Charles Dickens' Christmas
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Just as Scrooge wanders London's streets on a cold Christmas night, Dan Snow follows the ghosts of Charles Dickens' past to discover the city that inspired his greatest works. With London-born tour guide David Charnick, they slip down hidden alleyways to find the old debtor's prison that the Dickens family once called home; a place that haunted a young Charles for the rest of his life. They find the old counting houses and graveyards that inspired the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge and the locations that appear in A Christmas Carol. With David's masterful guidance and atmospheric readings, this immersive episode takes you to the fireside of a London coaching inn as the sun sets outside on a late December afternoon.
A warning: this episode contains references to historical suicides.
Dickens' extracts are read by Robyn Wilson.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
Transcript
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| 0:24.6 | Hi folks, this episode is sponsored by The World, specifically The World podcast, with Richard |
| 0:31.9 | Engel and Yalda Hakim from Sky News. The World is a new World Affairs podcast, hosted by NBC's chief foreign correspondent |
| 0:41.4 | and Sky's lead world news presenter. Every week, Richard and Yaldo are going to have decades |
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| 1:18.1 | Engel and Yalda Hakim, now on your favourite podcast app. Welcome to Dan Snow's history. Christmas is |
| 1:26.0 | approaching, and what could be more Christmasy than |
| 1:28.8 | Charles Dickens. So in this episode of History Hit, I hike around London. Me and the History Hit team, |
| 1:35.2 | we took to the streets and went with the lovely London-born tour guide David Charac. And we visited |
| 1:41.0 | the places that inspired Dickens' greatest works. We visited the prison, where Dickens' father was thrown for indebtedness. We walked the mean streets where Ebenezer Scrooge has his counting house. We visited the graveyard where the ghost of Christmas future points to the grave in the corner that could be Ebeneas unless he changes his ways. |
| 2:02.3 | We went to the banks to the Thames see where the mudlarkers and scavengers |
| 2:05.3 | searched the murky waters for bodies to turn over for profit. |
| 2:10.0 | We finish up on Cornhill, the street that Bob Cratchit went down on the slide |
| 2:14.6 | 20 times in honour of it being Christmas Eve. |
| 2:20.3 | After this tour was over and we were freezing cold, team of history hit went and we found an old medieval coaching in, |
... |
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