It's 24th December, 1843...
and a man is hurrying through the streets of London to get home to his family.
Tomorrow is Christmas Day.
But if you were walking through the centre of London, you'd hardly be aware of it.
Over in Printing House Square, they're producing tomorrow's edition
of the Times, just as if it was any other day.
Here it is, here's a copy - London, Monday December 25th, 1843.
But astonishingly, if you look through the paper, there isn't a single reference to Christmas.
In fact, there's scarcely been a reference to Christmas in the Times for 25 years.
And yet 1843 was a momentous year in the history of Christmas,
because it was the year that this man, Charles Dickens,
published A Christmas Carol.
This little book IS Christmas.
It is full of presents, decorations, turkey, plum puddings,
family parties, and most of all, goodwill to all men.
But as it happens, all these things we think of
as completely traditional were in fact newly fashionable at this time.
This is the story of how Christmas as we know it had to be invented,
and how Charles Dickens came to tell the world
that they had a positive duty to celebrate it.
Charles Dickens is heading home to celebrate the season.
But what sort of celebration is that going to be?
And what sort of man is he?
He's hurried home to his rather comfortable house
not far from London's Regent's Park.
And he'll do what quite a lot of well set-up Victorians
like to do at this time.
It's new, and it's fashionable,
and it's to celebrate a private, family Christmas.
In his writing he summons up a picture of overwhelming enthusiasm.
"Then the shouting and the struggling and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter to despoil him
"of brown paper parcels, the wonder and delight
"with which the development of every package was received."
We know quite a lot of what Charles Dickens got up to in the Christmas
of 1843, the year that he published A Christmas Carol.
And I think probably the reason he loved Christmas so much was because it was a perfect time for him.
His children were young enough to enjoy it.
And he was innocent enough to love it too.
At this stage of his life, he has four very small children and he gave them all elaborate nicknames.
The eldest, Charlie, was known as Fluster Flobby.
Mamie was called Mild Gloucester.
Katy was Lucifer Box, which is a Victorian name for matches.
And little Walter had the charming name of Young Skull.
Dickens' wife Catherine was expecting another baby at any moment.
Her younger sister Georgina also lived with the family.
And Dickens close friend, Forster, who would be his first biographer and often shared his house.
Dickens still looks quite young, doesn't he?
In fact, he was only 31 years old.
But he's already a literary giant.
The celebrated author of the Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.
These novels distilled the character, the colour, and the sheer harshness of the early 1800s.
They'd made Dickens the writer of his age.
Dickens really was, if not the first celebrity,
the first celebrity author. He went on book tours,
and went abroad to give book tours.
And gave special readings for charity.
I want to take you first of all back to 1843 - he's just come back
from America earlier in the year.
Yes he got back, yeah,
he got back from America in 1842.
And he'd been there for six months - he hadn't actually told his wife how long they were going for.
He said it would be about three months. And then when he came back, started working on Christmas Carol.
It came out on 19th December, 1843.
It sold out within days which is incredible.
It just shows what a massive celebrity he'd become by that point.
So there he is, I mean, he's almost like the sort of sage of his era.
The person that everybody will listen to. So why do you think he chose Christmas as his subject?
He loved Christmas. His daughter Mamie said that it was his favourite time of year.
And he made them all love it. He sent his children off to learn dancing.
His two daughters Mamie and Katy learnt the polka once.
So that he could dance with them, dancing was a huge part of the Dickens family life.
And Catherine Dickens was usually pregnant so, although she'd loved dancing beforehand, most Christmases
she seemed to be imminently about to give birth so Dickens would often dance with his daughters instead.
And this year, he was planning his biggest Christmas celebration ever.
As well as dinners, games and magic lantern shows. His week would include a party for all his friends.
There would be a trip to the pantomime at the Haymarket Theatre
and it would end with another huge party for his son's birthday.
One of Charles Dickens's own rules of Christmas was to make every
conceivable effort to entertain his family and his friends.
He'd even gone to the bother of buying a complete set of conjuring tricks from a professional magician.
He spent hours rehearsing and preparing for a show.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
I am the unparalleled necromancer!
He was pretty good at it too.
As one of his guests noted.
"This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding
"made out of raw eggs, raw flour,
"all the raw usual ingredients, boiled in a gentleman's hat and tumbled out wreaking,
all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children and the astonished grown people.
A Christmas pudding!
Charles Dickens seemed utterly dedicated to doing Christmas properly.
their daily concerns for Christmas,
and at this time, he did have quite a few of his own.
Not everything in this busy household was perfect.
Perhaps one of Dickens's best tricks was sustaining the illusion that his marriage was entirely happy.
