'What Brutal Hand …?': with Lydia Craig

*This episode focuses on the theme of domestic violence*

Dominic shares a bonus fragment from his last interview with Dr. Lydia Craig on The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain ...

It is a moment in the story where Redlaw comes across ‘a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn’ and ‘whose head’ is ‘bent down on her hands and knees.’ Redlaw sees that her arms are ‘black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised.’

It’s a deeply powerful, moment in the story, that reveals Dickens’ compassion not only for the poor, but for women on the receiving end of violence and abuse at the hands of husbands, partners, fathers or sons …

Given that there is a spike in this cruel and vicious behaviour over the holiday season it makes this moment in Dickens’ final Christmas book a clarion call for our society today …