"The Cricket on the Hearth" (Excerpt): Read by Tom Bennett

Happy 5th Day of Christmas!

The fantastic actor Tom Bennett reads an excerpt from Dickens’ third Christmas book The Cricket on the Hearth …

Caleb Plummer and his daughter Bertha are poor toymakers in the service of the cruel, miserly Tackleton. As the scene unfolds we learn that Caleb’s daughter Bertha is blind, and that her father is constantly trying to shield her from the hardship and poverty of their lives … meanwhile even their poor hearth is visited by a cricket that may yet bring good fortune for them.

Tom’s screen credits include his critically acclaimed portrayal of Sir James Martin opposite Kate Beckinsale in Love and Friendship, the HBO series Family Tree, Netlfix’s After Life and coming soon in 2024 House of the Dragons. He also starred as Del Boy in the London’s West End hit Only Fools and Horses …

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Hi everyone, happy fifth day of Christmas. As we sit in that strange half-world between Christmas and New Year, I'd like to welcome the fantastic actor Tom Bennett, who is going to read us an excerpt from Dickens' third Christmas book, the Cricket on the Hearth. Tom's screen credits include his critically acclaimed portrayal of Sir James Martin opposite Kate Beckinsale in Love and Friendship, the HBO series Family Tree, netflix's Afterlife and Coming Soon in 2024, house of the Dragons. He also starred as Del Boy in the London's West End hit Only Fools and Horses. In this excerpt, we meet Caleb Plummer and his daughter Bertha, who are both poor toy makers in the service of the cruel, miserly Tackleton. As the scene unfolds, we learn that Caleb's daughter Bertha is blind and that her father is constantly trying to shield her from the hardship and poverty of their lives. Meanwhile, even their poor hearth is visited by a cricket that may yet bring good fortune for them.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the storybooks say and my blessing with yours to back it, I hope on the storybooks for saying anything in this work-a-day world. Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter lived all alone by themselves in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house which was in truth no better than a pimple on the prominent red-brick nose of Gruff and Tackleton. The premises of Gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of the street, but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer's dwelling with a hammer or two and carried off the pieces in a cart. If anyone had done the dwelling house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been no doubt to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton like a barnacle to a ship's keel or a snail to a door or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung and under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last had in a small way made toys for a generation of old boys and girls who had played with them and found them out and broken them and gone to sleep.

Speaker 2: 2:47

I have said that Caleb and his poor blind daughter lived there. I should have said that Caleb lived here and his poor blind daughter somewhere else, in an enchanted home of Caleb's furnishing, where scarcity and shabbiness were not and trouble never entered. Caleb was no sorcerer, but in the only magic art that still remains to us, the magic of devoted, deathless love, nature had been the mistress of his study and from her teaching all the wonder came. The blind girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls blotched and bare of plaster here and there, high crevices unstocked and widening every day, beams mouldering and tending downward. The blind girl never knew that iron was rusting wood, rotting paper, peeling off the size and shape and true proportion of the dwelling withering away. The blind girl never knew that ugly shapes of delft and earthenware were on the board, that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house, that Caleb's scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey before her sightless face. The blind girl never knew they had a master, cold, exacting and uninterested. Never knew that Tackleton was Tackleton in short, but lived in the belief of an eccentric humorist who loved to have his jest with them and who, while he was the guardian angel of their lives, disdained to hear one word of thankfulness. And all was Caleb's doing, all the doing of her simple father. But he too had a cricket on his hearth and listening sadly to its music. When the motherless, blind child was very young, that spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing and the girl made happy by these little means. For all, the cricket tribe are potent spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it, which is frequently the case. And there are not in the unseen world voices more gentle and more true that may be so implicitly relied on or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel, as the voices in which the spirits of the fireside and the hearth address themselves to humankind.

