Encore: Charles Dickens | A Very Dickens Christmas | 3

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Encore: Charles Dickens | A Very Dickens Christmas | 3”

Legacy Podcast by Original Legacy Productions
Hosts: Afua Hirsch & Peter Frankopan
Date: December 25, 2025

Episode Overview

This special encore episode revisits the impact and legacy of Charles Dickens, focusing on “A Christmas Carol”—its origins, influence, and Dickens’ complex personal life. Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan explore the tensions between Dickens’ reputational warmth as the creator of Christmas cheer and the darker, often problematic realities of both his characterizations and his own behavior towards women and minorities. Moving through the publication of “A Christmas Carol,” his family life, involvement with social causes, and the infamous breakup with wife Catherine, the hosts ask: Does Dickens deserve the reputation he holds today?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Enduring Popularity of 'A Christmas Carol'

• Dickens, lacking money but inspired by his own childhood poverty and social injustice, created “A Christmas Carol” (03:48).
• The success was immediate: 6,000 copies sold in a week, but his desire for quality production meant minimal profits (05:19).
• “It's a decent sum of money, about £20,000 in today’s money, but not quite enough to meet the scale of his money troubles at the time.” — Afua Hirsch [05:19]
• The story endures because it combines “horror, despair, hope and warmth,” and its powerful device (the three ghosts) remains relatable (08:32).

“It's so authentic to Dickens. He is somebody who loved Christmas, he believed in Christmas warmth and cheer. He's also at the same time somebody who has a relentless focus on social injustice—and both those things coexist.” — Afua Hirsch [08:32]

2. Dickens and the Invention of Christmas Traditions

• Dickens wrote multiple Christmas stories, not just “A Christmas Carol,” contributing hugely to the idea of Christmas as a family and charitable holiday (12:21).
• Research reveals Christmas wasn't a public holiday when A Christmas Carol was published; Dickens essentially shaped this tradition (13:13).
• "Dickens really popularized the idea of Christmas as this important family holiday... The idea that work should stop, families should come together... This was really invented in real time." — Afua Hirsch [13:13]
• Discussed the relation between Dickens, Prince Albert (who brought Christmas trees to England), and the modern view of Christmas.

3. Character Creation & Cultural Legacy

• Scrooge becomes an enduring shorthand for miserliness; other Dickensian characters like Fagin and Micawber retain cultural importance (14:57).
• The hosts remark that Dickens could coin phrases and archetypes still resonant today.

4. Dickens’s Personal Life and Social Conscience

• Dickens’ financial woes, extravagant spending, and need to write for income shape his professional output (05:28).
• His connection with social reform is a driving force, as seen in themes addressing child labor and poverty (06:11).
• Dickens’ engagement in Urania Cottage, a “home for homeless women” (often young women exploited or trafficked), is examined. His intentions are progressive but paternalistic and controlling (21:20).

“He wants it to not feel like a penal institution. He specifically gives instructions that it should feel like a kind and nurturing environment, even though there are strict rules… That is really different from the prevailing attitude of what charity should be like at the time.” — Afua Hirsch [22:10]

5. Dickens and His Female and Jewish Characters

• The hosts are critical of Dickens’s female characters: often one-dimensional or moralized, even when inspired by real life (25:22).
• Discussion about whether male writers can authentically depict female interiority; compared Dickens to García Márquez (27:23).
• Fagin in “Oliver Twist” discussed as a harmful Jewish stereotype; Dickens initially displays ignorance but softens somewhat over time (28:11–30:16).

“Fagin is like his Shylock… but as he goes on in life and gets to know more Jewish people, he becomes more reflective on the ideas he's absorbed and actually edits Oliver Twist to remove the descriptions of Fagin as ‘the Jew’…” — Afua Hirsch [29:03]

6. Dickens’s Workload, Travels, and Family Strain

• Dickens authored prolifically, traveled extensively (including risky climbs up Vesuvius), and had a large, growing family, leading to exhaustion (15:26, 16:12).
• Tragic family events: loss of infant daughter Dora; ongoing pregnancies, large Victorian families (38:34–40:30).
• Victorian child mortality rates and the context of Dickens’s relatively high surviving children (40:30).

7. Literary Achievements and Innovation

• “David Copperfield” is Dickens’s most autobiographical novel and represented a new, first-person narrative style (31:40–33:28).
• Comparison to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”—noting their differences in tone and approach (33:04).

8. Later Success and 'Bleak House'

• Dickens’s financial situation stabilizes through book sales and his magazine “Household Words” (35:23).
• “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” and “Little Dorrit” are highlighted as mature masterpieces, with “Bleak House” praised for its vivid social criticism (41:11–42:44).

9. Marriage Breakdown and Darker Dickens

• Dickens’s marriage to Catherine deteriorates after a series of pregnancies (44:19–45:50).
• Begins obsessive attachment to 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan, humiliating Catherine and gaslighting her publicly (46:26–49:34).
• Catherine is forced to deliver a gift intended for Nellie; Dickens publicly rewrites history to blame Catherine for the marriage breakdown, attempts to have her committed (47:21–51:26).

