Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol

Summary

Throughline - Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol

Date: December 25, 2025
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah & Ramtin Arablouei
Featured Voices: Dominic Gerrard (as Charles Dickens), Lucinda Dickens Hawksley (Dickens' great-great-great-granddaughter), Leon Litvack (Victorian Studies professor)

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Episode Overview

This festive episode of NPR’s Throughline uses Dickens’ classic "A Christmas Carol" as both a literary time capsule and an entry point into the reinvention of Christmas as we know it. Hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei revisit the story’s origins, Dickens’ personal history, and the tale’s global cultural ripple effects—moving through history, social critique, and the enduring need for kindness and reflection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Enduring Power of "A Christmas Carol"

[01:33–05:22]

• The hosts theatrically narrate and perform scenes from "A Christmas Carol" to draw listeners into the narrative world of Scrooge.
• Rund points out the global pervasiveness of the story and adaptations, from Looney Tunes to The Muppet Christmas Carol:

  “Since Charles Dickens first wrote it in 1843, there have been hundreds of adaptations, each one with its own twist. My personal favorites...” (04:19)

• The basic plot is recapped: miserly Scrooge is visited by three ghosts who guide his transformation.

2. Dickens and the Invention of ‘Modern’ Christmas

[05:22–06:46]

• Victorian Studies scholar Leon Litvack describes how Dickens was mythologized as the ‘inventor’ of Christmas.
• Pre-"Carol," Christmas was sparsely celebrated in England, with most people working straight through the day.
• Dickens’ influence is illustrated by an anecdote:

  “A journalist tells a market girl that Dickens is dead, and she responds, ‘Oh, will Father Christmas die too?’” (05:37)

3. Dickens’ Personal History & Inspirations

[09:16–16:48]

• Lucinda Dickens Hawksley shares family stories: Dickens’ parents loved Christmas but were financially careless, inspiring his later themes of poverty and festivity.
• Rund and Lucinda paint Dickens’ impoverished youth: his father’s imprisonment, child labor in a blacking factory, and deprivation.
• Dickens’ experiences in poverty deeply shaped his advocacy:

  "But for the mercy of God… I might have been… a little robber or a little vagabond." – (Dickens, as read by Dominic Gerrard, 14:54)

4. Dickens’ Rise as Writer & Social Critic

[15:19–19:00]

• Dickens starts as a journalist and short story writer (“Boz”) then achieves early literary fame with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.
• His unique approach: writing about every class of society, not just the rich.
• Excerpts from his work underscore his observational wit and connection with ‘ordinary’ people.

5. Dickens in America: Disillusionment and Commercialism

[19:08–22:44]

• Dickens’ first U.S. tour is disappointing: he is disturbed by American materialism, celebrity obsession, and glaring social injustices like slavery and racial discrimination.
• The commercialization of authorship is discussed:

  “He was followed down the streets with people wanting to cut off locks of his hair.” (20:07)

• Financial stress and a career slump lead Dickens to seek a new hit—a context for the genesis of "A Christmas Carol".

6. The Social Crisis: Child Labor & Industrialization

[24:24–26:21]

• Parliamentary testimonies about child labor move Dickens deeply—he reads stories of children like Sarah Gooder (age 8) forced to work in mines.
• Dickens resolves to write a story that will strike "a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man’s child.” (27:40)

7. Crafting "A Christmas Carol": Narrative & Allegory

[28:16–37:34]

• Rund, Ramtin, and Lucinda Hawksley walk listeners through the story’s structure and symbolism:
  • Scrooge’s visits from Marley and the three spirits are detailed with dramatic readings.
  • Autobiographical elements: Scrooge’s childhood mirrors young Dickens’ isolation.
  • Dickens’ focus on children’s suffering crystallizes in the figures of Ignorance and Want, who symbolize society’s failures:

    “Ignorance was the one that must be feared more than anything...” (37:34)

• The Cratchit family is highlighted as the emotional core, representing the dignity and struggles of the working poor.

  “He shows Scrooge that even in a household that doesn’t have very much money, Christmas can still be celebrated with great joy.” (36:21)

8. Immediate Impact & Legacy

[41:05–47:46]

• Dickens self-publishes, risking his own money—A Christmas Carol sells 6,000 copies in days.
• On subsequent reading tours, Dickens draws huge, adoring crowds; his persona and readings become cultural events.
• The story popularizes traditions: family gatherings, caroling, generous holiday feasting.
• Commerce and Christmas intertwine:

  “The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year A Christmas Carol published. The first in-store Santa appeared in Macy’s department store in the 1860s.” (45:45)

• Dickens’ duality: part social crusader, part savvy businessman.

