Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Charles Dickens - From Childhood Poverty to Giant of Literature

Transcript

Charles Dickens - From Childhood Poverty to Giant of Literature · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everybody.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I like how you backed off the mic so that you didn't overmodulate.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well done.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_03: Professionalism.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was really good.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: I've learned a lot, and this is the end of season three of Bird Camp City.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Time is flying.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: Now we have as many episodes as some of your favorite TV shows.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think what we got, about 80 episodes, 75 episodes?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I think we're in the 80s at this point.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we're we're doing well.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: We're not quite in 60 minutes territory yet, but you know, we I think it's more fun than 60 minutes.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know what?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We also have some big news.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you saw this, but we have a new uh Buzz Sprout supporter.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Did you see that?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Scott Henderson from Austin, Texas is our uh Buzz Sprout supporter and jumped on and is Do you mean Patreon?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, you can actually support through Buzz Sprout as well.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, where'd you go, Scott?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's I I think he might be the first one to do that for us.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and what it does, we pay for Buzz Sprout every month, and until you make enough, it just helps cover offset the cost of the Buzz Sprout subscription.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Scott is actually, I I would call him at this point like uh associate producer.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thanks, Scott.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Does that mean we have to start submitting our scripts to Scott?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, funny funny thing, he he uh he's a client of mine on my regular job, so I have to do that anyway.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, he's probably expecting something along those lines.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, um uh I'll I'll have this, you know, this is totally scripted show.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, some people think we riff on this.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, I'm reading a line right now.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean uh I've memorized every all of this stuff.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Kelly winks at Alex.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, actually, these are characters.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: This this is like uh Stephen Colbert.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: People often ask me how similar I am to my character on this show.
• 2:06
  unknown: Not much.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely not at all.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: Not really.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, you really nobody would like Alex in real life, but but oh, I was thinking it the other way around.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: I was thinking I was playing a son of a bitch.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're much nicer on the show than you are in person, Alex.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: We know this is true.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, big shout out to our uh Patreon and Buzz Sprout supporters, and to our uh viewers and listeners on YouTube.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: We are have we have you know we've exceeded a hundred subscribers at this point on YouTube.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, everybody.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next thing we should probably say is Merry Christmas.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting close.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Merry Christmas.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Merry Christmas, everyone, and God bless ye all.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people didn't always say Merry Christmas.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: I I heard that was popularized, right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's about what we're talking about today.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: This is one of those episodes where you and I are not surprising each other.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of ironic that we choose the Christmas episode to not do it.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: To not surprise each other, right, right.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Look what I got you.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: I got you uh Charles Dickens.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we're gonna be talking about Charles Dickens today.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I don't know what your relationship with Charles Dickens is, but to me, uh we have a tradition in our house where we go to see a Christmas Carol every year.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: We've probably gone every year since 2000, maybe 2000.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So almost 25, 24 years.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: We've probably this is the where we're gonna be going in a couple of days to go see uh uh Christmas Carol at the alley theater in Houston.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Very cool, very cool.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm a big I I I fell in love with that uh play.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: I think when I saw it in 2000, that might have been the first time I'd seen it on stage, though.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: I had seen probably the Muppet Christmas Carol and and uh all those, but I really enjoyed it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then I uh I think after the first or second year, I I uh downloaded the uh the text to the the novella of Christmas Carol.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: He and he's just such a good writer.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: I just love I just love the way he writes, I love the character names, I love all that stuff.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: I sadly have not read a lot of other Dickens stuff, um, but I plan to, especially after I'm sure I'll I'll run right to the local library after we talk about him today, because I think he's a great writer and I think its stuff is kind of timeless.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: But uh, what's your relationship with Charles Dickens?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Christmas Carol is probably the thing I know the most.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: I have seen the play not every year, but I saw it a number of times.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh college performances and uh went to see it with my grandmother.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think I saw maybe a high school version of it.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's just a really great story, and you can see it again and again.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And what's cool about the way they do it in the play is they will change up.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's unique, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: When you see a stage play of it, you're gonna see something that is a little bit different depending on who's putting it on, depending on who the characters and the actors are and the sets.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I definitely love the Victorian kind of aspect of it, you know, the the really frilly that age costumes from England, but it just kind of takes you away.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And for some reason, England to me is very Christmas.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been there for Christmas?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, never been to England for Christmas.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Have you?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'd love to, though.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: I would seem like it'd be a really cool place to be for Christmas.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think so too.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I agree with you about the adaptations too.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: That uh at the Alley Theater, which is one of the the best regional theater companies in the in the country, uh they the version that they used to put on um was uh it was called uh uh Christmas Carol, a ghost story of Christmas.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was almost spooky, it was almost uh kind of scary.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: They had a lot of supernatural kind of things going on, and and I really enjoyed that, but it wasn't for little kids at all.