SPEAKER_06: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I am Roman Mars.
SPEAKER_04: Hello, you there, boy. Me, sir? Yes, you, my good fellow. Today is today. Today? Well, it's Christmas Day, of course.
SPEAKER_05: Christmas Day.
SPEAKER_06: No, you haven't missed it. It's Christmas Day and we're celebrating with two fun stories from The Illusionist, a show about language from Helen Zaltzman. The Illusionist is one of my all-time favorite podcasts, and I'm not just saying that because Helen Zaltzman is one of my all-time favorite people. It is a show about language, but it is absolutely not just for word nerds. It is 99PI style storytelling using language as the lens to be a culture rather than design. And if you haven't discovered it yet, you are going to love it. With two festive seasonal favorites from The Illusionist, here's Helen Zaltzman.
SPEAKER_10: The War on Christmas. When did that start? Upon the birth of Jesus Christ himself, when King Herod ordered all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem be killed. In 1644, when Oliver Cromwell's Puritans passed an ordinance prohibiting Christmas celebrations in England. In 1659, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans managed to get Christmas bound for 22 years for being a pagan festival. Or was it in 1998, in Britain's second largest city, Birmingham? If you picked up practically any newspaper at the time, you would have read that Birmingham City Council had renamed Christmas Winterville. Birmingham will celebrate the festive season as usual this year with carol singing, fairy lights and street entertainment. But don't call it Christmas, council officials have renamed it Winterville in the hope of creating a more multicultural atmosphere in keeping with the city's mix of ethnic groups. A politically correct decision to call Christmas festivities Winterville. Council Christmas call it Winterville. Birmingham Council claiming it was anxious not to offend those in other faiths renamed Christmas Winterville. Political correctness gone bad. Crazy council chiefs provoked outrage last night after naming Christmas festivities Winterville. Political correctness gone mad. Political correctness gone mad. Churchmen believe the Winterville name is intended to avoid offending Muslims and other minorities. Political correctness gone mad. A municipal brainwave called Winterville renaming the annual holiday and likening it to shopping rather than shepherds. Political correctness gone mad. The word Winterville has a nasty echo of communists who banned any Christian connotation in East Germany. Political correctness gone mad. Gone mad. And verily in Britain Christmas was banished. Now we sing Winterville carols and wear ironic Winterville sweaters. We hang up our Winterville stockings for Father Winterville to fill with Winterville gifts. And when we turn on the radio we rock around the Winterville tree to these festive tunes. It'll be lonely this winter.
SPEAKER_11: Winterville, winterville, winterville.
SPEAKER_11: Winterville.
SPEAKER_10: Yep, that's exactly what happened. Well it's about as true as most things that have been said about Winterville. Which came about thanks to one mic chub. Hi, my name is Mike Chubb. You could say that I was the one that has caused the
SPEAKER_05: furore that is Winterville. In the late 1990s Mike Chubb was the head of events
SPEAKER_10: for Birmingham City Council. From our point of view, from mine, myself as the
SPEAKER_05: manager of this huge events section in Birmingham City Council and my team of some like 30, we came up with the terminology Winterville. It's like a portmanteau word for winter and festival. I thought it was a portmanteau of winter and
SPEAKER_10: interval I must say to sort of suggest this hiatus in the year. No it's between
SPEAKER_05: winter and festival. I think it's a good portmanteau, it's quite elegant. Until it
SPEAKER_10: became shorthand for war on Christmas with a side of political correctness gone mad. It started well enough with Birmingham's first Winterville in 1997. Events ran over several weeks and were attended by hundreds of thousands of people without complaints from the press or the populace. So it's not clear why the following year's Winterville became a wincedent. But it did. In November 1998 the then Bishop of Birmingham, Mark Santa, no not as in clause, issued his Christmas message to the clergy of the Diocese. It said, I wonder what madness is in store for us this Christmas. I confess I laughed out loud when our City Council came out with Winterville as a way of not talking about Christmas. No doubt it was a well-meaning attempt not to offend, not to exclude, not really to say anything at all. And soon the papers got hold of it. On the 8th of November 1998 the Birmingham Sunday Mercury reported that the Bishop of Birmingham had condemned the City Council's attempt to rebrand Christmas. What happened then was
SPEAKER_05: of course all those papers. But hey, this is a good wheeze, you know, not much news at Christmas is there? Let's use an interesting story. Did you know Birmingham City Council of Council Christmas or the name Christmas Winterville? Thereafter it went nationwide and worldwide. Pretty much the only person who didn't notice was Mike Chubb.
