Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations) E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

"Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations)" is a quintessential anthology that showcases Dickens's masterful narrative style, interweaving vivid characterizations with profound social commentary. Featuring beloved tales such as "A Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," and "The Cricket on the Hearth," this collection not only captures the spirit of Christmas but also reflects the Victorian societal values, dilemmas, and hopes of its time. The original illustrations accompany each story, enriching the text and offering readers a visual glimpse into the era, thus framing Dickens's work within the larger Victorian literary context where morality and social responsibility play pivotal roles. Charles Dickens, one of the most celebrated novelists of the 19th century, was deeply influenced by his own hardships and the socio-economic conditions of Victorian England. Having experienced poverty in his youth, Dickens became a fervent advocate for social reform and used his literary voice to shine a light on the plight of the working class. His personal experiences, coupled with his keen observations of societal injustices, led him to write these holiday classics that echo themes of redemption, generosity, and community. Recommended for both long-time Dickens enthusiasts and new readers alike, this collection provides a unique opportunity to experience the warmth of Dickens's stories as intended by the author. With its timeless messages and charming original illustrations, "Christmas Classics" invites readers to reflect on the true spirit of the season and encourages a sense of compassion that transcends time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

Leseprobe

Charles Dickens

Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations)

Enriched edition. The Greatest Stories & Novels for Christmas Time

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Tessa Longmere

Edited and published by Good Press, 2023

[email protected]

EAN 8596547690320

Table of Contents

Introduction

Author Biography

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations)

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations) gathers Dickens’s enduring seasonal writings alongside select major novels, offering a panoramic introduction to his imagination at once festive, moral, and socially attentive. Bringing together beloved Christmas books, reflective sketches, collaborative Christmas numbers, and complete novels, the volume presents both the intimacy of fireside tales and the sweep of long-form fiction. Its purpose is twofold: to trace how Dickens used Christmas as a lens for compassion, memory, and reform, and to situate those shorter works within the broader arc of his storytelling craft. Restored period illustrations accompany the texts, echoing how readers first encountered many of these works.

At the core stand the five Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Each is a self-contained tale written for holiday audiences in the 1840s, blending the marvelous with ethical urgency. A Christmas Carol follows a miser confronted by spirits who reveal past, present, and possible futures. The Chimes centers on a poor porter and the admonitory voices of bells. The Cricket on the Hearth celebrates domestic affections. The Battle of Life treats self-denial and reconciliation in a rural setting. The Haunted Man explores the cost of forgetting sorrow.

Complementing these are shorter pieces that mingle essay, fable, and anecdote. A Christmas Tree arrays memories like ornaments, turning the season into a catalogue of childhood wonders and fears. What Christmas Is As We Grow Older contemplates how festivity deepens with remembrance. The Poor Relation’s Story, The Child’s Story, The Schoolboy’s Story, and Nobody’s Story adopt distinct voices to examine hope, disappointment, and social vantage, inviting readers to hear Christmas through many lives. First appearing in Dickens’s journals, these concise works demonstrate his range as a moral observer who could, in a few pages, move from playful recollection to sober appeal.

Hospitality and the road recur in narratives like The Seven Poor Travellers and The Holly-Tree, where inns, wayfarers, and shelter become occasions for storytelling and sympathy. In these works, a shared table or a pause in travel reveals a cross-section of society: strangers exchange histories, prejudices dissolve, and charity finds practical expression. The frame structures encourage multiple perspectives while keeping the emphasis on fellowship. Snow, lamplight, and the bustle of streets are not merely backdrops; they are active atmospheres, heightening the sense that winter brings people together and turns ordinary places—parlors, taprooms, waiting rooms—into temporary communities with moral consequence.

Several later pieces originated as the annual Christmas numbers of Dickens’s weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round. In these, Dickens frequently devised a framing situation and contributed key chapters, while trusted colleagues supplied interlinked tales. The Wreck of the Golden Mary, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, A House to Let, The Haunted House, A Message from the Sea, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Somebody’s Luggage, Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy, Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, Mugby Junction, and No Thoroughfare exemplify this collaborative method. Their subjects range from maritime peril and railway encounters to domestic mysteries, always returning to themes of kindness, responsibility, and second chances.

Alongside the seasonal writings, the collection includes complete novels that reveal Dickens’s broader canvas: Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations. First issued in parts or weekly installments to a mass readership, these works explore crime and care for the destitute, convivial travel and comic society, the making of a writer, the burdens of debt and bureaucracy, and the forging of identity. While not confined to Christmas settings, they contain memorable winter scenes and charitable impulses that resonate with the spirit animating the shorter tales, allowing readers to see how Dickens’s festive concerns permeate his sustained narratives.

