Dickens, Charles(English)
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The Guardian, the Guardian Short Stories podcast. I'm Simon Callow and I'm going to read a Christmas tree by Charles Dickens. I've been looking on this evening at a merry company of Children assembled around that pretty German toy, a Christmas tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy cheeked dolls hiding behind the green leaves. There were real watches with movable hands at least and an endless capacity of being wound up dangling from innumerable twigs. There were French polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture wonderfully made in tin at Wolverhampton. Perched among the bows as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping. They were jolly broad faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men and no wonder for their heads took off and showed them to be full of sugar plums. There were fiddles and drums, there were tambourines books, work boxes, paint boxes, sweet meat boxes, peep show boxes, all kinds of boxes. They were trinkets for the elder girls far brighter than any grown up gold and jewels. There were baskets and pin cushions in all devices. There were guns, swords and banners. There were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard to tell fortunes. There were tea totems, humming tops, needle cases, pen wipers, smelling bottles, conversation cards, bouquet holders, real fruit made artificially dazzling with gold leaf, imitation apples, pears and walnuts crammed with surprises. In short as a pretty child before me delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, there was everything and more this motley collection of odd objects clustering on the tree like magic fruit and flashing back. The bright looks directed towards it from every side. Some of the diamond eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts and nurses made a lively realization of the fancies of childhood and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth have their wild adornments. At that well remembered time being now at home again and alone. The only person in the house awake. My thoughts are drawn back by a fascination which I do not care to resist to my own childhood. I begin to consider what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas tree of our own young Christmas days by which we climbed to real life straight in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises and looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top. For I observe in this tree, the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth. I look into my youngest Christmas recollections. All toys. At first, I find up yonder among the green holly and red berries is the tumbler with his hands in his pockets who wouldn't lie down? But whenever he was put up on the floor persisted in rolling his fat body about until he rolled himself still and brought those lobs to eyes of his to bear upon me when I affected to laugh very much. But in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. The cardboard lady in a blue silk skirt who stood up against the candlestick to dance and whom I see on the same branch was milder and was beautiful. But I can't say as much for the larger cardboard man who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string. There was a sinister expression in that nose of his when he got his legs around his neck, which he very often did. He was ghastly and not a creature to be alone with. When did that dreadful mask first look at me who put it on and why was I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life. It is not a hideous visit in itself. It is even meant to be dr why then were its solid features so intolerable? Surely not because it hid the wearer's face. An apron would have done as much. And though I should have preferred even the apron away, it would not have been absolutely insupportable like the mask. Was it the immovability of the mask? The doll's face was immovable, but I was not afraid of her. Perhaps that fixed and set change coming over a real face infused into my quickened heart, some remote suggestion and dread of the universal change that is to come on every face and make it still nothing reconciled me to it. No drummers from whom proceeded to melancholy chirping on the turning of a handle. No regiment of soldiers with a mute band taken out of a box and fitted one by one upon a stiff and lazy little set of lazy tongs, no old woman made of wires and a brown paper composition. Cutting up a pie for two small Children could give me permanent comfort for a long time. Nor was it any satisfaction to be shown the mask and see that it was made of paper or to have it locked up and be assured that no one wore it. The mere recollection of that fixed phase, the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere was sufficient to awake me in the night. All perspiration and horror with, oh, I know it's coming. Oh, the mask are the doll's house of which I was not proprietor, but where I visited, I don't admire the houses of Parliament half so much as that stone fronted mansion with real glass windows and doorsteps and a real balcony greener than I ever see now except at watering places and even they afford but a poor imitation. And though it did open all at once, the entire house front, which was a blow I admit as canceling the fiction of a staircase, it was but to shut it up again. And I could believe even open, there were three distinct rooms in it. A sitting room and bedroom, elegantly furnished and best of all a kitchen with uncommonly soft fire irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils over a warming pan and a tin man cook in profile who was always going to fry two fish could all the temperance societies of these later days united give me such a tea drinking as I have had through the means of yo, a little set of blue crockery which really would hold liquid. It ran out of the small wooden cask. I recollect and tasted of matches and which made tea nectar upon the next branches of the tree lower down hard by the green roller and miniature gardening tools. How thick the books began to hang thin books in themselves at first but many of them and with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters to begin with a was an archer and shot at a frog. Of course, he was, he was an apple pie also. And there he is, he was a good, many things in his time was a and so were most of his friends except X who had so little versatility that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe. Like why? Who was always confined to a yacht or a tree? And Z condemned forever to be a zebra or a zany? Good for Christmas time is the ruddy color of the cloak in which the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through with her basket. Little red riding hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling wolf who ate her grandmother without making any impression on his appetite and then ate her after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married little Red riding hood, I should have known perfect bliss but it was not to be and there was nothing for it but to look out the wolf in the Noah's Ark there and put him late in the procession on the table as a monster who was to be degraded. Oh, the wonderful Noah's Ark. It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing tub and the animals were crammed in at the roof and needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in even there and then 10 to 1. But they began to tumble out at the door which was, but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch. But what was that against it? Consider the noble fly a size or two smaller than the elephant? the ladybird, the butterfly all triumphs of art. Consider the goose whose feet was so small and whose balance was so indifferent that he usually tumbled forward and knocked down. All the animal creation hush again a forest and somebody up in a tree, not Robin hood, not Valentine, not the yellow dwarf. I have passed him and all mother bunches wonders without mention but an eastern king with a glittering sime and turban by Allah two eastern kings. For I see another looking over his shoulder down upon the grass of the tree's foot lies the full length of a coal black giant stretched asleep with his head in a lady's lap. And near them is a glass box fastened with four locks of shining steel in which he keeps the lady prisoner when he is awake. I see the four keys that is now, the lady makes signs to the two kings in the tree who softly descend. It is the setting in of the bright Arabian knights. Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful. All rings are talismans. Common flower pots are full of treasure. The little earth scattered on the top trees are for Alibaba to hide in beef steaks are to throw down into the valley of diamonds that the precious stones may stick to them and be carried by the eagles to their nests. Once the traders with loud cries will scare them. Tarts are made according to the recipe, the vizier son of who turned pastry cook after he was set down in his drawers at the gate of Damascus cobblers are all mustafa and in the habit of sewing up people cut into four pieces to whom they are taken blindfold. Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician and the little fire and the necromancy that will make the earth shake my very rocking horse. There he is with his nostrils turned completely inside out. Indicative of blood should have a peg in his neck by virtue thereof to fly away with me as the wooden horse did with the Prince of Persia. In the sight of all his father's court. Yes. On every object that I recognize among those upper branches of my Christmas tree. I see this fairy light when I wake in bed a day break. On the cold, dark winter mornings, the white snow dimly beheld outside through the frost on the window pane I hear sister, sister. If you are yet awake, I pray you finish the history of the young king of the Black Islands. Zada replies, if my lord, the sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that but tell you a more wonderful story yet then the gracious sultan goes out giving no orders for the execution and we all three breathe again of this height of my tree. I begin to see cowering among the leaves. It may be born of turkey or of pudding or mince pie or of any of these many fancies jumbled with Robinson crusoe on his desert island, Philip among the Mokes Sanford and Merton with Mr Barlow Mother Bunch and the mask or it may be the result of indigestion, assisted by imagination and over doctoring a prodigious nightmare. It is so exceedingly indistinct that I don't know why it's frightful, but I know it is, I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things which appear to be planted on a vast exaggeration of the lazy tongs that used to bear the toy soldiers and to be slowly coming close to my eyes and receding to an immeasurable distance when it comes closest. It is worst in connection with it. I describe remembrances of winter nights, incredibly long of being sent early to bed as a punishment for some small offense and waking in two hours with a sensation