The Politics of Scrooge: Charles Dickens and Karl Marx Saw the Same Industrial Revolution, But Came to Very Different Conclusions Dickens created A Christmas Carol. Marx created Das Kapital. Their only point of agreement: Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to your employer.

In October 1843, Dickens and Engels witnessed the same Industrial Revolution horrors in Manchester. CD wrote A Christmas Carol. Engels began collaborating with Karl Marx on works that would eventually become Das Kapital. open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

MLS gets cloudier, not more transparent, with Clint Dempsey’s Seattle Sounders deal Major League Soccer owners appear happy to have fans and media in the dark about much of their process.

Not like the league rigging a player allocation to the Seattle Sounders is without precedent. share.google/a7ql6JkkGnX2...

I let the French Revolution historiography for Cities get out of control! Now I see why the Russian Revolution breached 100 episodes! Anyway, thank you for your work, you inspire others, hope you and Alexis start the pod up again!

@mikeduncan.bsky.social Hello Mike Duncan! Just finished the Martian Revolution! Wanted to say thank you for inspiring my Substack livinglitpod.com , which among other things, is an attempt to approach Great Books like you approach Revolutions. A Tale of Two Cities is first up.

Part 2: The French Revolution's Contribution to Democracy Today's Concept of the Political Left and the Political Right Literally Came From the First English Debate About the French Revolution

Entertain yourself whole for on the birth of the Political Right and Left, the Founding Father of Conservatives Edmund Burke and the FF of the Left Thomas Paine arguing about the French Revolution. open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

How Literature “Lives”: Each Reader Gives It New Life in Their Own Time and Place A Manifesto About Teaching Literature: If It Wasn’t the Most Important Subject In School, They Wouldn’t Be Willing To Kill Over It

At Living Literature: a manifesto on teaching literature that makes the humanities vital. Our guiding light is Supreme Court Justice and Adult Musical Theater Nerd Ketanji Brown Jackson. #booksky #edusky

open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

The “Noisiest Authorities”: Charles Dickens Explains How It Can Be Both the Best and Worst of Times in the Age of Trump The World’s First Global Media Star Understood the Power of Attention

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" is about revolutionary moments. A Tale of Two Cities offers the clearest way to think about our times. On Monday, I will walk you through it. If this sounds intriguing, read this and subscribe! open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

The “Noisiest Authorities”: Charles Dickens Explains How It Can Be Both the Best and Worst of Times in the Age of Trump The World’s First Global Media Star Understood the Power of Attention

@chrislhayes.bsky.social Your conversation inspired this longform post on Charles Dickens and understanding the first par. of A Tale of Two Cities in the age of Trump. Dickens was the world's first global attention merchant! open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

My podcast Living Literature deep-dives into Stave I of A Christmas Carol. I tour you through Scrooge's London like it's Purgatory We do a deep reading of Marley's house to discover that, in Marley, Scrooge found a Rich Widower to keep him out of the debtors' prisons.
linktr.ee/livinglitpod

If you like what you read, subscribe to my Substack! You will get at least one longform deep-dive a week, centered on the book I'm covering on the podcast. Season 1 is A Christmas Carol. Season 2 will be A Tale of Two Cities.
linktr.ee/livinglitpod

Belle Dumped Scrooge Because She Held Up Her End of the Bargain and He Didn’t. Scrooge Wasn’t Greedy: He Feared the Debtors Prisons. A Tragic Love Story Defined By the Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie in Late Industrial Revolution England

A Christmas Carol adaptations diminish Belle. On the page, she's bold, risking her life to dump Ebenezer. Belle bets on herself and wins. Hers is a tragic love story defined by the rise of the petite bourgeoisie in Late Industrial Revolution England.
open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

If you like what you read, subscribe to my Substack! You will get at least one longform deep-dive a week, centered on the book I'm covering on the podcast. Season 1 is A Christmas Carol. Season 2 will be A Tale of Two Cities.
linktr.ee/livinglitpod

The Politics of Scrooge: Charles Dickens and Karl Marx Saw the Same Industrial Revolution and Came to Very Different Conclusions A Christmas Carol Is Much More Than a Parable About Why Your Ability to Pay For Health Care Shouldn’t Be Tied to Your Employer

In October 1843, Friedrich Engels and Charles Dickens were both in Manchester to witness the worst Industrial Revolution squalor. Engels went on to collaborate with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto. Dickens wrote something more seditious: A Christmas Carol.
open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

I asked the curator at the Morgan Library if this was an intentional choice, and he said yes, this is the page they wanted people to see.

