A Dickensian Christmas Songs of Praise

Season's greetings to you all.

I'm travelling as the Victorians would have done

on the London to Dover express driven by John here - expertly.

And we're stepping back in time to celebrate a writer

who many believe invented our traditional Christmas.

His story of Scrooge has become a family favourite

since it was written back in 1843.

And we're gearing ourselves up to the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Who am I talking about? It is, of course, Charles Dickens.

On this week's Songs Of Praise...

We're Christmas Carolling, Dickinson style.

We'll be hearing from his great-great-grandson.

And finding out more about the writer's faith

and passion for social justice.

One of the most important messages of all Dickens' work

is his frustration with social injustice.

His Christianity was of a very practical kind.

He was a great performer - a celebrity, a star on the road.

Dickens' legacy is the love of humanity,

which is the keynote of all his works.

We've come to Kent to the area around Rochester.

It's a place Dickens knew and loved.

The happiest years of his childhood

was spent just down the road in Chatham.

Many of the buildings here in Rochester were mentioned in his novels.

He referred to this area as the birthplace of his fancy and imagination.

As a boy, he and his father would go walking.

And it was on one of these occasions that they came across Gad's Hill Place.

His father told him, if he worked hard enough,

he might one day afford the house.

Dickens never forgot this. Years later, he did buy it.

He spent the last ten years of his life there.

I'm not sure if Dickens ever visited the church we're off to,

but he certainly would have known it.

We're heading to St George's Church in Gravesend. Do you stop there?

Yes, come on-board.

Thanking you.

BELLS RING

Members of the congregation are gathered, dressed as they would've been in Dickens' day.

Everyone has made a huge effort,

bringing our Dickensian Christmas to life.

And we begin with a joyous Advent hymn

I'm sure the man himself would recognise - Hark, The Glad Sound!

On public view here at Eastgate House in Rochester

is Dickens' Swiss chalet. It was originally in his garden at Gad's Hill Place.

It was given to him as a Christmas present,

and it actually arrived as a flat-pack.

Imagine that! Most days, he'd be up there writing away.

I think it's fair to say that it was his best Christmas present ever.

I think one of the reasons that Dickens wrote about Christmas a lot

was that it was a time of year that he really loved.

His parents had been very fun-loving people

and Christmas in their household was presumably very happy -

they were very sociable, they loved parties.

When Dickens got married to his wife, Catherine Hogarth,

from the beginning, Christmas was a real celebration in their family.

There was an increasing interest during the 19th century

in Christmas traditions.

Lots of candles and jollity and celebration.

But what Dickens did through A Christmas Carol in particular

was to bring the idea of Christian charity as an enormous part

of what should be happening at Christmas.

A Christmas Carol was written in 1843,

the first edition sold out within days.

In A Christmas Carol,

the Cratchit family is the ideal Christmas family scene.

The Cratchits themselves are, as Dickens see it, the perfect family.

They don't have much money but they have a lot of love

and they're very considerate to each other.

People often read A Christmas Carol and see Scrooge saying to Bob Cratchit,

"You'll want the whole day off tomorrow, I suppose?"

Bob Cratchit says, "Oh, if it's quite convenient." It's NOT convenient.

One of the messages he was getting over with the novel was that

employers really had to think about this.

It should be automatic that people had Christmas Day off - it was

a day of prayer, of celebration - a day to be with family.

-Hello, everyone!

-Hello!

-Mrs Cratchit.

A lot of people made quite a secular Bible of A Christmas Carol

and kept it on a little shelf and read it every Christmas,

because of its strong teachings of humanity

and celebrating Christmas in the true sense.

In many of his books, Dickens creates an image of Christmas,

which remains familiar to us today.

Perhaps what he did was to introduce almost a cult of celebrating Christmas.

His first real treatment of Christmas came in Sketches By Boz.

There's a wonderful essay called A Christmas Dinner.

That just about describes everything

and this is really the prototype of the happy Christmases

that we then see at Dingley Dell

in The Pickwick Papers and with the Cratchits.

The ideas of carol singers, the idea of family meals -

all these things that Dickens wrote about.

Decorating your homes with holly and ivy.

Merry Christmas!

One of the most important things that Dickens says

in his description of the Cratchit family Christmas

is that they were pleased with one another and contented with the time.

Merry Christmas, my dears! God bless us.

I think Dickens was a very simple and a very sincere Christian.

He had a great faith in the teachings of the New Testament.

It was much to do with love, it was much to do with service

it was much to do with good works.