SPEAKER_10: I was so busy at the time. I didn't take in any of the media
SPEAKER_05: furore at the time. It just didn't touch me at all because I literally, we were working 41 days non-stop, day and night. Busy work waging the war on
SPEAKER_10: Christmas, except that wasn't really what Mike and the Council were doing during the war on the War on Christmas. In this war only one side turned up to the battlefield. It was the media really that actually took it on. People like the
SPEAKER_05: Daily Mail just going to Google and Google Winterville and just look at the organisations who are up in arms about it. They're up in arms because they've been led to believe that that's what Birmingham City Council intended. It wasn't?
SPEAKER_10: No. Christmas was never off the page. It was part of a 41 day life festival of events.
SPEAKER_05: But people thought you were trying to rebrand Christmas? Yes. They said it's
SPEAKER_05: political correctness gone mad. But actually political correctness had not
SPEAKER_10: gone mad. Political correctness had not even been a factor because the council's events team was not trying to rebrand Christmas. It was trying to bundle together a whole lot of events occurring in the weeks before and after Christmas. Birmingham is Britain's second largest city with a very culturally and ethnically diverse population. There's a lot of stuff going on, particularly at that time of year. Hence they decided to use the marketing banner Winterville. You feel like it does what it says on the tin. It markets a major festival at a
SPEAKER_05: time of the year called winter and there are all sorts of things that happen in winter. You know, Diwali happens in winter, BBC Children in Need happens in winter, you know, Chinese New Year happens in winter, New Year's Eve happens in winter. Hanukkah, Eid, oh and Christmas! Christmas lights, Christmas market, Christmas trees,
SPEAKER_10: Christmas carols. It was still called Christmas. That particular event which
SPEAKER_05: included the Christmas lights switch on, it was about a month of events of a Christmas that came under Christmas. It was termed Christmas, it had its own brochure, Christmas. But unfortunately people decided not to see that. They decided that that's what the council did. Shortly after the war on
SPEAKER_10: Winterville erupted in the papers, the council actually issued a statement that they were not renaming Christmas and Christmas was very visibly a major part of the Winterville lineup. But which story sticks more? The true one that Winterville was a marketing and admin umbrella or the lie that Winterville had come to kill Christmas? Nobody actually could see the simplicity of the Winterville
SPEAKER_05: brand but they read into it what they wanted, you know, to give voice to their own aspirations and prejudices. Now personally I've noticed significantly
SPEAKER_10: more uproar about the war on Christmas than actual evidence that that war is being waged. Some people seem very eager for there to be a war on Christmas so they can leap to Christmas's defence. Though Christmas has achieved cultural dominance way beyond religious lines, to cast it as an underdog provides a cover for taking a pop at other cultures and to create and maintain divisions in society. But Christmas is a pagan Roman Christian festival celebrated by people from all sorts of cultures with all sorts of beliefs including me, an ethnically Jewish atheist. Christmas is not threatened by multiculturalism, it is multicultural. People don't like change. They're scared of change. And to a
SPEAKER_05: certain extent Winterville was used as an example of a change that's gone too far because they misread what the organisers are trying to do. And they continued to
SPEAKER_10: misread it. After 1998 Birmingham didn't run Winterville again but in the following years the Winterville myth was repeated dozens of times in Britain's national newspapers. In fact in 2011 after running another such piece the Daily Mail had to print a retraction saying that Winterville did not rename or replace Christmas. But too little too late Winterville had already become the byword for political correctness gone mad. And it still continues. Just a few weeks ago in the British Parliament, Shailesh Vara, the Conservative MP for Northwest Cambridges, told Prime Minister Theresa May that minority communities should respect the views and traditions
SPEAKER_04: of mainstream Britain and that means and that means Christmas is not Winterville and Christmas trees are not festive trees. Well we can all agree with him that Christmas is not Winterville since it
SPEAKER_10: never was Winterville.