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it actually it would actually scare you.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of like skulls and scary stuff in it, and they've backed away.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: I think ever since like maybe 2019 or 2020, they have a different adaptation that I don't care for as much.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: But just like you said, you can do it so many ways, and then the older you get, you kind of see different things from it, you know.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think when I was you relate to different characters, oh definitely, yeah.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think when adaptations happen, I think like uh I was reading that during the Great Depression, you would have seen a different version of Christmas Carol than you would have in the 1980s, you know, when corporate greed was kind of the thing.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh in in America at least.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think in the UK they kind of make it more straight, but in the US, I think they had they kind of change the adaptations depending on what's going on in in the world, which is kind of what's fun about theater, anyways.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's it is interesting because you know, Christmas Carol being a very famous book of his, but you know, he he did um David Copperfield, he did Oliver Twist, um, he did, I mean, there there's a lot of things that people have heard of that maybe they don't realize are um uh attributed to Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, um Nicholas Nickleby, right?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Something that most people probably maybe have heard that name but don't know anything about it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Tale of Two Cities was was Dickens.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he really had a string of hits in turn far as far as his uh writing went, but then he did these serialized things, and that's really how he got started with his writing was uh the Pickwick Papers.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of that?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, the idea that people he would have what we know now as cliffhangers, that at the end of each episode you would put somebody in peril, and you'd have to wait until the next one would come out.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think they came out every month, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a monthly thing.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, back then a lot of people didn't read, and so people like illiterate people would even pay uh a half a penny to have these things read to them, and then they would, you know, no half a penny, you know what that in 1800.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say, how do you how do you how do you even break a penny in half?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, ha a haypenny?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what it's called?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Back then, yeah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't have a haypenny, then God bless you.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, half penny uh to in today's dollars, that's like 37 cents.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: Dang, for someone to read to you.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but imagine, I mean, I think you would pay and somebody would like stand up on an Apple box, maybe.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and they would read to the group, but you'd have to pay like each person would pay 37 cents or a haypenny, sure, and this person would walk away with you know three dollars and seventy cents worth of haypennies.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: Just by reading uh the monthly story.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think they were terribly long.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think you know you could read one of these in 20 minutes, right?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: But this was, I mean, this was before television, this was before radio, this was before any of that stuff happened.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't even know that um serialized stuff was very popular before that.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think this he kind of invented it.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: He and the publishers that he was working with.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: But let's let's back up um a little bit to his early life.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he was uh the the son of uh Elizabeth and John Dickens.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And something I learned that I actually didn't know before was that uh John Dickens, his father, while they weren't poor, um, they were often in a lot of debt.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: His father was um pretty a man who worked for the naval pay office, but he lived beyond his means.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he would borrow money from family, he would borrow money from business associates, and he did not always pay it back.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he liked, you know, he liked finer things, he couldn't really afford them.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so he ended up um get going to debtor's prison when Dickens was 11 years old.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, a lot of people may or may not know, I didn't really know that he was a big social reformer, right?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: A social critic, a reformist.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of that came from seeing his father being incarcerated in debtor's prison when he was 11, 12 years old.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let me just give you a little picture of what the Victorian era was like.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I mean we we think of Dickens, the Dickens, you could picture like poor people running around in the streets of England, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh dirty children, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: That's you could kind of, when I say Dickensian, you can kind of think of that.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: Also, like in a lot of the Raw Dahl stories, you see that kind of the same thing.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: Or even uh like the Willy Wonka movie that we watched last year, kind of that same vibe, right?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: That Victorian England where some people were.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: They've got a top hat and a and a velvet coat, or they're in rags, exactly, and uh, you know, and no shoes.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: With speaking Cockney, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: At least in the US version, uh, that's what they speak.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: But so we're talking about the time Victorian England was like from 1837 to 1901 under Queen Victoria, so that was right when he lived.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so in this this era was like kids didn't really go to school.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: I think in 1820, only 20% of children had any schooling.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Now part of Victorian England was they were that it was increasing, but it was very common for kids not to go to school.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know what they did instead?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: They worked, yeah.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you would have eight-year-old kids go and be chimney sweeps because they could fit in tall in in small crevices, you know, and they'd have them do sometimes really dangerous work.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: There was a lot of disease, there was industrial, you know, industrialization was just starting.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: There was a lot of child labor, a lot of pollution.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: And there was absolutely uh no appetite for poor people back then in uh England.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: They just didn't, they thought they were kind of the the scourge of society and blamed them, blamed them for being poor.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: So they passed a law.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: Have you ever heard of the Poor Law Amendment Act?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh come across that?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I have heard of the um it was something like the debtor's um debtor's deed or something like that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: But what's the poor law amendment?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it was basically so people would take relief, and relief is like what we would call welfare today.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: And they were they would always the the politicians of the day would always say that people would rather be on relief than work, you know.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: So the law made it where you could only get relief or welfare if you went to a workhouse.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes workhouses were called poorhouses.