He had very, very severe criticism

and often very satirical treatment to make of people

who held to extremely narrow religious positions.

You think of Mrs Clenham in Bleak House with her very vengeful Christianity -

you've got the complete contrast there.

The kind of people Dickens wanted to get at was those who went to church on Sunday,

but walked past starving children on the streets on their way home and didn't pay any attention to them.

He did feel that a lot of organised religion had lost its way -

it wasn't teaching the Bible, it wasn't teaching what

he felt was the Christian message, which was to treat others

as you'd have them treat you, or to help the poor and the meek.

In 1846, when he started to consider it important to give

some kind of clear statement of religious teaching for his children,

he wrote a work which later became known as The Life Of Our Lord.

It's a very, very sweet book. It's really lovely, actually.

He's got little asides to his children, saying things like,

"I think you've seen a camel, but if you haven't, let me know

"and I'll take you to see one - we have them at the zoo."

He explains what a locust is and writes about the plague of locusts

and talks about the Bible in general.

It does re-state the teachings of Christ,

it does re-state the story of the Gospels.

The Good News message of the Gospel.

These were things which were central to him

and important for him to pass on to his children.

Everybody ought to know about it...

It wasn't published until 1934. The reason being that Dickens didn't want anyone else to see it -

this was just a private thing for him and his family.

It wasn't published until the last of Dickens's children had died.

"You can never think what a good place Heaven is without knowing..."

It gives an insight into Dickens's own religious beliefs,

which was that kindness is the most important thing.

He says to his children, when you are grown up, be kind to people.

It's a really nice way on looking at the Bible without making it

really full of hellfire and brimstone - but looking at the good messages in there.

Towards the end of his career,

Dickens made almost 500 public readings of his work.

He toured the length and breadth of Britain as well as America.

Wherever he went, audiences flocked to see him.

The performances were incredibly theatrical and dramatic

and absolutely engaged his audiences in the passion

and excitement of the stories, which of course they all knew

so well from the original novels.

Dickens had loved the theatre from childhood.

He adored the sense of... Well, play acting.

As a young man, he really almost became an actor. He had an audition

booked at the Covent Garden theatre... He missed it -

he was suffering from flu on the day, but it was generally reckoned that if

he had had that audition, that would have been his career, as an actor.

So really the readings enabled him to come back to that first love of his.

Gerald is now following in his great-great grandfather's footsteps.

"Don't be cross, Uncle," said the nephew.

"What else can I be?", returned the uncle.

'Someone came to me with the idea of recreating a reading of A Christmas Carol.'

I started working through the script

and putting all my own characters and voices and expressions into it.

I was rather proud - I thought I'd done this rather well.

After I'd done it, I went and did a little research into Dickens

and found that I was just recreating exactly what he had done

with all the voices and expressions and everything!

"As the good, old city knew..."

'He has created each and every one of his characters so precisely

'and he would perform them first in a mirror to himself.

'And he would watch and listen to the character as it came back to him

'and then he would go and write it down.'

Part of his success absolutely is that ability to include his readers

in the scene. Suddenly he describes a scene and you are there.

If it's a winter scene, you're shivering - if it's a summer scene, you're hot. And it...

Even today, an image of Dickens's Christmas is a wonderful snowscape with carol singers

and stagecoaches and you're there, right in the middle of the snow.

# God rest you merry gentlemen

# Let nothing you dismay

# For Jesus Christ our saviour was born upon this day

# To save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# Comfort and joy

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# From God, our Heavenly Father a blessed angel came

# And unto certain shepherds brought tidings of the same

# How that in Bethlehem was born the Son of God by name

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# Comfort and joy

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# But when to Bethlehem they came where our dear saviour lay

# They found Him in a manger Where oxen feed on hay

# His mother Mary kneeling unto the Lord did pray

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# Comfort and joy

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# Now to the Lord sing praises All you within this place

# And with true love and brotherhood Each other now embrace

# This holy tide of Christmas All others doth deface

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

# Comfort and joy

# Oh, tidings of comfort and joy. #

All of Dickens's novels engage with important social issues.

Dickens had a good deal of exposure to social inequality as a child.

When he moved to London in the 1820s,

very soon after their arrival,

his family found themselves descending into

an ever-worsening spiral of debt, and difficulty - the consequence

of which was that his father was sent to the Marshalsea Prison.

He was living in London on his own for several months -

walking along the streets of London late at night on his way back

from seeing his family at the prison.