You may recognize the Morgan's stacks from various movies and tv shows. It's quite moving.

This is the man that Dickens used as a model for Scrooge's politics: The poor are poor because they lack virtue, and if they die, well, get on with it because the surplus population is taking food from the virtuous wealthy.

Malthus also beefed with William Godwin, the utilitarian and anarchist philosopher who was married to early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter later became Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Malthus thought "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" would lead to famine.

Malthus was controversial in his own lifetime. In "An Essay on the Principle of Population," Malthus said that Rousseau's views on income inequality and romantic individualism defied the mathematical logic that population increases exponentially while food supply only increases linearly.

...they should have avoided all the vice and wastefulness that put them in this situation. And if that led to mass death, well, that's just the "surplus" population. Their own vice and wastefulness dictated their own fate, and they would be judged accordingly by God.

Not that Malthus didn't have views on economic policies: He thought the Poor Laws created inflation, which hurt the virtuous well-off, and he supported the Corn Laws, which taxed grain imports and spiked the price of bread. If the poor died because they couldn't afford food, well....

For Malthus, this created a spiritual problem: If population growth *thwarts* social progress, it's imperative for a nation to impose standards of virtue on its people. Being poor and hungry was the result of individual vice and wastefulness, not national policies or macroeconomics.

This line is an allusion to the works of English economist The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, whose work became known as the "Malthusian Trap": The idea that increasing a nation's food production would, eventually, lead to a living standards because the population growth would lead to shortages.

This is also the page where the charity gentleman says "many would rather die" than go to the debtors prisons, to which Scrooge says, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." This line is thrown back at Scrooge when he asks if Tiny Tim will die.

Turns out, they opened it to one of my favorite passages: Two gentlemen are collecting money for the poor, and Scrooge asks them if the Poor Law is "in full vigor" and whether there are "plenty of prisons" and "Union workhouses in operation."

Later this week, I will publish an episode covering Stave I of A Christmas Carol. Two years ago, my family went to the Morgan Library in New York City, where Dickens' handwritten manuscript of A Christmas Carol is on display. I was very interested to see which page would be displayed

6) The most racist policy of the Theresa May prime ministership that cost her Home Secretary her job, 7) The best street-vendor jerk chicken outside the Caribbean, and 8) The cheapest stereo decks in the mall at Montgomery Ward.

4) The “Windrush Generation” of Afro-Caribbean immigration during the post- World War II liquidization of the British Empire, 5) David Bowie making original MTV VJ Mark Goodman flop-sweat during the early days of basic cable,

"Electric Avenue" intersects: 1) The Brixton Riots of the 1980s in the bombed-out slums of southern London 2) “Operation Swamp 81” and the Victorian “Sus Law,” 3) London Metropolitan Police abuses that eventually got their version of “Stop and Frisk” rescinded by Parliament,

Why They Were Out in the Streets of “Electric Avenue”: The Brixton Riots and the Ongoing Persecution of the Windrush Generation Trump Might Have Won the Election, But Eddy Grant Remains Undefeated

In September, a federal judge issued a cease and desist to the Trump Campaign from using "Electric Avenue." In my first "Art In Its Place" essay, I deep-dived into the historical context of Eddy Grant's hit. Let's go to the south London borough of Brixton. open.substack.com/pub/livingli...

“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, Part 1 How Standardized Test-Driven Curriculum Degraded America's Capacity to Tackle Our Most Pressing Issues

Living Literature tackles an Atlantic article making the rounds, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." Long story short: Twenty-five years of the standardized testing regime has emphasized "passages," so we don't really teach reading anymore.
www.livinglitpod.com/p/the-elite-...

Living Literature | Stephen Himes | Substack Living Literature illuminates great books, chapter by chapter. Uses the literature of the past to understand the present, with observation on how we teach literature in the classroom. Click to read L...

Find me on Substack for all my podcasts and posts! www.livinglitpod.com