of having been asleep two nights, the lead and hopelessness of mourning, ever dawning and the oppression of a weight of remorse. And now I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the ground before a vast green curtain. Now a bell rings a magic bell which still sounds in my ears. Unlike all other bells and music plays amidst a buzz of voices and a fragrant smell of orange, peel and oil. And no, the magic bell commands the music to seize and the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically and the play begins come swift to comfort me. The pantomime stupendous phenomenon when clowns are shot from loaded mortars into the great chandelier bright constellation that it is when Harlequins covered all over with scales of pure gold twist and sparkle like amazing fish. When Pantaloon whom I deem it no irreverence to compare in my own mind to my grandfather puts red hot pokers in his pocket and cries somebody coming or taxes the clown with petty larceny by saying now I saw you do it when everything is capable of. The greatest of ease are being changed into anything and nothing is but thinking makes it so now too. I perceive my first experience of the dreary sensation often to return in afterlife of being unable next day to get back to the dull settled world and wanting to live forever in the bright atmosphere. I have quitted of doting on the little fairy with the wand, like a celestial barber's pole and pining for a fairy immortality along with her. Ah, she comes back in many shapes as my eye wanders down the branches of my Christmas tree and goes as often and has never yet stayed by me. Out of this delight springs the toy theater there. It is with its familiar proscenium and ladies in feathers in the boxes and all its attendant occupation with paste and glue and gum and water colors in the getting up of the Miller and his men and Elizabeth or the Exile of Siberia. In spite of a few besetting accidents and failures, particularly an unreasonable disposition in the respectable Elmar and some others to become faint in the legs and double up at exciting points of the drama, a teeming world of fancies, so suggestive and all embracing that far below it on my Christmas tree. I see dark dirty real theaters in the daytime adorned with these associations as with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers and charmingly yet. But the weights are playing and they break my childish sleep. What images do I associate with? The Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas tree known before all the others keeping far apart from all the others. They gather around my little bed, an angel speaking to a group of shepherds in a field. Some travelers with eyes uplifted following a star, a baby in a manger, a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men, a solemn figure with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand again near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow on his beer to life. A crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where he sits and letting down a sick person on a bed with ropes. The same in a tempest walking on the water to a ship again on a sea shore, teaching a great multitude. Again, with the child upon his knee and other Children round again, restoring sight to the blind speech, to the dumb hearing, to the death health, to the sick, strength to the lame knowledge to the ignorant. Again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on the earth beginning to shake and only one voice heard. Forgive them for they know not what they do away into the winter prospect. There are many such upon the tree on by low lying misty grounds through fens and fogs up long hills, winding darkest caverns between thick plantations, almost shutting out the sparkling stars so out on broad heights until we stop at last with a sudden silence at an avenue. The gate bell has a deep half awful sound in the frosty air. The gate swings open on its hinges. And as we drive up to a great house, the glancing lights grow larger in the windows, the opposing rows of trees seem to fall solemnly back on either side to give us place at intervals all day. A frightened hair has shot out across this whitened turf or the distant clatter of a herd of deer trampling. The hard frost has for the minute, crushed the silence too. Their watchful eyes beneath the fern maybe shining now, if we could see them like the I CD rocks on the leaves, but they're still and all is still. And so the lights growing larger and the trees falling back before us and closing up again behind us. As if to forbid retreat, we come to the house. There's probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time. But we are telling winter stories, ghost stories or more shame for us round the Christmas fire and we have never stirred except to draw a little nearer to it. But no matter for that, we came to the house and it is an old house full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the half and grim portraits. Some of them with grim legends too lower, distrustfully from the open panels of the walls. We are a middle aged nobleman and we make a generous supper with our host and hostess and their guests. It being Christmas time and the old house full of company and then we go to bed. Our room is a very old room. It is hung with tapestry. We don't like the portrait of a Cavalier in green over the fireplace. There are great black beams in the ceiling and there is a great black bedstead supported at the foot by two great black figures who seem to have come off a couple of tombs in the old baronial church