SPEAKER_05: It's so simple. It's not difficult. It's just certain people just decide to say what they want to say. Maybe they want to create a bit of a stir because it sells papers. But in a way as a marketing story it is very successful because the brand really clung on.
SPEAKER_10: If you just called it, I don't know, Birmingham winter holidays no one would... Oh yeah, yeah I mean yeah absolutely. It's just unfortunate that the brand had been so misinterpreted. That's right, that's right, yeah.
SPEAKER_10: If you had your time again would you do it differently?
SPEAKER_08: No.
SPEAKER_05: Good for you. People have got to experiment, they've got to introduce and the public need to be introduced to new exciting initiatives because otherwise we're just going to live in a very dull society.
SPEAKER_06: Here's what you're going to do. You're going to go buy that prize turkey in the window and settle in for another story from The Illusionist featuring a couple of familiar 99PI voices after this. When you're working on the go how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluver technology, 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet. The perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3MScreens.com to get your new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3MScreens.com slash brighter. If you need to design visuals for your brand you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks and if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com. Here again is The Illusionist on 99% invisible.
SPEAKER_02: So we're in the parking lot of Cow Palace. There's a gun show happening at the same time.
SPEAKER_09: It says welcome patriots. We are here for the dickens fest. Excuse me. Katie mingle and Avery truffleman of 99% invisible are about to enter Victorian London
SPEAKER_10: in the Cow Palace arena in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, California. It's also like sunny
SPEAKER_09: 60-ish degrees. It feels not Christmassy at all. The great Dickens Christmas Fair entrance
SPEAKER_02: is a giant portrait of Santa Claus as you walk in. The Dickens Christmas Fair has been an annual event in the Bay Area since 1970, founded by husband and wife team Ron and Phyllis Patterson,
SPEAKER_10: who previously had started the Renaissance Fairs in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles. Their kids are on the Dickens Fair now. It's held on five weekends prior to Christmas and is 120,000 square feet of Victorian London festivity. Whoa. Oh my goodness. They did a really good job.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so it smells like apple cider or something spiced spicy. It's sort of set up to look like an
SPEAKER_09: old English like like a market or like I don't know what would you say? Yeah, they're like storefronts and right here there's a big old timey sign that says champagne and they're like
SPEAKER_02: bar maids serving champagne. And there's a lot of the British Oh my God, Helen, they're British flags everywhere. All along the ceiling. It looks like a film set of a street. The streets are named things like Nickelby Road, Cratchit's Yard, Pickwick Place, Fezziwig's Dance Party. Yeah,
SPEAKER_10: we do have a map. We have a map. Hand painted map. So we're on Nickelby Road right now
SPEAKER_02: by Charles Dickens House. The streets are thronging with people in different interpretations of Dickensian costume, not compulsory for attendees but encouraged. Oh yeah, that baby
SPEAKER_10: is like wrapped in a potato sack. Like that, that man actually took his baby, put dirt on its face,
SPEAKER_09: wrapped them in a potato sack and brought him to the Dickens Fair. The Dickens Fair's London is also inhabited by scores of volunteers in well-researched period costumes. Before the event,
SPEAKER_10: they've been taught relevant history, given vocabulary guidelines and chosen names from a selection of approved Dickensian names. I'm sorry, do you want to tell us your names? Oh yeah, Autense Snevalecki. Of the theatrical family Snevaleckis. Oh, and there are English accents,
SPEAKER_08: which I thought were all right. You go straight down until you hit the docks and if you go any
SPEAKER_08: further you're going to hit the Thames. You don't want to hit the Thames. And there's a Thames here?
SPEAKER_10: Well of course there's a Thames, we're in London you silly fool. She's brought many white names.
