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A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Classics

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SKU:
461
Condition:
Like New
Format:
Hardcover, 760 pages
Publisher:
Fall River Press, 2012
Edition:
Second Printing
A Christmas Carol is Charles Dickens's best-known work and a beloved classic of nineteenth century literature. Published in 1843, it was the first of five books that Dickens wrote specifically to promote the spirit of charity and generosity that we associate with the Christmas holidays. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Classics brings together all five Christmas books that Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848, including The Chimes, A Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man--stories that Dickens hoped would, as he wrote, "awaken some loving and forebearing thoughts" in his readers. Through these immensely popular tales Dickens's name became synonymous, in the minds of his audience, with the warm tidings of the Christmas season. This volume also collects "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," an early sketch that was Dickens's model for A Christmas Carol. And it includes another fifteen stories, three written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and all published in the Christmas issues of the two magazines Dickens edited between 1850 and 1870, Household Works and All the Year Round. These works also celebrate the virtues of home, hearth, and holiday cheer. Although associated with Christmas-time, the stories collected in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Classics transcend their time and season and can be enjoyed all the year round.

A Christmas Carol is Charles Dickens's best-known work and a beloved classic of nineteenth century literature.  Published in 1843, it was the first of five books that Dickens wrote specifically to promote the spirit of charity and generosity that we associate with the Christmas holidays. 

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Classics brings together all five Christmas books that Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848, including The Chimes, A Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man--stories that Dickens hoped would, as he wrote, "awaken some loving and forebearing thoughts" in his readers.  Through these immensely popular tales Dickens's name became synonymous, in the minds of his audience, with the warm tidings of the Christmas season.  

This volume also collects "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," an early sketch that was Dickens's model for A Christmas Carol.  And it includes another fifteen stories, three written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and all published in the Christmas issues of the two magazines Dickens edited between 1850 and 1870, Household Works and All the Year Round.  These works also celebrate the virtues of home, hearth, and holiday cheer.

Although associated with Christmas-time, the stories collected in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Classics transcend their time and season and can be enjoyed all the year round.

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in London backing warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for six shillings a week. His father John Dickens, was a warmhearted but improvident man. When he was condemned the Marshela Prison for unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain; his experiences as a child alone in a huge city–cold, isolated with barely enough to eat–haunted him for the rest of his life.


When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836-7) he achieved immediate fame; in a few years he was easily the post popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) was less so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855-7)reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British Society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations(1860-1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) complete his major works.

Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hoggarth produced ten children but ended in separation in 1858. In that year he began a series of exhausting public readings; his health gradually declined. After putting in a full day’s work at his home at Gads Hill, Kent on June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and he died the following day.

Andrew Sanders is a lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London. He is Honorary Editor of The Dickensian, and editor of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackerary, and Sylvia's Lovers by Mrs. Gaskell, both in The World's Classics series.