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Documentary, Charles Dickens and the Invention of Christmas (BBC)
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00:00It's the 24th of December, 1843,
00:05and a man is hurrying through the streets of London to get home to his family.
00:10Tomorrow is Christmas Day.
00:13But if you were walking through the centre of London, you'd hardly be aware of it.
00:18Over in Printing House Square, they're producing tomorrow's edition of The Times,
00:22just as if it was any other day.
00:24Here it is. Here's a copy.
00:25London, Monday, December 25th, 1843.
00:29But, astonishingly, if you look through the paper,
00:33there isn't a single reference to Christmas.
00:36In fact, there's scarcely been a reference to Christmas in The Times for 25 years.
00:42And yet, 1843 was a momentous year in the history of Christmas
00:48because it was the year that this man, Charles Dickens, published A Christmas Carol.
00:54This little book is Christmas.
00:57It's full of presents, decorations, turkey, plum puddings, family parties,
01:03and most of all, goodwill to all men.
01:08But as it happens, all these things we think of as completely traditional
01:12were, in fact, newly fashionable at this time.
01:16This is the story of how Christmas as we know it had to be invented,
01:20and how Charles Dickens came to tell the world that they had a positive duty to celebrate it.
01:27Charles Dickens is heading home to celebrate the season.
01:42But what sort of celebration is that going to be?
01:50And what sort of man is he?
01:52He's hurried home to his rather comfortable house, not far from London's Regent's Park,
02:02and he's going to do what quite a lot of well-set-up Victorians like to do at this time.
02:06It's new and it's fashionable, and it's to celebrate a private family Christmas.
02:13In his writing, he summons up a picture of overwhelming enthusiasm.
02:18Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter
02:24to despoil him of brown paper parcels.
02:27The wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received.
02:32We know quite a lot of what Charles Dickens got up to in the Christmas of 1843,
02:47the year that he published A Christmas Carol.
02:49And I think probably the reason he loved Christmas so much,
02:52because it was a perfect time for him.
02:54His children were young enough to enjoy it, and he was innocent enough to love it too.
03:01At this stage of his life, he has four very small children,
03:05and he gave them all elaborate nicknames.
03:08The eldest, Charlie, was known as Fluster-Flobby.
03:12Mamie was called Mild Gloucester.
03:15Katie was Lucifer Box, which is a Victorian name for matches.
03:20And little Walter had the charming name of Young Skull.
03:25Dickens' wife, Catherine, was expecting another baby at any moment.
03:30Her younger sister, Georgina, also lived with the family.
03:34And that's Dickens' close friend, Forster, who would be his first biographer,
03:38and often shared his house.
03:40Dickens still looks quite young, doesn't he?
03:43In fact, he was only 31 years old.
03:46But he's already a literary giant.
03:49The celebrated author of the Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.
03:55These novels distilled the character, the colour, and the sheer harshness of the early 1800s.
04:02They'd made Dickens the writer of his age.
04:05Dickens really was, if not the first celebrity, the first celebrity author.
04:11He went on book tours and went abroad to give on book tours and gave kind of special readings for charity.
04:17I want to take you first of all back to 1843.
04:21He's just been come back from America earlier in the year in 1843.
04:24Yes, he got back in, yeah.
04:26And he got back from America in 1842.
04:28And he had been there for six months, which he hadn't actually told his wife how long they were going for.
04:34He said it would be about three months.
04:35And then when he came back, he started working on Christmas Carol.
04:38It came out on the 19th of December, 1843, and it sold out within days, which is incredible.
04:45Just shows what a massive celebrity he'd become by that point.
04:48So there he is. I mean, he's sort of almost like the sort of sage of his era, the person that everybody will listen to.
04:55So why do you think he chose Christmas as his subject?
04:57He loved Christmas. I mean, his daughter Mamie said that it was his favourite time of year.
05:02And he made them all love it.
05:04He sent his children off to learn dancing.
05:06His two daughters, Mamie and Katie, learnt the polka once so that he could dance with them.
05:10Dancing was a huge part of the Dickens family life.
05:13And Catherine Dickens was usually pregnant, so although she loved dancing beforehand, most Christmases she seemed to be imminently about to give birth.
05:20So Dickens would often dance with his daughters instead.
05:28And this year, he was planning his biggest Christmas celebration ever.
05:32As well as dinners, games and magic lantern shows, his week would include a party for all his friends.
05:38There would be a trip to the pantomime at the Haymarket Theatre, and it would end with another huge party for his son's birthday.
05:50One of Charles Dickens' own rules of Christmas was to make every conceivable effort to entertain his family and his friends.
05:57He'd even gone to the bother of buying a complete set of conjuring tricks from a professional magician.
06:03He spent hours rehearsing and preparing for a show.
06:07Ladies and gentlemen, I am the unparalleled necromancer, Ria Hrama Roos.
06:26He was pretty good at it, too, as one of his guests noted.
06:31This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw eggs, raw flour, all the raw, usual ingredients.
06:41Boiled in a gentleman's hat and tumbled out, reeking, all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children and the astonished grown people.
06:51A Christmas pudding!
06:56Charles Dickens seemed utterly dedicated to doing Christmas properly.
