Birmingham historian Carl Chinn explores Charles Dickens’ long relationship with the city, from packed Victorian readings of A Christmas Carol at Town Hall to a new talk in Digbeth’s Irish Quarter. The report looks at how Birmingham helped shape our idea of Christmas, and what that history says about class, culture and conscience in the city today.
00:00Dickens is often imagined as a writer rooted in London, but his bond with Birmingham ran far deeper than a passing visit.
00:08He returned to the city repeatedly across the 1830s to 1870s, finding an audience that recognised the struggles he wrote about.
00:16Those crowds weren't gentry, they were craftsmen, factory hands and clerks who saw their own lives in his stories.
00:22That history sits behind Carl Chin's work and it opens the door as to why Dickens kept coming back.
00:30He came here first as a young political reporter and he wrote that Birmingham was a town of iron and radicals.
00:37Iron because of all the metal that we worked and the radicals because Birmingham had been at the forefront of the movement for democracy, pushing forward for the Great Reform Act of 1832.
00:48And it wasn't long after that visit that Dickens had his first great success, the posthumous papers of Mr Pickwick.
00:57By the 1850s, Dickens wasn't just visiting, he chose Birmingham to launch his public readings, rising money for an institute designed to give working people access to education.
01:09Those nights at the town hall weren't just performances, they were a statement about who he wanted to speak to and whose future mattered.
01:16The link between culture, learning and the city's industrial workforce still runs through Birmingham today and it gives weight to the legacy that followed.
01:25The self-educated working class, the aspiring working class, and those are the people that Dickens was always shouting out for, as well as for the poor who didn't have the opportunities for self-improvement.
01:38So when he came here to Birmingham, Dickens felt not only a bond with the place physically, and you can see that through, or you can read that in his words about Birmingham, but he felt a bond with Birmingham emotionally, as a place, a town that epitomised self-improvement, self-education.
02:00Dickens' Christmas stories are remembered for warmth, but the world he stepped into in Birmingham was anything but gentle.
02:08The city was noisy, polluted and crowded, with many families living on irregular wages.
02:14Yet his performances offered a tale of redemption and moral duty.
02:17That contrast is part of what makes his Birmingham visit so striking.
02:21He saw hardship up close, then held up the idea that society should still choose compassion.
02:26But he acknowledged the hardships of the working class.
02:30Working class, particularly poorer working class people, who were the majority of the working class, couldn't afford to buy a book.
02:36But if you bring out your books in monthly episodes, and then you can get whosoever could read well to read it out aloud.
02:47So Dickens captured the heart of the working class because he gave them an opportunity to listen to his stories.
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