In a recent letter, he'd referred to his wife as "the donkey".
And he'd had problems with his father who'd been borrowing money
using his famous son's name.
His father really just used Charles Dickens as a meal ticket.
He'd always been getting himself into trouble, but as soon as he realised that his son was financially secure,
and quite wealthy, he would just say, well, I'm Charles Dickens's father, and people would give him credit.
But in the autumn of this year,
the first instalments of his latest novel Martin Chuzzlewit were not selling as well as he'd hoped.
He'd written A Christmas Carol in six hectic weeks.
And he had every hope that this, at least, would be a financial success.
This very Christmas Eve, he received some rather heartening news from his publishers.
In just five days, A Christmas Carol had sold 6,000 copies -
an astonishing figure.
It looked like it had netted Dickens a small fortune. Or so he thought.
As it happens, he'd been a little too lavish with his ideas
for the illustrations and the design for this book.
So he expected to make about £1,000, but he wasn't to know that evening.
In fact he was only going to make 230 quid off the initial sales of A Christmas Carol.
He'd been a little bit too generous in his Christmas gift to the world.
"The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand, and Scrooge
"starting up into a half-recumbent attitude found himself face-to-face
"with the unearthly visitor who drew them."
It was an immediate hit.
So what were the ingredients of its success?
Well, first and foremost it was a brilliant piece of entertainment.
A terrific scary ghost story.
"It was a strange figure, like a child,
"yet not so like a child but like an old man viewed through some supernatural medium."
As 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, the father
of the crippled boy Tiny Tim, a day off work.
But then Scrooge is visited by a series of different ghosts
who take him on a journey to discover the meaning of Christmas.
"Are you the spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?"
..asked Scrooge.
"I am."
"Who and what are you?"
..demanded Scrooge.
"I am the ghost of Christmas past."
"Long past?"
..enquired Scrooge.
"No, your past."
The ghost takes Scrooge back to look at his childhood
when he was able to enjoy Christmas before the love of money took over.
He calls Christmas a humbug.
One reason for the book's success was that it had a powerful message.
It was a ghost in front of him.
It's a message that children still respond to today.
It was about a man who was really angry and hated
Christmas and hated everything and didn't want to give anyone money.
Then these ghosts came of Christmas
and showed him what would happen if he kept doing this.
When he was with the ghost of Christmas past, it showed him,
And the Christmas present, it showed him
everyone altogether enjoying Christmas.
And the future, when everyone was talking about his death they was all happy.
So he thought, "Everyone hates me, so I've gotta be a better man."
I like the end part, like when he suddenly changes.
When he woke up he just suddenly started being nice to everyone.
It's basically saying if you don't enjoy yourself other people won't enjoy themselves.
And the moral is what goes around comes back around.
Dickens's message was popular with the highly moral Victorians.
In the year after it first appeared as a book, there were no less than eight different theatre productions
of A Christmas Carol and the story has been performed countless times since on stage and on film.
Patrick Stewart has done both, and knows that adults find as much in it as children.
I think that the secret of it is the second chance.
And particularly this is something which affects
middle-aged and older people.
This sense that no matter how much you have screwed up your life,
and Scrooge is a success, in financial terms, he has done terrifically well,
but in every other possible way, his life is a disaster.
In humanitarian terms, in personal terms,
in fulfilment in relationships, it is calamitous, his life.
And then he is given this great gift of being shown where he came from,
how he started, and gradually what he has become,
and the impact of what he has become has had on other people.
And he is allowed to take a step back
and change himself.
And I start to get emotional just as I think about this, and of course this is a Shakespearian theme too -
he uses this similarly, in which somebody is given an opportunity to change their life.
And to make that change have an impact on the world around them.
I find that really potent.
It was the impact, though,
of the book that caused such amazing...
because this is a review here
in a magazine of the time under the title "Literature".
How shall we convey to our readers the surpassing beauty with which this accomplished author
of the seasonable little volume has worked out, or as he sportively terms it -
raised "the ghost of an idea." There's a page here of enthusiasm.
And Thackeray, who was Dickens's great rival, called it "a benefit to mankind".
And he said to every man and woman who reads it, Dickens has done a personal kindness.
Another critic compared it to the Fourth Gospel.
It was an instant classic.
Dickens had done more than create an uplifting entertainment for the entire family.
He'd also produced the ideal Christmas gift.
Brian Lake is a book dealer who specialises in original editions of Charles Dickens's work.
Dickens took quite a lot of interest in this book. He wanted it to be
a sort of Christmas present in itself?
Yes, it was designed by Dickens to be a Christmas present.
He wanted to make money out of the book so he created something to sell at five shillings,
which he felt that people would go out and buy in large numbers.