Readers will encounter an array of forms: full-length novels; novellas; framed sequences; short stories; sketches; and reflective essays. Some pieces blend reportage with imaginative fiction, while others present linked monologues within a unifying situation. The mixture mirrors Dickens’s professional life as novelist, journalist, and editor, and shows how flexible the Christmas platform proved for him. A few items originated as special seasonal publications later adapted for other media, including the stage. Together they offer the pleasures of variety without sacrificing coherence, because each form—brief reminiscence or expansive serial—serves the same broad aim: to bring moral feeling to vivid, entertaining life.

Across the volume, certain concerns recur with unmistakable clarity. Dickens treats poverty and exclusion not as abstractions but as urgent human situations, inviting readers to imagine practical benevolence. He returns to memory and time, often using supernatural devices or festive gatherings to test how individuals change. Family, chosen and biological, is probed for its duties and redemptive possibilities. Institutions—workhouses, prisons, offices, railways—are scrutinized through satire and pathos. Above all, the season’s rhetoric of goodwill becomes a spur to empathy that extends beyond a single day, making Christmas a vantage point from which to consider justice, gratitude, and renewal.

Stylistically, the collection showcases Dickens’s celebrated blend of humor, caricature, and tenderness. He delights in names, voices, and idiosyncrasies that fix characters in the mind while granting them capacity for growth. His narrators address readers directly, cultivating intimacy and moral conversation. Description is sensuous and dynamic: city fogs, frost patterns, and firelight are almost animate, setting moods that underline ethical choices. Comic set pieces balance grave subjects, ensuring that delight accompanies admonition. Many scenes possess an audible quality, shaped by Dickens’s lifelong interest in performance and public readings, which helped carry these stories from page to hearthside across generations.

These writings emerged in the bustling world of Victorian print, where serial publication fostered anticipation and communal reading. Dickens used the rhythms of weekly and monthly intervals to pace revelation and reflection, aligning festive issues with the calendar to heighten their social appeal. As editor and contributor, he orchestrated multiple voices while maintaining a recognizable ethos. The result was literature that reached a broad audience, from circulating libraries to family parlors, and that encouraged readers to connect private feeling with public concern. The seasonal frame, far from limiting him, gave structure to an ongoing conversation about kindness and reform.

The presence of original illustrations situates the texts in their historical mode of reception. Nineteenth-century readers often encountered Dickens’s chapters accompanied by engravings that guided expectation, punctuated episodes, and fixed memorable images. Restoring period artwork here preserves that dialogue between word and image. The plates accent domestic warmth, spectral visitations, comic assemblies, and street scenes, complementing Dickens’s tonal shifts from merriment to gravity. They also testify to the collaborative nature of Victorian publishing, in which visual artists and writers shaped a shared imaginative world. For contemporary readers, these images offer context and enrich the immediacy of Dickens’s narrative staging.

Taken together, the selections in this collection invite both continuous reading and seasonal return. One may linger with a long novel’s unfolding community or turn, in a single evening, to an essay that reframes familiar customs. The organizing spirit is not mere nostalgia but a sustained engagement with sympathy, memory, and moral choice. By bringing the Christmas books into conversation with landmark novels and journal pieces, the volume highlights the consistency of Dickens’s humane vision across length and genre. It offers an accessible, historically grounded pathway into his work—complete with the textures of original illustration—while leaving discovery pleasantly ahead.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Introduction

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a leading novelist of the Victorian era whose vivid storytelling, memorable characters, and sharp social critique shaped English literature and public consciousness. Rising from modest beginnings, he became internationally renowned through serialized novels that combined humor, sentiment, satire, and reportage. Among his most celebrated works are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s narratives explored poverty, injustice, bureaucracy, and urban life, influencing social reform debates while entertaining mass audiences. His innovation in serial publication and his theatrical public readings made him a defining cultural figure of nineteenth-century Britain.

Education and Literary Influences

Dickens’s formal schooling was limited. After an early period of instruction and attendance at a small academy, his education was disrupted by family financial hardship, including his father’s imprisonment for debt. As a child, Dickens worked in a factory, an experience that left a lasting mark on his imagination and moral outlook. He later returned to school briefly, then educated himself through voracious reading and professional discipline. In his late teens and early twenties, he mastered shorthand and became a parliamentary and newspaper reporter, learning to observe rapidly, distill complex proceedings, and write under pressure—habits that profoundly shaped his literary craft.