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: And a workhouse is somewhere where you would go and you would live and you would break stones, or you would crush bones to make fertilizer, or you would spend your time taking like a rope and picking it out with a spike, just really horrible labor.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: Breaking stones and crushing bones.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: The idea is that it would be so distasteful that you would rather just not ask for the relief at all.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where you know, when you hear a lot of his his works have talk about workhouses and debtors' prisons, like you say, and and the evil people, the villains of these things would uh in Christmas Carol, he says, Are there no prisons?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: Are there no workhouses?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of uh when when people would come by and ask for charity, they would say, you know, what happened to the workhouses and all that.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um debtor's prison that you mentioned was even worse, and it was a scam.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: So a debtor's prison is where you would go and you would pay a fee to be in the debtor's prison.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So they would take a fee from you, you would bit let out during the day and go to work, and it would be just enough to pay your fee.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then as soon as you paid your fee, they would raise the rates of your fee.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: So making it impossible to ever get out of there.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: But like 10,000 people a year um would be in debtor's prison.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and they would have a lot of starvation and torture and all that.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was just a horrible place because Victorian England was all about keeping poor people down.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: And like you said, that really colored Dickens um his social reform ideas, his view of the world.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, you can imagine your dad's just gone, and he was he owed money to a baker, which eventually selled.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: John John uh, yeah, yeah.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like 42 pounds, which I think today would be like$3,000 in our money today.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Must have eaten a lot of donuts.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, like you said, he I think he l liked like to the fancier life than he can afford.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: But a$3,000 debt shouldn't, you know, cause you to have to live away from your family and spend all your time and like you couldn't get out of this debtor's prison.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what what I read was that um in some cases the family would come to live with you in debtor's prison.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: So sure, if they wanted to see you, they'd have to.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: The the wife and and kids, um, younger kids.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is sort of what happened with um with Dickens.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: John Dickens was put into debtor's prison, and his father and mother decided he should go to work, and he went to a boot blacking factory.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he not only had to go to work, but he moved away from them because the work was other side of town.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: He had to live with uh another woman.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: He boarded with somebody, and this is when he's 12 years old, and apparently he was pretty good at this um job.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: He would he would put the labels on the boot blacks on the on the boot blacking stuff.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even know what that is, some sort of uh polish or uh powder or something.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds dirty though, doesn't it?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds really um and and that was kind of his job, and he always felt a little bit bitter toward his parents because they they sent him there pretty quickly.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like they didn't try to figure something else out.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, Nope, you go to work for the boot blacking.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that was something that he carried as a weight for a long time.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, eventually his father did get out.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think, I think his uh Charles's grandmother, uh, she died and left him some some money, and he was able to get out.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they went to living together again.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, John or uh at that point Charles had several other careers.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: He ended up um being very interested in the theater.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: He had seen Joseph Grimaldi.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know who this guy is?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's the king of clowning.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the father of modern clowning.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: He saw this guy perform, he was into mimes, he was into clowns, he was into comedy, he was into singing songs and and making these sort of observations about people, almost what you would do with stand-up comedy these days.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is all stuff Charles was into.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and because he was influenced by the theater, and because his father was willing to go into debt, he would take them to the theater.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the kids actually got to go see plays and things that were normally reserved for upper upper crust families, but you know, his his father would borrow the money, they would go see a sh play, and he just really kind of fell in love with the idea of um theater, with the idea of writing, and he actually got a job at the House of Commons reporting on the government and worked there for a while.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing about it is he saw He was like 15 though when he was doing this, right?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, this is 15, 16 years old.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: His father had gone to debtor's prison, so he he saw that happen, and then he's reporting on the House of Commons and he's seen how much corruption and greed and stuff there is in government.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think those two things together sort of melded his opinion of of what government was and you know how they tried to keep most people down.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing, though, that and I I guess we've talked about this on different episodes that when we talked about like teenagers weren't really a thing back then.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, 12 years old, you're doing hard labor, and by 15 you're like a court reporter.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: This is crazy.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: I I think of I don't know a lot of 15-year-olds that could take that job and then like and then like uh become aware, you know, politically aware, but it was just a different time back then, man.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: You grew up fast.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: You grew up fast.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um well in 1834 he began to he got an opportunity to publish something under a pseudonym, which I don't think he was actually paid for at the time.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh sketches by Bose.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of that?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I've heard it called Bose and I've heard them called Boz.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think with an English accent, it's kind of the same.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know the origin of the name?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: That it was supposed to be like Moses, right?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: When you had a cold, it sounded like Bose, Moses, and then it turned into Bose.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I think when you say it with an English accent, it sounds like Bose.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Bose.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: So it's yeah, it's kind of right in the middle.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: Have you ever seen that movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's a movie called The Man Who Invented Christmas that's about Dickens and like him, his process of writing Christmas Carol.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: And there they call him Boz, but it's uh with an English accent.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: So it's kind of yeah.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I would I was thinking it was Bose because of Moses, right?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Which right would be that's what I thought too, yeah.