Show me a first edition. This is a first edition of A Christmas Carol?
This is it.
Dickens always spent a lot of time on the physical appearance of his books.
He was always very concerned about how much they would cost.
He wasn't just a writer, he was very concerned about how it was going to be seen by the public.
Initially, he wanted to have green title page and green endpapers.
You can see this didn't work. It starts to rub off.
So the next version was with yellow endpapers.
But all of them are made with this rather beautiful attention...
We've got a two-colour title page.
Absolutely unique to A Christmas Carol, and the expense
of hand-colouring basically killed the book commercially.
All of the colouring is done by hand, it's done by rows of women sitting,
applying different colours, and therefore became a very expensive process.
So the fact that when we come to visit a bookshop before Christmas,
and it's groaning with books ready for Christmas,
that's all down to the success of this book.
It was the first Christmas story, really.
It just spawned a whole industry.
If I wanted to buy a first edition of A Christmas Carol now,
the original first edition with the green endpapers.
With the green endpapers. How much would I have to spend?
Probably £10,000-£15,000.
Even though there were 6,000 produced. Yes. It's a popular book.
It's one of the Dickenses that people really want.
All the ingredients were certainly there for a Christmas bestseller for Dickens.
It was a terrific thriller with a moral message for all the family,
and lovely to look at, too.
But that doesn't entirely explain its huge contemporary success.
The truth was, Dickens had caught the wave of a new fashion that had
been building in Victoria's England over the last 30 years.
Christmas was about to bust out all over the place.
1843, the year that A Christmas Carol came out,
was clearly an annus mirabilis for Christmas,
because it happened coincidentally to be the same year
that the very first Christmas card was published - and here it is.
And it shows a family holding up glasses of wine, enjoying Christmas.
It could pass muster as a Christmas card today, the very first one.
It was the idea of Henry Cole, a civil servant and industrial designer,
who is often credited with having designed the Penny Black stamp.
He doesn't look a very merry soul, but he started something.
Henry Cole was obviously far too busy
to send Christmas greetings to all of his friends, acquaintances
and business associates, so instead he wrote, "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"
on a piece of cardboard, and so the Christmas card was invented.
In little more than 30 years, four million cards were being sent every year.
It became a fashion, then a craze and then a tradition - just like A Christmas Carol.
The Victorians were hungry for Christmas ideas.
Especially the comfortable people of the middling sort, as they called themselves.
Dickens was one himself.
These were city-dwellers who wanted the chance to enjoy themselves.
They wanted to have a proper Christmas.
But what sort of Christmas was that?
Do you ever get the feeling as you settle in for the exhausting hard grind of another Christmas season,
that these things must have been done a lot better about 150 years ago?
In fact, that's exactly what they thought, about 150 years ago.
Because the Victorians loved history.
These are the Houses of Parliament,
and they're actually being built in 1843.
They're brand new, and yet, if you look at them,
they're being made to look like a Flemish Burghermaster's hall
from the early 1300s.
This is the fastest-growing era the world has ever seen.
They're rocketing into modernity.
And yet they're obsessed with the romance of the past.
And there's no better example of this obsession than the Society of Antiquaries.
It was the Antiquarians who first began gathering up the folklore and historic customs of Britain.
I've come here just off Piccadilly to meet a modern-day historian, Steve Roud.
Steve. Hello there.
Welcome to the Society.
The enthusiastic, educated members of this very exclusive club
were also the first to investigate the origins of our Christmas traditions.
The first people to really start worrying about Christmas
were around 1800, 1810, at a time when really,
Christmas was fading away.
People weren't really celebrating it.
It was literally just dying out.
They suddenly realised if they didn't do something, then Christmas,
one of our major festivals, would disappear.
Christmas had been having a rocky time since it was banned by Oliver Cromwell.
The Puritans felt that a "Christ mass" sounded a bit too Catholic.
Christmas pudding was actually made illegal in 1647.
The festival was restored with the monarchy in 1660.
But it was never quite as popular.
Then at the beginning of the 1800s, the Antiquarians got involved.
They said, "Well, let's get back to old Christmas".
With an "e"? Of course!
Olde Christmas! That's right.
That's when it started...
The movement started not only to bring back Christmas, but to bring back the spirit of "olde" Christmas.
The way Christmas used to be done in my grandfather's day.
Even before that, in Merrie England.
Mostly it's set in Elizabeth I's time.
That's when England was strong,
England was happy, England was merry.
But Steve believes some of the more ancient customs
that the Antiquarians wrote about are simply myths.
And what about the idea that holly and ivy are
part of a pagan ritual for bringing in things alive into the dead season?
Well... No.
It wasn't.