"What he's going to do now is not only cut her off emotionally, but he's going to rewrite history... He even tries to have her committed to a lunatic asylum... It's just so dark and it really shows the worst of his character." — Afua Hirsch [49:34–51:26]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the lasting image of Scrooge:
  “If you call someone Scrooge in one word, you capture the character and mentality of somebody. I mean, it’s an amazing legacy.” — Peter Frankopan [14:57]

• On Victorian gender and social dynamics:
  “Can men really write female characters and do them justice?... He struggles to really see their humanity because he so idolizes and worships them.” — Afua Hirsch [27:23]

• On Dickens’s role in inventing Christmas:
  “Dickens really popularized the idea of Christmas as this important family holiday... It was only a few years later and partly as a result of this book that it became a national holiday.” — Afua Hirsch [13:13]

• On Dickens’s treatment of Catherine:
  “He literally divides his bedroom with his wife in two, literally puts a partition between them and then he splits from her publicly in a move that divides his family, his friends, the literary world and London society.” — Peter Frankopan [51:26]

• On his complicated philanthropic pursuits:
  “He’s a control freak and he tries to make sure everything is under his watch. But I guess this is also an impact of seeing his father in Marshalsea when he was young…” — Peter Frankopan [22:45]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to Dickens’s money troubles and inspiration for 'A Christmas Carol' — 01:31–06:11
• Release, immediate impact, and profits of 'A Christmas Carol' — 03:48–05:45
• Discussion: Christmas traditions and Dickens’s wider influence — 12:10–14:57
• Dickens’s creative branding, character legacies — 14:57–15:44
• Founding Urania Cottage, discussions on women and control — 19:16–25:22
• Dickens’s problematic portrayals of Jews and other minorities — 28:11–30:16
• Literary innovations (David Copperfield, Bleak House, etc.) — 31:40–36:38
• Personal tragedies: Family deaths and dynamics — 38:34–40:30
• Dickens’s marital collapse and relationship with Nelly Ternan — 44:19–53:05

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Tone & Takeaways

• Afua and Peter maintain a candid, questioning tone—admiring Dickens’s literary achievements yet not shying away from his personal failings and harmful stereotypes.
• There is warmth and humor in remembering Dickens's festive side, but great seriousness in evaluating his legacy in light of modern culture, MeToo, and social justice.
• The episode concludes with Dickens’s life in turmoil after his family split—a set-up for further exploration in subsequent episodes.

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In sum:
This episode offers a nuanced portrait: Dickens as literary legend, Christmas inventor, tireless reformer—and complex, deeply flawed man. The hosts genuinely interrogate whether legacy matches merit, engaging with Dickens’ enduring impact while pulling no punches about the problematic aspects of his life and work.

Transcript

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[Peter Frankerburn]

Hello and welcome to a special Legacy encore episode.

[Afwa Hirsch]

While we take a short break over the Christmas period, we're dipping back into the archive to revisit some of our favourite episodes.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And we can't start anywhere better than with Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol.

[Afwa Hirsch]

We'll let the episode speak for itself, but before we do, here's a quick reminder that the full back catalogue is always there for you to explore. Hello and welcome to the third episode of our series on Charles Dickens. We left you in the last episode with Dickens, the novelist in search of a novel. He's a star both in Britain and America, but he's short of money. He needs to write a bestseller.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And Dickens has a burning social conscience too. All around him in London, he can see the effects of extreme poverty and he's been there himself. It's the life he experienced as a child and he wants to bring about change. Christmas is coming and Dickens thinks he's found the answer. From wandering goal hanger. I'm Peter Frankerburn.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm Afwa Hirsch.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And this is Legacy, the show that tells the lives of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived and asks if they have the reputation that they deserve.

[Afwa Hirsch]

This is charles dickens, episode three, a very dickens christmas.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

A Merry Christmas, Uncle.

[Peter Frankerburn]

God save you.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

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 there, said Scrooge. Humbug. He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's that he was all in a glow. His face was ruddy and handsome, his eyes sparkled and his breath smoked again.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Christmas.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

A humbug, Uncle, Said Scrooge's nephew. You don't mean that. I am 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 dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough. Scrooge, having no better answer, ready on the spur of the moment, said, bah again, and followed it up with humbug.

[Peter Frankerburn]

That's from one of the most famous stories ever written in English. It's A Christmas Carol. Published on 19 December 1843 and still in print nearly 200 years later.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It's a story of Scrooge, who is a miserable, miserly old man and employer, who's mean to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, who has an ill little son, Tiny Tim.

[Peter Frankerburn]

He's haunted by the three ghosts and his former partner, Marley, who take him back through Christmas past, present and future, to show Ebenezer Scrooge what his life really means, and in the process, changes Scrooge from a miser to a benefactor, to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his ill son, Tiny Tim.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Guess how many movie adaptations there are of this story?

[Peter Frankerburn]

I don't know. 10, maybe 12.

[Afwa Hirsch]

55. 0. And the most famous? Well, what do you think is the most famous one?

[Peter Frankerburn]

I know easily this one. It's Michael Caine in A Muppet Christmas Carol. It's an absolute classic and it has a great opening line. Marley was dead colon to begin with. And that sets up the idea that you're already starting off on the back foot trying to work out what's going on.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I love a Dickens opening line. He is the master of the opening line. A Christmas Carol sells 6,000 copies between publication on 19th of December and Christmas Day. But because Dickens wanted it public, with colorful end papers and engravings, to be a proper Christmas book, with the price kept at five shillings, he makes 137 pounds on that first sale.

[Peter Frankerburn]

That's a lot of money.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It's a decent sum of money, about £20,000 in today's money, but not quite enough to meet the scale of his money troubles at the time.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Dickens is a big, big spender. It's a big house, growing family, the lifestyle. He's extremely generous, but he needs to write, to earn. So this isn't just about him being creative or writing great literature. He needs to generate cash, and this is still not enough to cover his spending.

[Afwa Hirsch]

A Christmas Carol will pay off down the line. I mean, as we all know, because you can imagine if he was alive today, all of the film royalties and options he would be earning from that book at the time. It does cement his place as the best selling author of the day. And that in turn strengthens his position with publishers and ensures that whatever else he writes will succeed. And not everything else he writes after that is as good.