07:01He strongly believed that people should put aside their daily concerns for Christmas,
07:06and at this time, he did have quite a few of his own.
07:11Not everything in this busy household was perfect.
07:15Perhaps one of Dickens' best tricks was sustaining the illusion that his marriage was entirely happy.
07:20In a recent letter, he'd referred to his wife as the donkey,
07:24and he'd had problems with his father who'd been borrowing money using his famous son's name.
07:30His father really just used Charles Dickens as a meal ticket.
07:35He'd always been getting himself into trouble, but as soon as he realised that his son was financially secure and quite wealthy,
07:41he would just say, well, I'm Charles Dickens' father, and people would give him credit.
07:45As well as his grasping father, Dickens had his own lavish lifestyle to maintain.
07:50But in the autumn of this year, the first instalments of his latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, were not selling as well as he'd hoped.
08:00He'd written a Christmas carol in six hectic weeks, and he had every hope that this, at least, would be a financial success.
08:13This very Christmas Eve, he received some rather heartening news from his publishers.
08:20In just five days, A Christmas Carol had sold 6,000 copies, an astonishing figure.
08:28It looked like it had netted Dickens a small fortune.
08:32Or so he thought.
08:36As it happens, he'd been a little too lavish with his ideas for the illustration.
08:42and the design of his book.
08:44So he expected to make about a thousand pounds, but he wasn't to know that evening.
08:48In fact, he was only going to make 230 quid off the initial sales of A Christmas Carol.
08:54He'd been a little bit too generous in his Christmas gift to the world.
08:59But what an enthralling gift it was.
09:03The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand.
09:09And Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them.
09:21It was an immediate hit.
09:23So what were the ingredients of its success?
09:25Well, first and foremost, it was a brilliant piece of entertainment, a terrific, scary ghost story.
09:31It was a strange figure, like a child, yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium.
09:43As we all know, it's the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a cold-hearted miser who hates Christmas and who complains at having to allow his poor clerk Bob Cratchit, father of the crippled boy Tiny Tim, a day off work.
09:56But then Scrooge is visited by a series of different ghosts who take him on a journey to discover the meaning of Christmas.
10:09Are you the spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me? asked Scrooge.
10:18I am.
10:20Who and what are you? demanded Scrooge.
10:25I am the ghost of Christmas past.
10:30Long past? inquired Scrooge.
10:35No, your past.
10:40The ghost takes Scrooge back to look at his childhood, when he was able to enjoy Christmas, before the love of money took over.
10:48He calls Christmas a humbug.
10:51One reason for the book's success was that it had a powerful message.
10:55It was a ghost in front of him.
10:58It's a message that children still respond to today.
11:01It was about a man who was really angry and hated Christmas and hated everything and didn't want to give anyone money.
11:11Then these ghosts came of Christmas and showed him what would happen if he kept doing this.
11:20When he was with the ghost of Christmas past, it showed him what he was doing in the past of Christmas.
11:28And, well, the Christmas present, it showed him, like, everyone all together enjoying Christmas.
11:35And in the future, when everyone was talking about his death, they was all happy.
11:41So, he thought, well, everyone hates me, so I've got to be a better man.
11:46I liked the end part, like, when he suddenly changed, when he woke up, he just started being nice to everyone.
11:54It's basically saying, if you don't enjoy yourself, other people won't enjoy themselves.
12:01And the moral is, what goes around comes back around.
12:04Dickens' message was popular with the highly moral Victorians.
12:12In the year after it first appeared as a book, there were no less than eight different theatre productions of A Christmas Carol,
12:18and the story has been performed countless times since on stage and on film.
12:25Patrick Stewart has done both and knows that adults find as much in it as children.
12:30I think that the secret of it is the second chance.
12:35And particularly, this is something which affects middle-aged and older people.
12:42The sense that no matter how much you've screwed up your life,
12:47and Scrooge is a success in financial terms.
12:52He's done terrifically well.
12:54But in every other possible way, his life is a disaster.
12:58In humanitarian terms, in personal terms, in fulfilment, in relationships.
13:03It's calamitous, his life.
13:05And then he's given this great gift of being shown where he came from, how he started,
13:12and gradually what he has become, and the impact of what he has become has had on other people.
13:20And he's allowed to take a step back and change himself.
13:27And, I mean, I start to get emotional just as I think about this.
13:32And, of course, this is a Shakespearean theme, too.
13:34He uses this similarly, in which somebody is given an opportunity to change their life,
13:39and to make that change have an impact on the world around them.
13:44I find that really potent.
13:47It was the impact, though, of the book that caused such amazement,
13:58because this is a review here in a magazine of the time under the title of Literature.
14:06How shall we convey to our readers the surpassing beauty with which this accomplished author of the seasonable little volume has worked out,
14:14or, as he sportively terms it, raised the ghost of an idea?
14:18There's about sort of a page here of enthusiasm.
14:21And Thackeray, who was Dickens' great rival, called it a benefit to mankind.
14:28And he said to every man and woman who reads it, Dickens has done a personal kindness.
14:35Another critic compared it to the fourth gospel.
14:39It was an instant classic.
14:44Dickens had done more than create an uplifting entertainment for the entire family.
14:48He'd also produced the ideal Christmas gift.
14:51Brian Lake is a book dealer who specialises in original editions of Charles Dickens' work.