He would pass terrible scenes. London was a really frightening place -

there was a lot of social deprivation, a lot of poverty and a lot of crime.

In order to supplement the family's difficulties with finance,

he was found a job working at Warren's Blacking

at Hungerford Stairs near the River Thames,

pasting labels on pots of shoe blacking.

For a little boy who had dreamt of being a learned

and distinguished man, it was the death of all his hopes

to become a little labouring hind with all these common men and boys.

He had a very unhappy time.

And I think this never quite left him.

This was what really came into his fiction, his journalism.

The fact that he wanted to do something

about these people living in terrible circumstances.

Dickens's principal social concern was with the way in which

society treats its children, because the children are the future.

He said, "I'm going to write a book that will deliver

"a hammer-blow in favour of the poor man's child".

What Dickens does a great deal with A Christmas Carol

is to talk about how his readers should behave,

and two of the most important characters are not only Scrooge

and the ghosts who visit him, but two children named Ignorance and Want.

The Spirit Of Christmas Present says to Scrooge to beware them both,

they're both frightening figures.

But most of all, beware this boy - the boy is Ignorance -

because if nothing is done to improve the prospects

of the child, if nothing is done to educate the next generation,

then the prospects facing all of us are alarming indeed.

But his main message was to get across to people that Christmas

wasn't the only time of year

when people needed to be kind to the poor - but it was a very good start.

# Hear my prayer

# Oh, Heavenly Father

# Ere I lay me down to sleep

# Bid Thy angels, pure and holy

# Round my bed their vigil keep

# Keep me through this night of peril

# Underneath its boundless shade

# Take me to Thy rest, I pray Thee

# When my pilgrimage is made

# Guide and guard me with Thy blessing

# Till the angels bid me home. #

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Dickens's novel Great Expectations.

Once again, it was the area around the River Medway in Kent

that inspired him.

The story remains one of Charles Dickens's most dramatised works.

A new BBC adaptation is set to hit our screens this Christmas.

One of its stars is Gillian Anderson, who plays Miss Haversham.

In this day and age, when everything is in your face,

it's fascinating to see that the same themes ran back then

and the fact that part of what Dickens was interested in

is the impact of society on human beings.

Ray Winstone plays Magwitch.

I think it's a story that can be told again and again

and it's relevant to any time it's told in, you know?

What's different with it? Hopefully not too much, because the story was such a great story anyway.

Because it was so well written, if you go too far off the text,

I think you'd probably be making a different story.

That was all right, wasn't it?

Charles Dickens was working on his final novel -

The Mystery of Edwin Drood -

when he was taken ill and collapsed at his home, Gad's Hill Place.

He died 24 hours later,

on the 9th of June, 1870.

He was 58-years-old.

Dickens left instructions that he was to be buried very simply

here in Rochester Cathedral, but his final wish wasn't granted.

The Dean and Chapter of Rochester's Cathedral actually started

to dig a grave for him there,

but then the call came out from the Times and Queen Victoria

that the correct place for Dickens,

the genius of Dickens, was Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

And so that is where he is buried.

His body was moved to Westminster Abbey

and following a private service, as news spread about his death,

thousands arrived to pay tributes.

There's a story of a little girl in London who said,

"Charles Dickens, dead?

"Will Father Christmas die, too?"

He wanted his work to provide his legacy

and it has proved a lasting memorial.

He remains a master of the language.

He remains someone who can create for us experiences, people,

circumstances, of which we have had no direct personal experience.

But in which we can participate through the words of someone

who can write as skilfully as he can.

In his will, Dickens wrote...

"I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.

"And I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves

"by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit.

"And to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter, here or there."

Perhaps the lasting appeal of the book A Christmas Carol

lies in the fact that we see that the miserable miser Scrooge

is not beyond redemption after all.

It's a heart-warming tale full of hope, just like the Christmas story,

where the birth of Jesus brings us the good news that change is possible.

And as Bob Cratchit says in A Christmas Carol,

"A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears - God bless us".

God bless us, everyone.

Jesus Christ,

light of the world,

shine on us as we prepare to celebrate again

the coming of your birth.

Help us to follow your example of gentleness, peace and mercy.

To love our neighbours as ourselves

and as we are so often reminded by the words of Charles Dickens,

to try to do the right in everything.

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,

be among us and remain with us now and always.

-Amen.

-ALL: Amen.

Next week, sumptuous carols by candlelight,

as Pam introduces the story of the first Christmas,

as told by the people of Stratford-upon-Avon.

And Joe McElderry sings some favourite festive songs.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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