We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Trshenski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. Today we are joined by Hillsdale College Professor
Dwight Lindley, who is currently running an online course teaching an online course called
Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol. And you can, by the way, go
to Hillsdale dot edu not just to learn more, but also to sign up
for the course, because, as I mentioned earlier, it is online,
so it's accessible. You don't have to be in little Hillsdale, Michigan to
take the course. So Professor Lindley, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Emily. Happy to be here. Of course, would
you mind telling us just a little bit more about the course and what you're
hoping to sort of get across with it? Sure, it's a short thing.
It just has one little bit of a little lecture for historical introduction and
then one lecture about each of the so called staves of the book, which
are like little chapters, And so it's meant to be a brief but compelling
take on something that is probably familiar to most people from seeing the countless film
and TV versions, But who would like to go a little deeper and see
something more there, especially through a kind of literary close reading of it that
really unearthed the text and brings brings out some of the magic that's there in
the deeper, the deeper senses. So I'm really just trying to refresh an
old and beloved story for people and take them deeper. And what are some
of those things that come through about the text when it's studied through this uh
kind of deeper analysis. Are there some really critical differences between maybe the cartoonified
version of the very familiar by now story that we get from some of the
Hollywood depictions or even you know, simplified narratives for children. Are there are
there key things that you get missed about the story? Yeah, that's a
good question. I mean the things that the Hollywood Hollywood Dickens kind of gets
are the humor, that the scariness, the uncanniness. I mean, it
is ghost story and everything the concern for the poor and the critique of of
Scrooge's narrow materialism and things like this. That's all, you know, there's
no problem that that comes through in the in the the versions that you can
see on video. The things that don't come through as much are, for
my money, the the sheer brilliance of the wordplay and the verbal wit that
that really fills the story as it's written. And and so I that's one
one service I hope that my class can can provide is to introduce people to
some of the hilarious and deep and thoughtful descriptions of things that really come to
life and have tremendous energy. Another couple of things that I think come through
that I'm hoping to bring out in this course. One the kind of childlikeness
that is so important to the story. I think a lot of the Scrooges
and the productions we get from recent years tend to give us a more cynical
and adult picture. I recently watched the trailer to a version from a few
years ago with Tom Hardy and oh what was the other guy's name, but
anyways, a few years ago Christmas Carol, and it was just it was
like this macabre horror story version of a Christmas Carol. But I think there's
this mystery of childlikeness at the heart of it. Scrooge is in a way
becoming a child again in an almost mystical way in the story, and it's
very beautiful and there's a tremendous innocence about it. And then that's related to
the last thing I would say, which is that there's just a profoundly religious
dimension and even like Christian incarnational dimension to the story, which is almost entirely
lost in film adaptations and the common ways of seeing this do you have,
By the way, what just while we're on the subject of favorite adaptation,
is there one that you think does the best job? Well, I mean
I like several. I think I mean it's actually hard to beat the Muppets
in some ways. I actually like several. I think you don't really want
just one because they tend to get different things. Well, I like,
there's one so the Muppets, and then there was one from the nineties with
Patrick Stewart as Scrooge. Those two both actually get a fair amount of the
narrator's voice and the kind of text of the story. I also like the
one with Alistair sim from the middle of the twentieth centuries is Black and White
nineteen fifties. That one is that one actually really captures that that spirit of
kind of childlikeness, which I think is so important to the story. I
can mention others. I'm kind of ecumenical. I like different ones. Well,
as you were preparing to teach the course, is there any historical context
that is important to the era of the time that Dick is writing in that
you felt needed to be conveyed or should be conveyed. Is there anything about
this particular time and history when a Christmas Carol is initially published that you think
is really helpful to kind of understanding the story instead of its message. Oh
yeah, yeah, yeah. As I said, my first lecture is on
that question, and I think this is eighteen forty three in England. The
main historical events and kind of movements that you want to know about are the
industrialization of the British and the world economy, and the related phenomenon of the
urbanization of their population. So you just had a bunch of a bunch of
poor laborers moved into the city and living in really destitute shandy towns. You
know, and we still have these invarious parts of the world, but we're
not used to them being in London in the in the kind of in the
anglosphere in the same way that they were then. And so that kind of
setting of of cultural upheaval and massive, you know, unhoused poverty was was
a big one. And along with that, just I mean, another factor
that goes along with both of those, both of those details is this capacity.