14:57Dickens took quite a lot of interest in this book, didn't he?
15:00I mean, he actually, he wanted it to be a sort of Christmas present in itself.
15:05Yes, it was designed by Dickens to be a Christmas present.
15:09He wanted to make money out of the book, so he created something to sell at five shillings,
15:15which he felt that people would go out into the shops and buy in large numbers.
15:18Show me a first edition.
15:20This is a first edition of A Christmas Carol.
15:23This is it.
15:24Right.
15:25Dickens always spent a lot of time on the physical appearance of his books.
15:28He was always very concerned about how much they would cost.
15:32He wasn't just a writer.
15:34He was very much concerned about how it was going to be seen by the public.
15:38Initially, he wanted to have green title page and green endpapers.
15:43You can see this didn't work.
15:45It starts to rub off.
15:46So the next version was with yellow endpapers.
15:50But all of them are made with this rather beautiful,
15:53we've got a two-colour title page.
15:56Absolutely unique to Christmas Carol.
15:58And the expense of hand colouring basically killed the book commercially.
16:03All of the colouring is done by hand.
16:05It's done by rows of women sitting applying different colours
16:10and therefore became a very expensive process.
16:12So the fact that when we come to visit a bookshop just before Christmas
16:16and it's absolutely groaning with books ready for Christmas,
16:21that's all really down to the success of this book.
16:25It was the first Christmas story really.
16:29And it just spawned a whole industry.
16:32So if I wanted to buy a first edition of Christmas Carol Now,
16:37the original first edition with the green endpapers...
16:40With the green endpapers.
16:41How much would I have to spend for it?
16:42Well, you'd probably have to spend about £10,000 or £15,000.
16:45Even though there were £6,000 produced?
16:48Yes. It's a popular book.
16:51It's one of the Dickenses that people really want.
16:55All the ingredients were certainly there for a Christmas bestseller for Dickens.
17:06It was a terrific thriller with a moral message for all the family.
17:10And lovely to look at too.
17:14But that doesn't entirely explain its huge contemporary success.
17:19The truth was that Dickens had caught the wave of a new fashion
17:23that had been slowly building in victorious England the last 30 years.
17:27Christmas was about to bust out all over the place.
17:391843, the year that A Christmas Carol came out was clearly an annus mirabilis for Christmas
17:44because it happened, coincidentally, to be the same year that the very first Christmas card was published.
17:51And here it is.
17:54And it shows a family holding up glasses of wine, enjoying Christmas.
17:59It could pass muster as a Christmas card today, the very first one.
18:05It was the idea of Henry Cole, a civil servant and industrial designer
18:09who is often credited with having designed the Penny Black stamp.
18:13He doesn't look a very merry soul, but he started something.
18:18Now, Henry Cole was obviously far too busy to send Christmas greetings
18:24to all his friends and acquaintances and business associates.
18:27So, instead, he wrote a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
18:30on a handy piece of cardboard, and so the Christmas card was invented.
18:36In little more than 30 years, 4 million cards were being sent every year.
18:41It became a fashion, then a craze, and then a tradition, just like a Christmas Carol.
18:48The Victorians were hungry for Christmas ideas.
18:52Especially the comfortable people of the middling sort, as they called themselves.
18:58Dickens was one himself.
19:00These were city dwellers who wanted the chance to enjoy themselves.
19:07They wanted to have a proper Christmas.
19:11But what sort of Christmas was that?
19:22Do you ever get the feeling as you settle in for the sheer exhausting hard grind of another Christmas season
19:28that somehow these things must have been done a lot better about 150 years ago?
19:32Well, in fact, that's exactly what they thought about 150 years ago.
19:41Because the Victorians loved history.
19:44These are the houses of Parliament, and they're actually being built in 1843.
19:53They're brand new.
19:55And yet, if you look at them, they're being made to look like a sort of Flemish Burgermasters Hall from the early 1300s.
20:06This is the fastest growing era the world has ever seen.
20:09They're rocketing into modernity.
20:11And yet, they're obsessed with the romance of the past.
20:16And there's no better example of this obsession than the Society of Antiquaries.
20:21It was the antiquarians who first began gathering up the folklore and historic customs of Britain.
20:27I've come here just off Piccadilly to meet a modern day historian, Steve Rowell.
20:33Steve.
20:34Hello there.
20:35Welcome to the Society.
20:38That's wonderful.
20:39The enthusiastic, educated members of this very exclusive club were also the first to investigate the origins of our Christmas traditions.
20:49The first people to really start worrying about Christmas were around 1800, 1810,
20:54at a time when, really, Christmas was fading away.
20:58People weren't really celebrating it.
21:00It was literally just sort of dying out.
21:03And they suddenly realised that if they didn't do something, then Christmas, one of our major festivals, would disappear.
21:15Christmas had been having a rocky time since it was banned by Oliver Cromwell.
21:21The Puritans felt that a Christ mass sounded a bit too Catholic.
21:26Christmas pudding was actually made illegal in 1647.
21:33The festival was restored with the monarchy in 1660, but it was never quite as popular.
21:40Then, at the beginning of the 1800s, the antiquarians got involved.
21:46And what they did was, they said, well, let's get back to old Christmas.