[Peter Frankerburn]

But Christmas Carol captures something really special. And when we left Dickens in the last episode, we had him walking around the streets of London thinking and trying to come up with a new idea. But one of the inspirations lies in a report published in 1842 by a royal Commission into Children's Employment, which documents the horrific conditions endured by children working long hours in mines and in factories.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It found that children as young as 4 or 5 years old were working 12 to 18 hours per day. And this was often in dark, cramped, hazardous conditions. They were working underground in coal mines, they were performing physically demanding tasks in textile mills and carrying out dangerous manual labor. And on top of that, they were also being beaten, maimed, sometimes even killed due to the hazardous nature of their work. You can see why this inspired a supernatural story. I mean, the level of, of tragedy in the facts of this report are.

[Peter Frankerburn]

So extreme and it strikes a chord with Dickens own childhood, of course. But I wonder whether it's something also more than that. It's the fact that this is being brought into the public domain.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And what I find interesting about A Christmas Carol is it's celebrated as having a Christian message of redemption, hope and warmth. But he's not a religious man. This is really inspired by the reality of those politics, of those policies of what children are going through in the real world, the poor laws. Scrooge is inspired by these characters in the workhouses in the penal system. And his biographer Clare Tomalin writes the book went straight to the heart of the public and has remained lodged there ever since with this mixture of horror, despair, hope and warmth. Its message, a Christian message that even the worst of sinners may repent and become a good man, and its insistence that good, cheerful food and drink, shared gifts and even dancing are not merely frivolous pleasures, but basic expressions of love and mutual support among all human beings.

[Peter Frankerburn]

But that's why it's so popular at Christmas time. I think that the story of the worst of sinners repenting and becoming good, that idea about hope and that there's a chance that things might get better is one that fills everybody with real optimism and maybe sentimentality too. Do you think it's too corny these days?

[Afwa Hirsch]

I think it's incredible. Survival and ongoing ability to entertain just speaks to how it does tap into something. I'm going to say what I love about Christmas Carol. I think it's so authentic to Dickens. He is somebody who loved Christmas, he believed in Christmas warmth and cheer. He's also at the same time somebody who has a relentless focus on social injustice and both those things coexist. And you know, for me that's very real. I think you can be somebody who spends a lot of their life critiquing unfairness in the world, but still be somebody who seeks joy and celebrates warmth. And you can, in Dickens's case, in a way that actually changes the conversation, that influences people, that moves the culture forward.

[Peter Frankerburn]

By having Marley's ghost take Scrooge back to these different scenarios, it allows us all to think about where are those turning points in our own lives. If you could go back and see yourself when you made decisions, good ones and bad ones, you know, what kind of advice would you give to yourself? And also how would you see yourself in the future? And I think that that's such a clever way of trying to think about the meaning of life.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And like so many of the best ideas, it's actually pretty simple. The ghosts are so effective, but quite a simple device. Looking back, seeing the present and looking forward is genius.

[Peter Frankerburn]

The fact that Dickens wants to make a difference with this book is very clear. And also what's clear is that Dickens loves this time of year, at least as a grown up. Plus the 6th of January, which is 12th Night, is the birthday of his oldest son, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens. It's gone out of style. Culliford as a name. I can't think why, but anyway, because of all of that, that season is even more of a time to celebrate and in Dickens case, a chance to perform.

[Afwa Hirsch]

6Th of January, 1844. 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park, London. The Dickens household is a hive of activity as everyone prepares for the annual Twelfth Night gathering. Five year old Mamie stands in the nursery watching with excitement as her father Charles rehearses his magic routines. It's her favourite time when her father forgets writing for a few hours and is guaranteed to be the life and soul of her brother's birthday party. Dressed for the evening already, she looks down proudly at her ruffled dress and ballet pumps. They'll be dancing later. Guests arrive. Mamie's father has something droll to say to each person as they crowd into the upstairs nursery, the party venue, and tuck into the mounds of food on the table. She wants everyone to hurry up with their supper. It's the magic show she's looking forward to. The room has been arranged like a Theater. So Mamie and her sister sit down at the front. It promises to be the best show yet. Her father and his friend have bought the entire collection of a retired conjurer. Charles is dressed in a flowing cloak as if he's a real life magician. He even has the black pointy hat. And it does not disappoint. A plain old box of bran is turned into a live guinea pig, which scurries across the floor to one boy's feet. Everyone is screaming with delight. Then Mamie's father takes his friend's hat and boils a plum pudding in it. The clapping and whoops of laughter are so loud, Mamie covers her ears. She looks around at the faces of the guests, all turned towards the beaming and laughing eyes of their host. Oh, what a party. These are merry and happy times indeed.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Dickens gets very closely associated with ideas about Christmas. Maybe it's to make up for the miserable Christmases of the past. And in 1903, he's called the man who Invented Christmas. But Dickens realizes that Christmas is a good hook.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I wonder how many people here realize that A Christmas Carol is actually only one of three Christmas stories he wrote in quite quick succession. Battle of Life. He wrote Christmas 1846.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Never heard of it.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm not going to pretend to have read it.

[Peter Frankerburn]

It wasn't just successful. It sold four times the number of copies that Christmas Carol did in the same amount of time. So in fact, he writes in total five Christmas books or novellas and numerous other Christmas stories for magazines and periodicals. And that becomes part of that Victorian Christmas tradition.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I mean, people tend to see it as a bit of a tie between Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, Love Prince Albert, and Charles Dickens as to who really invented Christmas. Albert, of course, introduced the Christmas tree, right, as a new symbol. It's weird to think how recent that is as an idea at Christmas, because now it's so cemented in our imagination. And Dickens really popularized the idea of Christmas as this important family holiday. I learned, doing the research for this, that Christmas wasn't even a public holiday when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. It was only a few years later and partly as a result of this book that it became a national holiday. I mean, it was just another work day. This was really invented in real time. The idea that work should stop, families should come together. There should be this special feast, it should be cozy, there should be snow outside the windows and a warm fire indoors. And that it should be this happy time where you permit yourself indulgence, but also you should be thinking about the poor and the needy, that you should be operating with this broader morality that extends goodwill to all people. And that is a very Christian message. But it's interesting that since Dickens wasn't a. A religious man and wasn't really a Christian, I wonder if he also helped dissociate Christmas a little from its religious roots.