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: You would think, but you know where the Moses came from?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you the his brother was named Augustus, um, and Augustus Caesar was you know a big famous um sort of person from way back, even when Charles Dickens was around.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so he called him Moses, but even though his name was Augustus, because he was kind of lumping him in with other uh famous people from back in the day, like way back in the day.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: I will say that I noticed Dickens was very big on giving people nicknames.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: He also uh uh went by the uh imitable.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Intimitable?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: Inomittable.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh inimitable, I-N-I-M-I-T-A-B-L-E.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Inomittable.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: This has got to be a YouTube short, though, this part.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it means someone is so good and unusual that it's impossible to be copied.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, he was.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was initable.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: It couldn't be imitated.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: Inimitable.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Inimitable, yes.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Inimitable.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: He couldn't be imitated.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, okay, that's where that comes from.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even realize that.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that's he called himself the in inimitable.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know what else you could call him?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Original.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Original, the OG.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: He was very, very uh uh into trying to make the most content he could.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was a content creator, an early content creator.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he signed up for several of these things, several of these contracts he had, like Oliver Twist originally um was signed under contract before he became famous.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened is, you know, he'd say, All right, I'll write this book for you for 200 pounds, let's say, which was a lot of money back then.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is two 200 pounds was several several thousand, maybe ten thousand dollars or whatever.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But then he became really popular with these Pickwick papers, and people, you know, became a kind of an overnight success, uh, a literary celebrity, famous, you know, all over the world.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: People are reading this stuff, and he actually went back on several of his contracts and basically said, I'm not doing it.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you guys are getting way too good of a deal.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I know I signed an agreement with you, but I'm not doing it.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so he backed out of more than one contract with a variety of publishers.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the very first instance of the word celebrity was in the Oxford Dictionary in 1851, and he was listed as like an example, like he was like the original celebrity.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: He he he his fame, his fame grew before his fortune grew, and so he did still have trouble with money sometimes, and he tended to move into bigger and bigger houses.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: He got married, and he had a bunch of kids, and he, you know, he was very much a um uh kind of figure out a plan and try to work that plan.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think he wanted a stable home life, right?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't want to have the situation that he had growing up, and so he he married, but it's said that his marriage was not you know, not the best marriage.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: He was a little bit um disappointed in the companionship that his wife brought him, Catherine Dickens.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he was an international celebrity too, and at least in the English speaking world, that in New York people would come down to the docks when they knew those Pickwick papers would be shipped in, and they would they would get them right off the dock, right, right off the press to read those monthly Pickwick papers.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: In New York.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so it's funny um you mentioned that in New York because that was some where some of his worst copywriting uh infringements were happening, or a lot of publishers in the United States could take his work, copy it, publish it under a different name or something like that, and there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it at the time because copyright was not really sure, it wasn't an international thing by any means, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So so that was a big problem that he had, and he actually came to the US, I think, in 1842 and did some live readings and kind of did some negotiation on his own behalf to try and get some of that copyrighted money back, you know.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that was a good move too, because you he he made his his name his his he he he came up with a brand, basically, right?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're gonna buy a book and it isn't by him, you know that it, you know, it's not gonna be as good.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: You wanted the name on it.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Them them taking his material and changing the name was a little counterproductive because it would probably sell a lot more with the name Charles Dickens on it.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and he would go on tour and just read his books.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and they said that people would even like pass out, they would be so excited.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like they would so yeah, they were so taken with his words and the way he read them.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um oh, probably had poor ventilation in those uh halls, though, in those arenas, theaters, halls.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and everyone was dressed, you know, up.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure the passing out hadn't showered anything to do with him.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean you you gather that many people in a tight spot like that with no uh air conditioning, you're gonna get some people passing out.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of a lot of uh powder, but not a lot of um, not a lot of uh showers going on.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, a lot of stink.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of stank.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so you know, we mentioned he had um in his kind of uh career, he was an editorial uh journal editor.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote 15 novels, he wrote five novellas, he wrote a bunch of uh short stories, uh nonfiction articles, he lectured, as you said.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: He also wrote these things called sketches.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of that?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that maybe is where the term sketch comedy comes from.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of this little look into a life.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he would do sketches about married people, he would do sketches about poor people, he would do sketches about um government officials since he worked in that area.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Were they to be performed or just they were just like short stories?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: They were short stories, but they didn't even really have a plot necessarily.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: They would be a description and they would have um, you know, maybe a few things that would go on in them, but they were more or less just imagine a visual sketch, you know, like like somebody looking at it.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you're taking a look into this world for just a moment.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was that was one of his writing was so good that he could do that.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not everyone could pull that off.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: That was actually one of the first things he started doing when he was really young, was writing sketches about people that he met and people in his family and people you know that came into his household.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a you know, this is a 12-year-old kid, a 15-year-old kid writing sketches about people in their 30s and 40s and 50s that are coming to his house, you know, and about the way they walked, the way they talked, the way they looked, the way they smelled, all that stuff.