9. Ongoing Questions: Has the Spirit Endured?

[48:02–51:21]

• Anecdotes circulate about real-life “Scrooges” transformed after hearing Dickens; yet, Lucinda Hawksley calls out superficiality:

  “That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture, but what about the 364 other days?” (48:24)

• Dickens remained a “campaigner all his life,” skeptical that society had fundamentally changed.
• The hosts and guests reflect: economic inequality, the commercialization of Christmas, and child poverty all persist.

  “Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us. Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change.” – Lucinda Dickens Hawksley (50:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Dickens’ formative suffering:

  "When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden market and stared at the pineapples." (14:07, Charles Dickens via Dominic Gerrard)

• On the legacy of the Christmas Carol:

  “Christmas Carol became kind of the do-it-yourself manual on how to do Christmas.” (44:53, Narrator/Host)

• On the real meaning of Christmas:

  “It was always said of [Scrooge] that he knew how to keep Christmas well… May that be truly said of us and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone.” (40:44, Charles Dickens via Dominic Gerrard)

• On Dickens’ skepticism:

  “Nothing was ever enough for Dickens. He was a campaigner all his life. … He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition.” (48:46, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley)

• Modern Echo:

  “Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world. … Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. … Nothing is going to change unless we do.” (50:50, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• (01:33) – Dramatic performance of A Christmas Carol opening
• (09:23) – Lucinda Dickens Hawksley introduces Dickens’ upbringing
• (13:28) – Dickens’ family in debtor’s prison; firsthand trauma
• (19:08) – Dickens’ U.S. tour and disappointment
• (24:24) – Accounts of child labor and social injustice
• (28:16–40:44) – Full walkthrough of A Christmas Carol narrative & key themes
• (41:05) – Dickens publishes & public response; instant classic
• (45:45) – The origins of Christmas cards and commercial Santa
• (50:50) – Discussion of Dickens’ modern relevance & unfinished advocacy

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Conclusion & Takeaways

"A Christmas Carol" was born out of Dickens' deeply personal and societal concerns—child labor, poverty, and the dark side of industrial progress. While it reinvented Christmas as a season of generosity and family, it also threaded social critique through its warmth and cheer. The hosts and guests ultimately argue that the story’s legacy is both a celebration and a challenge: we are all Scrooge, and it’s up to us to keep the spirit of transformation—personal and social—alive, not just for Christmas but all year long.

Transcript

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

Somehow we are almost at the end of 2025. A lot happened this year, and it's been a tough one for NPR and local stations. We lost federal funding for public media. We've seen relentless attacks on a free press, but we're not going anywhere. Here at Throughline, we will keep bringing you immersive, entertaining stories that answer our guiding question, how did we get here? If you're already a Throughline plus supporter, thank you so much. We see you and we're really grateful for you. If not, please consider joining the community of public radio supporters right now before the end of the year at plus.npr.org Signing up unlocks a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from across NPR's podcasts. Plus, you get to feel good about supporting public media while you listen. End the year on a high note and invest in a public service that matters to you. Visit plus.NPR.org today. Thanks. Welcome back to Throughline's Winter Book Club. Today we're going to start by telling you a story.

[Narrator/Host]

Once upon a time. Of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy withal, and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already. The door of Scrooge's counting house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who, in a dismal little cell beyond a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal, but he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal box in his own room, wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle.

[Narrator/Host]

Merry Christmas, Uncle. God save you.

[Dramatic 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.

[Narrator/Host]

Bah.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Said Scrooge.

[Narrator/Host]

Humbug Christmas.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

A humbug uncle, Said Scrooge's nephew.

[Narrator/Host]

You don't mean that. I'm sure I do, said Scrooge. Merry Christmas. What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Come then, returned the nephew gaily.

[Narrator/Host]

What right have you to be so dismal? What right have you to be so morose? You're rich enough.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Scrooge, having no better answer, ready on the spur of this moment, said bah again.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Bah.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And followed it up with Humbug.

[Narrator/Host]

Don't be cross, uncle, said the nephew. What else can I be, returned the uncle, when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas. Out upon. Merry Christmas. What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money? A time for finding yourself a year older but not an hour richer. A time for balancing your books and having every item in em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with the stake of holly through his heart.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Tis the season to be jolly. Merry Christmas, everybody.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

You've probably seen a version of A Christmas Carol. Since Charles Dickens first wrote it in 1843, there have been hundreds of adaptations, each one with its own twist. My personal favorites.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Good morning, Mr.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Duck.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Bah, humduck. A Looney Tunes Christmas.

