Every December we return to A Christmas Carol the way we return to familiar music. We know the notes. We know the ending. We know exactly how it is supposed to make us feel. And that is precisely the problem.

In this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we pull the story back out of its comfortable holiday wrapping and look at what Dickens was actually doing in 1843. This was not a bedtime story. It was a warning. Dickens was not trying to redeem one grumpy old man. He was indicting a society that had learned how to explain suffering away with respectable words and tidy laws.

Scrooge is not a monster. He is lawful, rational, and catastrophically wrong. The ghosts are not magical fixes. They expose. They accuse. They do not excuse.

This episode asks the question Dickens intended. Not whether Scrooge changed, but whether we ever do once the lights come up and the book is closed.