Dickens drew on a wide range of influences. He admired eighteenth-century novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, whose picaresque narratives and comic vigor informed his episodic storytelling and gallery of characters. Shakespeare’s breadth of humanity, the energy of the popular theatre and melodrama, and topical journalism all fed his style. He was attuned to Gothic effects and to contemporary debates about industrial society. The rhythms of oral performance, honed in amateur theatricals and later public readings, sharpened his ear for dialogue and timing. These influences converged in a distinctive blend of satire, sentiment, and social observation that became unmistakably Dickensian.

Literary Career

Dickens began as a journalist, publishing sketches under the pseudonym “Boz” and gathering them as Sketches by Boz. His breakthrough came with The Pickwick Papers, issued in parts, which rapidly expanded his readership and established serialization as his dominant mode. The success of Pickwick revealed his gift for comic set pieces and character invention while demonstrating how installment fiction could build a national conversation. He continued writing for newspapers and magazines, building a professional identity that combined reportage and imaginative art. This dual practice gave his fiction immediacy and topical reach, aligning entertainment with incisive commentary on contemporary life.

In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Dickens produced Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. These works deepened his engagement with urban poverty, child exploitation, and the spectacle of London’s streets. Oliver Twist dramatized criminal underworlds and the workhouse regime, while Nicholas Nickleby exposed abuses in Yorkshire schools. The Old Curiosity Shop united pathos with social panorama, and Barnaby Rudge explored historical violence and crowd psychology. The public embraced his narratives, and his characters became part of popular speech. Critics sometimes questioned his sentimentality, but even detractors recognized his mastery of incident, dialogue, and atmosphere.

The 1840s and 1850s saw Dickens consolidate artistic authority and editorial influence. He published American Notes after traveling to the United States and satirized aspects of American society in Martin Chuzzlewit. He launched and edited Household Words, later All the Year Round, commissioning and contributing to essays and stories on industry, health, and urban conditions. Dombey and Son and David Copperfield marked advances in psychological depth and structural control; the latter, partly autobiographical in theme, remains a touchstone of the Bildungsroman. Dickens also wrote seasonal works, notably A Christmas Carol, whose blend of social critique and festive spirit reshaped modern notions of Christmas.

In the early to mid-1850s, Dickens produced Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. Bleak House offered a panoramic indictment of the Court of Chancery and bureaucratic paralysis, interweaving multiple narrative strands and experimenting with dual narration. Hard Times examined industrialism’s dehumanizing effects in a compressed, emblematic setting, while Little Dorrit scrutinized debt, imprisonment, and systemic inertia. Throughout, he refined the art of serial suspense—cliffhangers, recurring motifs, and intricately layered subplots—without losing the energy of caricature and the warmth of community. These novels added analytical rigor to his social vision, reinforcing his status as both entertainer and reform-minded critic.

In the 1860s, Dickens turned to historical drama and introspective retrospection. A Tale of Two Cities set personal sacrifice against the convulsions of the French Revolution, while Great Expectations offered a tightly structured meditation on ambition, guilt, and moral growth. Our Mutual Friend returned to the Thames as symbol and setting, interrogating wealth, waste, and identity. Meanwhile, he developed a second career as a public reader of his own work, captivating audiences with dramatic performances that further broadened his fame. Popular enthusiasm remained intense, though some highbrow critics debated his use of melodrama; over time, scholarly appraisal affirmed his artistic complexity.

Beliefs and Advocacy

Dickens’s writing and public activities reflected deep concern with social justice, particularly the conditions of the poor, children, and the imprisoned. He supported initiatives such as ragged schools and used journalism to advocate for sanitation, education, and humane treatment within institutions. With the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, he helped establish and oversee a home for women seeking to rebuild their lives, applying practical management and careful oversight. His fiction—Oliver Twist on workhouses, Nicholas Nickleby on brutal schools, Little Dorrit on debtors’ prisons—translated advocacy into narrative, making systemic failures palpable to a mass audience and encouraging readers’ moral attention.

Although wary of rigid ideological programs, Dickens championed ethical responsibility, civic compassion, and reform grounded in common sense. He often criticized bureaucratic indifference and religious hypocrisy while affirming humane values associated with Christian ethics. His essays and speeches engaged with public debates, including international copyright and the responsibilities of the press. The Christmas Books, especially A Christmas Carol, argued for generosity and social conscience in accessible, festive form. Across genres, he sought to align private feeling with public duty, insisting that individual choices—kindness, diligence, imagination—could mitigate the harshness of industrial society and inspire practical improvement in everyday life.