[Narrator/Host]

And hello, welcome to the Muppet Christmas Carol. My name is Charles Dickens.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And my name is Rizzo the rat. Hey, wait a second. You're not Charles Dickens.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I am too.

[NPR Sponsor Announcer]

No.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

A blue, furry Charles Dickens who hangs.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Out with a rat.

[Narrator/Host]

Absolutely.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

The basic story goes, it's Christmas Eve, and a miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts who take him into the past, present and future to teach him the value of kindness and generosity. The true spirit of Christmas. The book was an overnight sensation, and Charles Dickens, already famous, became a legend.

[Narrator/Host]

Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas, or the inventor of Christmas.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Leon Litback. He's a professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project.

[Narrator/Host]

There's a famous story that goes. A journalist at the end of the 19th century, after Dickens had died, went to Covent Garden market, and he encountered there a small girl who was selling fruits and vegetables, probably illiterate. And he said to her, well, Charles Dickens has died. And she says, oh, will Father Christmas die too?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Before A Christmas Carol, the holiday wasn't as widely celebrated as it is today. Many people didn't even get the day off work. Dickens had already devoted his life to documenting urban London's harsh realities. Dickensian has become a catch all word for that world, a world of unfair working conditions, meager wages, homeless families and hungry children.

[Narrator/Host]

I think that even more than Christmas, Dickens is well known for his championship of social issues, and he wrote a.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Novel to represent what he saw. But of course, as the book's fame spread from England to the US and around the world, Christmas took on a life of its own, a very different one than what Dickens might have imagined.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

When Jingle Bells starts playing in department stores pretty much as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Halloween, The soundtrack to a season of spending.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I am the ghost of christmas past.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm ramtin arablouei.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

And I'm rund abdelfatah. Coming up, how a christmas carol changed christmas.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

This is Rob from Yonkers, New York. You're listening to Throughline on npr.

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[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I have kids under 18, so, like.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Time is very limited.

[Narrator/Host]

That's why at BetterHelp, our therapists try.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

To have sessions, sometimes at night, depending.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

On the therapist, or during the weekend.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

So I think that's what we need to tell the parents.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

You're not alone.

[Narrator/Host]

We can help you out.

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[Narrator/Host]

Part 1 Great Expectations.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

My teachers at primary school, she said to the class, has anybody ever heard of Charles Dickens? And I thought it was some weird joke being played on me by my parents or something.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This is Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, a historian of Victorian England, author of a number of books about Dickens and Christmas and Charles Dickens great great great granddaughter.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

I knew that he'd written Christmas Carol and I knew about Oliver Twist, but I think when you're that little, you don't necessarily realize that that means that other people know who they are.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Today she's our ghosts of Christmas past. And our first stop is the year 1812.

[Narrator/Host]

The Marquis and Marchioness Camden gave a magnificent ball and supper at their seat in Kent.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It was always reported in the newspapers here what the royals had given each other for Christmas. Which duchesses had the most lavish parties?

[Narrator/Host]

The preparations displayed uncommon taste and consisted of the usual brilliancy of light.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

What people were wearing, what people were eating.

[Narrator/Host]

About one o' clock, the company supped. At half past four, the party broke up.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Charles Dickens would have been way too young to appreciate all the gossip. He was just 10 months old. This was his very first Christmas.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

He had one older sister, Francis, but he was the oldest boy.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

His father, John, and his mother Elizabeth, loved Christmas and each other.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It was a very loving marriage, but they were both fairly irresponsible, particularly John, when it came to money.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But they made sure to fill their home with the one thing that was virtually free. Music.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

One Christmas, they postponed their Christmas party because they'd just moved house and shock horror. The piano hadn't yet been delivered, so the party couldn't possibly happen.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The Dickens family embraced a festive Christmas.

[Narrator/Host]

For many people, though, Christmas was almost a day like any other day of the year.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The average person in Britain didn't even have the day off work.

[Narrator/Host]

You might have gone to church for a church celebration, but that was really about the height of it.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

There is, however, mistletoe, and if two.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

People found themselves under one, they were meant to kiss.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Some people banned that in their houses because it was all associated with paganism.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Keep in mind one reason December 25th may have been chosen as Christmas Day was to coincide with the winter solstice, a pagan tradition.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

At this time, the world itself seemed to be changing meaning at lightning speed. New machines were transforming everything about how people lived and worked.