So in a new urbanized, industrialized world, there's more wealth, and
yet there's also this destabilization because everybody's moved away from their families, and so
there are the old supports support systems of family and church and community that you
could just rely on to be your safety net in the eighteenth century and before,
basically in all pre modern periods. That's all gone now and people are
living cheek by jowel in the new urban world, and yet they don't know
how to take care of each other and are not taking care of each other.
That's part of why Dickens wrote this. He's trying to write a Christmas
story that will that will warm people's hearts to this need to dramatically encounter Christ
in the poor and in elite of these in that setting, it almost reminds
me of someone else who was living in Victoria in London around the same time,
and that would be Karl Marx writing about alienation and the sort of ravages
of urban industrialization. Seriously, I mean, if you read friedrich Ingel book
on the State of I'm trying to remember the name of his texts where he
basically went up to Liverpool and Manchester and walked around is like and looked at
the plight of the Irish who had been brought over to work in the mills.
And I mean, you know, there's like a lot of uh,
there's a lot of over driven rhetoric in there, but he's actually talking about
a real problem, you know, the condition of the working class in England.
That's what it's called. And you know it's yeah, they're they're responding
to the same issues with you know, with some different approaches. And Marx
is, you know, maybe more complicated on religion than people realize, although
obviously it sort of lands in the same space that people commonly understand Marx being
in when it comes to religion, but Dickens in religion very very different.
How is how is dickens from a Christian perspective, from a religious perspective,
how is he sort of processing these up the societal upheavals from that background.
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, he personally, you know,
was kind of his own man. Theologically, he's not he's not kind
of a card carrying Christian of this or that stripe. But he read the
Gospel his entire life and dearly loved Christ. And the moral vision that comes
out of the New Testament was you know, like searingly important to him and
shaped his whole way of seeing the world, not just the moral vision like
he thought. You know, he believed it even though, like I said,
he didn't fit in any place, you know, particularly church wise.
But okay, his how did how did that shape his response to to poverty
and things like this? Basically he thought that, like the test of your
life is how how well will you love those you have been given to love?
And he thought that, you know, the way that you love the
least of these is kind of the most important subset of those. And you
know, he is sincerely believed like that's that's where you're going to meet Christ,
is whatsoever you do to the least of these. And and so I
mean he thought is like, this is this is the one truth I need
to tell in a certain sense. And I think if you, if you
look for that, you see it all over his novels too, his big,
his big fat novels that that people probably don't read as often as they
read a Chriss Carrol. Is this importance of encountering Christ in the poor,
the widows, the orphans, the children, and so on. The Watchdot
on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack the connection
between politics and the economy and how it affects your wallet. Where's the fastest
rising area for commercial real estate? Train stations Another huge effect of COVID are
people's chim meets too and from their office. While office buildings in major cities
are getting cleared out, the only parts of cities that are growing are train
stations. Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting
you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah,
and I guess the sort of broader West has you've just gone through so
much. It was going through a lot what it was published, but has
gone through a lot since. I'm thinking right now, just off the top
of my head about Ian hersee Ali's recent conversion to Christianity and how she cited
Tom Holland, who we've had on this program fairly recently, his book Dominion
about sort of the emergence of Christian ethics and how it's the water that we're
swimming in in ways that people don't even you know, it's sort of does
the western fish know that it's wet? The water? Being kind of Christian
ethics and all of that. Is this book sort of a reflection of the
way in which, you know, even when we see the way that both
the left and the right approached Dickens in an ideological sense today even the left
kind of claims Dickens from that perspective of social welfare, it seems to me
there's a dynamic involved actually from the kind of Holland Esque Dominion esque perspective there
when it comes to the through line as you were just explaining of Dickens's message
in a Christmas Carol, Yeah, I mean I think that he he Dickens
took the the I don't know the centrality of the Gospel and its vision to
for his morality like he took it for granted. I mean, he would
never call into question and he repeated it over and over again in his life.