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's funny because there's so many people in our world that do that now.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like LA is full of people that do that, but he was the first to do that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_03: Almost like a street photographer.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he was like that, isn't what writing looked like at that time.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, no, he was breaking a lot of barriers.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: He was definitely he was definitely um kind of going into new territory.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this was 200 years ago almost.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: And he's doing things that we would recognize today.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh it's it's pretty hard to have that longevity as an artist, um, you know, as we can tell from our rock and roll Hall of Fame, uh, what is rock and roll or is rock and roll dead episode.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people burn bright and then burn out, but but Charles Dickens did not.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: But he only lived 58 years.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, so I mean, in that respect, and he was and he what he didn't have a ton of I mean, he wasn't super prolific.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: You don't think so?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_03: I think you could read everything that he ever wrote of any consequence in 2025.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're saying um I I mean I guess it depends on what you define as any consequence because I know he wrote a lot of stuff under pseudonyms.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: He did write some things, you know.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned earlier that he would go back on some of these deals that he had with publishers, um, he sometimes had to write under a pseudonym because he had um gone back on a deal with a publisher, and therefore he was kind of under a um, you know, he wasn't supposed to write for anybody else during this period of time, and so he had to do it under a fake name so that he didn't get in legal trouble.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but out of all that content, do you know which uh which piece of work was his favorite?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: His favorite?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: Was it something random that we don't really know?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's a pretty popular one.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: Oh um I would say maybe Tale of Two Cities.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, I have a quote and I'll read it to you here.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is from Dickens himself.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Of all my books, I like this the best.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to say every child of my fancy and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child, and his name is David Copperfield.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: He he he said it was the most um the that character was the most like him.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, in his opinion, David Copperfield.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder what he would think of the magician, David Copperfield.
• 30:54
  unknown: Yeah.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I I had no idea that David Copperfield was uh taken from a Dickens book until I don't know, 10, 10 years, 20 years ago.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: But growing up, I remember the the magician name, and that's who I knew.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'll go, oh, this is a famous book by Dickens, and it's Dickens' favorite book.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I should probably read it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: But he said it was the closest to him in terms of you know what he grew up with and what he loved.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you um mentioned to you earlier that he did uh have some uh things that he did to try and help society, like setting up charities and stuff.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: He had one called U Urania, U-R-A-N-I-A cottage, and it was a place for fallen women.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of that thing?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it was a mostly for prostitutes.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: And also back in those days, if a woman had an affair or they did something to dishonor their family, um, you know, like like basically cheating on a husband or something like that, they would end up being disavowed, they would end up poor and destitute, and they wouldn't get um wouldn't be able to get any help.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: They could go to prison.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so this your your uranian urania cottage was set up for them to come to and learn and become um productive.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then what they often did with these women after they graduated or finished the time there was they sent them to the US or Australia so they could start a fresh life.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, when I was reading about all those uh crazy laws that happened in the 1830s that uh really put poor people down, one of the reforms that they did um was to end uh child support.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: So if a guy got a woman pregnant, they said that if he gave her money, that would just incentivize women to keep doing that, to get pregnant.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: And uh they didn't want quote unquote illegitimate children uh running around.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_03: So they it would promote bastardization and all these horrible words that they used to use back then.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: So they actually took away child support laws, which really put women in a horrible spot back then, and there was and a lot of them had to turn to prostitution, they weren't allowed to work doing much of anything, right?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: We learned with typhoid Mary there was only so many jobs um that you could do.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: She was kind of a contemporary of these folks, right?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh she was a little later, I thought.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_03: A little later, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but just as dirty and and filthy as other people we're talking about.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: She could have been a character in a Dixon Dickens novel.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but it was it was awful.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you when you think about how much they they put poor people down.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: If you're a woman, it was even worse.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: And if you were a single woman, it was even worse.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, they were they were ostracized.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um I I read an account of uh Dickens actually defending a woman.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: He was on a jury, and this servant uh girl who had had a baby, the baby had died, was accused of murdering the baby, and he defended her and ended up getting her um to not be guilty, you know, uh a not guilty verdict because he argued the case so well.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and she hadn't killed the baby.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: She basically she never stopped working, and the baby was born while she was on the staircase of the house she worked in because she was walking down those stairs to do something for the for the Lord or whatever.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: He was a good dude.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he was, but then there was this little thing that after 22 years of being married to Catherine, uh, in 1858, he actually declared her mentally unfit and left her.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they say that she wasn't mentally unfit.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: This was something he just used his star power to call her that, and that, you know, um, she was never his soulmate.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: She was somebody that he married and thought he was in love with initially, but you know, even early in their marriage, he had other friends, like more male companions that he was friends with.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't very friendly with his wife, you know, he he had lots of children with her, so obviously he was uh cordial with her, but um, she was very subservient, she wasn't very quick-witted, she wasn't somebody that was maybe intellectually stimulating for him.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so, again, 22 years of marriage, he left her, and there were rumors that he was running around with an actress or even Catherine Dickens' um Catherine, you know, I forget what her maiden name was, but his wife's sister.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there was some stuff going on there.