21:52With an E?
21:53With an E, of course, yes.
21:54Oldie, oldie Christmas.
21:55Oldie Christmas.
21:56Yes, that's right.
21:57That's when it started, the movement started, not only to bring back Christmas, but to bring back the spirit of old Christmas.
22:05The way Christmas used to be done in my grandfather's days.
22:09That's right.
22:10Or even before that, in merry England.
22:14Mostly, it's set in Elizabeth the first time.
22:19That's when England was strong, England was happy, England was merry.
22:25But Steve believes that some of the more ancient customs that the antiquarians wrote about are simply myths.
22:32And what about the idea that holly and ivy, that's a sort of, that's part of a pagan ritual for bringing in things alive into the dead season?
22:43Well, no, it wasn't.
22:48The answer is we don't really know.
22:51There's so little information from pre-Christian times about what happened at midwinter that it's assumption.
22:59And the mistletoe, because, of course, I understand the mistletoe is some sort of druidic sexual fertility ritual.
23:06Is that true?
23:08No, again, there's the slightest shred of evidence there.
23:13In fact, quite a lot of slightly dodgy different Christmas traditions were gathered together around this time.
23:21Some were used, some were not.
23:26We all put up mistletoe, but we don't dress up as barnyard animals or shoot pistols at trees on Boxing Day, some of the other customs that the antiquarians gathered in.
23:37The Victorians took what they wanted.
23:40And what these new city people wanted was whatever reminded them of a joyful old village Christmas in a manorial hall.
23:49The world they'd left behind, in fact.
23:51Dickens first wrote about exactly this seven years before A Christmas Carol.
23:57There's a great Christmas chapter in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, when Mr. Pickwick and his friends visit Squire Wardle at his country seat.
24:07This, said Mr. Pickwick, this is indeed comfort.
24:12Our invariable custom, replied Mr. Wardle.
24:16Everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve as you see them now, servants and all.
24:21And here we wait until the clock strikes twelve to usher Christmas in and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories.
24:29But Squire Wardle's country Christmas was a big, rowdy, rather adult affair.
24:36So, how were those polite city Victorian folk of the middling classes supposed to celebrate ye oldie worldie boisterous Christmas in their parlours without ruining the rugs?
24:52Dickens' own Christmas party is a pretty good example of how they adapted the old traditions to the new cities.
24:59They would definitely play a game of blind man's buff. It was one of Dickens' favourites.
25:05But this was a tidied up parlour version of a much more boisterous game from the village past, which had given servants the opportunity to wrestle with the master or fondle the mistress.
25:17And when the adults kissed under the mistletoe, it was the custom, right up to the end of the century, to take a kiss for every berry on the sprig.
25:40And there's a wonderful description in the Pickwick papers of all the girls running off to hide behind the sofas in case they get caught,
25:50because this was a way of getting up close and personal, when up close and personal generally was pretty difficult.
25:58So, games, mistletoe, what about the other things we do at Christmas?
26:05I asked historian Darry Rook, and it seems that when it comes to traditions, the Victorians went shopping around all over the place.
26:17But, Darry, if I'm decorating a Christmas tree today, I can go mad. I can put up and wits anything I want.
26:26You can go crazy. You really can. All these colours and shapes.
26:30And with the Victorians, in Charles Dickens' when he went to decorate his house with the kids on Christmas Eve,
26:36I mean, would he have used baubles, bangles, beads? When do they start to come in?
26:40Well, glass beads really take off in the 1850s and 60s, and they come in from Germany.
26:45And at first, they're very chaste things that look like fruit or flowers.
26:49But then, by the end of the century, you can get model airships, famous actresses, the whole lot.
26:54Really? That early! People start. It's extraordinary, isn't it?
26:58Because one of the other things is that you don't get in Christmas decorations.
27:01You don't have minimalist Christmas decorations, do you?
27:04Well, you can in shops and things like that.
27:06And sometimes, I have been into Architects House, and there's just a sort of one-coloured thing down there.
27:10But generally, when we go for it for Christmas, however sort of decorous we are,
27:15when we go for Christmas, we go completely wild, don't we?
27:18I think that's very much in the spirit of the 19th-century house, though,
27:21when you think about it with its reflective pier glasses, its gaslighting, its gilded surfaces.
27:26This is the middle-class home, I'm adding. It's all about this excess, really.
27:30And Christmas is still very much Victorian excess.
27:33Would they have had Christmas stockings in there?
27:36They're not in Dickens' early years. They come in via France and America in the 1870s and take off then.
27:41Though I think they really intended you to hang up your own stocking,
27:44not have something embroidered and glamorous quite like that.
27:46I see, right.
27:47We like to think that many of these things are of English, oldy English origin,
27:53but are they all of old English origin?
27:55Well, very few of them are, when you think about it.
27:57I mean, look at the cracker, for example. That comes in in the 1840s, invented by a confectioner.
28:02It's based on a French idea, but it's a modern English invention to go bang and give you an interesting message.
28:08So, what about the piece de resistance here, the Christmas tree?
28:13Would the Dickens family have spent a lot of time, then, bringing up a Christmas tree, do you think?
28:17Well, they might have done. Really?
28:19Or they would have been very advanced if they did.