[Narrator/Host]

When the railways first started, there are reports of people feeling that they just were unable to take the speed, which was far beyond the speed that they could travel on foot or by horse. How rapidly society was changing. You had a greater emphasis on commerce. Business was thriving.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The key of the house was sent back to the landlord who was very glad to get it. And I was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady long known to our family.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This wasn't theoretical for young Charles Dickens. One day in 1824, his father, Short on money and having racked up a mountain of debt, was suddenly taken away to debtors prison. Charles was just 12 years old.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I was so young and childish and so little qualified. How could I be otherwise to undertake the whole charge of my own existence?

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

I think he realized quite early on that his parents didn't have a great sense of responsibility when it came to making sure that their children had enough to eat and clothes to wear and everything else.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Dickens later wrote about this experience.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden market and stared at the pineapples.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Initially it was just his father who went into the prison cell. But then his mother couldn't afford to pay rent for them. So she and her younger children all had to move into the prison cell because they didn't have anywhere else to go.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

As for Charles, they couldn't afford to.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Pay his school fees. He was told that he had to leave school. So Charles Dickens ended up in a factory, a factory that produced a liquid called blacking. And it was used for things like coach hoods and, and boots and front steps, anything that needed a black color to it. And he obviously thought he was never going to get to have the kind of life that he wanted.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I know that I worked from morning to night with common men and boys. A shabby child. I know that I have lounged about the streets insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that. But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Newspapers and magazines were beginning to be mass printed and becoming more widely affordable, which meant that they needed writers. And Dickens was determined to never end up back in a factory. So in the late 1820s he decided to pursue a career in journalism, became.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

A freelance journalist, taught himself shorthand and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Started looking for work his journalism looked at every level of the world around him. Cab drivers and slum dwellers, bachelors and boarding houses, Parliament and the courts, hospital patients and prisoners. And while working as a reporter, he.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Started writing short stories. And these were his first works of fiction.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He'd publish them anonymously, so what you.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Would do at the time if you wanted to be published, you would put them through the door of a magazine and hope that they would publish them for free. Just you could see your words in print.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

His pen name was Boz.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

That was the nickname of his youngest brother, Augustus.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And that collection of stories came to be known as Sketches by Boz. They gave snapshots of daily life in London and they were a hit.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

His stories were just very simple, often very funny, sometimes very sad.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Matrimony is proverbially a serious undertaking, like an overweening predilection for brandy and water. It is a misfortune into which a man easily falls and from which he finds it remarkably difficult to extricate himself a little bit.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Like stand up comedians do observational comedy today where they pick up on a small element of something and it's something that everybody can identify with and go, oh, I know someone who does that. Well, I've been in that situation myself. So it spoke to the people in general.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And pretty soon he was commissioned to work on the Pickwick Papers, his very first novel.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass and then fairly turned his back and we will not say fled, firstly because it is an ignoble term, and secondly because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And then he wrote Oliver Twist.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The boy was lying fast asleep on a rude bed upon the floor so pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of his prison that he looked.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Like death and Nicholas Nickleby.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between, between this world and a better.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Eventually he started publishing under his real name and before he'd reached the age of 30, people all across the world began to know Charles Dickens.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

He just became incredibly famous. One of the things that made Dickens more popular than other writers was that his works dealt not just with the upper classes, which is what most authors of that time had done. And what Dickens did was he wrote about everybody, from aristocracy down to street sweepers, and everybody could identify with him.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

There is one broad sky over all the world and whether it be blue or cloudy, the same heaven beyond.

[Narrator/Host]

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

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Because of new mass printing machines, paintings like this one could be engraved, reproduced by the thousands, and then could be.

[Narrator/Host]

Circulated around the world. And people would become familiar with the image, the visual image of a person.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Dickens stories and his face were especially popular in the U.S. so in 1842, he set off on a ship with.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Very, very high hopes, expecting that he was going to absolutely love it.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had when I landed in America.

[Narrator/Host]

And he thought that this great American experiment could yield lessons for the rest of the world, particularly the United Kingdom. However, what he found was not quite to his liking.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

All that is loathsome, drooping, decayed is here.

[Narrator/Host]

He found, unfortunately, that there was too great an emphasis on materialism, too great an emphasis on the love of money.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

And too great an obsession with celebrity.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

He was followed down the streets with people wanting to cut off locks of his hair.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Once, on a boat traveling the Great Lakes, he awoke to a, quote, party of gentlemen peering through his cabin window.

