Christmas with Charles Dickens (Radio Edit)

You're Dead to Me

BBC

Comedy, History

4.7 • 10.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Emily Bell and Mike Wozniak to find out what Christmas was like with Charles Dickens.

We take a walk through the many Christmases of the renowned Victorian author. From elephants walking on ice to the family Christmas punch recipe, we take a closer look at the factors that may have influenced some of his most famous works and unpick what the phrase Dickensian has come to mean over the years.

Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Researcher: Jessica White Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
0:44.5	Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the BBC Radio 4 comedy
0:49.7	podcast that takes history seriously.
0:51.7	My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian
0:54.0	author and broadcaster and in the immortal words of Noddy Holder, it's Christmas!
1:00.0	So we're back, briefly, to give you a one-off seasonal stocking filler dedicated to Mr. Christmas himself, not Noddy Holder,
1:07.0	no, the famous Victorian author Charles Dickens.
1:10.0	And today we're going to be looking at how he's celebrated Christmas throughout his life.
1:14.0	So it's not a conventional biography. This is a Christmas biography.
1:17.0	And joining me on this jolly jaunt through Christmas's past are two very special guests.
1:21.0	In History Corner, she's a lecturer in digital humanities at the
1:24.1	University of Leeds specializing in 19th century literature. She's the editor of
1:27.8	the DeKensian, the oldest academic journal in Dickens studies. It's Dr Emily Bell.
	...

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