So for him, it was like he would never want to divorce his
social understanding or his his sense of morality from from the Gospel the way that
I don't know, like progressive readers or was a socialist people, yeah,
aggressive people from our own day who would much more carefully want to separate the
two. So he wouldn't have even imagined wanting to do it. But I
mean, yeah, it's it's it's really is true what Tom Holland says that
the poor and and children. I mean, we could add women don't really
have that don't don't really start to attain a place of importance until Jesus gives
it to them. I mean, I think I think you can you can
see uh, really important directions that are already pointing there in the in the
Old Testament, but especially in the New Testament, you know Jesus. I
mean, like in Paul, I often talk about this in my classes that
if you don't like we take for granted so many things. But Paul in
Galatians three says there's no now, no longer June or Greek slave, nor
free male nor female. All there one in Christ Jesus. And there's this
kind of equality across all of these old lines that the pagan world took for
granted of tribe, ethnicity, class, sex, and so on. And
Paul says, no, there's a kind of equality of persons across these lines
which before God, right, and just that's such a challenging thing to the
old world. And then the same thing with children and poor as as we
can see elsewhere in the Gospel. And so anyway, I think that that
kind of Christian revolution in moral thinking is definitely at the heart of Dickens's vision
and something that people today don't necessarily understand. Yeah, could you speak to
women in a Christmas carol and the role that they play just in this narrative
alone, that's a good question. There's not much to say, unfortunately.
I mean, for anybody who's read it, you know that it's you know,
it's it's mostly guys. There are There is a Scrooge's fiance whom he
left years ago. He in my reading of Scrooge is that he has basically
decided years back to retreat into a kind of moral and personal isolation in order
to defend himself, in order to avoid vulnerability and to protect himself from you
know, being hurt and uh, and to kind of attain this sort of
control of his life. But that that enables that it forces him to not
to make room for other people. So so he loses a fiance over this,
and that's uh, you know, part of a short backstory we get
in Dave number two, the Ghost of Christmas Past. So this a little
bit of a female presence there, and then there's a definitely a female presence
in the Cratchett family where I don't know, we see Missus Cratchett as a
homemaker, and then there's his nephew, Freddy's wife. Yeah, I was
gonna say, Fred's wife is the only other one. And there it's very
much in the context of the home. I mean, the Victorian period didn't
really I mean didn't really envision a lot of roles for women outside of the
home, with some important exceptions, but it was a time when I mean,
this is one of the I don't know, this is a huge conversation,
So forgive me, but just to touch on it, please touch on
it very briefly. But you know, the industrializing urbanizing economy had moved out
of the old world sort of household system of economy which was there in the
eighteenth century at all previous centuries where families were working together in the household,
which is where you ran your business, and so you had your the father,
the mother, and children would all be part of the same economic project,
which is you know, either agricultural or you know, weaving or running
a store or whatever it is. Everybody would be part of it, and
it was sort of run out of the family. So there was this kind
of more porous, porous boundary between work and family, and and women were
like never not part of that. You know, when in the nineteenth century
with industrialized industrialization and urbanization, you have you have the jobs moving out of
the family. You're going to go work in that factory over there, or
in management over here, or in the or over this shop, and then
you're going to live in this other place, and the men are out and
the women are in with the children, and all of a sudden, it's
like it's separated where it used to be together, and that creates a kind
of crisis for women's vocations, women's roles, because Okay, so my only
work is now in the home, and I have to choose between loving my
family this way and well, I mean, what it becomes in the twentieth
centuries, do I have to choose between the home and work and all of
these questions that we've been preoccupied with for the last hundred years. So part
of that is like still dealing with the after effects of this urbanized, industrialized
economy. This is not something that Dickens writes about too much, although I
think you can see it if you start looking that there are some good books
about this recently, thinking of okay, what is her name? It came
out from Notre Dame Press and she's an Italian last name. Oh yes,
that's a fantastic book, Erica. Yep, that is fantastic. Yes,
yeah, So she really addresses some of these some of these issues I think,
really profoundly. And she's not the only one, so I think it's
getting attention. Yeah. Mary Harrington sort of from a Marxist perspective exactly too.