[Narrator/Host]

He found the manners of the Americans to be appalling.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

There was actually a lot he found appalling.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Underhanded tamperings with public officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields and hired pens for daggers.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

On one stop, he visited a prison outside Philadelphia, and he was absolutely horrified.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

To see that black people and white people were treated completely differently, even though they were all in prison.

[Narrator/Host]

He also traveled to the American south and was appalled by slavery.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Now I appeal to every human mind imbued with the commonest of common sense and the commonest of common humanity, and ask can they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave, or can they for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of its flagrant fearful features and their own just consciences.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

They got as far as Richmond, Virginia, and they were on a train. And there were two slave owners bartering over a family. And Dickens listened to the crying as the father was taken away. So the father was in one train carriage waiting to leave the rest of his family. His wife and children were in another train. He wrote very poignantly that he was grateful that he had not been a baby in a slave rocked cradle, which is a line that still gets to.

[Narrator/Host]

Me every time, he said in a letter to his friend back home.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

It is not the republic of my imagination.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Tanked and his publishers started to think that this was maybe he wasn't such a good bet after all.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He had a wife and four kids by this point, with another one on the way, and was on the verge of falling into debt, the thing that haunted him most from his childhood. He desperately needed a new idea to get him out of the red.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

So he was struggling. And that was one of the things that would have been feeding his own anxiety, his fear of his own children ending up as he and his siblings had done.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

With the memories of his childhood replaying in his mind, Dickens found himself coming back to one Christmas. It had always been a special time for his family, despite all the hardships they faced. Coming up, Charles Dickens dreams up a Christmas Carol.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Hi, my name is Jessie. I live in Santa Cruz, La Laguna of Guatemala.

[Narrator/Host]

And you're listening to Blue line from NPR.

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[Narrator/Host]

Part 2 A Tale of Two Cities.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

I'm a trapper in the gawber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to track without a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. I would like to be at school far better than in the pit.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Sarah Gooder, Aged eight years back in.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

London after his trip to the US and contemplating what his next book should be about, Dickens was sent a parliamentary report that he couldn't get out of his mind. People had been collecting hundreds of testimonials from children working in Great Britain's mines and factories. It's said that Dickens wept when he read them.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Isabella Reed, 12 years.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

I have to stoop much and creep through the water, which is frequently up to the calves of my legs. When the weather is warm, there is difficulty in breathing and frequently the lights go out. And then he thought, well, who's going to read this? So he did what he could do best, which was to turn it into a work of fiction.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He started thinking about how.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Dickens was very insomniac for much of his life, so a lot of his thinking was done walking around.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking it was.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

The biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes from all over the world.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the Hungry Forties.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

There were famines starting. The big Irish famine hadn't quite happened, but there were early settings of what would come, and many, many migrants were.

[Narrator/Host]

Coming from Ireland to England, a kind of migrant crisis.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It was absolutely overcrowded.

[Narrator/Host]

In this society where things are allowed to progress without controls, without those kinds of social nets in which to catch the people who happen to fall through. What you're leaving behind is a trail of destiny.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste.

[Narrator/Host]

London did not have a proper sewer system, sanitation system until the 1850s.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It wouldn't have smelt good and he.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Would have known to avoid certain areas.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

I read one account of an area known as Seven Dials, one of the worst slums at the time. And it was said that if you weren't there and you weren't from there, you could expect to get your throat cut. It was a very violent society.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

He would have seen children without shoes, with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Children were just treated worse than animals. You know, they were hit. Working class children were often considered kind of just expendable.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The days were dark and cold, and.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Of course, there's only so many cold you can give out, so many individuals you can help.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got. A story was forming in his mind.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Unfortunately, his publishers weren't as enthusiastic about this new Christmas book.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

They thought it was a very uncommercial idea.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

But Dickens was willing to take the gamble.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It's almost like he was possessed with this desire to get this story out there, just get those feelings into it, this feeling of his anger with the world.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

So he began to write.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Once upon a time. Of all the good days in the year. On Christmas Eve, old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house.