28:21Well, when did Christmas trees come in, then?
28:24Well, we know that the royal family were using Christmas trees in the 1790s.
28:291790s? Yeah, yeah.
28:31Because we sort of think it was Prince Albert who brought it in, but this was a bit earlier.
28:34We do. As a young woman in the 1830s, Queen Victoria talks about the lighting up of the Christmas tree in the family home,
28:39so the royals were doing it well in advance of everyone else,
28:41and possibly a few German merchants in Manchester or Bradford were doing it early, too.
28:46So, it was a German idea, but it didn't look like this, did it then?
28:50Well, no. It was a real Christmas tree brought in,
28:52and people were quite creative at that time about how they used them.
28:55Queen Victoria used to replace the chandeliers with Christmas trees hung with lights.
28:59Some people put presents on the tree, but periodically they caught fire,
29:03and ultimately the presents were just put around the bottom.
29:05It was constantly evolving through the Victorian period.
29:08Isn't that a fascinating idea that the royal family there were right in the forefront of ideas?
29:13Because we sort of associate the royal family with old tweed jackets
29:16and things which are a little bit old-fashioned these days.
29:19Well, Victor and Albert really do set the tone of the ideal couple,
29:22and what they do in the home, setting up the Christmas tree, lighting it up,
29:25is published in all the magazines and periodicals,
29:28and the rising middle classes want to do just as they do.
29:31We know that Charles Dickens soon caught on to the idea of a Christmas tree.
29:37He wrote about that pretty German toy, as he called it, in a short story in 1850.
29:43And he was amongst the first to give Christmas presents.
29:47The tradition at that time was to exchange gifts at New Year.
29:51But the Dickens children wouldn't have expected anything to be delivered down their chimney.
29:56In the 1840s, the bearded old man of Christmas was a sort of green sprite
30:01with slightly lewd associations.
30:04Now, Father Christmas, where did he emerge from?
30:07Well, Father Christmas as we know him now is a real hybrid.
30:10He comes in England out of quite a long tradition of Sir Christmas,
30:13who was this kind of almost pagan character that encouraged you to eat, drink and be merry,
30:17and used to have an open-cut robe in green.
30:21But then, by the 1860s, he's married with the American concept of Christmas,
30:26which itself comes from Holland,
30:29and it's an idea of a genial sort who brings presents down your chimney.
30:33And that, too, comes out of literature.
30:35It's a real mishmash, a proper patchwork, without any real tradition at all.
30:39So, again, poor old Father Christmas, he sort of comes, like we all do,
30:43from a number of different ancestors.
30:45That's right, mixed ancestry, but how beautiful he is today.
30:57Like any respectable Victorian family, on Christmas morning,
31:01the Dickenses went to church.
31:03They'd have been very, very peculiar if they hadn't,
31:06because the church, in all its denominations, was at the heart of Victorian society.
31:15They'd have been very careful,
31:17and they'd have been very careful.
31:18They'd have been very careful,
31:19and they'd have been very careful.
31:21Actually, there is another part of the story of the revival of Christmas
31:25that I haven't looked at yet, and it's staring me in the face.
31:29It's the title of the book, for goodness sake.
31:31It's the title of Christmas, I'm going anywhere,
31:49and I have to.
31:53Chris Howard I don't want you to stop because you see for me that that is instant Christmas
32:03there's almost nothing like it and that's why the shops play it presumably about November don't
32:07they I think it's instant Christmas and instant childhood does it take you back it does but the
32:13question I want to know is what what is specifically a Christmas Carol then as opposed to a sort of him
32:19or well a Christmas Carol really is a is a country folk song with a Christmas theme as opposed to a
32:26straightforward hymn like Hark the Herald Angels Sing which Charles Wesley a great hymn writer wrote
32:31specifically to be sung in a church I thought Hark the Herald Angels Sing was a carol Christmas Carol
32:36well they've all merged into one great tradition now but the old you know country tradition of
32:41singing carols is really old goes back to the Middle Ages where people you'd just as likely to
32:46hear a Christmas Carol in in a pub as you would in a church it's a lot of old carols I saw three
32:52ships come sailing and come sailing oh tomorrow shall be here my dancing day I would these are
32:57very dancey jolly jaunty songs that got attached to the Christmas season if I were an ordinary man in
33:06London and in about 1830 would I have recognized all the cows in the same way that we do now I mean
33:15they're so instant for us now we know them all there is a litany well I think what happened was at the
33:20beginning of the 19th century in about the 1820s 1830s they started to collect people started to
33:24collect into books these songs that were just sung and handed on from person to person out in the
33:30countryside in little villages I'm really they brought them then into the towns and they brought
33:34them into the churches in the towns I mean how it sounds as if carols were not specifically
33:39associated with churches they were especially with plays and with carol singing going around
33:44the town doing good in fact they used to call it gooding and in fact they brought into church
33:48because of course the church was a big thing in 19th century Britain lots people went to church of
33:52various kinds not just Anglican Church and so why not bring all the tunes people loved and associated
33:57with Christmas into a Christmas setting God rest you merry gentlemen God rest you merry gentlemen now
34:03that's an old tune that people got new words for it and fitted it to it so it could work at
34:07Christmas and there were there was a whole craze for these songs to come from all over the place
34:12in fact quite a few come from Germany in do to you that's an old German tune now they were brought in
34:20and made wrapped up into this new form when you think about it a Christmas Carol as a title is referring
34:26to something which is newly fashionable which is which is a which is like a sort of there's a craze for carols
34:31and he's writing a book which actually directly has that has that sort of crazy it's like calling
34:36something the iPod you know as a book because it's sort of all around him but new well and probably
34:43he managed to make the word carol and Christmas stick forever together because in the middle ages
34:48you could have a carol any time of year there were carols from all around the year it's just that
34:52they started to really attract themselves just to Christmas we don't think of a carol any other time of
