Christmas Books
by Charles Dickens
A collection of Christmas books by Charles Dickens.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim "to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land."
Contents:
- A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose)
- The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In)
- The Cricket on the Hearth
- The Battle of Life
- The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870), who also wrote under the pen name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era. He was a vigorous social campaigner, both in his own personal endeavours as well as through the recurrent themes of his literary enterprise.
Critics George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton championed Dickens's mastery of prose, his endless invention of unique, clever personalities, and his powerful social sensibilities, but fellow writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf faulted his work for sentimentality, implausible occurrences, and grotesque characterizations.