The answer is, we don't really know.
There's so little information from pre-Christian times
about what happened at midwinter that it's assumption.
And the mistletoe?
I understand mistletoe is some sort of druidic sexual fertility ritual.
Is that true? No, again.
There's not the slightest shred of evidence there!
In fact, quite a lot of slightly dodgy different Christmas traditions
were gathered together around this time.
Some were used, some were not.
We 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.
The Victorians took what they wanted.
And what these new city people wanted was whatever reminded them
of a joyful, old, village Christmas in a manorial hall -
the world they'd left behind, in fact.
Dickens first wrote about exactly this seven years before A Christmas Carol.
There's a great Christmas chapter in his first novel, the Pickwick Papers,
where Mr Pickwick visits Squire Wardle at his country seat.
"This", said Mr Pickwick, "This is indeed comfort."
"Our invariable custom", replied Mr Wardle.
"Everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve as you see them now, servants and all...
"and here we wait until the clock strikes 12 to usher
"Christmas in and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories".
But Squire Wardle's Country Christmas
was a big, rowdy, rather adult affair.
So how were those polite, city, Victorian folk
of the middling classes supposed to celebrate "ye olde worlde"
boisterous Christmas in their parlours without ruining the rugs?
Dickens's own Christmas parties are a pretty good example of how
they adapted the old traditions to the new cities.
They would definitely play a game of blind man's bluff.
It was one of Dickens's favourite.
But 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.
Oh! This one's Mary!
Yes!
And when the adults kissed under the mistletoe,
it was the custom right up until the end of the century to take a kiss for every berry on the sprig.
And there's a wonderful description in the Pickwick Papers of the girls
running off to hide behind the sofas in case they get caught
because this was a way of getting up close and personal
when up close and personal generally was pretty difficult.
So games, mistletoe, what about the other things we do at Christmas?
I asked historian Daru Rooke, and it seems that when it comes
to traditions, the Victorians went shopping around all over the place.
If I'm decorating a Christmas tree today, I can go mad, can't I?
I can put up almost anything I want! You can go crazy. All these colours and shapes.
And with the Victorians... When Dickens went to decorate his house
on Christmas Eve, would he have used baubles, bangles, beads?
Glass beads really take off in the 1850s and '60s
and they come in from Germany,
and at first they were chaste things that looked like fruit or flowers
but by the end of the century, you can get model airships, famous actresses, the lot, it takes off.
That early?! It's extraordinary because you don't get in Christmas decorations,
you don't get minimalist decorations.
Well, you can in shops and things like that, and I've been into architects' houses
and there's one-coloured thing,
but generally when we go for it for Christmas, however decorous we are,
we go completely wild, don't we?
I think that's in the spirit of the 19th century house,
with its reflective pier glasses, gas lighting, its gilded surfaces.
This is the middle-class home, I'm adding.
It's all about this excess.
Christmas is still very much Victorian excess.
Would they have had Christmas stockings?
Not in Dickens's early years, they come in via France and America in the 1870s,
though I think they intended you to hang up your own stocking,
not something embroidered and glamorous.
We like to think that many of these things are of olde English origin
but are they all of "olde" English origin?
Very few are when you think about it.
Look at the cracker, for example. That comes in in the 1840s, invented by a confectioner.
It's based on a French idea but it's a modern English invention to go bang and give you an interesting message.
What about the piece de resistance, the Christmas tree?
Would the Dickens family have spent a lot of time putting up a Christmas tree?
They might have done, although they would've been very advanced if they did.
When did Christmas trees come in then?
We know the Royal Family were using Christmas trees in the 1790s. 1790s?
We think it was Prince Albert who brought it in but this was earlier.
We do. As a young woman in the 1830s, Queen Victoria talks about
the lighting up of the Christmas tree in the family home.
The Royals did it well in advance of everyone else
and possibly German merchants in Manchester and Bradford too.
And it was a German idea. It didn't look like this, did it?
No, it was a real Christmas tree brought in
and people were quite creative about how they used them.
Queen Victoria replaced chandeliers with Christmas trees hung with lights.
Some people put presents on the tree but periodically they caught fire.
Ultimately, the presents were put around the bottom.
It was constantly evolving through the Victorian period.
Isn't that fascinating, that the Royal Family were at forefront of ideas,
because we associate them with old tweed jackets and things
which are a little bit old-fashioned these days?
Victoria and Albert really do set the tone of the idea couple
and what they do in the home, setting up the Christmas tree,
is published in magazines and periodicals and the rising middle classes want to do just as they do.
We know Charles Dickens soon caught on to the idea of a Christmas tree.
He wrote about that "pretty German toy", as he called it, in a short story in 1850.