SPEAKER_08: I don't know but they're giving me that look that says, oh you've been having a little too much laudanum haven't you Missy? Laudanum was not a controlled substance in 19th century Britain,
SPEAKER_10: but it is now so the Dickens Fair doesn't sell it. But there are lots of places to buy tea and ale. There are performance stages, a fencing academy, shops, lots of shops. Drawbenders, fine hats and
SPEAKER_09: bonnets. I've been wanting a bonnet. Really? No. Shops selling Victoriana such as corsets,
SPEAKER_10: jewellery, pies and wands. Hang on, wands? Right, okay well I don't really know where
SPEAKER_07: that's come from. Historian Greg Jenner has visited The Illusionist before. In the episode
SPEAKER_10: Xmas Man he talked about the history of Santa Claus and Victorian Christmas cards with dead mice and bacon on them. Greg knows a lot about history and a lot about the history of Christmas, so I asked him to check a few things at the Dickens Fair to see whether or not they are Dickensian.
SPEAKER_07: I don't think Magic Wands particularly Dickensian but I may be wrong on that. They're $15 each. Yeah I guess that's just Harry Potter rolling over into some other season isn't it? They're like we've got a lot of wands left, what else is British? Dickens that'll do. Or perhaps someone just mixed up their
SPEAKER_10: David Copperfield's. There's a lot of commitment here. It's just interesting to see this many
SPEAKER_02: people go there you know like playing make believe on this grand a scale. Yeah. Like all ages. It's
SPEAKER_09: kind of wonderful really. There's a man in a top hat. Yes top hats no problem at all. I mean this
SPEAKER_07: is obviously the era of both Dickens and Abe Lincoln both of whom were top hat aficionados.
SPEAKER_03: Happy Christmas! Hey why does no one say Merry Christmas? That's an American sort of thing.
SPEAKER_02: Only Happy Christmas. Greg, Happy Christmas Dickensian, Merry Christmas, non-Dakensian.
SPEAKER_07: Season's greetings were very varied in Victorian times. It's Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas and season's greetings and Happy Yule-tide and biblical quotations and lines from Carol's. So frankly there's no real wrong way to say Happy Christmas or Merry Christmas in a Victorian fair other than saying Cowabunga Christmas which would be obviously completely inappropriate. Are there particular words or phrases that are like useful to say?
SPEAKER_02: Bollocks is wonderful. Like that was Bollocks! There's one guy the Bollocks not Bollocks guy.
SPEAKER_01: You know he has a sign that says you're either Bollocks or you're not Bollocks and then he and then he people walk by like you're Bollocks. You're like I walked by and he said you're Bollocks and the baby's not Bollocks. Greg, the word Bollocks? Well I mean that's a good old English
SPEAKER_07: swear word. I don't know off the top of my head if Dickens ever used it in his novels. Perhaps he did but I mean it's got a long history. It goes all the way back to Anglo-Saxon English, Bollocks. So if your festival is all about sort of quaint Britishness then Bollocks is our standard go-to English insult. It's all quaintest swear. I think so isn't it? There's this one alley
SPEAKER_02: where everyone was dressed up as like a beggar or a prostitute or I guess a um what is it the Artful Dodger is a pickpocket yeah and pickpockets and chimney sweeps like there are a lot of people with fake mud on their faces here which is kind of a weird thing to like dress up as a poor person.
