Hello, seasons greetings and bar humbug to you all and welcome to a very special festive

edition of Navara FM. I'm your host Elna Penny and today's episode takes us 180 years

back to Snowy Victorian London, where ghosts harang the wealthy into giving away a little

more Christmas cheer. This week we discuss the politics of Charles Dickens' famous novella,

a Christmas Carol, in which Mises, philanthropists, schools, children and hard-done by clerks

conjure up a new spirit of Christmas at the height of the industrial revolution.

And to do so, I am joined by Navara Media's very own co-founder and contributing edited

to the London Review of Books, James Butler, James Hello. It is 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 praisey

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 Chuzzlewitt,

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. So he writes

what becomes a Christmas Carol. And unlike Martin Chuzzlewitt, he writes it in Wango, right?

It arrives as a single novella. So it's published in this kind of expensive edition for Christmas

1843. It's a very, very nice book that first edition. What goes on in it? Well, many, many

listeners will know the story of a Christmas Carol without ever having read it or perhaps

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