Yeah, the division of labors is kind of a post industrial Mary Harrington
writes about it hilariously. I mean, she's very talented, right yeah,
and that's it's due, you know, it should be written about. And
I have to imagine, actually, you know, sort of teaching this.
There are a lot of priors that go unchallenged in our political discourse and our
cultural discourse. And I have to imagine you started teaching this and putting into
a course format, and then even you know, in other classes as you
talk about some of this with students, all those hills, those students are
obviously some of the very best around. Still again, the sort of cultural
waters that we swim in, certain things we really do take for granted.
It has to be pretty interesting teaching some of the stuff right now. Yeah,
I think so. I mean, I thought a whole class on Dickens's
Last Fall, and it's really kind of looking at some of the issues that
have blossomed and in some cases exploded in our own days that are going crazy
in sideways. You're seeing them in a kind of earlier form, when they
were a lot fresher and closer to the to their beginnings. I mean,
I basically just think it's an earlier stage in late modernities development where you can.
It really is enables us to face our own questions in a fresh way.
And the students definitely do see that. Right. I was going to
say, actually, in some ways the marriage subplot feels incredibly modern. It
just it is so and in some cases, you know, you kind of
have the flipped sexes. But I mean either way, actually this priority supplot
in general, like across novels. Oh with Scrooge, but yes, in
general. But yeah, in Scrooge's case, you sart prioritizing work over marriage
and looking back. Oh yeah, at the emptiness in your life is in
some I mean that is just you cold. That could be ripped from the
pages of or I should say, from this day and age more the ripped
from the video and audio of any TV show, because it's it's almost in
its proto form, as you were saying in Christmas currently. No, I
totally agree, and I mean, he's well, this this story is kind
of a story of him waking up and realizing what has my life been about?
It's not actually about the most important things. And I think there are
so many people like that who we see who are in their you know,
late thirties, forties, maybe fifties, maybe later trying to start over again,
or starting a late family, or you know, somehow beginning again and
reorienting because their first their first X many decades where they were working hard,
and yet what is it? Was it? What is it all for?
You know? Actually that's a great segue into a question I wanted to ask
as well, which is why a Christmas Carol? You know you said this
earlier. There are all of these other rich Dickens stories that has stuck with
us, that are still familiar, that are still popular, but probably none
as much as Christmas Carol. Why do you think it is that this one
continues to have such resonance with people year after year after year in a way
that you know, the others well popular, don't quite you know, they
don't quite have this level of popularity. That's a really good question. I
think there are a few, uh, sort of reasons for that that are
all converging in this in this little book. One is that it's little Unlike
his other books, or a lot of his other books, people just don't
have long attention spans anymore. We can watch and people will watch the mini
series for Bleak House or or whatever, Little Dorrit. But they're not,
you know, they're not going to read the book. I think a lot,
at least most people, so that the brevity. But I think maybe
more to the point is is just the fact that in late December, you
know, in midwinter. I think it's a it's a it's a time when
a lot of people struggle with depression. And I think that in turn has
to do with the sense that there should be a meaning here like this,
this is the time we associate with Christmas in the old Christian way of seeing
the world. This is the time where like the secret of the of the
divine entering the human and giving a radical new hope and meaning to to all
of reality. Right like that, it's it's a living, open secret at
the heart of things. Well, I think we late moderns and postmoderns still
have the ghost of that memory no pun intended, present with us, and
you can't quite forget it, you know. I mean. Tom Hollins talks
about the way that Christianity has informed our moral sense and our I don't know,
our frame, our inherited frameworks for justice and other other questions like that
apology. We can also talk about this inherited sense even of time and of
the time of year. I think there's this expectation for profundity of meaning,
a light in the darkness, you know, in the midst of the dark
time of the year. And we get together with our families, and you
know, it's hard to get together with your family for you know, more
or less depending on what your family is and what it's like. But it's
you know, oftentimes it just doesn't pay back. Okay. So what I'm
saying is, I think one of the reasons people go to Christmas Carol over
and over again is because it actually provides some access to that mysterious meaning at
the heart of at the heart of things, and at the heart of this
this time of the year that we have we feel a profound need for.