SPEAKER_09: It wouldn't be my chosen form of escapism on the weekend sure but being rich is expensive and hard
SPEAKER_03: and you have to do boring things and when you're scum you get to gamble and drink and scream a lot and it's really fun. But I think we completely underestimate the terrifying daily stresses and
SPEAKER_07: strains of of not having enough food of having sexual violence if you're a woman who was a sex worker of the diseases you know the infant mortality rates the fact that children are working in factories and now pickpocketing on the streets the lack of educational reform. There is an enormous canvas of of sadness of human sadness which Dickens picks up on but there's a strange romance to it which we seem to revel in and I don't quite know why that is. Yeah what was the life expectancy? Oh incredibly poor really poor the average life expectancy in
SPEAKER_07: 1820 was perhaps something like 40 years old and now we're closer to 80. The fact of course that's contributing to that is massive infant mortality rates you have a really high chance of having at least two children die on you if you have a family of six or seven kids. Women would frequently have very serious illnesses in childbirth more often than not the thing that would kill a woman would be complications from childbirth. For men of course you have the military military service being particularly dangerous in the age of the British Empire which is off travelling the world and conquering things in a ruthless fashion but also of course you have terrible diseases and no understanding of germ theory until the 1850s and 60s so there are horrible cholera outbreaks that people don't understand what spreads cholera there is scurvy there is dysentery there is a typhoid just terrible deprivation there are people unable to feed themselves unable to have healthy diets there is chalk in the bread you know it's this is a period of history where you can die of an ear infection or you can die of a scratch on your wrist anything can get infected so it's really not a very nice time to be living if you don't have quite a lot of money and even if you do have money you might still die young as happened to several of dickens's closest relatives
SPEAKER_09: okay let's go see if we can peek in we're we're getting close to the house of charles dickens where he's writing you can see in the window oh my goodness what is he writing could be one of his
SPEAKER_10: 20 novels and novellas dozens of short stories articles and plays but given the environment there's quite a high possibility that he's writing something about christmas the christmas carol wasn't his first christmas story but it was such a hit that like mariah carrey re-releasing all i want for christmas is you each year afterwards there was pressure for dickens to keep supplying festive material his other christmas stories uh the chimes the cricket on the hearth the battle
SPEAKER_07: of life um the haunted man and the ghost's bargain he also writes in household worlds which is his sort of magazine he'd be working on stories for the christmas edition of the magazine from july
SPEAKER_10: of each year there's the christmas tree a christmas dinner there's a very sad essay written in 1851
SPEAKER_07: the year in which four of his family members die called what christmas is as we grow older which is a kind of tribute to them but also a calling out in defense of christmas and saying christmas is about looking forward and hope and hoping for a better future while at the same time remembering those who've gone before so he returns to christmas many times in his career and indeed a great expectation starts with a christmas scene but none of those matched the success of a christmas carol a christmas carol is by far and away his best is most defiantly popular and most influential christmas story how many other books have been adapted hundreds of times for film and
SPEAKER_10: tv the popularity of a christmas carol has never waned it was an absolute smash hit straight away it was published on the 19th of december 1843 and by christmas eve it was already sold out the next year the book was adapted several times for stage and reprinted and reprinted it has never been out of print dickens did public readings of the book in britain and the us until his death in 1870 and beyond yeah we're at we're at charles dickens house and where he will be doing a reading but
SPEAKER_09: this is a very elaborate house it's like completely set up like a full interior
SPEAKER_02: and there's like a swooning couch and a fireplace and a bookshelf tchotchkes all over the place pictures on the wall rugs full nine yards this exterior is painted like stone so charles dickens wearing a long black coat is standing at an a wood podium reading dramatically from a christmas carol to a crowd that has gathered and costumed and non-costumed people sitting in his house he's very enthused he's like
SPEAKER_12: going beyond the podium he's leaning into the audience he's using his hands he's just a gilling
SPEAKER_04: scrooge said it with an earnestness that you're not mistaken he clapped him on the back a merry christmas ball merrier my good fellow than i've given you
SPEAKER_02: what do you know about charles dickens katie mingle so little
SPEAKER_09: i was in a production of oliver once but dickens is one of those authors whose work you kind of
SPEAKER_02: know without even having read it some authors work sticks so much in cultural consciousness
SPEAKER_10: their name becomes an adjective kathka-esque or wellian dickensian well dickensian is a very very broad idea there's an incredibly vast canvas of what we think of as dickensian and even though
SPEAKER_07: we use it as a word that word itself has so many different interpretations and meanings men with mutton chop sideburns and stovepipe hats women with hearts of gold and tragically short