Speaker 2: 5:22

Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual working room, which served them for their ordinary living room as well, and a strange place it was. There were houses in it, finished and unfurnished, for dolls of all stations in life, suburban tenements for dolls of moderate means, kitchens and single apartments for dolls of the lower classes, capital town residences for dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were already furnished, according to estimate, with a view to the convenience of dolls of limited income. Others could be fitted on the most expensive scale at a moment's notice, from whole shells of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads and upholstery. The nobility and gentry and public in general for whose accommodation these tenements were designed, lay here and there in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling. But in denoting their degrees in society and confining them to their respective stations, which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life, the makers of these dolls had far improved on nature, who is often fraught and perverse, for they not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton, print and bits of rag has super-added, striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the doll lady of distinction had waxed limbs of perfect symmetry, but only she and her compeers, the next grade in the social scale being made of leather and the next, of course, linen stuff. As to the common people, they had just so many matches out of tinderboxes for their arms and legs, and there they were, established in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it.

Speaker 2: 7:17

There were various other samples of his handicraft. Beside dolls, in Caleb Plummer's room there were Noah's arks in which the birds and beasts were an uncommonly tight fit. But I assure you though, they could be crammed in anyhow at the roof and rattled and shaken into the smallest compass by a bold poetical license. Most of these Noah's arks had knockers on the doors, inconsistent appendages, perhaps a suggestive of morning callers and a postman. Yet a pleasant finish.

Speaker 2: 7:50

To the outside of the building, there were scores of melancholy little carts which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music, many small fiddles, drums and other instruments of torture, no end of cannon shield, sword, spears and guns. There were little tumblers in red breeches. There were many swarming up high obstacles of red tape and coming down head first on the other side, and there were innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs inserted for the purpose in their own street doors. There were beasts of all sorts, horses in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs with a small tippet for a mane to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest metal, as it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdices on the turning of a handle. So it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice or weakness that had not its type, immediate or remote. In Caleb Plummer's room, and not in an exaggerated form, for very little handles will move men and women to a strange performances as any toy was ever made to undertake.

Speaker 2: 9:15

In the midst of all these objects, caleb and his daughter sat at work. The blind girl busy as a doll's dressmaker, caleb painting and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion. The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb's face and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or a true student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation and the trivialities about him. But trivial things invented and pursued for bread become very serious matters of fact. And apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say myself that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain or a Member of Parliament or a lawyer or even a great speculator, he would have dealt in toys one wit less whimsical, while I have a very great doubt whether they would have been as harmless.

Speaker 2: 10:13

So you were out in the rain last night, father, in your beautiful new great coat, said Caleb's daughter. In my beautiful new great coat, answered Caleb, glancing towards a clothesline in the room on which the sackcloth garment previously described was carefully hung up to dry. How glad I am. You bought it, father, and of such a tailor too, said Caleb. Quite a fashionable tailor, it's too good for me. The blind girl rested from her work and laughed with delight.

Speaker 1: 10:47

Too good.

Speaker 2: 10:47

Father, what could be too good for you? I'm half ashamed to wear it, though, said Caleb, watching the effect of what he said upon the brightening face, upon my word. When I hear the boys and the people behind me say, hello, here's a swell, I don't know which way to look and when the beggar wouldn't go away last night. And when I said I was a very common man, said no, your Honor, bless your honor. Don't say that I was quite ashamed. I really felt as if I hadn't a right to wear it.

Speaker 2: 11:19

Happy blind girl, how merry she was in her exaltation. I see you, father", she said, clasping her hands as plainly as if I had the eyes. I never want, when you are with me, a blue coat, bright blue, said Caleb. Yes, yes, bright blue, exclaimed the girl turning up her radiant face, the colour I can just remember in the blessed sky. You told me it was blue before.

Speaker 2: 11:46

A bright blue coat Made loose to the figure, suggested Caleb. Made loose to the figure, cried the blind girl laughing heartily. And in it you, dear Father, with your merry eye, your smiling face, your free step and your dark hair, looking so young and handsome. Halloa, hallaoa, said Caleb. I shall be vain presently. I think you already are, cried, the blind girl pointing at him in her glee I know you, father, I've found you out. You see how different the picture in her mind from Caleb as he sat observing her. She had spoken of his free step. She was right in that For years and years he had never once crossed that threshold at his own slow pace but with a footfall counterfeited for her ear. And never had he, when his heart was heaviest, forgotten the light tread that was to render hers so cheerful and courageous.