34:57year now and I think Dickens has got quite a lot to do with that he wrote one himself which is in
35:02Pickwick and it's supposed to go to the tune of old King Cole and I wondered whether we could have a
35:09look at it and see if we could make it fit here we go my song I troll out for Christmas not the hearty
35:18though here we are in church and singing a carol we do have to ask where exactly is the baby Jesus
35:35in Charles Dickens vision of Christmas there are plenty of bumpers avail in his song but no mention
35:41of a little star over Bethlehem in a Christmas carol itself only a few sentences are given over to
36:02the worship of God whereas whole pages are devoted to the worship of food this is because full bellies
36:10had a rather greater meaning for Dickens than rituals and prayers the grosses oh the grosses
36:18the raisins were so plentiful and rare the almonds so extremely white the candied fruits so caked and
36:26spotted with molten sugar nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy or that everything was good to
36:33eat and in its Christmas dress downstairs in the kitchen of the Dickens home the cook and the maid
36:42are preparing a Christmas dinner they're going to serve it at 5 30 in the afternoon and it'll include
36:48mince pies and plum pudding these date to medieval times when they contained actual shredded meat this
36:56idea of traditional food though was very important to Charles Dickens vision of Christmas there's a
37:05wonderful scene in a Christmas carol where Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Day he throws open the window
37:12he spots a little boy and he orders him to go off and get the biggest turkey he can get hold of because
37:18Charles Dickens loved Christmas but in 1843 he still expected the shops to be open on Christmas Day
37:27in our own century we have to start thinking about ordering provisions a little earlier perhaps from a
37:35gloriously well stocked food hall like this one but even so we stick to the traditions don't we
37:42good morning good morning to you good morning to you um yes I want now if I if I wanted to buy
37:51uh something for my Christmas dinner yes what would you recommend oh uh a riverbee to start with
38:00right ah well you can't win them all what about a turkey well as well as well as well yes yes what
38:08will you actually have yourself for Christmas I I normally have a capon a capon yes and that's
38:14completely different what's a capon when it's a chicken that's been uh caponized been what
38:20caponized caponized caponized caponized right yes yeah what does that mean well that means it's had
38:27its private parts exactly yeah that's pretty politely yes yes and so it does and in your opinion
38:34a chicken which has had its private parts removed is the most tasty thing you can have yes what about
38:40you Sylvie what do you have for Christmas I have a traditional turkey do you is that what your family
38:45expects yeah grandchildren brought up with it and then we have beef maybe for Boxing Day but if you
38:53turned up and said to your family I tell you what we're going to do we're going to have a bit of a nice
38:58bit of salmon some fish for our Christmas yeah dinner would they protest about that I think so
39:03I think grandad would get the sack he's the cook no traditional turkey ever since my dad did it and
39:14what about goose have you ever is there much demand for goose it's nice oh yeah it's enjoyable but it's
39:20not a big bird there's not a lot on it like you would get on the turkey so what's the history behind
39:26the custom of eating turkey or goose historically especially around Christmas time you know goose
39:34was the very much the traditional thing in fact it goes as far back as Elizabethan times when Queen
39:40Elizabeth the first defeated the Spanish Armada and to celebrate for that Christmas she ordered that
39:46everybody in the land should have a roast goose turkey is a relatively recent introduction because
39:53turkey originated from America right and in fact the first person to eat turkey was King Henry VIII
39:59when we say recent I mean not not not like just something which we borrowed from the Americans for
40:04Thanksgiving dinner or something like that it really does stretch back to as soon as they discovered
40:08America the first thing they did was bring back a turkey then it was actually imported by a Scotsman and
40:13they brought back six birds and most I think of the birds that are in the UK now were from those six birds
40:20traditionally people ate geese for Christmas and once turkey became a little bit more commonplace
40:27only sort of people with a medium to high income could afford it and the very rich would eat beef
40:35it feels oddly doesn't it a little bit sort of well to me anyway a little bit sort of um sacrilegious or as
40:43if you're breaking the rules to eat beef but it's that's not the case no I mean in medieval times
40:47they ate all sorts of things like larks and the whole variety of game wild boar which is why they
40:54would have a wild boar's head on the table thing is it wasn't until really Victorian times that Christmas
40:59as what we think of now really took off and that was really with the advent of Charles Dickens and and
41:05a Christmas Carol because in that you know Bob Cratchit is actually eating a goose and he's eating
41:12that he's eating the the poorest celebration the sort of exact a thin goose as it were because
41:18there's not an enormous amount of meat on the goose and Dickens actually describes which is fun he
41:22actually describes them eating every morsel of the goose they've sort of they're so hungry that they
41:28basically they eat there's nothing barely anything left on the plate by the time they've finished with it
41:32and and then Scrooge goes out and gets and gets them a turkey because that's one level up from
41:38eating a goose it indicates that they're trying yeah and interestingly enough actually Andre we know
41:44that Charles Dickens himself settled down to a turkey on Christmas Day in 1843 oh well I didn't
41:51know so perhaps he didn't feel he had enough money quite to stretch to beef himself or perhaps he just
41:59liked turkey he certainly popularized it but he also knew that for poor people like the Cratchits
42:05a skinny Christmas goose was the most important meal of their year because it might be the only day
42:12when they actually had full stomachs God bless us everyone God bless us everyone Bob said he didn't
42:24believe there ever was such a goose cooked its tenderness and flavor size and cheapness were the themes of
42:32universal admiration eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family
42:39indeed as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish they hadn't at it all at last yet every one had had enough
42:51when they're the first time to eat the goose Bob Cratchit said it was the greatest success achieved by Mrs.
