A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories - Softcover

Charles Dickens

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451532023 ISBN 13: 9780451532022

Publisher: Signet Classics, 2011

Synopsis

A delightful holiday collection that includes “A Christmas Carol” and other classic Charles Dickens Christmas stories.

As much a part of Christmas as mistletoe and carolers, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was once read publicly on Christmas Eve each year by Dickens himself. This heartwarming tale continues to stir in us the same feelings of repentance, forgiveness, and love that transformed Ebenezer Scrooge from grumbling, “Bah!  Humbug!” to sharing Tiny Tim's happy “God bless us, every one!”
 
Dickens’s other Christmas stories prove as rich as his most famous. “A Christmas Tree” describes a Victorian Christmas as seen through a child’s delighted eyes. “Christmas Dinner” celebrates the reunion of a divided family, while the Christmas chapters from The Pickwick Papers move from the exhilaration of a Christmas wedding to a shivery ghost story that foreshadows the spirits seen by Scrooge. Warmly nostalgic and beautifully written, the Christmas stories of Charles Dickens deserve a very special place in our memories and our hearts.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

From the Back Cover

An immediate bestseller when it was first published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennial Yuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who comes to know the meaning of kindness, charity, and goodwill through a haunting Christmas Eve encounter with four ghosts, is a heartwarming celebration of the spirit of Christmas.
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition also includes two other popular Christmas stories by Dickens: "The Chimes, in which a man, persuaded by hypocritical cant that the poor deserve their misery, is shown what his pessimistic resignation might lead to in a vision conjured by the pealing of bells, and "The Haunted Man, Dickens's last Christmas tale, which features one of his great comic families, the Tetterbys.

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451532023
• ISBN 13: 9780451532022
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 224