Pod Only Knows #040 – Did Dickens “Invent” Christmas? – with Kristen Hanley Cardozo
The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring human treasure Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, is a lovely bit of an anachronistic historical revisionism (though, to be fair, it gets a number of things right both in fact and in, pardon the pun, spirit). But it also perpetuates an increasingly popular myth – that Charles Dickens…well…invented Christmas. At least, that is, Christmas as we think of it today.
There are a lot of reasons why this seems true, and, yes, Dicken’s A Christmas Carol played an enormous role in a Victorian revival and redefining of Christmas – but that revival was happening with him or without him.
So we decided to take a closer look at Victorian society in the 1940s and exam how religious – or not – Dickens and A Christmas Carol actually were. Kelly and John invited Victorianist Kristen Hanley Cardozo to share some of her expertise and talk about spirits, Scrooges, and the real reasons for the season.
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