It’s Christmas Eve, and Dominic takes a deep dive with you all through A Christmas Carol. Returning to the series is the inimitable Prof. John Bowen (who recently worked on David Edgar’s Carol adaptation for the RSC) and who like many of us, re-reads this ghostly little book every Christmas and has pondered its power and meaning for decades.

The Carol Philosophy that Dickens expresses so generously in this story is truly universal: everyone has a chance to change and not be fixed, or branded, as the worst version of themselves. Dickens’ righteous anger here is channeled and diffused with goodwill, laughter and an unyielding determination to think only the best of people …

Joining the series again to read excerpts is the fantastic Hollie Hales and the violin you will hear throughout is played by the brilliant Alexis Bennett

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If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Support the show

If you'd like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Thank you so much!

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard

Thank you for listening!

*This episode focuses on the theme of domestic violence*

Dominic shares a bonus fragment from his last interview with Dr. Lydia Craig on The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain ...

It is a moment in the story where Redlaw comes across ‘a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn’ and ‘whose head’ is ‘bent down on her hands and knees.’ Redlaw sees that her arms are ‘black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised.’

It’s a deeply powerful, moment in the story, that reveals Dickens’ compassion not only for the poor, but for women on the receiving end of violence and abuse at the hands of husbands, partners, fathers or sons …

Given that there is a spike in this cruel and vicious behaviour over the holiday season it makes this moment in Dickens’ final Christmas book a clarion call for our society today …

Support the show

If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Support the show

If you'd like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Thank you so much!

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard

Thank you for listening!

Todays episode is on Dickens’ final Christmas Book The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. A deeply powerful story, where the chemist, Stephen Redlaw is offered the chance to forget all his painful memories by a Phantom who is a ghastly copy of himself drawn from the shadows in his study. Redlaw accepts the ghost’s bargain … but then faces a desperate struggle to have this spell lifted again, when to his horror he discovers that his new gift has a 'King Midas' quality of infecting everyone he meets (or nearly everyone) with the same curse of forgetting …

Light in the story comes in the form of Millie, one of Dickens’ good little women and a ministering angel to the people around her. Millie, her sparky husband William Swidger and her ancient father in law Philip, quietly try to help Stephen: turning up the lamps or decorating his study with that powerful wintry emblem, holly …

Dominic is joined by the inimitable Dr Lydia Craig, Lecturer in English at the University of Eastern Illinois. Lydia co-authored The Verse of Charles Dickens for Edinburgh University Press and her specialities include Nineteenth Century Race and Gender and The English Novel.She is both Associate editor of The Dickensian and The Charles Dickens Letters project, Co-editor of Dickens Search and Treasurer of The Dickens Society …

Support the show

If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Support the show

If you'd like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard

Thank you so much!

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard

Thank you for listening!