in the park for our particular accommodation. But we are not a superstitious nobleman and we don't mind. Well, we dismiss our servant, lock the door and sit before the fire in our dressing gown. Musing about a great many things at length. We go to bed, we can't sleep, we toss and tumble and can't sleep. The embers on the half burn fitfully and make the room look ghostly. We can't help peeping out over the counter pain at the two black figures and the cavalier that wicked looking cavalier in green in the flickering light. They seem to advance and retire which though we are not by any means, a superstitious nobleman is not agreeable. Well, we get nervous more and more nervous. We say this is very foolish, but we can't stand this. We'll pretend to be ill and knock up somebody. Well, we're just going to do it when the locked door opens and there comes in a young woman, deadly pale and with long fair hair who glides to the fire and sits down in the chair. We have left there wringing her hands. Let me notice that her clothes are wet. Our tongue cleaves to the roof of our mouth and we can't speak, but we observe her accurately. Her clothes are wet. Her long hair is dabbled with moist mud. She is dressed in the fashion of 200 years ago and she has at her girdle a bunch of rusty keys. Well, there she sits and we can't even faint. We are in such a state about it. Presently, she gets up and tries all the locks in the room with the rusty keys which won't fit one of them. Then she fixes her eyes on the portrait of the Cavalier in green and says in a low terrible voice, the stags know it. After that, she rings her hand again, passes the bedside and goes out of the door. We hurry on our dressing gown, sees our pistols. We always travel with pistols and our following. When we find the door locked, we turn the key, look out into the dark gallery. No one. There we wander away and try to find our servant can't be done. We pace the gallery till daybreak. Then return to our deserted room, fall asleep and are awakened by our servant. Nothing ever haunts him and the shining sun. Well, we make a wretched breakfast and all the companies say we look queer after breakfast, we go over the house with our host and then we take him to the portrait of the Cavalier in Green. And then it all comes out. He was forced to a young housekeeper once attached to that family and famous for her beauty who drowned herself in a pond and whose body was discovered after a long time because the stags refused to drink of the water since which it has been whispered that she traverses the house at midnight, but goes especially to that room where the Cavalier in green was want to sleep trying the old locks with her rusty keys. Well, we tell our host of what we have seen and a shade comes over his features and he begs it may be hushed up. And so it is, but it's all true. And we said so before we died, we're dead. Now to many responsible people, there is no end to the old houses with resounding galleries and dismal state bed chambers and haunted wings shut up for many years through which we may ramble with an agreeable creeping up our back and encounter any number of ghosts. But it is worthy of remark, perhaps reducible to a very few general types and classes for ghosts have little originality and walk in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to parts that a certain room in a certain old hall where a certain bad lord Baronet Knight or gentleman shot himself has certain planks in the floor from which the blood will not be taken out. You may scrape and scrape as the present owner has done or play in and playing as his father did or scrub and scrub as his grandfather did or burn and burn with strong acids as his great grandfather did. But there, the blood will still be no redder and no paler, no more and no less. Always just the same. Thus, in such another house, there is a haunted door that never will keep open or another door that never will keep shut or a haunted sound of a spinning wheel or a hammer or a footstep or a cry or a sigh or a horse's tramp or the rattling of a chain. Or else there is a turret clock which at the midnight hour strikes 13 when the head of the family is going to die or a shadowy immovable black carriage, which such a time is always seen by somebody waiting near the great gates in the stable yard or there was the daughter of the first occupier of the picturesque Elizabethan house so famous in our neighborhood. You've heard about her? No. Why she went out one summer evening at twilight when she was a beautiful girl to 17 years of age to gather flowers in the garden and presently came running terrified into the hall to her father saying, oh dear father, I have met myself. He took her in his arms, told her it was fancy. But she said, oh no, I met myself in the broad walk and I was pale and gathering withered flowers and I turned my head and held them up. And that night she died, the picture of her story was begun and never finished. And they say it is somewhere in the house to this day with its face to the wall. All the uncle of my brother's wife was riding home on horseback one mellow evening at sunset. When in a green lane close to his own house, he saw a man standing before him in the very center of the narrow way. Why does that man in the cloak stand there? He thought, does he want me to ride over him? But the figure never moved. He felt a strange sensation of seeing it so still but slackened his trot and rode forward, but he was so close to it as almost to touch it with his stirrup, his horse shied and the figure glided up the bank in