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: Again, he was ahead of his time, stuff which is very familiar.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_03: TMZ would have been all over Dickens' house.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, very very tick Dickensian, right?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so maybe added out the part where I said he was a good dude.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, I I want to throw out a couple of other things that um I've heard.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever heard um run like the dickens?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Or you scare the dickens out of me.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: What in the Dickens are you doing?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: Substitute for a cuss word.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a substitute for devil.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh it's actually uh run like the devil, um, you scared the devil out of me.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it it is, it's a euphemism, but it has nothing to do with Charles Dickens.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually traced back to Shakespeare and the Merry Wives of Windsor.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: He he talks, he says something about run like the Dickens.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of people think when they say you know, you scared the Dickens out of me, we're talking about Charles Dickens, but I would have yeah, I always thought that.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: The only Dickens I know.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: The only Dickens I know.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, in 1870, he died of a stroke, and it was a pretty big deal, I guess, when he died.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people were pretty let down and disappointed that they wouldn't have him to write for them anymore.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's sad.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is sad.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you don't really think about people back then having that, but but he said himself that he would grow very attached to the characters when he was writing a book.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And have you ever read a book and you're done with it, and then you're kind of sad that you're done with it?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely TV shows.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yeah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like a long series, you might watch, you know, like like uh uh uh Kate or Sawyer or Jack from Lost, right?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you watched that, if you invested, you know, years and years of your life watching And then they're just gone.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're just gone.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of kind of sad.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he uh was buried in um Poets Corner.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and I think you can still see his grave in Westminster Abbey, right?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, did you go s did you go to Poets Corner?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we did.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we did when we we were there two years ago, and I don't think we went there, but I I'd go there now.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: He was um so they have actual burials there, and then they have monuments.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_03: So not everyone's buried there, but even if you're if you're not buried there, they can put a monument to you.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_03: But like Chaucer is buried there, wow, uh Rudyard Kipling is buried there, but even like uh more recent people like Lawrence Olivier there.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but then they have monuments to people like Shakespeare or the Bronte sisters.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_03: But um, I heard that he had a secret funeral.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know anything about the secret funeral?
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, I hadn't heard about that.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: What what happened?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I was gonna ask you.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, I I had read that he had asked for a small private funeral, but it ended up being a big deal because everybody was so sad.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of kind of like John Lennon when everybody came out in New York City and just like had that vigil, right?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_03: Just maybe that's what it was.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was a secret one just because they didn't want to deal with the crowds or something.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now the thing that I love, uh, one of the things that I really love, even if you don't read the books, is the character names that he comes up with.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's Pip.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, and just like Rald Dahl, I who had to have been just a big uh uh Dickens fan.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_03: Dickens fan, but even like Dr.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: Seuss, you know, you see these kind of the character names were just wonderful.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna read you some character names here that just oh yeah, even if you've never read the book, you just an image comes up of these people, right?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: So Ebenezer Scrooge, man.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: That what a great name.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: The rumor is that came he was in Edinburgh and that he found a tombstone, and the grave was for Ebenezer Lennox Scroggy.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: And that it said that his job, like it said Ebenezer Lennox Scroggy, and then under that it said a meal man, and a meal man is like somebody who sold corn, okay, cornmeal.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but the rumor is that Dickens misread it as a mean man and that it had always kind of stored away, like he would hear funny names and they would store them away for later.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna use that someday, and then when he was uh younger, he lived near a um a business, and the sign said Googe and Marnie.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Googe, G-O-O-D-G-E and Marnie.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: That's where you got Scrooge and Marley.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: So these kind of things would just kind of stick with him.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: But Ebenezer Scrooge is one of the great names, and probably killed any idea of anybody being named Ebenezer these days.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you don't see that name a lot.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there aren't a lot of eight-offs, there aren't a lot of Ebenezers.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: But Bob Cratchit, I love that name, too.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Cratchit just sounds so pathetic and sad.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: And you mentioned Nicholas Nickleby.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: Just what a cool name that is.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oliver Twist, the artful Dodger that came from that, too, right?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: David Copperfield.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: But here's one, here's one that's also.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: Can you name a Dickens character was also a name of uh a classic rock band?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uriah Heap.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uriah Heap, yeah, was a character.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: I never knew.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: What book?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know uh Uriah Heap, I think, came from Uriah Heap.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: From David Copperfield.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what song they sing?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know anything about them.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, you've heard of them.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I've heard of them.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're one of those bands that I was like, whatever.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, yeah.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_03: They sing that song where they go, uh uh uh fighting, killing wine women gonna put me to my grave.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh running, hiding, losing, crying, nothing left to save.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: But my life.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_03: Remember that part?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: Remember that part where they go, but my life.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: You remember that?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: I don't.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what that song's called?
