A truly Dickensian Christmas

All those Christmas card scenes ... horse-drawn stagecoaches in snowy country lanes, cheerful urchins playing snowballs in London streets by yellow gaslight, jolly Mr Pickwick walking with his friends, Bob Cratchett tramping home to the bosom of his loving family ... ahh, the Good Old Days.

Except they weren't. Not good at all ...

So BorgCo Personal Experiences in conjunction with MaxCo Financial Enterprises are pleased to be able to offer customers a fourteen-day Truly Dickensian Christmas Experience, so you experience first hand what it was really like for most of the population in the heyday of Queen Victoria's reign.

Having chosen Urban or Rural for your experience, on 19 December you arrive at the Welcome Centre to prepare. Here, your clothes are replaced with dirty poor-quality second-hand ragged garments, thin and far from waterproof, and pre-infested with fleas, lice and highly infectious skin diseases. Then a fully qualified dentist will drill out all your fillings, and make extra holes in any undamaged teeth to ensure you're in constant pain, after which you swallow a sucession of capsules to provide your body with an appropriate burden of internal parasites.

You are then delivered by open cart to your hovel (if rural) or slum (if urban). Each has its own quirks, but generally feature a contaminated water supply, negligible heating, no draughtproofing, leaky roofs, incredible overcrowding, nonexistent sanitary facilities, and unhygienic food storage.

For two weeks, you subsist on very poor quality food (which there's never enough of) while being required to perform seemingly endless drudgery, often outdoors in all weathers, for a despotic employer - just to earn a pittance, all of which goes on food and rent. You're always cold, often soaking wet, hungry, exhausted, in pain from your rotten teeth, and unable to afford any meaningful medical care. To add to it all, while you're busy working, other people steal your stuff.

Then, at 2330 on December 31, [MaxwellBuchanan], following his family's fine old tradition of fiscal rectitude, turns up outside your dwelling in his fancy carriage, wearing his tall top hat and smoking a big cigar, accompanied by a retinue of baliffs, thugs and bully-boys, and evicts you into the street on the stroke of midnight, so that you start the New Year in the right spirit and frame of mind.