a curious unearthly manner backward and without seeming to use its feet and was gone, the uncle of my brother's wife exclaiming good heaven. It's my cousin Harry from Bombay put spurs to his horse which was suddenly in a profuse sweat and wondering if such strange behavior dashed around to the front of his house there. He saw the same figure just passing in at the long French window of the drawing room opening on the ground. He threw his bridle to a servant hastened in after it. His sister was sitting there alone, Alice, where's my cousin Harry your cousin Harry John. Yes, from Bombay. I met him in the lane just now and saw him in to hear this instant, not a creature had been seen by anyone and in that hour and minute it afterwards appeared, this cousin died in India or it was a certain sensible old maiden lady who died at 99 retained her faculties to the last who really did see the orphan boy, her story, which has often been incorrectly told. But at which the real truth is this because it is in fact a story belonging to our family and she was a connection of our family. And when she was about 40 years of age and still an uncommonly fine woman, her lover died young, which was the reason why she never married though she had many offers, she went to stay at a place in which her brother and India Merchant had newly bought. There was a story that this place had once been held in trust by the guardian of a young boy who was himself the next heir and who killed the young boy by harsh and cruel treatment. She knew nothing of that. This has been said that there was a cage in her bedroom in which the guardian used to put the boy, there was no such thing, there was only a closet, she went to bed, made no alarm or whatever in the night. And in the morning said composer, her maid when she came in, who is the pretty forlorn looking child who's been peeping out of that closet all night? The maid replied by giving a loud scream and instantly decamping. She was surprised but she was a woman of remarkable strength of mind and she dressed herself and went downstairs and closeted herself with her brother. Now, Walter, she said I have been disturbed all night by a pretty forlorn looking boy who has been constantly peeping out of that closet in my room which I can't open. This is some trick. I'm afraid not. Charlotte said he for it is the legend of the house. It is the orphan boy. What did he do? He opened the door softly said she and peeped out. Sometimes he came a step or two into the room. Then I called to him to encourage him and he shrunk and shutter and crept in again and shut the door. The closet has no communication. Charlotte said her brother with any other part of the house and it's nailed up. This was undeniably true and it took two etters a whole for noon to get it open for examination. Then she was satisfied that she had seen the orphan boy. But the wild and terrible part of the story is that he was also seen by three of her brothers, sons in succession who all died young. On the occasion of each child being taken ill, he came home in a heat 12 hours before and said, oh, mama, he had been playing under a particular oak tree in a certain meadow with a strange boy, a pretty forlorn looking boy who was very timid and made signs from fatal experience. The parents came to know that this was the orphan boy and that the course of that child whom he chose for his little playmate was surely run. Legion is the name of the German Castles where we sit up alone to wait for the specter where we are shown into a room made comparatively cheerful for our reception where we glance around at the shadows thrown on the blank walls by the crackling fire where we feel very lonely when the village innkeeper and his pretty daughter have retired after laying down a fresh store of wood upon the half and setting forth on the small table such supper cheer as a cold roast cap bread, grapes and a flask of old r wine where the reverberating doors close on their retreat. One after another, like so many peels of sullen thunder. And where about the small hours of the night we come into the knowledge of divers supernatural mysteries. Legion is the name of the haunted German students in whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire. While the school boy in the corner opens his eyes wide and round and flies off the footstool he has chosen for his seat. When the door accidentally blows open, vast is the crop of such fruit shining on our Christmas tree in blossom almost at the very top ripening all down the bows among the later toys and fancies hanging there as idle often and less pure be the images once associated with the sweet old weights that soften music in the night ever unalterable encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas time. Still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged in every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings. May the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian world. The moments pause, a vanishing tree at which the lower bows are dark to me as yet. Let me look once more. I know there are blank spaces on my branches where eyes that I have loved have shown and smiled from which they are departed. But far above. I see the razor of the dead girl and the widow's son and God is good if age be hiding for me in the unseen portion of thy downward growth, who may I with a gray head, turn a child's heart to that figure yet and a child's trustfulness and confidence. Now the tree is decorated with bright merriment and song and dance and cheerfulness and they're welcome, innocent and welcome