43:01Cratchit since their marriage well now in the 21st century of course that is an appalling horrifyingly
43:09sexist thing to say the best thing she ever achieved was cooking this goose but when they sit around the
43:15hearth and they've thrown the chestnuts on the fire and Bob pours out into what he said the family display of glass
43:23two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle but they held the hot liquid in the jug as well as golden
43:30goblets would have done and Bob poured it out with beaming looks it's it's you know a sense of warmth just floods
43:39through that scene and it's very infectious a feeling of shared happiness was vital to Dickens it
43:50was part of another old seasonal tradition that he felt had almost died out charity but for Dickens
43:57charity wasn't some quaint custom from the past it was very much the essence of Christmas present he knew
44:05that it was possible in the streets outside his house for people to starve to death
44:13while Dickens was writing the Christmas Carol he got into the habit of taking extremely long walks
44:19through the streets of London sometimes covering 15 to 20 miles in a single night we have no idea
44:28of the depths of poverty that he actually made a point of searching out but we get a clue in the book
44:37when a Christmas Carol suddenly takes on a much darker and stronger purpose
44:44it's at the end of the chapter with the ghost of Christmas present and Scrooge suddenly
44:51he notices something protruding from the long coat that the spirit wears at first he thinks
45:01it's a claw or a foot and he asks the ghost what it is and the ghost shows him
45:11they were a boy and a girl yellow meager ragged scowling wolfish but prostrate too in their humility
45:29spirit are they yours Scrooge could say no more they are man's said the spirit this boy is ignorance
45:38this girl is want beware them both but most of all beware this boy for on his brow i see that written
45:47which is doom
45:52London in the 1840s was dotted with what were called rookeries slums we would say where as many as 20 000
46:00people will be crammed into an area of a few small streets
46:03the filthy and miserable appearance of this part of london can hardly be imagined by those who have not
46:11witnessed it
46:14wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper
46:19filth everywhere clothes drying and slops emptying from the windows men and women in every variety of
46:27scanty and dirty apparel lounging drinking smoking squabbling and swearing
46:37dickens had never been afraid of delivering a strong social message in his novels
46:42oliver twist was his protest against the institutional cruelty of the new poor law
46:47nicholas nickleby highlighted the abuses at yorkshire boarding schools
46:51and a christmas carol right from the beginning was conceived as another campaigning story
47:02in october 1842 dickens had been filled with indignation at a parliamentary report
47:10into the employment and conditions of children in the mines and manufacturers so much so that he
47:16decided with a few friends to go and actually visit a mine what he saw there incensed him and he
47:23decided to write a pamphlet an appeal to the people of england on behalf of the poor man's children and
47:30while he was preparing this he was making a speech in manchester in 1843 when he suddenly conceived of
47:36writing his short novel instead
47:39he wrote what he hoped would be as he put it a hammer blow to draw attention to child poverty
47:49i think he wanted to show people that it was everyone's responsibility to help the poor that
47:54that somebody like scrooge could have this great conversion and that's what everyone should be doing
47:58that's what christmas should be about it should be kept in people's hearts and lived throughout the whole year
48:03in creating those two children ignorance and want and saying unless you solve the problems that these
48:12two young people represent disaster awaits you it awaits all of society it will just collapse and
48:18crumble unless you solve these problems dickens told the victorians that charity was the essential
48:26tradition of christmas there were feastings and parties games turkeys plum puddings and christmas cheer
48:32plenty in a christmas carol but all these things were meaningless unless they could be shared and
48:37enjoyed by all with their family in their home but could charles dickens own family christmas live up to
48:46this demanding ideal to find out we're going to enlist the help of the spirit of christmas future
48:53we're going forward to 1867 24 years after a christmas carol was first published
49:02it's christmas day but charles dickens is on a train traveling from boston to new york he's distracted by
49:10a painful foot he's still only 55 but worn out by hard work he looks 20 years older dickens is in america to
49:19make money 20 000 pounds by all accounts and he sacrificed christmas to do so
49:29he's embarked on one of his now famous reading tours appearing on stage to deliver extracts from his most
49:36popular novels
49:39charles dickens first started reading his works aloud to the public for charity in 1853
49:45but as is often the way he got asked so much he wondered whether he should do it for money and in
49:531858 he started charging and it soon turned into a hugely lucrative business he toured all over england
50:00and by the time he got to america he was filling two thousand seaters at two dollars per ticket
50:05well i'm sure you can do the mathematics
50:08could he be accused of commercializing christmas as much as championing it dickens was wildly
50:14successful wherever he appeared and the most popular reading in his repertoire was always a christmas carol
50:22scrooge was better than his word and to tiny tim who did not die he was a second father and it was
50:31always said of him ever afterwards that he knew how to keep christmas well if any man alive possess the
50:41knowledge may that be truly said of all of us and so as tiny tim observed god bless us everyone