Does that make sense? Oh? Absolutely, that makes sense. And that
reminds me of another question I wanted to ask in a weird way. I
think maybe you know, ten years after this book comes out, Queen Victoria
herself, is you reported to be using mediums and the question of religion again
and Christianity and the question of sort of spiritualism that is emerging in the Victorian
West at that time. Obviously there has to be some technological aspect to that.
You know, people are doing very early versions of photoshop, and as
it relates to ghosts and all of that stuff. Because photography has just been
invented, you can have so much fun with it. But also there's this
mingling of Christian culture, spiritualism, and the supernatural. How is this book
kind of if it is part of that or is it part of that?
And if it is, how is it part of that kind of cultural conversation
that was happening at the time. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah,
I mean it's it's a complicated issue. I think the advent of spiritualism
and in the later nineteenth century you get all this funny business about seances and
occult questions. I mean, I think it all registers just a profound hunger
for spiritual meaning and that the more that traditional Christianity is not presumed to supply
that that kind of mystical spiritual hunger. More the traditional Christianity is not taken
to meet that need or that desire, that sense of things that that side
of the world, people are going to explore other options. They're going to
find that somewhere. They're going to search for it. Because you know,
I mean, command is a mystical animal in some ways, like we have
this sense that there is an invisible reality which is somehow impinging upon my material
experience. I mean, that's just as old as human beings, and it
will always be here, you know. And so what I'm saying, I
guess is over the nineteenth century you have a waning of influence beginning of traditional
Christianity, especially among the educated set. There's just already a kind of deconstruction
of the Bible and of I don't know, like Christian history. You know,
people starting to look back at history and look at the formulation of a
doctrine of the trinity for example, or the incarnation and the nature of Christ.
All these kinds of things. You look back there and it's actually pretty
messy. And the so called Higher Criticism is a movement for the interpretation of
the Bible and Christian theology out of Germany, very very influential on liberal Protestantism
in the nineteenth century in England. And like I said, it and other
forces, you know, also we can talk about Darwinism and other challenges.
But these these multiple convergent forces are influencing a lot of educated set to lose
their faith and yet they're still spiritually seeking. You know, Queen Victoria,
as far as I know, never never lost her faith, but you know,
she's she's surrounded by people in the zeitgeist. And right, go ahead,
what it was you actually get into that question of Darwinism, because that
does seem really interesting everything we started talked about here. Okay, so origin
of species is I believe eighteen fifty eight. I'm doubting myself whether it's forty
eight right now, but I think it's fifty eight. And even before that,
people were already talking about you were already talking about evolution as a possible
theory. But that's that was the bombshell in fifty eight. Already, in
I think eighteen thirty, another guy named Sir Charles Lyle, who was a
geologist, he had already advanced this theory of the age of the Earth based
on his analysis of you know, strata of strata of soil and rock,
and he was saying, look, the world has to be much older than
six thousand years which was one dominant traditional way of dating the earth, you
know, just using the Bible was oh, it's six thousand years old,
and this guy, Sir Charles Lylyy teen thirty. No, there's no way.
