound, but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house. This might have lasted half a minute or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks of the wine merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains. The cellar door flew open with a booming sound. And then he heard the noise much louder on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight towards his door. It's humbug still, said Scrooge. I won't believe it. His colour changed, though, when without a pause, it came on through the heavy door and passed into the room before. Before his eyes upon its coming in, the dying flame of the fire leapt up as though it cried, I know him. Marley's ghost. And fell again.

[Unknown Historian]

So the apparition of the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner, Jacob Marley, dead business partner, which has been recreated so many times on television, on cinema, on stage. I mean, the Muppets have done it, for goodness sake. We're so familiar with it now, we tend to lose the sense of terror and the frisson of chill that the original readership would have had when they read that moment. But nowadays, I mean, when we leave work, we go home, and we go either to a house in a street or a flat in a block. And even if we don't connect with our neighbors, they're there. There are always people around. The equivalent to Scrooge's experience would be if we went home to an empty office block and we lived in one of the offices, and everybody else has gone and all the power's off and everything. You know, we don't appreciate how alone he is. And one of the strengths of the ghost story comes from the vulnerability of the subject. You're on your own, there's no one to help you. There's no one even to see what you're seeing, and there's no one there to help Scrooge. And so that terrible vulnerability we lose, I think, because we've seen it reenacted in so many times, but also because we don't know what the counting house culture was like.

[David Charnick]

Okay, here we go. Right, where are we? We're still in this little warren of streets here, aren't we? We're not far from Ebenezer Scrooge.

[Unknown Historian]

We've left Bengal Court. We came along St. Michael's Alley, and here we are in the churchyard of St. Peter Cornhill. The churchyard here wouldn't have been landscaped as the garden that it is now. It would have been a disused, derelict burial ground, uncared for, with the tombstones starting to lean over. You will have noticed that we've actually come up above street level into the churchyard. A similar situation back at the churchyard at St. George the Martyr, where we started. And this is because of overcrowding, not by the living, but by the dead. London was growing in the early 19th century, increasing numbers of people coming in. And with an Increasing density of living population. An increasing density of living population. You get, in due course, an increased number of dead people to be buried. But where are you going to bury them? You've only got the churchyards and dissenting burial grounds and Quaker burial grounds, that kind of thing. Very small, designed for a medieval city. So what you would do is you would go to the. You'd bury as many people as you could, then you would go to the old graves people haven't visited for ages, remove the gravestone, dig down to the coffin and jump up and down on it and smash the coffin and the remains into the ground, and then you cover it with soil. As far as anyone knows, it's just an ordinary grave and the coffin goes in there. Trouble was, after a while, there's a limit to the amount of times you could do that. And the coffins weren't in the ground long enough, so they started building up on top of each other. So they decided to put graves between graves. And there are stories of grave diggers digging down and knocking the side of a coffin off with their spade and an arm starts swinging out and they haven't got time to put it back together, so they just chop the arm off with their spade, bundle it in and then just shove the side of the coffin back on and then carry on digging their grave. But inevitably, the graves between the graves were getting quite close to the surface as well. So they started raising the level of the churchyards to get some soil between all these bodies and the open air. But inevitably, with that amount of corpses in there decomposing away like nobody's business, you can imagine what is filtering up, percolating through the soil and the health hazard that was causing, especially as these vapours start to condense on the buildings around the churchyards. This was another thing the Victorians had to address. And from 1852, within the space of about 30, 30 years, you get 13 burials acts passed. And what they do is they stop buryings in the city and central London and they start bringing it under control. And that is when you get the big cemeteries around what were then the edges of London, Highgate, Tower Hamlets, Abney Park, Brompton and so on. What will later to become known as the magnificent Severn. And of course, the big necropolis at Brookwood near Weybridge in Surrey, which had its own dedicated railway line. So getting rid of that health hazard of burials over burials. And we can actually, through Dickens's word, get a feeling of what those graveyards were like, because they're mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit. But of course, they're also mentioned in A Christmas Carol, because after the visit of Jacob Marley, Scrooge is visited by three more ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, but then the feared Ghost of Christmas yet to Come. Shrouded in black, you can't see the face. All you can see is this exposed hand with a pointing finger that it uses to communicate. Doesn't say a word, just points. It takes Scrooge through the city of London, showing him scenes connected with the death of a businessman who is unmourned and despised by all. And he thinks, well, this is obviously the example I'm being shown. I must change my ways to live in a different way from this man. And then the ghost takes him to the churchyard so that he can find out who this businessman actually is.