And he was amongst the first to give Christmas presents.
The tradition at that time was to exchange gifts at the New Year.
But the Dickens children wouldn't have expected anything to be delivered down the chimney.
In the 1840s, the bearded old man of Christmas was a green sprite with slightly lewd association.
Father Christmas, where did he emerge from?
Father Christmas as we know him now is a real hybrid.
He comes in England out of quite a long tradition of Sir Christmas,
who was almost a pagan character that encouraged you to eat, drink and be merry,
and used to have an open cut robe in green.
But by the 1860s, he's married with the American concept of Christmas
which itself comes from Holland and it's an idea of a genial sort
who brings presents down the chimney, and that comes out of literature.
It's a mish-mash, a proper patchwork without any real tradition at all.
So again, poor old Father Christmas, he's sort of comes, like we all do,
from a number of different ancestors.
That's right, mixed ancestry but how beautiful he is today.
CHURCH BELLS CHIME
Like any respectable Victorian family, on Christmas morning, the Dickenses went to church.
They'd have been very, very peculiar if they hadn't
because the church, in all its denominations, was at the heart of Victorian society.
MUSIC: "The Holy And The Ivy"
Actually, there's another part of the story of a revival of Christmas
that I haven't looked at yet and it's staring me in the face,
it's the title of the book, for goodness sake.
Griff.
Howard. I don't want you to stop because you see, for me,
that's instant Christmas, there's almost nothing like it.
That's why shops play it presumably from November, don't they?
I think it's instant Christmas and instant childhood. Yes.
Does it take you back? Yes, it does.
But the question I want to know is what is specifically
a Christmas carol then, as opposed to a hymn or.,.?
A Christmas carol is a country folk song with a Christmas theme.
As opposed to a straightforward hymn like Hark The Herald Angels Sing,
which Charles Wesley, a great hymn writer, wrote specifically to be sung in a church.
I thought Hark The Herald Angels Sing was a carol.
They've all merged into one great tradition now
but the country tradition of singing Christmas carols is really old
and goes back to the Middle Ages where people were just as likely
to hear a Christmas carol in a pub as you would in a church.
A lot of old carols, I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In,
or Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,
these are very dancey, jolly, jaunty songs that got attached to the Christmas season.
If I were an ordinary man in London in about 1830,
would I have recognised all the carols in the same way we do now?
They're so instant for us now, we know them all.
I think what happened was, at the beginning of the 19th century, in about 1820s, 1830s,
they started to collect into books these songs which were sung
and handed on from person-to-person out in the countryside, in little villages.
Presumably, they brought them to the towns and into the churches in the towns.
It sounds as if carols weren't specifically associated with churches.
They were associated with plays and carol-singing going round the town doing good.
They used to call it gooding and they brought it into church
because the church was a big thing in 19th-century Britain.
Lots of people went to church of various kinds, not just Anglican Church.
Why not bring the tunes people loved and associated with Christmas into a Christmas setting?
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen... # God rest Ye Merry Gentlemen...
That's an old tune but people got new words for it and fitted it to it so it would work at Christmas.
There was a whole craze for these songs from all over the place.
In fact, quite a few come from Germany.
# In Dulci Jubilo. # That's an old German tune.
They were brought in and wrapped up into this new form.
When you think about it, A Christmas Carol as a title
is referring to something which is newly fashionable.
it's like a sort of craze for carols and he's writing a book
which actually directly has that sort of craze.
It's like calling something the iPod as a book.
It's all around him but new.
And probably he managed to make the word carol and Christmas stick forever together.
In the Middle Ages you could have a carol any time of year.
There were carol from all round the year
but they started to attract themselves just to Christmas.
We don't think of carols at any other time now and Dickens has a lot to do with it.
He wrote one himself which is in Pickwick
and it's supposed go to the tune of Old King Cole.
I wondered whether we could have a look at it
and see if we could make it fit. Here we go.
# But my song I troll out for Christmas stout
# The heart and the true and the bold
# A bumper I drain and with might and main
# Give three cheers for this Christmas song... #
Though here we are in church and singing a carol,
we all have to ask, where exactly is the baby Jesus in Charles Dickens's vision of Christmas?
There are plenty of bumpers of ale in his song,
but no mention of a little star over Bethlehem.
# ..echoes from wall to wall...
# To the stout old wight Fair welcome tonight
# As the king of the seasons all. #
In A Christmas Carol itself, only a few sentences are given over to the worship of God.
Whereas whole pages are devoted to the worship of food.
This is because full bellies had a rather greater meaning for Dickens than rituals and prayers.
The grocers. Oh, the grocers.
The raisins were so plentiful and rare.