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: Stealing.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: Stealing stealing when I should have been buying.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_03: No, I'll have to check it out.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's uh, you'll know it.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's kind of like Mark Staple.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of like Vruca Salt, right?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_03: Sure, sure.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and there's again, those those those are great names from Raw Dahl, you know, like Augustus Gloop and those kind of uh Wackford Squeers was another name of a character.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't that a cool name?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: What is Wackford Squeers in?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't know.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Martin Chuzilwit.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, okay.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds like a Simpsons character.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then in Christmas Carol, his old boss was Mr.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: Fezziwig.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: You remember that?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Mr.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Fezziwig.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_03: The done the one that does the dancing, yeah.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Mr.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: and Mrs.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: Fezziwig.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it just those are just such whimsical names.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said, Dr.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_03: Seuss kind of got us used to those kind of names, but just really cool uh names.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_03: And when you when you sit down and read a book and you see characters like that, you're all in.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_03: Now, how do you gonna not?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was big on he was big on giving nicknames to people, you know, like I said, um uh about his own nicknames.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh did you also know that he was uh uh animal lover?
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Did not.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: He had uh cats, dogs, horses, but he also had a raven, and he had a raven named Grip, and his uh raven was an inspiration for the character Grip in Barnaby Rudge.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in that movie about him, somebody gave gave a raven as a present, and they said the raven could talk, and then the raven started talking like a parrot.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't know ravens could do that.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is that actually true that they can?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he was uh He was a uh I just Googled it and it says Ravens can talk.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: They can mimic speech and they're very intelligent.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, and they did.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, that so that was in the that movie.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: Did you know that you mentioned the the readings that he would go on and like the America tour?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um that uh the first ticket scalpers ever appeared at uh his readings, like that's ticket scalping was basically invented, right?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: There were so many so many people that wanted to get in and only so many tickets, and so yeah, this is before we really had like sports, and I don't think there was a lot of touring uh bands or anything like that, but he was one of the tours that everybody looked forward to, and people would go outside and sell their tickets for above face value.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Shout out uh um uh Sandy Psony.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_03: Shout out Sandy Sony, yeah.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Probably back in the day he was uh scalping tickets to Dickens, Dickens, it was it was Dickens with uh Henry Rollins opening at a spoken word thing.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: Now the the word the term bah humbug.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: Think about that for a second.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Because when I did the episode on uh um who was it that that said was always talking about hoaxes and humbugs?
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh uh yeah, um he's the guy who did the greatest show on earth.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Barnum.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: Barnum.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: Everything, remember that's where he talked about humbugs, right?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and everyone thinks that bah humbug comes out of a Christmas carol, but actually can't really find it those two words together.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you he's always kind of he's just so like grumpy, Scrooge this is he's always going around going bah.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: And then he would say humbug a lot, but he would never actually say bah humbug.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, those two were uh they were put together later, like by by the audience, fan fiction?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: I've never even seen it like in a in a play.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_03: I've never seen him say bah humbug.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: He just always says Christmas is a humbug.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and he he said humbug like you know, like bullocks, basically.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know what it means.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: It means a fraud.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, hoax, right.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I said with Barnum that humbug was a hoax.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but he always said that Christmas was a hoax.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: But I think I don't think we've talked about this yet that prior to a Christmas carol, Christmas was not a huge holiday.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh not the way we know it now.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_03: We would not recognize Christmas before Christmas Carol came out.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe that's why Bob Cratchit had to work.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was just it was like it was like a bank holiday, but it wasn't really uh, you know, everybody else.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_03: It was the kind of thing that people would take off and people would roll their eyes like presidents just trying to get a day off of work.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like technically you could get it off, but what is there really to do?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: There were no people that had like traditions on Christmas or anything like that.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: Easter was a much bigger religious holiday.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and they didn't have a lot of holidays on the calendar back in Victorian England.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_03: People just worked every day, seven days a week.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: You didn't get weekends off, and your kids worked.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is just a pretty miserable time.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but the Christmas tree and the goose, and I mean, or the you know, the all those traditions that we see in Christmas Carol that we kind of follow today, um, that's where it all started.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it was not that that much of a the idea that people would go from house to house singing Christmas carols was just a new thing back then.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um so that's why that movie is called The Man Who Invented Christmas, because essentially if you went to pre if you went to pre-Dickens, England, you wouldn't have seen you wouldn't have recognized December 25th.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: Definitely there was no Christmas season.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he had he had a couple of other plays about Christmas too, I think.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, there were some precursors to a Christmas Carol where they were even similar, like vi being visited by goblins.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, so you mentioned humbug earlier.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, two other instances of humbug that I found interesting.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: One was from The Wizard of Oz.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the Scarecrow refers to the Wizard of Oz as a humbug.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, really?
