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2:00

Gomorri Corner, he's a comedian, actor,

2:02

podcaster and globally renowned moustache ambassador.

2:04

You'll have seen him in Taskmaster,

2:06

Man Down, Horrible Histories and The

2:08

Moonstone. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome, Mike.

2:11

Hello. Merry Christmas, one and all. Lovely to

2:13

have you back, Mike. Are you feeling Christmasy?

2:16

Are you feeling Dickensian? I'm

2:18

feeling very Christmasy. I think feeling Christmasy

2:21

and feeling Dickensian, they're sort of, they're

2:23

part of each other, aren't they? Everyone's

2:25

sort of nobly strutting around town with

2:27

their chins high up in

2:29

the air, bellowing Merry Christmas, one and all and all

2:31

that kind of thing. So,

2:35

what do you know? We

2:41

start as ever with the so what do

2:43

you know? This is where I try and

2:45

guess what our listener might know about today's

2:48

subject and it's Charles Dickens. You know about

2:50

Charles Dickens, but in terms of Dickens and

2:52

Christmas specifically, I am guessing it is the

2:54

novel, A Christmas Carol that you're going to

2:56

know. It features the miserly Scrooge who gets

2:59

ghosted in triplicate into changing his ways. It's

3:01

been adapted into countless theatre productions, TV dramas,

3:03

radio broadcasts, graphic novels, ballets, operas and not

3:05

even counting the 30 plus films.

3:08

But what about the man himself, the big

3:11

Chuck D? How did

3:13

he experience Christmas in his lifetime?

3:15

Let's find out. Right then. Charles

3:18

John Huffam Dickens, good name, was born on

3:20

the 7th of February 1812 in which town,

3:24

Mike, I think you know it quite well. He

3:27

was born in Portsmouth. I know that because I grew up

3:29

in Portsmouth. He was. And that's a

3:31

Portsmouth thing. That was us. That

3:33

was. We did that. We

3:35

made a Dickens. What did you do,

3:38

Southampton? Emily,

3:41

why Portsmouth? What's the family situation?

3:43

So, Dickens has quite a big family. And it's

3:45

a fairly poor family. They move around a lot.

3:48

He's born in Portsmouth, but they go to London,

3:50

they go to Chatham. His dad was John Dickens.

3:52

He was a payroll clerk in the Royal Navy.

3:55

His mum was Elizabeth Dickens. He had

3:57

an older sister. His name was Fanny and six

3:59

younger siblings. we get the older Dickens

4:01

remembering for his childhood and his remembrances are

4:03

of toys, Emily. He's slightly terrified of his

4:06

toys. Yeah, absolutely. So we do

4:08

know a bit about Charles's childhood

4:10

Christmases, mostly from autobiographical elements in

4:12

his later stories and journalism. So

4:15

yeah, we know that Dickens had toys and

4:17

he does describe some of them as quite terrifying.

4:20

One toy had lobster eyes that bore

4:22

down onto him. Another one was a

4:24

cardboard man whose legs could be pulled

4:26

up right around his neck, making

4:29

him in Dickens's words, ghastly

4:31

and not a creature to be alone in. Mike,

4:36

have you ever been traumatized by your childhood toys? Traumatized

4:40

by my childhood wardrobe, the way the

4:43

wood was cut, there was a very

4:45

sort of ghoulish kind of Edvard Munchin

4:47

type face in the door that sort of faced

4:49

me every night and it would sort

4:51

of catch the moonlight off the window through

4:54

the curtains and don't get

4:56

a lot of sleep in a small town

4:58

by any means. Charles Dickens's childhood was not

5:01

full of deprivation, he had toys, even if they

5:03

were harrowing and scary. And

5:05

also in the multiple words of the song, baby,

5:08

it was cold outside because we're

5:10

talking here about a mini Ice Age. His

5:12

first eight Christmases were white Christmases. It

5:14

was the coldest decade since the 1690s.

5:17

So there's no likely left an impression

5:19

on him as lots of his Christmas stories

5:21

later include that kind of extremely cold weather

5:23

that we wish that we would get now

5:25

that snowy Christmas. And it was

5:28

so icy during Dickens's early years that

5:30

the River Thames froze in February of

5:32

1814 and London celebrated its

5:34

final Thames Frost Fair that year. So

5:36

what they would do is roll out tents and

5:39

vendors onto the ice, do drinking,

5:41

dancing, bowling and there was even an

5:43

elephant being led across the river just

5:45

below Blackfriars Bridge. Did they try

5:47

anything before the elephant? It's

5:52

a bit of a gambit, isn't it? It's like, we know

5:54

this is just frozen water, so let's get the heaviest thing

5:56

we can find in the zoo. And was it

5:59

just dancers

10:00

for Christmas and take the kids to a

10:02

toy shop in Hoban on Christmas Eve. And

10:04

as well as filling their home at Gads

10:06

Hill with guests, they kept a cottage in

10:08

the village reserved for the use of the

10:10

bachelor members of the holiday. It's like a

10:13

sort of Airbnb, but for bachelors, it's

10:15

great. It's sort of get all

10:17

the single lads, put them in the cottage in the

10:19

village and then they can come over away from the

10:21

kids. But

10:24

I mean, Mike, in terms of your Christmases, you're

10:26

a dad, children running around song and

10:29

dance, theatre, magic tricks. Are you the life and

10:31

soul of the party? The kids are crucial, right?