[Narrator/Host]

House.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

The Story of A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve and we see Ebenezer Scrooge, who's in his counting house, so his place of work. He lends money to people and he's part of his firm, known as Scrooge and Marley. And what we learn is that it's seven years to that day since Jacob Marley died.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

[Narrator/Host]

Dead as a doornail, says Dickens.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And Jacob Marley was just like Scrooge.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Didn't care about anybody, had a lot of money and was a miser.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw Marley's face.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Ebenezer Scrooge.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

What do you want with me? Said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. Much Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And Scrooge kind of dismisses it. He refuses to believe in ghosts.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

You don't believe in me, observed the ghost. I don't, said Scrooge.

[Narrator/Host]

Jacob Marley warns him.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Forced to walk the earth wrapped in these chains. Chains and cash boxes. The sign of the money. All his life he's been accruing, what can he do with it in the next life? And he tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts of Christmas.

[Narrator/Host]

Each of which will teach him an important lesson.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Expect the first tomorrow when the bell tolls one Christmas past, expect the second on the next night at the same hour. Christmas present, the third up on the next night, when the last stroke of 12 has ceased to vibrate and Christmas.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Yet to come, often called Christmas Future in adaptations.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Without their visits. You cannot hope to shun the path I tread.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Scrooge says, no, I don't really want that to happen, thanks very much. But of course it does happen.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside and Scrooge, starting up into a half recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. Are you the spirit whose coming was foretold? To me? Asked Scrooge. I am. Who and what are you? Scrooge demanded. I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Past?

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Long past? Inquired Scrooge. No, your past.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And he gets taken back to his own childhood by the first ghost.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Good heaven, said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked about him. I was bred in this place. I was a boy here. He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts and hopes and joys and cares long, long forgotten.

[Narrator/Host]

And teaches him that in his past, Scrooge celebrated Christmas much more fully.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs. All these boys were in great spirits and shouted to each other until the broad fields were so full of merry music that the crisp air laughed to hear it. The school is not quite deserted, said the ghost.

[Narrator/Host]

He's also given the opportunity to visit himself as a schoolboy.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Scrooge said. He knew it. And he sobbed.

[Narrator/Host]

He's kind of lonely and destitute. And I think that that also is a kind of autobiographical reflection on something within Dickens. As Scrooge grew into an adult, he began to evolve into a miser.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning dress, in whose eyes.

[Narrator/Host]

There were tears which upset his love interest.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

You fear the world too much, she answered gently. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one until the master passion gain engrosses you. Have I not? She left him and they parted.

[Narrator/Host]

And he's left at the end of the the Ghost of Christmas Past visit, disturbed by what he has found and what he's turned into.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

No more. Cried Scrooge. No more. I don't wish to see it. Show me no more. I am the Ghost of Christmas Present.

[Narrator/Host]

Look upon me.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Second ghost is the Ghost of Christmas Present, which, of course, is the Ghost of Christmas 1843.

[Narrator/Host]

He's a much more jolly kind of spirit, and his job is to show Scrooge how Christmas is celebrated in his own time, what he could be enjoying. And so he takes him, for example, to different parts of the world, to lighthouses and mines and various other places where Christmas is celebrated.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit and punch, all vanished instantly.

[Narrator/Host]

He also takes Scrooge to the residence of Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit is Scrooge's clerk, who works for a very meager wage.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Scrooge is reluctant to give Bob Cratchit any time off at Christmas.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

What has ever got your precious father, then? Said Mrs. Cratchit. And your brother Tiny Tim and Martha weren't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour.

[Narrator/Host]

So he's part of the working poor, of which there were many, of course, in Victorian London.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Here's Martha, Mother. Cried the two young Cratchits.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

We see Martha coming home from work and all the family being around the table together.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

These young Cratchits danced about the table, and in came little Bob, the father, and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim. He bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame. And how did Little tim behave? Asked Mrs. Cratchit. Oh, as good as gold, said Bob, and better. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church because he was a cripple and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see, Chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed a Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us. Which all the family re echoed. God bless us, everyone, said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

[Narrator/Host]

And he shows Scrooge that even in a household that doesn't have very much money, Christmas can still be celebrated with great joy and with great fervor.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Spirit, said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, tell me if Tiny Tim will live if these shadows remain honored by the future. Future that the child will die. The chimes were ringing the 3/4 past 11.

[Narrator/Host]

At that moment, at the end of that stave. They're called the. The different sections of the carol.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I see something strange, said Scrooge.

[Narrator/Host]

The Ghost of Christmas presents Scrooge with these two children that he produces from beneath his cloak.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Two children named Ignorance and War.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

And the ghost says to Scrooge, they are man's. They are mankind's children.

