What Dickens taught Mariah Carey

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this long extract from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the LRB podcast. This bonus episode is a long extract from our close reading series novel approaches, in which I'll be talking to Colin Burrow and Claire Bucknell about Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. If you think you might like to listen to the whole thing, you can get a seven-day free trial to close readings right now. Just follow the link below or go to lrbb.me forward slash audio. That's lrb.m.m.m.
0:25.7	forward slash audio. Hello and welcome to this Christmas special of novel approaches, a
0:33.2	close readings podcast series from the London Review of Books, where we'll be talking about
0:37.5	A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I'm Thomas Jones, a senior editor at the paper, and
0:42.0	joining me here today in Scrooge's Countinghouse on Christmas Eve. I'm delighted to be reunited
0:47.3	at last with my co-host for this series, Claire Bucknell, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, author
0:52.4	of the Treasuries, and regular contributor to the LRB.
0:55.4	Hello, Claire.
0:56.3	Hello, Tom.
0:57.4	And equally delighted to be reunited with Colin Burrow, fellow of all souls, author of many books and longstanding contributor to the LRB,
1:04.6	who has joined us previously on this series to talk about Austin's Mansfield Park, which is also a Christmas story of sorts, and Thackeray's
1:11.5	Vanity Fair. Hello, Colin, and Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. What's Christmas time to you,
1:18.3	but a time for paying bills without money, a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an
1:23.8	hour, richer, a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months
1:30.8	"'presented dead against you.
1:32.7	"'If I could work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly,
1:36.9	"'every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips
1:41.9	"'should be boiled with his own pudding
1:44.1	"'and buried with the steak of
1:46.0	Ollie through his heart.
1:47.4	He should.
1:49.0	So Merry Christmas to you too, Tom.
	...

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