10:33

That's the whole point in our household. It's not

10:35

a massive family. There'll be mine and my sister's

10:38

children. There's four children, a couple of dogs. That's

10:40

plenty. We don't invite any bachelors to our

10:43

Christmas. That's why I draw the line. That

10:45

was too high risk. All that moon's swimming

10:47

around. Oh, what a gravy. It's

10:51

a mess. We do

10:53

have from 1847, not a Christmas story,

10:55

but we do have a Dickens Punch recipe

10:57

for Christmas party. Mike, you

10:59

are a renowned voiceover artist. Would

11:02

you like to give us your

11:04

finest Nigella voice for this Christmas recipe

11:06

for punch? Peel into a very

11:08

common basin, which may be broken in case of

11:11

accident without damage to the owner's piece or pocket.

11:13

The rinds of three lemons cut very thin.

11:17

Add a double handful of lump sugar, a

11:19

good measure, a pint of good old rum

11:21

and a large wine glass of good old

11:23

brandy. If it don't be a large claret

11:25

glass, say two. Set

11:28

this on fire. Let it burn three

11:30

or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to

11:32

time, then extinguish it. Squeeze

11:34

in the juice of the three lemons and add a quart of

11:36

boiling water. Stir the whole well,

11:38

cover it up for five minutes and stir

11:40

again. Lovely, beautifully done, Mike. I

11:43

mean, I'm a teetotaler, but I feel like I want to

11:45

drink this. There's another one, another

11:47

punch called Nagus that shows up a lot in

11:49

Dickens' novels. It was very, very boozy and the

11:51

Victorians would give it to kids. So

11:54

at Christmas parties, Dickens' kids are almost

11:56

certainly drinking quite boozy punch. Dickens

11:58

then has another big. It's a

12:00

novel by the name of Oliver Twist in 1838. Then

12:03

you get Nicholas Nickleby, followed by The Old Curiosity Shop

12:05

in 1840, so it's going quite well. Then

12:08

he has his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge. It's not

12:10

going so well at that point. No one

12:12

has read. And then he's off

12:14

to America, 1842. And

12:16

does he have a nice time, stateside Emily? So the

12:18

1840s is when he's really starting to get famous. And

12:21

in a letter to a friend, he writes, I can

12:23

do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where

12:25

I want to go, and see nothing that I want

12:27

to see. If I turn into the street, I'm followed

12:29

by a multitude. So he's properly, properly

12:32

famous in the States. Catherine is pregnant with their fifth child

12:34

by this point. He needs a big hit to pay the

12:36

bills. And so in 1843, he

12:38

scribbles a little novella, and it is called

12:40

Mike. Is this Christmas Carol time, is

12:42

it? It is a Christmas Carol.

12:45

And Emily, after a bumpy old childhood, he's not

12:47

just scared of falling back into a poverty himself. He

12:50

has a social conscience. Absolutely. Dickens

12:52

is very interested in the poor and the kind of

12:55

plight of the poor. He visited

12:57

Cornish Chin Mines earlier in that year,

12:59

where he saw children laboring in terrible

13:01

conditions. A parliamentary report of the Children's

13:03

Employment Commission had revealed many of the

13:06

horrifying realities of industrialization. Dickens

13:08

actually considered writing a pamphlet in response to

13:10

that. And thank God he didn't. He decided

13:13

that fiction could be more

13:15

powerful. Dickens' difficult upbringing and

13:17

his mixed class background meant he engaged with

13:19

social issues in a very personally informed way.