SPEAKER_10: lives orphans fending from themselves while menacing adults lurk around every corner please sir i want some more and christmas merry christmas christmas goose christmas ghosts god bless us everyone dickensian is quite a tricky word actually and i think we need to be careful
SPEAKER_07: because dickensian is quite a tricky word actually and i think we don't always necessarily know what we mean when we say it as a word it kind of conjures up poverty perhaps a sense of squalor a sense of people trapped in this sort of brutal society where there is no safety net there is no fallback plan where children and young women can suddenly be cast into a life of poverty or crime or violence but dickensian also really should sum up some of the beautiful things some of the harnesses you know when we look at a christmas carol the way he depicts the street scenes and sort of children and people singing and saying hello to each other the sense of community the the shop windows are filled to the brim with delicious goods and treats to eat on christmas day and toys in the window you know this is a also a bountiful visual iconography dickens conjured up both quite alarming and also quite um in rapturing uh entrancing visions of what a city and a community could be so dickensian tends to be quite negative but it really should i suppose apply to all of the different uh worlds that dickens created and some of those were rather pleasant and lovely and some of those were rather cruel and dark yeah like what's his deal with
SPEAKER_09: christmas dickens yeah yeah a lot of authors have written about christmas but don't have
SPEAKER_10: festive fairs devoted to them why does dickens get to be the adjective why is he given credit for christmas you know one of the things people often say is dickens invented christmas which
SPEAKER_07: is absolute nonsense of course he didn't charles dickens's christmases are not brand new in 1843 he perpetuated some traditions he uh he reinvigorated others there had been christmas for centuries there had been traditions that he had grown up with as a child that he perpetuated and shared in his books singing feasting charitable donations that's all medieval tudor stewart georgian
SPEAKER_07: whatever you want to call it so dickens is not the architect he's a cheerleader very different professions well maybe maybe so i mean they both build large structures don't they a christmas
SPEAKER_10: carol landed at a time when there was a trend for nostalgia the 19th century is an era where you
SPEAKER_07: have many folklorists and antiquarians taking an interest in the old ways there is definitely in the 19th century this idea of a mythologized past of the tudor era being the sort of halcyon days just as we have dickensian festivals in san francisco and we look back to the victorians the victorians looked back to the saxons and the normans and the Tudors as a kind of glory days of simplicity where the good old days of christmas were were much more pleasant and because in in some ways the victorian christmas is a reaction to industrialization the trauma of enormous economic thrust of people moving from the countryside into the cities of communities being broken up of dark satanic meals of factories of trains and industry of the british empire expanding and people being separated by huge geographical distances not only that a christmas carol was riding a wave of renewed
SPEAKER_10: interest in christmas so along with the revival of older festive customs there were new ones emerging that decade too christmas cards were suddenly logistically viable with the invention of the penny post in 1840 christmas trees also became popular around then king george the third's german wife had introduced them to britain in the late 1700s so they weren't completely new but they were newly fashionable when in 1848 queen victoria prince albert and their children posed in front of theirs for the illustrated london news and like when whatever kate middleton wears sells out christmas trees became all the rage so quite a lot of traditions what we think of as traditions
SPEAKER_07: now that we assume are dickensian they're not dickensian they just arrive at exactly the same time through pure coincidence and it's all mushed together and this victorian festival suddenly feels like it's this brand new thing but it's not it's a continuity with some extra additional elements and um the capitalism ramps it all up christmas is a commercial economy without parallel it's incredibly capitalistic had been for a while but in the 19th century it becomes more so and you see the emergence of christmas magazines christmas books christmas toys for children which is a new market that's just sort of opening up but dickens's main intention wasn't to cash in on christmas
SPEAKER_10: i mean he did need the money though he had had considerable literary success the previous decade lately the serialization of his novel martin chuzzlewit hadn't been too popular and his income was looking dicey plus he had a growing family to support and was often bailing out his parents and siblings too and dickens did sincerely love christmas his children wrote about the relish with which their father approached the festivities each year but that wasn't the primary motivation either instead his heartwarming christmas fable was the cover story for a political mission he was a man who had a tremendous political appetite and who was of the middle classes
SPEAKER_07: and of course befriended the upper classes but was always on the side of the working classes and this of course was largely because he'd experienced poverty as a child dickens was the
SPEAKER_10: second of eight children in a pretty close family and had what he considered to be an idyllic childhood until he was aged 11 whereupon his father who regularly had financial problems was sent to prison for debt and as was custom at the time dickens's mother and younger siblings moved in there with him for a year charles dickens lived alone he had to quit school and work 10-hour days six days a week at a boot blocking factory though the family did reunite the experience stayed with dickens informing much of his work and political attitudes he is a man
