In this episode, Dr. Himes steps you through Stave I of A Christmas Carol, giving you background and context to get the most out of your reading.

He frames Carol as Scrooge's journey through Purgatory, helping you understand Dickens' interpretation of Christianity through the ideas of Dante. Then he discusses Charles Dickens as a narrator, that his "First Person Omniscient" style wasn't just Dickens' particular style, but how he enhanced his "brand" by personalizing himself in the text.

Next, he covers the opening paragraph and why it's important that Marley was as dead as a doornail, and why the Hamlet allusion is key to understanding Dickens' Christian worldview.

Dr. Himes then explains where "Bah Humbug" comes from, and he breaks down Scrooge and Marley's company, putting it in the context of London and the financing of the British Empire in the 1840s. He covers Scrooge's politics by describing the real politician who said that the poor should die and rid England of its surplus population.

Dr. Himes ends the episode with a brief tour through Scrooge's London, including Marley's house that Scrooge inherited, which is a serious piece of London real estate with its roots in the Dutch Empire of the 1600s. He returns to Dante to help us understand Dickens' description of Marley Ghost, and why the chains are so significant.

In October 1843, Friedrich Engels and Charles Dickens were both in Manchester, England, witnessing the worst squalor of the Industrial Revolution. Engels went on to write Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto with his partner Karl Marx, and Dickens looked at the same situation and wrote A Christmas Carol.

Charles Dickens' views on poverty are foundational to understanding modern politics. A close reading of Ebenezer Scrooge will not only help explain why A Christmas Carol has become a civic ritual, but how Dickens saw the world.

George Orwell will be our guide on this journey, which takes us from Early Dickens' "Good Rich Man" characters to Late Dickens' guillotines and revolutions. And in the end, I'll reveal what I think is the true meaning of A Christmas Carol

Welcome to Episode 1.0 of the Living Literature podcast. After a brief introduction to your podcast host, I will describe how literature does indeed live. It's a story that begins in a high school classroom, then travels to law school, were I first encountered the Originalists and the Living Constitutionalists. Then Charles Dickens convinces me to return to teaching, where I figured out that the Originalists interpret the Constitution with all the moral imagination and intellectual rigor of the SAT. We end with a deep dive into the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, where figuring out how it can be the best of times and the worst of times and the same time is the secret to keeping books alive.