[Peter Frankerburn]

You know, Father Christmas, St Nicholas comes from the southern part of Turkey. That's the 6th of December is the date where in still lots of parts of Europe, that's the day you give people presents, because it's to do with St. Nicholas and his life of helping poor people. Our visions of Father Christmas turning up in red with white fur everywhere is to do with the colours, the Coca Cola. So when we read Christmas Carol backwards now, it feels like it's telling us about today's world. But Dickens was kind of pioneering, helped create something that landed on such fertile territory. So sometimes people think that Dickens came up with the phrase Merry Christmas, which he didn't. But he did come up with a very famous saying.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Bah humbug.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Oh, that's very good.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Do you know, it's funny, actually, as we were talking, I was thinking about the name Ebenezer, because I, when I first read A Christmas Carol as a child, thought that Ebenezer was a unique name to Scrooge. And since I've been spending more time in Ghana as an adult, I've realized it's actually still quite a popular name in Ghana. I wonder if in Britain Dickens killed the name Ebenezer as something anyone would ever give a child, because I think it was quite popular until then and now it's so synonymous with Scrooge that.

[Peter Frankerburn]

You wouldn't want to, and that's Ebenezer. But Scrooge is still obvious. If you call someone Scrooge in one word, you capture the character and mentality of somebody. I mean, it's an amazing legacy to have that you're able to introduce characters who are seminal and even if you haven't read A Christmas Carol, all seen Michael Caine surrounded by the Muppets. And there are other people that are like that too in Dickens work. You know, Oliver Twist, Fagin, Mick Awber, you know, that kind of way in which those characters still mean something.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Having written his six novels, plus Christmas Carol, the American travel book, numerous articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, by 1844, Dickens is exhausted. I'm exhausted just reading the list of things that he'd been doing.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Peter It's a lot of material to be produced.

[Afwa Hirsch]

He needed a Break.

[Peter Frankerburn]

He goes to Paris and the city captures him at once. He describes it as the most extraordinary place in the world. But then he travels south to Italy and goes up to the top of Mount Vesuvius when he goes to visit Naples, and he gets so close to the crater that some of his clothes catch fire.

[Afwa Hirsch]

He's definitely got a bit of risk appetite. Not just him, he's dragged his wife and their whole entourage of about 20 people.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Can I say risk appetite means he has yet another child at this time, which he does, number six.

[Afwa Hirsch]

He doesn't have an appetite for that, but it happens anyway. And poor Catherine is stuck in this endless cycle of pregnancy, for which, by the way, she gets no thanks by him because he's beginning to get annoyed with the number of children that he is fathering, by the way.

[Peter Frankerburn]

But he's also preoccupied by social issues and he writes a series for the Daily News, which is a newspaper set up by his publisher with him as the salaried editor. That tells you something about his star power and earning power. And he writes these articles that oppose capital punishment. But then there's his involvement in one of the most extraordinary and unexpected projects of.

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[Peter Frankerburn]

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[Afwa Hirsch]

I have a lot to say about Dickens's relationships with treatment of and attitudes towards women.

[Peter Frankerburn]

We were talking about that before we started.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It's hard not to talk about it because it's not really an additional subject. It kind of goes to the core and cuts across everything he did and. And it highlights his complexity. We're all complex and flawed humans, and it's always interesting to get into the nuance of someone's character, but it does really flag up some of the hypocrisy and I think, actual unresolved trauma that ate away at him throughout his life.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Well, women, female characters in Dickens work are either caricatures or they lack any depth or complexity.

[Afwa Hirsch]

They're just good, which always takes away from a character. And actually, it's one of those examples that I think if he had had a bit more of a nuanced approach to women, his books would have been even better. But in 1847, he embarks on a project that indicates there was maybe a bit more to his thinking about women than meets the eye.

[Peter Frankerburn]

November, 1852. Urania Cottage, Shepherd's Bush, London. Walking to the main door of the home for homeless women, Charles Dickens checks the front stoop for cleanliness. He nods. Everything looks smart outside, even in the driving rain. He's often here at Urania Cottage, usually for committee meetings and to pay bills. Sometimes, like today, he's needed to restore order when the women and girls become, well, unruly. Once inside, he heads straight for the office, the room where he has listened to the stories of all the women who have stayed here since the house opened. The matron is there with the girl in question. Willis has got herself into trouble, and now the little minx is demanding to see Mr. Dickens. According to the matron, she was in bed in the dark, trying her hand with the key and Bible business. A superstition among some of the girls who believe that if they place a key in a Bible at the Book of Ruth, it will somehow tell them the name of their future husband. She has already been told that she must be on her best behavior or receive no marks for a month. She stands sullenly in front of Charles. The only way to get your marks back is to behave, Dickens says to her. Well, if I'm not going to get my marks, then I might as well leave. Dickens feels his temper rising. The insolence, the ingratitude. Too often in the past, he has let moments like this slide. There's a pause, and then he calls her bluff. Very well, he says. You can go tomorrow morning. Her mouth opens in shock. She was not expecting that. Some of the girls are sitting on the stairs, eavesdropping through the banisters. A few are crying. They get upset when people are dismissed, but order must be maintained.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, that sounds harsh, but the whole point of this home is a genuine attempt to help women and girls because some of them are pretty young. In fact, we wouldn't call them sex workers today. We would call some of them trafficked or exploited children. But the Victorian view was often to judge and condemn young women in this position. And Dickens genuinely wants to help them.

