A Christmas Carol And Other Christmas Books [Paperback]

No holiday season is complete without Charles Dickens’s timeless tale of redemption starring the tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, the long-suffering  Bob Cratchit, kindhearted Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. ButA Christmas Carolwas only the first and most famous of Dickens’s holiday tales. In this edition, everyone’s favorite misanthrope appears in company with four more Dickens stories—The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, andThe Haunted Man—that further develop the Chistmas spirit Dickens did so much to invent.

Charles Dickens(1812-1870) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent most of his life in London. When he was twelve, his father was sent to debtor’s prison and he was forced to work in a boot polish factory to help support the family, an experience that marked him for life. At age fifteen he found work in an attorney’s office and later become a reporter. His first stories and sketches were published in 1833, and after his tremendous success with the serialization ofThePickwick Papersin 1836 he turned to writing novels. A passionate advocate of social reform throughout his life, he was the most popular writer of the Victorian era.

MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permitl3.