50:53over the last 24 years christmas had certainly become a big part of dickens financial planning
51:02following the success of a christmas carol dickens produced a whole series of christmas books
51:08there was the chimes the cricket on the hearth the battle of life and the haunted man none of them
51:17were actually as good as the original story of bob cratchett and scrooge but they were
51:23as popular if not more so and then he presented special christmas editions of the magazines he
51:28edited all the year round and household words culminating in the 1867 christmas edition which sold
51:35over 300 000 copies if anybody was turning christmas into a business opportunity
51:43it was charles dickens himself but he was increasingly disillusioned by it
51:48the extra christmas number has now been so extensively and regularly and often imitated
51:56that it is in very great danger of becoming tiresome
51:59i have therefore resolved though i cannot add willingly to abolish it at the highest tide of its success
52:07but there might have been other deeper regrets at work on that train too
52:13what about that other essential element of his vision of christmas
52:17the family dickens had by now forced a separation on his wife catherine
52:23first by building a wall down the middle of their bedroom before finally turning her out of the house
52:32his wife had a great number of pregnancies i mean she
52:35had 10 children and at least two miscarriages in a 15-year period and she suffered from what we
52:41now know as postnatal depression after each one and the more that their marriage developed and she
52:46became less attractive to him she put on a lot of weight and she wasn't so interested in all the
52:51things that he was interested in he retained this very kind of buzzy outward going wanting
52:56to go out and meet people's sociable exterior whereas catherine just became slightly more depressed
53:01they separated in 1858 um and this really wasn't dickens's finest hour he was quite terrible towards
53:09her he'd fallen in love with an 18 year old actress very familiar story middle-aged man falling
53:14in love with a very young girl and he decided that he he couldn't be with his wife and be with ellen
53:20turnen the young actress so he kind of kicked his wife out of the home one of the saddest things i i
53:25felt when i was researching the book about their daughter katie was that catherine would have she
53:30would have parties for local children in the area that she lived in regents park but none of her
53:35own children were ever able to come it was very sad charles dickens relationships with his children
53:42were also marked with regret his eldest son flaster flobby had grown up and was now a bankrupt
53:51he was estranged from his daughter lucifer box
53:56and young skull had left for india in 1857 aged 16. dickens never saw him alive again he died
54:04six years later perhaps most tragic of all was his third daughter dora who died before her first birthday
54:12so all in all 1867 is hardly a very happy christmas for charles dickens he's even had to leave his
54:21mistress behind he couldn't risk the public scandal of bringing her to america and instead he writes
54:27weekly letters sent secretly via a friend in london
54:34so as he sat on the train trundling through the american countryside
54:40he was a very very long way from that vision of family forgiveness and family togetherness and family
54:47warmth by the fireside which had seemed such an essential part of the vision of a christmas carol
54:54and in fact even the spirit of giving had become slightly tawtry to him because he thought that people
55:02used christmas as an excuse to give too little and then demand too much from the recipients
55:10but however jaded dickens personally might have been there's absolutely no doubt that his magic was
55:18still extraordinarily potent the evening before he got on the train he'd appeared in boston and he'd given
55:25a reading as he usually did of a christmas carol a couple had been in the audience from vermont and they
55:35left the theater went straight home and gave their entire workforce in their factory a day off for
55:42christmas something they'd never done before it would seem that christmas and a christmas carol now had a
55:52momentum over which charles dickens had little control but dickens himself was running out of time
56:00two years after returning from america aged only 58 charles dickens died of a stroke his son charlie
56:11was sure that the trip to america had shortened his father's life
56:21it's said that when charles dickens died a costamonger's daughter turned to her father and said daddy
56:27does that mean there won't be christmas anymore and what what i like about that story is not that
56:32it reflects on the on the feelings of sentimental little girls but it shows that somehow that charles
56:39dickens idea of christmas so cleverly corresponds to our own idea of christmas christmas is after all
56:47a huge imaginative fantasy and he got it it may be a fantasy but it's something that is i think
56:56he's really worth pursuing um and and there's something else the being together is important but
57:02it's giving as well um and that's that's the big change for screwed he is selfish and mean with his
57:10money and he's selfish and mean with himself he doesn't love because loving means giving it means
57:18sharing it means risking yourself means opening your heart
57:27reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many not on your past misfortunes
57:35of which all men have some fill your glass again with a merry face and contented heart
57:41our life on it but your christmas shall be merry and your new year a happy one
57:55god bless us everyone
58:03what better way to get well and truly into the festive spirit than a choral christmas
58:21an hour of special music one of the christmas mixes listen now on bbc sounds
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