[Peter Frankerburn]

PETER Fallen women, they're referred to at that time. But he sets up the home with his friend Ms. Angela Burdett Coutts, part of the banking family. She provides the cash. And there's some evidence from the letters that he wrote her that she wasn't altogether sure about some of his ideas, including the Marx system. But Dickens is really closely involved with setting this up. He finds a cottage, as he calls it, and he wants it to sound as far away from an institution as possible.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And there are other things about it that are quite progressive. He wants it to not feel like a penal institution. He specifically gives instructions that it should feel like a kind and nurturing environment, even though there are strict rules. He wants them to have nice clothes, he wants them to have Sunday best. He's not trying to give them the worst of everything and feel like they're in the workhouse. He wants them to. That they are living a good life there. And the idea is to kind of win them over rather than scare and threaten them. And that is really different from the prevailing attitude of what charity should be like at the time.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And it's to give them a new start. So the aim is for women to learn to read and write and to become housekeepers. The idea is that they might be sent away to the colonies, but also their new life means that they don't bring their pasts with them. And that, you know, the best thing, Dickens thought was that these women could be sent to, I don't know, Australia or Canada to find a husband after retraining at. And it's admirable in trying to do something, but, you know, Dickens is a control freak and he tries to make sure everything is under his watch. But I guess this is also an impact of seeing his father in Marshalsea when he was young, and Dickens and his brothers and sisters were taken to go and see and live with his father in Marshalsea. So Dickens has an experience of what A penal system.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Looks like he was a young boy experiencing hardship. He hasn't created something to help young boys like his younger self. He's specifically focused on young women, and not just young women in poverty in general, young women who've worked in prostitution. There's not really any explanation for that. And one of his biographers, Claire Tomalin, explores the theory that he might have actually visited prostitutes himself and has been grappling with the guilt of that. There's a suggestion he might have contracted some sexually transmitted diseases. You know, he believed in the moral universe of having a wife and being monogamous. But if his own behavior strayed outside of that, it could have fed into this already complex idea he has about women and virtue and disgrace and has way more involvement than you would expect of somebody of his importance and stature and just the demands on his time with his own huge family and very busy workload. So I feel like there is something a little bit unexplained about this fixation on these young women in particular.

[Peter Frankerburn]

I think it's always tricky because sometimes you feel that there must be something underlying it. I mean, I think that Dickens experience with his father, that it goes most of the way, if not the whole way, to explaining why he would do this. I mean, I suppose why with women rather than with men. But Dickens is very surprisingly non judgmental about women's past, as though there's a judgment he could have. Anyway, there are normally 13 at a time in Urania Cottage. And he writes them and he says things like, I mean nothing but kindness to you, and I write to you as if you were my sister. And I think that attempt to show kindness and generosity doesn't need to be seen through a cynical lens of thinking there must be some guilt that he's carry. What do you make of the fact that women in his works are often prostitutes or sex workers or have this sort of sin that they are expected to wash away from them? I mean, it's not so awful, is it?

[Afwa Hirsch]

I think it makes sense. I mean, he was always drawing inspiration from the things he saw in real life. And if he's seeing young women who've been working in prostitution, then he's going to be writing those characters. The weirder thing for me is that it hasn't fed into him creating more nuanced, rounded female characters, because even those women who have been prostitutes in his work, like obviously Nancy in Oliver Twist, who's probably his most famous example, is just very, again, one dimensional. She's like a caricature More than a character. And the same can be said of many other women. Martha and David Copperfield, which is written after the home opens. So he's already got access to these interesting characters of the young women he's working with. But Martha is completely. And it's hard to imagine that she really reflects the personalities that he'd encountered at close hand. So I'm not saying that this home was cynical, Peter. I'm just saying for me, there is a bit of dissonance between the inspiration for running this home, the things he learned there, and then the way he's dealing with it in his fiction. Something is broken somewhere in that link.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Well, I think the point also must be that the complexity in the different kinds of male characters that he produces is so overwhelming, both in their backgrounds, their characters, et cetera. Whereas Dickens young female characters tend to be ones that they're lovable, they're pretty, they're timid, they're harmed by those supposed to be looking after them, you know, and that means that bag of is like Claire Tomlin says that Dickens simply has an inability to present real women. Their female characters are either like fairy tale princesses or melodramatic characters. And even the odd exceptions like Aunt Betsy and David Copperfield, you know, who's an older woman, or Estella in Great Expectations, it's all over exaggerated, you know, so there's none of the same way of getting inside people's minds, explaining their motivations, explaining how they're trying to think things through. I don't know whether that's just Dickens fault or maybe that's just male writers have always been useless and uninterested in exploring women's psyches.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I think about that a lot. Can men really write female characters and do them justice? There are definitely examples where they can. I was reading a biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who's one of my favorite authors. He's definitely more complicated and he writes a lot about his attitudes towards women. And like Dickens, he's another huge literary great. But he acknowledges that he kind of looks at women as gods. He struggles to really see their humanity because he so idolizes and worships them. I think it is a problem that a lot of male writers have and not doing any armchair psychology here, but it does often seem to stem from their relationships with their own mothers, who they either worship or loathe, or an uncomfortable vacillation between those two poles.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And of course, it's not just women. It's also the way that Dickens portrays Jewish characters. And of course, the most Famous of those, probably not just in Dickens, but one of the most famous Jewish characters in English literature is Fagin in Oliver Twist, who's described as a very old shriveled Jew whose villainous looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted old hair. And so Dickens's views about race, about difference, about people who are not like him, is something that's really very problematic. And, you know, there are elements where Dickens does write about Jews fairly regularly in his articles, often in disparaging terms, but not always. So there is a complexity there too. But it's definitely right that he doesn't try to move beyond characterizations of peoples of different colors, ethnicities and even genders.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I think. I think it's fair to say Dickens goes on a journey in terms of his ignorance and prejudice towards Jewish people, because Fagan is like his Shylock, you know, the equivalent of Shakespeare's incredibly crude depiction of a Jewish villain. But as he goes on in life and he actually gets to know more Jewish people, he becomes much more reflective on the ideas he's absorbed and actually edits Oliver Twist to remove the descriptions of Fagin as the Jew and exchanges letters with a friend who is from a Jewish family about how he hopes to be the best of friends with the Jewish people, acknowledging that the character of Jews has been too long wronged by a Christian community. So he shows a capacity to reform himself as well. But it doesn't take away from the legacy of Fagin as a real archetype of anti Semitism in English literature. And, you know, both from the physical description of him, which is an incredibly crude caricature of this idea from medieval Europe of the Jew as this villainous presence to the things that he does, association with criminality, Child snatcher. I mean, it just couldn't be more crude and harmful, really.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Well, like you say, even though he has characters like Rhea in Our Mutual Friend, who he puts words in his mouth to say that Jews are described by having the worst taken of them as samples of the best, and they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest. And they say all Jews are alike. So. So the damage is really done. I mean, Fagin as a trope, it's not just in the 19th century. It's taken on again and again and again and fuels some of the poison that we see in the 20th century in particular. But alongside Dickens's philanthropic work, his main focus is writing. And he gets back to the day job with Dombey and Son, which begins appearing in installments in 1846. And he finds it difficult to write. Maybe it's because he's been so successful, maybe it's a bit of writer's block, maybe he's got so many other things and balls that he's juggling. But anyway, it has the Dickens name on it. So it sells and brings in much needed cash.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And you can't even dismiss this as a period where the problem is that he's writing because he needs the money, which he does, because after Dombey and Son, which critics who have read it say isn't great, the next novel he begins under these cash strapped circumstances is David Copperfield, which he also thought was one of his best. And this time I think he was. And it is the most autobiographical of his novels and I think it shows because just the kind of nuance of the characters and the story are very, very compelling.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