13:22

So this social commentary was rare and impactful. And

13:24

again, thank God it was in fiction and not

13:26

in a pamphlet. No, the Muppets Christmas

13:28

pamphlet doesn't really have the same ring

13:30

to it, does it? I

13:34

love a Christmas Carol, Mike, because I think

13:36

it does two things extremely well. It's quite

13:38

spooky. It's also really funny. And that's very

13:40

hard to pull off. Well, certainly he's always

13:42

funny, isn't he, Dickens? They're genuinely terrifying ghosts,

13:46

aren't they? The way the first one is described,

13:48

the Ghost of Christmas Past, it shifts in its

13:51

shape, doesn't it? It's quite

13:53

freaky, really. Christmas present is

13:55

looks avuncular and is dressed

13:57

in green. He's very cheerful about it, but he

13:59

keeps... He's

16:00

told that actually he fell from the tower during his

16:03

climb and he's now dead, but at the end of

16:05

the book Trotty finds himself awakening at home as if

16:07

from a dream as the bells ring in the new

16:09

year. So it's very, it's a wonderful life in that

16:11

way. There's still time, another last chance

16:14

basically. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,

16:16

it's a Christmas carol with goblins. I

16:19

do remember reading one that had goblins

16:21

that was about a gravedigger, I seem

16:23

to remember. They do a similar thing to him with Scrooge and

16:25

they tell him he's a terrible bloke and they take him to

16:27

a cabin and sort of rough him up a bit. So

16:30

Mike's absolutely right. There's an earlier Christmas

16:32

story. Oh. Yeah, from the Pickwick

16:34

papers called The Goblins Who Stole the

16:36

Sexton. So he likes the goblins and

16:39

he's been thinking about these Christmas stories

16:41

for a while. It's all reassuring that

16:43

I haven't just completely invented some goblins. So

16:48

we've had the chimes and now we move on to the next

16:50

story for the following year, It's

16:52

called The Cricket on the Half and it

16:54

stars another brilliantly named character called John

16:57

Piribingle who lives with his young wife

16:59

Dot, their baby boy and their nanny,

17:01

Tilly Slowboy. What happens in The Cricket

17:03

in the Half, Emily? So it features a cricket

17:05

who chirps on the half and acts as a

17:07

kind of guardian angel to the family. One

17:10

day a mysterious elderly stranger comes to

17:12

visit the Piribingles and their

17:14

life intersects with Caleb Plummer, a poor

17:16

toy maker employed by the miserly Mr

17:19

Tackleton. I'm not going to spoil all

17:21

the details but scandal, intrigue and obviously

17:23

a miserly heart melted by appropriate festive

17:26

cheer. It sounds like a Christmas carol

17:28

with added Pinocchio elements. Yeah, why not? Yeah,

17:31

it's not a sequel, it's just, yeah, same

17:33

thing with a bit of jazzle. Exactly. Give

17:36

the people what they want. Let's move on

17:38

then from The Cricket on the Half, which

17:40

is quite successful and it's quite a big theatrical

17:42

success, isn't it Emily? Yeah, so although

17:44

we don't really read it today, it

17:47

quickly went through two editions and had

17:49

huge theatrical success with 17 different

17:51

theatres in London during the Christmas period of 1845 putting

17:53

it on. Dickens

17:56

sometimes found plays of his work difficult

17:58

to watch, once being so embarassed by

18:00

a production of Oliver Twist that he lay down on the

18:02

floor of his box in the middle of the first

18:04

act and stayed there until the end of the play.

18:08

But he also had a very nifty marketing trick

18:10

for this one where he gave his friend the

18:13

playwright Albert Smith the cricket on the half in

18:15

advance so that the theatrical version could open on

18:17

the same day that it was published. Oh

18:19

nice. Brand synergy. So this is basically Dickens in

18:22

his sort of Spice Girl era where he's

18:24

getting Christmas number one year after year. He's

18:27

making hay isn't he? He is. He's racking

18:29

up the Christmas hits. And then you get

18:31

his next Christmas book in 1846 called The Battle of Life. Mike,

18:35

what's the plot of The Battle of Life? It

18:37

doesn't even sound very Dickensian either does it? It doesn't

18:39

really. It sounds like a Powell and

18:42

Pressburger movie doesn't it? Or a very, very,

18:44

very dodgy soap opera that lasted for six

18:46

episodes. Emily,

18:48

what's The Battle of Life? Yeah,

18:50

it's interesting you say it's not very Dickensian

18:52

because this is the only one with no supernatural

18:55

elements in it. So the protagonist

18:57

is Dr. Jeddler and he finds life a joke

18:59

and thinks human cares and issues are trivial. But

19:02

he does have a change of heart because of

19:04

his two daughters who hide their love for their

19:06

mutual friend Alfred so that the other can have

19:08

him. In terms of

19:10

the theatrical side, Albert Smith again opens a

19:12

dramatization on publication day and the plays

19:14

in this case were actually more successful than

19:17

the book. The Battle of Life doesn't have

19:19

the supernatural elements. We really associate Dickens with

19:21

those kind of ghostly moral lessons. Is this

19:24

a new technique? He's pioneered? Is

19:26

he borrowing someone else's tradition? So

19:28

Christmas ghost stories are probably a

19:30

very old tradition and interest rose

19:33

in response to industrialization, the rise

19:35

of science, new technologies. Early

19:38

photography might capture accidental ghostly images of

19:40

blurry double exposures. There's

19:42

a nice meeting of kind of modern

19:44

issues and old forms in an era

19:47

of mesmerism, which Dickens was really interested

19:49

in, spiritualism, ghost hunting. Some

19:52

scholars have even suggested that leaking gas lamps

19:54

as kind of part of the Victorian city

19:57

meant people were hallucinating more due to...