[Charles Dickens]

A churchyard here. There, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place, walled in by houses overrun with grass and weeds. The growth of vegetation's death, not life, choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place.

[Unknown Historian]

So he describes the churchyard as full of vegetation, the growth of vegetation's death. So many nutrients in the ground from these decomposing bodies that all these vines and what have you and creepers are twining around each other, choking each other out. And he talks of the graveyard as if it's a living thing. It's fat with repleted appetite. Now, repleted appetite. That's what you get when you go to the buffet restaurant, the all you can eat restaurant, and you have that dangerous last plateful, and then you get out in the street and it all settles down and you realize you should never have touched that last one. That's being fat with repleted appetite. And that's what these places are like. They've swallowed down so many corpses. And that is one of these little wretched burial grounds, surrounded by buildings, tucked away down a little courtyard where that businessman is buried, who, of course, as we come to learn, is Scrooge himself. That is where he's going to end up. We've left St. Peter's churchyard. Now we've come up St. Peter's alley onto Cornhill, the street along which Bob Cratchit slid 20 times on an ice slide in honour of Christmas Day. And we've come up here to Threadneedle street, and we're round the back of the Royal Exchange, so across the road we have the bank of England. These are two institutions that are at the heart of the City of London's financial story. And so we are in the traditional financial district of the old city, although the city itself now is a financial district in its own right. But we're not here for business. We're here for this sculpture here, the statue of George Peabody. Now, Peabody was a businessman. He was a merchant banker from Danvers in Massachusetts in the United States, a self made man. But he came over and settled in London in 1837, the year that Victoria ascended the throne. And he is known not for his business ventures, but for his philanthropy. He became known as the father of modern philanthropy. And in this city, in London, he is known for Peabody's housing, the trust fund that he set up in 1862 as the first proper attempt to address the terrible housing crisis that we had in the 19th century. It was a time when profiteering landlords and developers were filling their homes with families who could only rent a room at a time. Central government, local authorities had no interest in addressing this issue. So Peabody got involved. So a philanthropist. Dickens was a journalist as well as being a novelist, and he knew of the sharp practices and hard hearts of the City of London. But he was also well acquainted with philanthropy, with people who used their resources for good. He was a friend of Angela Burdeck Coutts, a granddaughter of Thomas Coutts, who founded Coutts Bank. And he also knew another philanthropist, a fictional philanthropist, Ebenezer Scrooge. We tend to forget that side of Scrooge. We think of the unreformed character. But Dickens gives us an example of how a businessman could actually operate in a good way, because he sees the three ghosts, the Christmas ghosts, and he wakes up the next morning, finds out that it's only Christmas Day and he can now put things right. He's a reformed character. Now, the most immediate recipients of his benevolence and his philanthropy is, of course, the Cratchit family. And the following day, Boxing Day, when Bob Cratchit turns up for work, he is greeted with the unusual announcement that his salary is going to be raised and that Scrooge is going to help him and help his family. And they sit down over a bowl of smoking bishop, which is a kind of heated punch. And Dickens sums up Ebenezer Scrooge, the reformed character, in this way.

[Charles Dickens]

He became as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset.

[Unknown Historian]

So people do good, they seek to help, and people think they're fools. And Ebenezer Scrooge is taken for a fool, no doubt by many of his business colleagues and associates. But that doesn't matter to him, doesn't matter what people think of him. What matters to him is that he is helping, he's redeeming his time, and that he's helping out. And so it matters that you help. It matters that you are there for people, irrespective of what others think of you. Which I'm sure is the thought that we all share today.

[David Charnick]

Well, thank you very much. That was a wonderful tour.

[Unknown Historian]

Thank you very much.

[Dan Snow]

And that brings us to the end of my Origins of Christmas series. Well, you might say, well, sure, Dan didn't talk to us about Stuart Christmas or Christmas in the 20th century, or Plantagenet Christmas or early Medieval Christmas. Well, don't worry. Trying to save some content back for next December.

[David Charnick]

Thanks for listening and if you enjoyed.

[Dan Snow]

This series, spread the Christmas cheer and.

[David Charnick]

Leave us a review.

[Dan Snow]

Or if you listen to your podcast. Thank you. I'm Dan Snow and this series was produced by Mary Dave Forge and edited by Dougal Patmore. Happy Christmas folks.

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