I trip over a word, Mr. Murdstone looks up, I trip over another word, Ms. Murdstone looks up, I redden, tumble over half a dozen words and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare. And she says softly, oh, Davy, Davy. Now Clara, says Mr. Murdstone, be firm with the boy.

[Peter Frankerburn]

So that extract is from a scene where David is having to recite his timestables in front of his mother and stepfather. And if he makes a mistake, he'll be beaten. And the tension mounts and mounts towards an explosive conclusion that we're not gonna spoil for you. So David Copperfield is Dickens first book that's narrated in the first person. And his observations about childhood are remarkable, again showing how raw and present his memories are. And it's important, I think, that he's talking about these to someone we've mentioned before, John Forster. Forster becomes Dickens first biographer and perhaps that process of opening up is unlocking memories and unlocking ways, I think, of writing about life from the point of view of the first person. And Dickens maybe been reluctant to do that in the past, but at the same time this also fits alongside other books being written in the first place, not the afwa.

[Afwa Hirsch]

This is the era of Jane Eyre, which was published two years earlier, Charlotte Bronte's magnum opus. And it weirdly seems that Dickens didn't read Jane Eyre, but Forster, who had so much influence over Dickens, did. And he suggested that Dickens also write in the first person. So this is the second novel really ever to offer a serious child narrator in the English language.

[Peter Frankerburn]

They're very, very different, different books. So Bronte is a very angry author describing childhood. Dickens is Rather sorrowful. So, as Claire Tomlin says, the first 14 chapters covering David Copperfield's early childhood stand on their own as a work of genius. They show with a delicate intensity the pain of a child being separated from his mother, unkindly used by his stepfather, humiliated and punished without knowing why. And then when David is sent to work in a factory, he lodges with the Micawbers who are the good parts of his parents.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And we get from the Micawber's the famous phrase from his father. Annual income £20 annual expenditure 19196 result happiness. Annual income £20 annual expenditure £20 ought 6 result misery.

[Peter Frankerburn]

That margin of error, right. And we all know what that feels.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Like and Dickens definitely did.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Being able to balance your books by someone like Micawber, who's a source of great happiness and warmth, is really important. And one of the other famous characters that Dickens creates here is Uriah Heep, one of his best known villains. A proper flesh crawler who always claims to be so humble, but is a sycophant and a deep, deep hypocrite.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It doesn't sell that well at first, not as well as Dombey, but it does become recognised as one of Dickens and best books. And among those who sung its praises were none other than Leo Tolstoy.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Tolstoy was a voracious reader and he was an obsessive follower of English and French literature. So other contemporaries like Ivan Turgenev, Flaubert and so on. It's part of a growing community of international authors who are trying to read their works. And that's partly to do with publications, translations, copyright protections in Europe that all starting up around about this time. But Dickens follows Copperfield by carrying on thinking about different ways of making money. And he sets up a magazine called Household Words.

[Afwa Hirsch]

He asks the novelist Elizabeth Gaskill to write for it and she'll publish the Cranford series there. So he's being entrepreneurial again and thinking about how serializing stories can help bump up circulation, while he himself writes articles on social issues. Accidents in factories, the appalling conditions in workhouses, poor sanitation, the need for the working poor to have Sundays off, which they didn't at the time. And this magazine is soon selling 40,000 copies a week, and that's a lot.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And that means he's making proper money. So Dom Bien Son has sold well, David Copperfield likewise, and Household Words goes like hotcakes. So his financial issues are coming to an end and it's always difficult, as we've said before, comparing incomes and money from different periods, but that's something like £200,000 now that he's making per year and that's only going to go upwards, so. So he's kind of magical in lots of ways. Dickens, he's listened to by the middle classes, he's found amusing by the people who are rich. He's seen as a novelist, he's brave, he's a crusading editor, he's beloved by the aspiring poor, he's helping women. I mean, he's a paragon in lots of ways of somebody that people would look up to. And he's pretty unique as well, you know, to be a writer that gets that kind of spectrum of audience, it's kind of incredible.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And this is a turning point for Dickens, actually. He is now out of the red. Money is never going to be a struggle again for him. He's reached the threshold where, where he can be comfortable with his level of income. Although he can't reduce the pace and take his foot off the gas. As long as he keeps it where it is, he will continue to be solvent, more than solvent. And since money has been a big worry for him throughout his life, life is good.