20:00

Carbon monoxide poisoning. Mike,

20:03

where do we stand on the carbon monoxide

20:06

poisoning good for literature debate? Sounds

20:09

like it was more than worth it, I'd say. Poison

20:12

those Victorians so we get some

20:15

great ideas and some absolutely great

20:17

novels. Thanks everybody. Dickens does not

20:19

write a Christmas book in 1847. He's too busy. 1848.

20:23

It's another Christmas book. This one is

20:25

called The Haunted Man and the Ghost's

20:27

Bargain. It's a bit more spooky

20:29

again. I'm gonna say it Mike. It should have

20:31

sound a lot like Christmas Carol. Um

20:35

but if it ain't broke, right? Emily,

20:39

what's the plot? So it's a bit

20:41

different. It's about an unhappy chemistry professor called

20:43

Redlaw who's haunted by his own ghostly double.

20:46

The ghost says he can take away Redlaw's

20:48

painful memories and he accepts but instead of

20:50

feeling happy he feels sad and angry but

20:52

doesn't know why. So we

20:54

have the nice moral lesson that pain serves

20:57

a purpose as it allows us to forgive

20:59

and grow as people and

21:01

Redlaw understands this and becomes a

21:03

happier, kinder and more humble person.

21:05

So in 1849 we get David Copperfield.

21:07

This was meant to be an autobiography but

21:09

he chickens out, makes it a fictional book

21:11

and then in 1850 you get Household Words.

21:14

He's kind of launching a magazine and it's got a

21:16

Christmas edition every year. The 1851 edition has a lovely

21:20

piece called What Christmas Is to a

21:22

Bunch of People which I love as

21:24

a title. It's so un-Victorian. But

21:27

it's actually a really lovely piece and it's

21:29

about how different people experience Christmas in the

21:31

family and I thought maybe Mike

21:33

you'd like to give us your finest Dickensian

21:36

performance of The Father. He

21:49

will get through his Christmas bills somehow or other

21:51

as he has done before. What if he does see half a

21:54

dozen more great hairs

22:00

displaying themselves, as though to remind him that

22:02

another year has passed, and a certain

22:04

line or two in his face does look a trifle deeper than when

22:06

he had last observed it. Meanwhile

22:08

he stands, thrumming a pleased but impatient tattoo

22:10

with his fingers upon the banisters, and

22:13

inhaling every now and then a savoury whiff

22:15

of sweet herbs rising up from the kitchen.

22:18

Ah, beautifully done. Thank you so much, Mike. He's

22:21

a happy little chap, isn't he? But the

22:23

little sense there of the grey hairs coming,

22:25

the wrinkles deepening, the fills, the worries. I

22:28

get this guy, I get where he's coming

22:30

from. He's going to

22:32

put all that into tomorrow's box, tomorrow's me

22:34

can sort that out. He's going to have

22:36

a good time. He's got some chestnuts to

22:38

eat. But then in 1851 we get a

22:40

different essay the following year, and

22:43

it's called What Christmas Is As We Grow

22:45

Older, and it's much more profoundly moving

22:47

and sad. I suppose Emily, the question

22:49

always with Dickens is, is this coming from

22:51

his personal life? Yeah, so

22:53

Dickens did experience a lot of trauma in his

22:56

life. We talked about his childhood. At this moment

22:58

of writing, he's recently lost his baby daughter, Dora,

23:00

his father, John, and his

23:02

beloved older sister, Fanny, and her son, Henry,

23:04

who was possibly the inspiration for Tiny Tim.

23:07

And all of that happens within three years. Yeah,

23:11

it's definitely a tough time for him. You can

23:13

see the sadness infused into his

23:15

writing here. And in

23:17

the 1850s, Dickens is back to writing

23:19

novels, Bleak House, Hard Times,

23:22

Little Dorrit, and in

23:24

1857 the Christmas bubble properly bursts because

23:26

our 45-year-old Charlie meets an

23:29

18-year-old actress called Ellen

23:31

Ternan, and things get disappointingly predictable.

23:34

Yeah, it's not a great look, and it's a

23:36

problem for his reputation as this kind of moral

23:38

figure as well. He ruthlessly separates from Catherine

23:40

in 1858. She has to move out of

23:42

the house. She doesn't see most of her

23:44

children again until after Dickens dies. And

23:47

this is kind of spurred by having a bracelet

23:49

sent to her that was meant for Ellen. That's

23:53

the plot of Love Actually. Hang on a minute, Love

23:55

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23:57

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