The almonds so extremely white.
The candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar.
More was it that the figs were moist and pulpy,
or that everything was good to eat, and in its Christmas dress.
Downstairs in the kitchen of the Dickens' home,
the cook and the maid are preparing a Christmas dinner.
They're going to serve it at 5.30 in the afternoon,
and it'll include mince pies and plum pudding.
These date to medieval times,
when they contained actual shredded meat.
This idea of traditional food, though,
was very important to Charles Dickens' vision of Christmas.
There's a wonderful scene in A Christmas Carol,
where Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Day.
He throws open the window, he spots a little boy,
and he orders him to go off and get the biggest turkey he can get hold of.
Because Charles Dickens loved Christmas, but in 1843,
he still expected the shops to be open on Christmas Day.
In our own century,
we have to start thinking about ordering provisions a little earlier,
perhaps from a gloriously well-stocked food hall like this one.
But even so, we stick to the traditions, don't we?
Good morning. Good morning to you.
Can I help you? Yes, now,
if I wanted to buy something for my Christmas dinner...
Yes? ..what would you recommend?
A rib of beef to start with. Certainly. Right.
Oh, well, you can't win 'em all.
What about a turkey? What, as well?
As well? Yes. What will you actually have, yourself, for Christmas?
I normally have a capon. A capon? Yes.
That's completely different. What's a capon when it's at home?
It's a chicken that has been caponised.
Been what? Caponised.
Caperised? Caponised. Caponised, right.
Yes. What does that mean?
It means it's had its private parts taken away. Has it? Exactly.
That's putting it politely. Yes.
And in your opinion, a chicken which has had its private parts removed
is the most tasty thing you can have at Christmas. Yes.
What about you, Sylvie, what do you have at Christmas?
I have a traditional turkey. Do you? Is that what your family expect?
Yeah. Grandchildren, brought up with it.
And then we have beef, maybe, for Boxing Day.
But if you turned up and said to your family,
"I tell you what we're going to do,
"we're going to have a nice bit of salmon,
"some fish for our Christmas."
Yeah. Would they protest about that?
I think so, I think Grandad would get the sack. He's the cook.
No, traditional turkey, ever since my dad did it.
And what about goose?
Is there much demand for goose?
It's nice, enjoyable, but it's not a big bird.
There's not a lot on it, like you'd get on a turkey.
So, what's the history behind the custom of eating turkey or goose?
Historically, especially around Christmas time,
goose was very much the traditional thing,
and in fact it goes as far back as Elizabethan times,
when Queen Elizabeth the First defeated the Spanish Armada,
and to celebrate for that Christmas,
she ordered that everybody in the land should have a roast goose.
Turkey is a relatively recent introduction,
because turkey originated from America,
and in fact, the first person to eat turkey was King Henry VIII.
When we say recent,
not like just something we borrowed from the Americans
for Thanksgiving dinner,
it really stretches back to as soon as they discovered America,
the first thing they did was bring back a turkey.
It was actually imported by a Scotsman,
and they brought back six birds,
and most of the birds that are in the UK now are from those six birds.
Traditionally, people ate geese for Christmas,
and once turkey became a little bit more commonplace,
only people with a medium to high income could afford it,
and the very rich would eat beef.
It feels oddly, doesn't it, a little bit sort of...
well, to me, anyway, a little bit sacrilegious,
or as if you're breaking the rules to eat beef,
but that's not the case.
No. In medieval times, they ate all sorts of things,
like larks, the whole variety of game,
wild boar, which is why they would have a wild boar's head on the table.
The thing is, it wasn't until, really, Victorian times
that Christmas as what we think of now really took off.
That was really with the advent of Charles Dickens
and A Christmas Carol.
In that, Bob Cratchit is actually eating a goose.
He's eating the poorest celebration, a thin goose, as it were,
because there's not an enormous amount of meat on the goose. Exactly.
Dickens actually describes them eating every morsel of the goose.
They're so hungry that they basically...
There's barely left on the plate by the time they've finished with it,
and then Scrooge goes out and gets them a turkey,
because that's one level up from eating a goose.
Interestingly enough,
we know that Charles Dickens himself settled down to a turkey on Christmas Day in 1843.
That I didn't know.
Perhaps he didn't feel he had enough money to stretch to beef himself.
Or perhaps he just liked turkey. He certainly popularised it,
but he also knew for poor people like the Cratchits,
a skinny Christmas goose was the most important meal of their year,
because it might be the only day
when they actually had full stomachs.
God bless us, every one.
Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked.
Its tenderness and flavour,
size and cheapness were the themes of universal admiration.
Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes,
it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family.
Indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight,
surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish,
they hadn't ate it all at last.
Yet everyone had had enough.
When they first start to eat the goose,
Bob Cratchit said it was the greatest success achieved
by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage.
Now, in the 21st century, of course,
that's an appalling, horrifyingly sexist thing to say.
The best thing she ever achieved was cooking this goose!
But when they sit around the hearth,
and they throw the chestnuts on the fire and Bob pours out...
He says, "the family display of glass" -
two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle -
"but they held the hot liquid in the jug as well as golden goblets would have done,
"and Bob poured it out with beaming looks."
It's... a sense of warmth just floods through that scene,
and it's very infectious.
A feeling of shared happiness was vital to Dickens.
But for Dickens, charity wasn't some quaint custom from the past,
it was very much the essence of Christmas present.
He knew that it was possible, in the streets outside his house,
for people to starve to death.
While Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol,
he got into the habit of taking extremely long walks
through the streets of London,
sometimes covering 15 to 20 miles in a single night.
We have no idea of the depths of poverty
that he actually made a point of searching out,
but we get a clue in the book,
when A Christmas Carol suddenly takes on a much darker and stronger purpose.
It's at the end of the chapter with the ghost of Christmas Present,
and Scrooge suddenly notices something protruding
from the long coat that the spirit wears.
At first he thinks it's a claw or a foot,
and the ghost shows him.
They were a boy and a girl,
yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish,
but prostrate, too, in their humility.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are man's", said the spirit.
"This boy is Ignorance, this girl is Want.
"Beware them both, but most of all, beware this boy,
"for on his brow, I see that written which is doom."
London in the 1840s was dotted with what were called rookeries -
slums, we would say -
where as many as 20,000 people would be crammed into an area of a few small streets.
The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London
can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed it.
Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper,
filth everywhere.
Clothes drying and slops emptying from the windows.
Men and women in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel,
lounging, drinking, smoking, squabbling and swearing.
Dickens had never been afraid of delivering a strong social message in his novels.
Oliver Twist was his protest against the institutional cruelty of the new Poor Law.
Nicholas Nickleby highlighted the abuses at Yorkshire boarding schools.
And A Christmas Carol, right from the beginning,
was conceived as another campaigning story.
In October 1842,
Dickens had been filled with indignation
at a parliamentary report into the employment and conditions
of children in the mines and manufacturers,
so much so that he decided, with a few friends,
to go and actually visit a mine.
What he saw there incensed him, and he decided to write a pamphlet,
An Appeal To The People Of England On Behalf Of The Poor Man's Children,
and while he was preparing this,
he was making a speech in Manchester in 1843,
when he suddenly conceived of writing his short novel instead.
He wrote what he hoped would be, as he put it,
a hammer blow to draw attention to child poverty.
I think he wanted to show people
that it was everyone's responsibility to help the poor,
that somebody like Scrooge could have this great conversion,
and that's what Christmas should be about.
It should be kept in people's hearts and lived throughout the whole year.
In creating those two children, Ignorance and Want, and saying,
"Unless you solve the problems that these two young people represent,
"disaster awaits you. It awaits all of society.
"It will just collapse and crumble, unless you solve these problems."
Dickens told the Victorians that charity was the essential tradition of Christmas.
There were feastings and parties, games, turkeys, plum puddings
and Christmas cheer aplenty in A Christmas Carol,
but all these things were meaningless
unless they could be shared and enjoyed by all,
with their family, in their home.
But could Charles Dickens' own family Christmas live up to this demanding ideal?
To find out, we're going to enlist the help of the spirit of Christmas Future.
We're going forward to 1867,
24 years after A Christmas Carol was first published.
It's Christmas Day,
but Charles Dickens is on a train, travelling from Boston to New York.
He's distracted by a painful foot.
He's still only 55, but worn out by hard work, he looks 20 years older.
Dickens is in America to make money.
£20,000, by all accounts,
and he sacrificed Christmas to do so.
He's embarked on one of his now famous reading tours,
appearing on stage to deliver extracts
from his most popular novels.
Charles Dickens first started reading his works aloud to the public for charity in 1853,
but, as is often the way,
he got asked so much, he wondered whether he should do it for money,
and in 1858, he started charging,
and it soon turned into a hugely lucrative business.
He toured all over England, and by the time he got to America,
he was filling 2,000-seaters at $2 per ticket.
Well, I'm sure you can do the mathematics.
Could he be accused of commercialising Christmas as much as championing it?
Dickens was wildly successful wherever he appeared,
and the most popular reading in his repertoire
was always A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge was better than his word, and to Tiny Tim, who did not die,
he was a second father,
and it was always said of him, ever afterwards,
that he knew how to keep Christmas well.