be they ever held beneath the branches of the Christmas tree which cast no gloomy shadow. But as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the this in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy, and compassion. This in remembrance of me. Now, here's Lisa, all editor of Guardian Review. Now, of course, um Charles Dickens is often credited as being the man who invented Christmas and is most famous for the Christmas Carol. But many listeners might not be as familiar with a Christmas tree, Simon. Why, why do you love this story so much? Well, it's part of a series of pieces that Dickens wrote for household words. I mean, he wrote lots of Christmas stories and stories for Christmas necessarily about Christmas. But uh there are these pieces which were written in the 18 fifties, mostly in his magazine. Household words were sort of autobiographical and they have a wonderfully free form. They're like fantasia or improvisations. Uh They don't have a necessarily continuous narrative line. They're extreme recalls on his part of feelings and observations from his own childhood for the most part these stories. Um but they also in this particular one which does evoke that, you know, pre Victorian childhood of his and what he calls this pretty German toy, the Christmas tree. But uh um it, it also touches on something that Dickens was very enchanted by which was the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. So he sort of having, having gone through his evocation of, of a child's Christmas in the probably the early 18 twenties. He um he then launches into a sort of rather virtuoso recap of all the possible ghost stories that are ever told. And uh he does them so witted and so affectingly, but also such as his brilliance, sort of creepily as well. And then again, it comes something which is absolutely central to Dickens, but which he made no great fuss in his own lifetime, but which is his very strong Christian faith and especially his uh strong feeling of the figure of Jesus himself. Dickens had no theological uh interests at all. He had very little time for organized religion. He was a Unitarian, would have neither ministers nor any set services. Um But he did feel immensely strongly and, and I venture to suggest almost identified with the vigor of Jesus Christ. That's very eloquently, I think and very touchingly done in this story. But you know, that aspect of Dickens is, is intimately connected with his vigorous and practical sense of commitment to the disadvantaged and uh his, his sense of crucial importance of charity and kindness and generosity within society. But that was all linked up in his mind with Jesus. He never named him in the story, but of course, it's very obvious who he's talking about. It's fitting that we should bring the year almost to a close with a Dickens story because of course, it has been very much the year of Charles Dickens. Um his bicentenary year which began with a book of your own about Dickens in the theater, didn't it? Well, he has a rather cunningly plan that my biography of Dickens was released. February the seventh, which was indeed his 2/100 birthday. And this book was called Charles Dickens in the great theater of the world. And I, I, I was trying to show what it was like to be Charles Dickens and what it was like to be around Charles Dickens. And one of the things that absolutely everybody said about Dickens in his lifetime was what a wonderful actor he was and what a great man of the theater. And there's no question about it. Had he not been the novelist that he was uh and he devoted himself entirely to it. He would have been the greatest actor of his day, greatest director of his day, the greatest producer of his day. He, he, he was utterly and totally immersed in the world of theater. You hear that in the Christmas tree as well. His love of the um toy theaters and then of of real theaters. That was very much the, the center and the theme of my thing because after all, almost the week or two weeks before he died, Dickens was showing some people around London. He suddenly pointed to the theater and he said to them, uh that's what I should have done with my life. I should have run a theater. I should have written all the plays told the actors what to do and uh been a great manager. So, uh I, I, I hope that I shed a bit of light on, on Dickens uh from that aspect and, and how has the bicentenary year been for you? Because you are always very busy, but you, you have been busy being Dickens and I think, I think you're gonna be Dickens over Christmas as well. Yes, I mean, I did a play called The Mystery of Charles Dickens, which we first did 12 years ago, but we revived it for the bicentenary in the west end in November. And um I am now doing a Christmas carol and one man version in the one man form. You can do something that you can't really do in an adaptation. You can actually become the narrator, the narrator, of course, is Dickens. So I feel very close to him when I do this story. It's a story that meant a huge amount to him. It came out of enormous passion and anger and, and love of again, the disadvantaged. And it's a story of redemption, really very moving story of a man who a man who's, who's cut himself off from ordinary human life and emotions and feelings and gets a chance to become a member of the human race again. And in some sort of weird way, this seems to me to be a semi autobiographical story of Dickens. He's very present in, in the room when, when I do Christmas cards, very moving for more great downloads go to guardian dot co dot UK forward slash audio.