The man who gave us the cozy, moral, family-centered image of Christmas lived a life that looked nothing like a greeting card. This episode follows Charles Dickens from an idyllic childhood in Kent to the rat-infested boot-blacking factory where, at 12, he pasted labels for ten hours a day while his father sat in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. We look at the trapdoor moment that never left him, the mother who wanted him to keep working even after the family's finances recovered, and the lifelong terror of poverty that drove everything that followed.

We trace his self-taught shorthand and rise as the fastest parliamentary reporter in London, the theatrical ear that let him cast characters rather than just write them, the origin of the pen name Boz, and the Sam Weller bump that turned The Pickwick Papers into a merchandising phenomenon. Then ...