[Peter Frankerburn]

In the summer of 1849, the family. Do you know how many children were up to now? Afra?

[Afwa Hirsch]

I lost count at six, I think. Peter.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

More.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Seven, eight.

[Afwa Hirsch]

They just keep coming.

[Peter Frankerburn]

They go to the destination of choice for the Victorians, which of course is the sunny Isle of Wight. So the writer William Thackeray sees them arrive and rather snobbishly, he writes the great Dickens. His wife and children, Ms. Hogarth, remember who is his sister in law, all looking abominably coarse, vulgar and happy.

[Afwa Hirsch]

This is going to be turned upside down though, and soon it's going to be torn apart.

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[Afwa Hirsch]

In August 1850, Catherine gives birth again. Poor woman. This is the ninth child that they have together and It's a daughter named Dora, after the character in David Copperfield.

[Peter Frankerburn]

On 14th of April, 1851, Dickens is at home in Devonshire Terrace. Catherine is away in Malvern, recuperating. He spends the day playing with his children. That night, Charles Dickens gives a speech at the London Tavern. Afterwards, John Forster pulls him aside. Terrible news. Dora has suffered sudden convulsions. Only 8 months old and she's gone. Dickens is of course, heartbroken. He spends the night with Dora's body. He also worries what it'll do to Catherine and writes tenderly to her, trying to prepare her, her for the worst news.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

Little Dora, without being in the least pain, is suddenly stricken ill. She awoke out of a sleep and was seen in one moment to be very ill. Mind I will not deceive you. I think her very ill. There is nothing in her appearance but perfect rest, you would suppose her quietly asleep.

[Afwa Hirsch]

They hardly even have time to grieve the loss of Dora, Peter, because within just months of that tragic loss, Catherine is pregnant again, this time with Edward, their 10th and last child, who's born in 1852. I mean, whatever you can say about this family, they are incredibly fertile, you're.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Gonna say resilient, infertile.

[Afwa Hirsch]

They just keep having children and it's, it's so sad, the loss of little Dora. But by the standards of Victorian London, the fact that they had nine living children is in itself quite remarkable.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Well, in London at this time, 30% of children die before their fifth birthday and that's partly to do with the slums, the appalling poverty, malnourishment, spreads of disease. But you know, that number is declining in the course of the 19th century. But it's not like it's any easier just because death is more prevalent. But Dickens is able to capture daily life. That in today's world means something different. But it still captures it for different reasons. But what's amazing is Dickens, you know, we mentioned so many of his famous books already, but in the next few years after 1852, he produces three of the most famous of all of his works. Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit.

[Charles Dickens (Reader/Actor)]

Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes. Gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Fog everywhere Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows. Fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city. Fog on the Essex marshes, Fog on the Kentish heights.

[Afwa Hirsch]

That was from the beginning of Bleak House. And if you haven't read Bleak House, I do urge you to go and just read the whole first part of the book, because it is the most remarkable description of London filth. The fog, the mud, the squalor, the cruelty. I know this sounds really grim, but it's written in such an elevated style that you just can't look away. And the subject is the inequalities of the legal system, the dysfunction and unfairness in the Court of Chancery, which is this arcane court where in Dickens's time, cases would just sit year after year, even generation after generation.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And you as a lawyer, afwa, you know, the fact that the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case has been going on so long, no one even remembers why it started or what it's all about.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Wish I'd read Bleak House before I decided that was the profession for nice.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Line of work to be in. As long as you keep getting paid, if you're a lawyer.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, I mean, contemporary listeners will definitely recognize the idea that the lawyers get paid and everyone else watches their pot of money diminish. That happens still all the time.

[Peter Frankerburn]

But we're seeing this mid 19th century London that Dickens is capturing so well. And this is a time of imperial growth, of the empire expanding in every corner of the world. But at the same time, London getting bigger and bigger and darker, filthier, shoddy housing, graveyards that are overflowing. And critics find Bleak House pretty bleak. Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. And yet it's still incredibly popular. So installment sales grow to more than 40,000amonth. So in March 1856, having now written 11 novels, Charles Dickens returns to Kent. And he heads to Gad's Hill, that house that we saw at the very beginning of the first episode that he'd walked past with his father all those years ago. He's determined to buy it. And it marks the fact that he now has reached the top of the hill.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And this is so associated in his imagination with happiness, the joy of childhood. It's like he's trying to get back to those more innocent times before he had to go and work in the factory and his father went to prison and then he had his own, own pressures of working and married life. But as I think many of us discover in our own adulthood. Moving location does not solve your problems, it only brings them with you.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And in this particular case it's his relationship with Catherine. We talked about Dickens and women and in particular with his wife. And he's not a kind man, Dickens. We talked about his philanthropy, how interested he is in other people. But the way he treats his wife is awful.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I mean, what a bastard. Sorry, I'm gonna say it. Because this poor woman, by the time she was in her early 40s, had been through 10 pregnancies that neither of them had particularly wanted. I mean this is also an indictment on a society without contraception. Dickens actually didn't want a big family. He wanted daughters, not sons. He had many of both. But instead of really appreciating what his wife went through, he grew more and more critical of her. Her weight gain, her lack of energy for things that interested in poor. Catherine and I are not made for each other and there is no help for it. He wrote to Forster. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too and much more so. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man. Her temperament will not go with mine. Now just to be clear, I'm not calling Dickens a bastard because he and his wife grew apart. That happens all the time and it's not necessarily anyone's fault. And you know, this is the kind of that he did feel that they were becoming a bit alienated from each other. It's how he dealt with that alienation and what he did next that I just find so completely unforgivable.