[Narrator/Host]

And they serve as an example of the depths to which society has sunk, particularly in how it treats its children.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Dickens said of the two of them, ignorance and want. Ignorance was the one that must be feared more than anything. Because if you leave a child to grow up in ignorance without any understanding of how to care for themselves or care for other people or care for the world, you create all the villains that Dickens wrote about.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The bell struck 12. Scrooge looked about him for the ghost and saw it not, As the last stroke ceased to vibrate. He beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

A very silent, scary ghost who's often identified with the Grim Reaper.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim, shall we?

[Narrator/Host]

So, amongst the things that the ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge are the situation in the Cratchit household, where the Cratchit's young child, Tiny Tim, has now died.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

When we recollect how patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.

[Narrator/Host]

And then we're shown an image of a house that is cold.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

He lay in the dark, empty house with not a man, a woman or a child to say that he was kind to me in this or that. Am I the man who lay upon the bed? He cried upon his knees.

[Narrator/Host]

And it turns out that this is Scrooge's own house. After Scrooge has died.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

No spirit. Oh, no, no.

[Narrator/Host]

Nobody mourns him. And at that point, Scrooge breaks down completely.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Spirit. He cried, tight clutching at its rope. Hear me. I am not the man I was. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present and the future. The spirit of all three shall strive within me.

[Narrator/Host]

And then he wakes up and we see him at the end, calling out the window to a boy.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

What's today, my fine fellow? Today? Replied the boy. Boy? Why, Christmas Day. Do you know whether they've sold that prize turkey that was hanging up there?

[Narrator/Host]

Buy the biggest turkey that he can.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Is hanging up there now, replied the boy.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Is it?

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Said Scrooge.

[Narrator/Host]

Go and buy it and deliver it to the Cratchits as their Christmas dinner. As a kind of apology for not just how he's treated his clerk, but, I suppose, in a way, how he's treated all of humanity. We hear at the end of the story from the narrator that Scrooge keeps Christmas in his heart.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

In just six weeks, Dickens had finished his book. He called it A Christmas Carol. His publisher was sure it was going to flop, and with his debts stacking up, Dickens personally invested in publishing 6,000 copies of the book. Then he held his breath and waited for the first reviews to come in.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Coming up, Christmas Takes off.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Hi, this is Adam Kafer calling from Woodland Hills, California. And you're getting smarter because you're listening to Throughline from npr.

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[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Part 31001 humbugs.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

When it came out in 1843, A Christmas Carol was a sensation.

[Narrator/Host]

The first edition sold out almost immediately.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

6,000 copies in just a few days leading up to Christmas Eve.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success, and by the time.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Of Charles Dickens second US visit in.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

1867, the Christmas Carol had just become legendary.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Dickens traveled by train from as far south as Washington D.C. and as far north as Maine, hosting hundreds of readings, hitting up major cities like New York and Boston.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

With an elastic step, he ascended the platform and moved quickly to his crimson.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Throne.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The applause meanwhile spreading and deepening.

[Narrator/Host]

Till the whole audience joined in.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

One universal and enthusiastic plotted, which continued for several minutes.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Everything he did just sold out.

[Narrator/Host]

There are stories of people who would wait on the street overnight in order to obtain entry to his readings. People felt that they could sympathize with the characters. People spoke about the pathos that Dickens had inserted into Tiny Tim.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

God bless us everyone.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

For the poorer people it was I'm finally being talked about.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I'll raise your salary and endeavour to assist your struggling family.

[Narrator/Host]

People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into the holiday.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present and the future.

[Narrator/Host]

Christmas Carol became kind of the do it Yourself manual or how to do Christmas.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And people were doing Christmas like for real.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

So people realized this is a time for family and friends. It became Fashionable to have the kind of Christmas parties that were described in A Christmas Carol. Inviting lonely people, as he's attempted to invite Uncle Scrooge.

[Narrator/Host]

Also, we have Christmas carols, the songs that is associated with Christmas. They call up for people those memories that they have of the songs that are sung at Christmas. That's still the case, of course, because whenever you go into a store in any place in the world, virtually, you will hear Christmas music.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The commercial side of Christmas was growing too. The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year a Christmas Carol published. The first in store Santa appeared in Macy's department store in the 1860s. And on that US trip in 1867, Dickens himself was a product. He wrote about this in his letters.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The excitement of the readings continues unabated. The tickets for readings are sold as. As soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In one letter, he mentions a man who sold a ticket for $50, which is more than $1,000 today. There are often famous authors in the audience. The readings were covered in the national press.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

He was so famous, he couldn't move without people wanting to talk to him.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

If I stop to look in at a shop window, a score of passersby stop.

