Hello, season's greetings and bar humbug to you all, and welcome to a very special festive edition of Navarra FM.

I'm your host, Eleanor Penny, and today's episode takes us 180 years back to snowy Victorian

London, where ghosts harangue the wealthy into giving away a little more Christmas cheer.

This week we discussed the politics of Charles Dickens' famous novella, A Christmas Carol,

in which misers, philanthropists, ghouls, children, and hard done by Clarks, conjure up a new spirit of Christmas

at the height of the Industrial Revolution. And to do so, I am joined by Navarra Media's very own

co-founder and contributing editor to the London Review of Books, James Butler. James, hello.

It's good to have you with us. It's really, really good to be back in the studio.

So for those who might not be aware, could you give us a little rundown, a little pracy of

what happens in a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens? What are we talking about here?

So this is a book that's written that Dickens writes for

Christmas 1843 and we can come back to that question of exactly when it's written and what's

going on at the time because it's quite important. But basically he's been writing his novel

Martin Chuzzlewit in the way that Dickens used to write his novels, which was this kind of

monthly series of supplements.

So you'd get a chapter a month,

and it would be done by subscription.

And sales were falling off.

So he thinks, I have four children.

I've got another one on the way.

I am not the world's most austere man,

so I probably need some money.

...