If any man alive possessed the knowledge,
may that be truly said of all of us.
And so, as Tiny Tim observed,
God bless us, every one.
Over the last 24 years,
Christmas had certainly become a big part of Dickens' financial planning.
Following the success of A Christmas Carol,
Dickens produced a whole series of Christmas books.
There was The Chimes, The Cricket On The Hearth,
The Battle Of Life and The Haunted Man.
None of them were actually as good as the original story of Bob Cratchit and Scrooge,
but they were as popular, if not more so,
and then he presented special Christmas editions of the magazines he edited,
All the Year Round and Household Words,
culminating in the 1867 Christmas edition,
which sold over 300,000 copies.
If anybody was turning Christmas into a business opportunity,
it was Charles Dickens himself,
but he was increasingly disillusioned by it.
The extra Christmas number has now been so extensively and regularly
and often imitated that it is in very great danger of becoming tiresome.
I have therefore resolved, though I cannot add willingly,
to abolish it at the highest tide of its success.
But there might have been other deeper regrets at work on that train too.
What about that other essential element of his vision of Christmas, the family?
Dickens had by now forced a separation on his wife, Catherine.
First by building a wall down the middle of their bedroom,
before finally turning her out of the house.
His wife had a great number of pregnancies, and she had ten children
and at least two miscarriages in a 15 year period,
and she suffered from what we now know as post natal depression after each one,
and the more that their marriage developed,
and she became less attractive to him, she put on a lot of weight,
and she wasn't so interested in all the things that he was interested in.
He retained this very buzzy, outward going,
wanting to go out and meet people,
sociable exterior, whereas Catherine just became slightly more depressed.
They separated in 1858,
and this really wasn't Dickens's finest hour.
He was quite terrible towards her.
He'd fallen in love with an 18-year-old actress.
A very familiar story,
middle-aged man falling in love with a very young girl,
and he decided that he couldn't be with his wife
and be with Ellen Ternan, the young actress,
so he kicked his wife out of the home.
One of the saddest things, I felt,
when I was researching the book about their daughter Katie,
was that Catherine would have parties for local children
in the area that she lived, in Regent's Park,
but none of her own children were ever able to come. It was very sad.
Charles Dickens' relationships with his children were also marked with regret.
His eldest son, Fluster Flobby, had grown up and was now a bankrupt.
He was estranged from his daughter, Lucifer Box.
And young Skull had left for India in 1857, aged 16.
Dickens never saw him alive again.
He died, six years later.
Perhaps most tragic of all was his third daughter, Dora,
who died before her first birthday.
So all in all, 1867 is hardly a very happy Christmas for Charles Dickens.
He's even had to leave his mistress behind.
He couldn't risk the public scandal of bringing her to America,
and instead he writes weekly letters,
sent secretly via a friend in London.
So as he sat on the train trundling through the American countryside,
he was a very, very long way from that vision of family forgiveness
and family togetherness and family warmth by the fireside
which had seemed such an essential part of the vision of A Christmas Carol,
and in fact, even the spirit of giving had become slightly tawdry to him,
because he thought that people used Christmas as an excuse
to give too little and then demand too much from the recipients.
But however jaded Dickens personally might have been,
there's absolutely no doubt that his magic was still extraordinarily potent.
The evening before he got on the train, he had appeared in Boston,
and he'd given a reading, as he usually did, of A Christmas Carol.
A couple had been in the audience from Vermont,
and they left the theatre, went straight home,
and gave their entire workforce in their factory a day off for Christmas,
something they'd never done before.
It would seem that Christmas and A Christmas Carol now had a momentum
over which Charles Dickens had little control.
But Dickens himself was running out of time.
Two years after returning from America, aged only 58,
Charles Dickens died of a stroke.
His son Charlie was sure that the trip to America had shortened his father's life.
It's said that when Charles Dickens died,
a costermonger's daughter turned to her father and said,
"Daddy, does that mean there won't be Christmas any more?"
What I like about that story is not that it reflects on the feelings of sentimental little girls,
but it shows that, somehow, Charles Dickens' idea of Christmas
so cleverly corresponds to our own idea of Christmas.
Christmas is, after all, a huge imaginative fantasy,
and he got it.
It may be a fantasy,
but it's something that I think is really worth pursuing,
and there's something else.
The being together is important, but it's giving, as well,
and that's the big change for Scrooge.
He is selfish and mean with his money,
and he's selfish and mean with himself.
He doesn't love, because loving means giving, it means sharing,
it means risking yourself, it means opening your heart.
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many,
Fill your glass again with a merry face and contented heart.
Our life on it,
that your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one.
God bless us, every one.