[Peter Frankerburn]

So in 1857, Charles Dickens, who's now 45, meets Nellie Ternan, who's an 18 year old actress. Nellie, her mother and her sisters are all actors and they perform in a play that Dickens puts on. But it's Nellie who catches his eye at once. So he begins to help the Turnans financially and puts puts acting jobs in their way. He sees this as another example of his charity helping a family in need.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And he does help families in need, but this is a little different because he's becoming obsessed by young Nelly and she enjoys the attention but is wary of his clutches.

[Peter Frankerburn]

Does she really enjoy the attention?

[Afwa Hirsch]

I mean, I don't know. She's an actor, you know, she wants to be appreciated. But I don't even know if she understood that she was playing with fire. Was she even playing? She was just living her life doing her acting. This very philanthropic man comes along and offers to help her and her family. She never asked for this kind of obsession. There's no indication she ever wanted any kind of intimate relationship with him. And I do wonder if the more she tried to resist, the more his obsession grows. And the more his obsession grows with Nellie, the more it sours his relationship with his wife and he begins to resent and even despise Catherine.

[Peter Frankerburn]

And then comes a moment that might have been taken from a Victorian version of love, actually. And it's one of the uncomfortable bits rather than one of the fun bits, but one that has a particularly dark Dickensian twist.

[Afwa Hirsch]

March 1858. Park Cottage, North London. Catherine Dickens reaches over to accept her teacher, trying to stop her shaking hands from rattling the delicate cup and saucer. She sits in a small front room of the one story cottage where Nellie Ternan lives with her two sisters and mother. They all smile at each other in an awkward silence. Someone makes a comment about the weather. Catherine puts her teacup and saucer down carefully on the table. She's been sent here by her her husband. The knot in Catherine's chest grows tighter as she tries in vain to compose herself. A few days before, a gift had arrived at her and her husband's own home on Tavistock Square. She'd hoped the beautiful bracelet inside the package was for her, but it had quickly become clear that it was not. Charles insisted that she go round to the Ternans to handle it to its rightful owner, the 18 year old Nellie. Catherine reaches into her bag, her heart beating fast and her cheeks burning. She can barely get the words out, but she knows she has no choice. Her husband tells her it's her weak character that makes her incapable of appreciating his platonic attachment to Nellie. Charles asked me to give you this, she says, offering the package to the beautiful young girl. It came to our house by mistake. Catherine sees Nelly's face flush. Even the mother looks uncomfortable. Mrs. Dickens knows the game is lost and that this moment will be seen by all as her tacit approval for the whole sorry affair.

[Peter Frankerburn]

So we're recording this in 2024 for those listening deep in the future. But I wonder if we'd been recording this 10 years ago, all those themes of the MeToo movement, of grooming, of unequal relationships, would have been something we'd have even talked about. It would have been framed as a kind of midlife crisis of a man leaving his wife for a younger woman, rather than something that looks much darker.

[Afwa Hirsch]

It's actually really recently that I think we've developed a mainstream language for this kind of behavior. You know. Now I think we're much better at recognizing emotional abuse or coercive and controlling behavior, all things that Dickens exhibits. You know, it's not enough for him to abandon his wife for this young woman, but he humiliates her, denies something that is patently obvious to everyone, that he wants to or is having an affair with Nellie, then tells his wife it's her fault gaslighting her, then humiliates her by sending her to Nelly's house to give her a gift that, that she'd received by mistake, which is a form of making her complicit in this relationship, which must have also been very upsetting for Nellie because as we said, there's no indication she necessarily wanted to be the object of his attention. But he's forced both these women into a role in his life that neither of them chose. And you know, Catherine has borne 10 children by this man. She's not the sexy 20 something year old that he married, but she's been his companion all these years. And what he's going to do now is not only cut her off emotionally, but he's going to rewrite history. He's going to claim that they never liked each other, that they were never suited, that they never enjoyed each other's company, that she was never a good mother, that her children always hated her. He even tries to have her committed to a lunatic asylum. And you know, in that era when male doctors had so much power over female patients, the violence of that inviting doctors to assess, hoping they would declare that she was mentally unfit, which would have meant a lifetime of incarceration in the very kind of institution that by the way, he was so effective at critiquing when others were at its mercy. It's just so dark and it really shows the worst of his character.

[Peter Frankerburn]

I think that's right. And Nellie after all, is the same age as Dickens own children. So I mean that imbalance is there too. But the atmosphere in the Dickens household is just completely poisonous. And of course it's Charles Dickens, no question, who's done the poisoning. In fact, Katie describes her father as acting like a madman. And I mean he literally divides his bedroom with his wife in two, literally puts a partition between them and then he splits from her publicly in a move that divides his family, his friends, the literary world and London society.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And even before that, one of his publishers stopped coming to his house, said he refused to go. Cause he found it so upsetting to hear the way Dickens talked to his wife and swore at her. I mean, this is in in Victorian London, when it was not uncommon for men to be patriarchal and dismissive of their wives. Even by those standards, people found Dickens behavior uncomfortable. But he really makes sure that she's humiliated publicly as well. And as everybody knows, the worst thing you can ever do in a marriage separation is to force your children to take sides, involve them in the hostility that's incredibly upsetting and damages children for life. It's. And he kind of just sets about doing this deliberately. It's really, really hard to understand. And the only way I can make sense of it is that he just really wasn't in control, that something darker was taking hold of his psyche and directing his actions. And one of the big fallouts is that this years long relationship he has with Ms. Coutts, who helps him with his home for homeless women, is a casualty. She disapproves of the way he's separated from Catherine and urges him to reconcile with her.

[Peter Frankerburn]

So his life, his legacy that had been so carefully constructed and controlled since he left his own difficult childhood behind, is threatening to come crashing down. That's next time on Legacy.

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