Katie says, “bah humbug,” but Tristan says, “oi guv, Bob’s your uncle an’ bless us all, every one” to this most beloved of Victorian Christmas kitsch. We’re diving into Charles Dickens this week with A Christmas Carol (1843) and all kinds of lighthearted topics for the holidays -- like child labor, poverty under industrial capital, killer smog, and reactionary political economy (we want to go on the record as being very much against all those things). We do some admirable BOTHSIDES analysis of Dickens, discussing the good (he’s often an incisive critic of structural conditions) and the bad (we Marxists do not care for his lib af resolutions). And we explore the repressive Victorian psyche as manifest in their terrifying parlor games.
There are a million editions to choose from. Pick the one that best captures your own relationship to Christmas. To learn more about the economic, social, and political forces at play in Dickens and many other nineteenth-century writers, check out Mary Poovey’s phenomenal Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864.
*Note to our listeners. Megan is on maternity leave. This is the last episode of our 2019 season. Katie and Tristan will be back with new episodes starting in mid-January, and Megan returns to the show later this winter.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.