[Narrator/Host]

He also had photographs of himself taken that were sold by street hawkers and others at these venues of his reading. So it was very much the kind of 19th century equivalent of going to a Taylor Swift concert and finding, you know, all kinds of Taylor Swift memorabilia and T shirts and bracelets, whatever else you can imagine that would increase the devotion of the fans to Taylor, or in this case, to Charles. He will make plenty of money, there is no doubt.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

The New York Times.

[Narrator/Host]

While we think of A Christmas Carol as something that is heartfelt and something that Dickens wanted to deliver as this kind of gift to the public, we mustn't forget that it was also a commercial venture and indeed one in which Dickens himself invested. It was as much as a financial decision as it was this kind of humanitarian gift that Dickens was giving to the world. He was never completely a humanitarian. He was always the consummate businessman.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Okay, so a little Bob Cratchit and maybe a little Scrooge. There were ways in which A Christmas Carol did seem like it was having the kind of impact Dickens had hoped for, or at least according to the lore.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

There's a story that he was giving a talk in Boston, giving a reading from A Christmas Carol. And in his audience was a factory owner from Chicago who had a Scrooge like Epiphany who went back to Chicago and said that from that time on, all his employees would get Christmas Day off and every family who worked for him would be given a turkey every Christmas.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

But Lucinda Dickens Hawks, his great great great granddaughter, says that Dickens also had a healthy dose of skepticism. That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture, but what about the 364 other days of the year? How were workers treated? Who looked out for the poor? Were things really changing for the better?

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Nothing was ever enough for Dickens. He was a campaigner all his life. He wrote journalism right up to the end. He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition, by, you know, political situations.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Dickens left the United States in April of 1868. He'd made a lot of money off his readings. Tax inspectors had been chasing Dickens trying to get a portion of the taxes he owed. Lucinda writes in her book that the sight of the tax inspectors on the harbor after their ship had already set sail cheered Dickens soul.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Dickens died in 1870, just a couple years after returning from his trip. Two weeks after his death death, Christmas was made a federal holiday in the U.S.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Dickens had always encouraged what he.

[Narrator/Host]

Called a carol philosophy.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A carol philosophy.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Call it the Christmas spirit.

[Narrator/Host]

Cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug. So that's hypocrisy. Jolly good temper. Papers always in season, hat to the time of the year, and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to home and fireside.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But modern Christmas is also undeniably about money. Giving it, sure, but also spending it.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if he were alive today, would look like?

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Oh, if I knew that, I'd write it and make my fortune.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

You've got the name already. You know what I mean?

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world. There is still a huge amount of child poverty. There's so much inequality of wealth. I mean, Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us. Everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. Everybody needs to understand that actually nothing is going to change unless we do.

[Narrator/Host]

We should become more familiar with our own past because the past has things to teach us. And I think that we all have a. A responsibility to the past. And we look towards the future, hopefully with bright hopes and with optimism, but at the same time, we have to be looking in both directions.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah I'm Ramtin Arablouei and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

You'Ve been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.

[Dramatic Reader/Actor]

Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

I'm Dominic Gerrard. I was the voice of Charles Dickens in the this episode. I'm an actor and musician and I host a podcast called Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Voiceover work in this episode was also done by Darian Woods, Devin Katayama, Irene Noguchi, and Helen De La Haye.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Thank you to Johannes Durgi, Tony Cavan, Stuart Harding, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Thanks for listening.

[Sponsor Announcer]

This message comes from the Council for Interior Design Qualification Interior Designer and CIDQ President Siyavash Madani explains the value of having an NCIDQ certification.

[Dominic Gerrard (Voice of Charles Dickens)]

An NCIDQ certified interior designer must complete a minimum of six years of specialized education and work experience and pass the three part NCIDQ exam. All three exams emphasize and focus on on health, safety and welfare of the occupants. It's really about the implementation of design. Good design is never just about aesthetics. It's about intention, safety and impact. We take the responsibility of protecting the public seriously. The space needs to be functional, safe and accessible.

[Sponsor Announcer]

To learn more about NCIDQ certification or to hire a Certified Designer, visit CIDQ.org NPR this message comes from Granger. For the ones who get it done, Granger offers access to over a million products and the scale to deliver when and where you need them. The right tools and supplies are never far away. Call clickgranger.com or just stop by.