In heck, it's six thousand years old. It's got to be millions
of years old. And so people are starting to I mean that already is
shake, like it's already shaking the foundation of a certain kind of simple faith
in the Bible as a measurement of time. And then the origin of species
goes like works along with that and says, okay, so we've got we
have like these eons of time over the course of which we are actually gradually
becoming who we are as a species. That like even more drastically challenges the
Biblical account not only of time, but of of I don't know, like
of creation. And I don't know. It's just it's hard to exaggerate what
a horrifying shock that it is to the intellectuals, right, the people who
are going to college, the people who want to think about things, even
if they're just going into business or going into the law, whatever. They
want to think about things, and they want to have reasons for things.
They want to look into the reasons for their beliefs. And like I said,
you just have a hemorrhaging of those that educated set from there from the
church churches throughout the century. I don't know if that helps absolutely. Is
there anything that we haven't talked about that you emphasize in the course that you
want to kind of leave listeners with, or you think is really important to
understand about this text. I think the one thing that I would want to
turn to real quick is one passage that I just think is at the heart
of the meaning of the book and yet tends to be missed in all of
the video versions that people are used to. And this comes from Stave four,
you know, instead of chapters that are arranged as staves or like musical
staffs, because it's a Christmas Carol. So in Stave four, this is
the visit from the last of the Three Spirits, Ghost of Christmas yet to
come. Scrooge goes to see the Cratchett family and tiny Tim has died in
this possible future that he's viewing here, and the Cratchett family is sitting around
and they're actually reading the Bible. The oldest Cratchett boy, Peter Cratchett,
is reading from the Gospel and he reads this line says and he took a
child and set him in the midst of them? Right, So this is
very kind of has a lot of pathos to it because tiny Tim is dead.
But then Scrooge says where the narrator says, where had Scrooge heard those
words? He had not dreamed them. The boy must have read them out
as he and the spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not go on?
Okay? So the interesting thing about it, it is the Bible verse
is from Mark nine thirty six, and Scrooge hears it and thinks, now,
what's right? Like why does he not going on? Like? What's
next? And so the text there is actually leading us to is leading its
its audience, which is much more biblically literate than ours is today, which
would not be hard, right, leading this biblically literate audience to think,
well, what is the next verse in the scripture? If you look at
Mark nine thirty seven, the next verse it says, whosoever shall receive one
of such children in my name, receiveth me. Okay. So not only
is the book about taking a child and setting him in the midst of them,
which this book is definitely like, it's a succession of children and poor
and widows and someone who are put into Scrooge's life. That's definitely happening.
But the other suggestion, like the the implicit suggestion in this passage and elsewhere,
is that in encountering that those the least of these, Scrooge is encountering
God whatever you know, whoever receives them, receives me. And so I
think the core message at the heart of the whole story, and what's so
compelling about it, is in in encountering the poor, the widows, the
orphans, the children, the least of these with love, you're encountering God
like you have this encounter with the divine, which is profoundly meaningful in life
changing. And that's that's the truth. I think that people long to hear
and that they come back to this story for whether they spell it out for
themselves that way or not. This has just been so fascinating. On a
personal note, my mom and my grandma used to take me to the Milwaukee
Repertory Theaters production of Christmas Carol at the beautiful Gilded Past Theater in downtown Milwaukee
every year growing up, and my mom and I still try to go every
single year. It's just a wonderful tradition, not just for my family,
but of course for many families. So I just really appreciate this opportunity,
professor, to dig a little deeper into it. And again, folks can
find more about this course at Hillsdale dot edu. Right, yes, that's
right, well, fantastic, Thank you so much for joining us. Thank
you, Emily, it's been a great of course. Dwight Lindley is a
professor at Hillsdale College. Again to learn more Hillsdale dot Edu. I'm Emily
Dashchenski, culture editor here at The Federalist. We will be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the friend.
You got me ride, but you won't scrap