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and as a hundred years later.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the wizard actually agrees.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this was in the 1900 book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: There I guess yeah.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: This was uh yeah, 60, 60, 70 years old later.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then um apparently there was a doctor who was doing a um surgery, and it was one of these surgeries with an audience, other doctors watching to see what was going on.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: He was using some sort of ether as an anesthetic during the surgery, and he put the put the patient under and he said, Gentlemen, this is no humbug.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: I like that.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think if I was a writer and I was writing under a pseudonym, I would go by Bob Humbug.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: Bob, how about Alec Humbug?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it doesn't roll off the tongue like Bob Humbug.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: Or or uh Yummy Humbug, tummy humbug.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of so many things you can do with humbug.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I gotta say this was interesting because I had a very one-track mind about Charles Dickens before, and that was pretty much Christmas Carol, and I suppose Oliver Twist to some degree, but knowing that he was somebody who did fight for and generally cared about the little man because that's who he was growing up, was a pretty refreshing thing to learn.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: And Christmas Carol has never been out of print.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it's like one of the only books to go that long.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's the longest ever.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, maybe Harry Potter think of how popular Harry Potter would have to be, though.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's only been out, what, 30 years?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_03: To survive another hundred and fifty to two hundred years to never be.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think Harry Potter's gonna make it.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think our future podcast podcasters will be doing a podcast talking about our podcast and how we talked about Harry Potter on our podcast.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I predict.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: If if somebody's listening to this in the year 2162, um write us an email at not at dirtnap city.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Although at that point it probably we will be we will be at dirt nap city, so it will be uh R at Dirt Knap City.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's that's uh deep.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's deep.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, Merry Christmas, Alex.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: Merry Christmas.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: What do we have in store for season four?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Season four is gonna be a barn burner, I'm telling you.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we've got some supporters behind us.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're coming up on that hundredth episode that'll hit in season four.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like we should probably do a few more uh in-person recordings and a few more uh nights, you know, like we did before our last in-person recording where we did a little kind of um exploratory creative uh session, don't you think?
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: What about a live episode?
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that I think we're saving that for season five.
• 51:39
  unknown: Okay.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't mean live.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't mean live where they listen to it as I mean live in front of an audience.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, season five.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: I see I think season four is gonna be where we go all Dickinsonian.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: We get we get big.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um we have to neg uh renege on our previous contracts because they weren't big enough for us.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're gonna get big for our britches and and uh you know have ten kids and move into a giant house and visit America.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: So when does season four start?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that'll be early in 2025.
• 52:12
  unknown: Right.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: So is there any weeks off here?
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're taking a couple of weeks off to spend a little time with the family, go see some plays, um, you know, do a little writing, maybe even uh record some episodes so we can catch up because you know at this point right now, as of this recording, we have uh one episode in the can.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're we're cutting it close with this, my friend.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you're getting this episode weekly, will you have any breaks between season three or season four?
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're gonna have about a about a month.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: About a month off.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: So go back and listen to our past catalog.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Here, here's here's the to-dos for our audience.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you're still listening at 54 minutes into this thing, thank you, first of all.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and second of all, go back and listen to our past episodes.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of gems in there, a lot of great stuff that you could cover.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: And and what's the one that you think is the least appreciated, the least listened to that you think deserves a second?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_03: Mr.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_03: Rogers.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: Mr.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: Rogers, for sure.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think a lot of people think they already know about Mr.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: Rogers because maybe they've seen the doc or maybe they've seen the Tom Hanks movie.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_03: But Kelly covers ground that those movies don't don't touch so much, so deep.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_03: Personal experience, even with Mr.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: Rogers, like personal encounter.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: You don't get that from Tom Hanks.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, you really don't.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: Even though Tom Hanks was uh Abraham Lincoln's cousin.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know that?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: It you know, we're we don't get into that stuff on this.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: We don't talk about live people in this podcast, right?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be interesting, you have to be dead to me.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_03: I don't even know who Tom Hanks is.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: Until you're dead, I don't even know who you are.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks, Mr.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: Dickens.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: We enjoy your work, and hopefully, uh you're up there writing in Dirt Knap City and telling people, or down there, wherever Dirtnap City is, and uh keeping people well entertained and looking out for the poor.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: Please, sir, can I have some more?
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: Dreams are dashed on a coal stone floor.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: Charles Dickens knew the score, writing tales that the rich ignore Leap and hope in a world so grim, streets of London dark and dim, voices whispering on a whim, Victorian ghost, they sing a hymn.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Pizza, can you feed my soul?
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: From the pages where the story's roll A genius done to gather In the very tone of evening's low He gave a name to every pain in under heart's despair remains Through fogging grief in alley lanes His worth became a worldly chain Poet of the poorest plant Guiding lost ones to the light Echoes of his pen still right in the shadows of each night Please can you be my soul I'm gonna tell a story?