SPEAKER_07: who's always championing those who have had a less fortunate life he campaigned against public executions he thought they were vile and grim you know he campaigned for for women he campaigned for better schooling for children he's a man who who uses his voice as a campaigning tool though in
SPEAKER_10: the victorian era britannia ruled the waves coloured the globe pink etc at home many people were destitute the industrial revolution had ushered in such huge societal and economic changes that century but welfare and health services had not been instituted yet and dickens was horrified by the poverty so many people were stricken by in 1843 particularly the conditions children were living in on the streets in schools for the impoverished working down mines or in factories as he had done himself and he was desperate to make a palpable difference as a journalist he planned to write a political pamphlet about it entitled an appeal to the people of england for the benefit of the poor man's child but he realized that not many people would read a political pamphlet they would however read his fiction and as a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down dickens coated his plea for social justice with a feel-good christmas ghost story and so dickens you know later on would write many many journalistic pieces and editorials and
SPEAKER_07: he would he would use his power as a journalist and an essayist but with a christmas carol he's using his power as a sentimental novelist to move people to action to inspire them to be better to be better christians to be better british people to be better neighbors family members lovers friends um co-workers colleagues etc it's a book about charity and it's a book about community and about what happens when the ravages of capitalism uh erode the human spirit and they they corrupt the heart of scrooge you know he was a man who once felt who once cared who once loved and ultimately over the years he's been sort of gradually worn down by this victorian urge to make profit you know economy industrial progress moving forward and he's lost his humanity to the point that his own family you know don't really want to hang out with him they don't really know him he's lost all of his empathy for his fellow man so a christmas carol is an allegory a very a very christian allegory a deeply spiritual book about a man who has become lost finding his way back to his humanity and dickens's mission did succeed somewhat the book was credited with
SPEAKER_10: causing a rise in charitable giving and greater generosity to your fellow humans and employees at christmas but it couldn't totally transform society literature can move us but ultimately
SPEAKER_07: structural systems are very hard to shift and the victorian period you know had many many years of of moving forward and very small steps being taken with you know children's rights or educational reforms and so on the rights of women in particular the christmas aspect may have overwhelmed
SPEAKER_10: the political message though the sentiment to be kind to fellow humans hasn't been lost it's there in all the screen adaptations even the ones riffing on the story like scrooged or running a little further away with the inspiration like bad santa but i tell you what i reread it this week and the original still works a treat because it's a really readable book the
SPEAKER_07: characters leap off the page and it's really moving and inspiring and you desperately hope that scrooge stays reformed it's really funny as well i think one of the disadvantages to the word
SPEAKER_10: dickensian is that it makes his work sound like it's going to be stodgy as a christmas pudding boiled for eight hours but it's not a cozy period piece his book is a reaction to the economic
SPEAKER_07: situation in the 1840s so his book is deeply modern and yet his outlook his attitudes his sense of nostalgia and whimsy is of course in many ways deeply traditional so he is bringing a kind of fusion between hyper modernity and old-fashioned old-timey lovely nostalgia days of yore and when we look back at dickens we do the same
SPEAKER_06: the illusionist is produced by helen zaltzman with music and production by martin ostwick it is a member of radio topia and you should subscribe to it immediately and thank me for the suggestion we'll have a link on the website and in the show notes 99 invisible is a project of 91.7 kalw in san francisco and produced on radio row in beautiful downtown oakland california we are a proud member of radio topia from prx a collection of fiercely independent and fascinating podcasts find them all at radio topia.fm we had a really good year of shows and i hope you heard them all but if you didn't you can subscribe and listen to them all at 99pi.org radiotopia from prx
SPEAKER_06: great sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. serta's new and improved perfect sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort memory foam and a cool to the touch cover the serta perfect sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days find your comfort at serta.com
SPEAKER_00: hey look at you florist by day student by night student by day nursed by night since 1998 penn state world campus has led the charge in online education offering access to more than 175 in demand programs taught by our expert faculty we offer flexible schedules scholarships and tuition plans to help you reach your educational goals online penn state world campus delivers on your time click the ad or visit worldcampus.psu.edu to learn more that's worldcampus.psu.edu to learn more when the weather app says rain the mcdonald's app says
SPEAKER_00: mcdelivery order mcdelivery in the mcdonald's app small