Final Years & Legacy

In his later years, Dickens intensified his schedule of public readings across Britain and, in the late 1860s, in the United States. The strain contributed to declining health. He survived a serious railway accident in the mid-1860s and continued to write, beginning The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished. He died in 1870 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, amid widespread public mourning and tributes from admirers and colleagues. Obituaries emphasized his humane imagination, narrative invention, and national stature. The unfinished Drood invited speculation about his evolving methods, while his readings cemented an image of Dickens as performer-author.

Dickens’s legacy is expansive. His novels remain central to the English-language canon and a touchstone for discussions of urban modernity, childhood, and institutional critique. The term “Dickensian” continues to evoke both exuberant characterization and stark social conditions. Adaptations for stage, film, and television have kept his stories in constant circulation, with A Christmas Carol playing a prominent cultural role. Scholars study his narrative techniques, serial structures, journalism, and engagement with public life. Later writers and artists have drawn from his blend of comedy and critique, while readers worldwide continue to find in his work urgency, empathy, and imaginative power.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Charles Dickens’s career unfolded across the high Victorian decades, from his first great success with The Pickwick Papers in 1836–37 to late Christmas numbers like Mugby Junction in 1866 and the collaboration No Thoroughfare in 1867. Born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812 and dying at Gad’s Hill, Kent, on 9 June 1870, he wrote in an era marked by the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the consolidation of empire, and the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Mass literacy expanded through cheap print and rail distribution, while urban London became a world metropolis. The works gathered here register those transformations in forms ranging from novels to seasonal tales and collaborative Christmas numbers.

Early hardship furnished Dickens with lifelong themes. In 1824 his father, John Dickens, entered the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark; the twelve-year-old Charles worked at Warren’s Blacking factory near Hungerford Stairs. Those experiences colored David Copperfield’s Murdstone and Grinby drudgery, the claustrophobia of Little Dorrit’s Marshalsea world (the prison closed in 1842), and Mr. Pickwick’s confinement in the Fleet. Oliver Twist’s workhouse origins bear the imprint of the New Poor Law’s regime. Later Christmas pieces, from The Poor Relation’s Story to The Child’s Story and The Schoolboy’s Story, revisit childhood memory, humiliation, and resilience, transmuting biographical pain into a broader moral argument about nurture, opportunity, and social responsibility.

Dickens’s methods reflect a nineteenth-century print economy that shaped reading habits. He pioneered serial publication with Chapman and Hall and across magazines, nurturing a weekly rendezvous with audiences. Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Oliver Twist (1837–39, in Bentley’s Miscellany) established his reach; David Copperfield (1849–50) deepened the autobiographical novel. Great Expectations appeared without illustrations in All the Year Round (1860–61), timed to the rhythms of the press. The Christmas framework proved commercially and imaginatively fertile: Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–70) issued seasonal numbers that framed tales such as The Holly-Tree, The Seven Poor Travellers, The Wreck of the Golden Mary, The Haunted House, and Mugby Junction for convivial winter reading.

Victorian readers expected pictures with prose. Dickens’s partnerships with illustrators made scenes immediately visible and helped fix character types in popular culture. George Cruikshank visualized the criminal underworld of Oliver Twist; Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) supplied the comic verve and pathos of Pickwick and David Copperfield; John Leech’s hand-colored plates for A Christmas Carol (1843) became iconic; Marcus Stone illustrated the 1861 volume edition of Great Expectations. Original wood-engraved vignettes and plates also accompanied shorter Christmas pieces, extending their reach into the gift-book market. Stage adaptations, often mounted within weeks, and later Dickens’s own readings, created a multimedia loop that shaped how audiences received A Christmas Carol and other seasonal texts.

The collection’s Christmas ethos intersects with a Victorian reinvention of the holiday. Court circles, influenced by Prince Albert after his 1840 marriage to Queen Victoria, popularized German customs such as the Christmas tree, prominently depicted in the Illustrated London News in 1848. Henry Cole commissioned the first commercial Christmas card in 1843, the year A Christmas Carol was published. Carols, crackers, charitable appeals, and family rituals gained cultural centrality. Dickens both reflected and accelerated this trend: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848), along with essays like A Christmas Tree and What Christmas Is As We Grow Older, linked festivity to remembrance and reform.

Debate over the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which centralized relief and emphasized the workhouse, provided a persistent backdrop. Dickens opposed Malthusian and Benthamite arguments that treated the poor as statistical burdens, instead dramatizing conscience and mercy. A Christmas Carol denounced Scrooge’s hard doctrine with spectral pedagogy; Oliver Twist opened on the indignities of parish administration; Little Dorrit anatomized bureaucratic inertia; later, the Christmas numbers, including The Seven Poor Travellers, Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, and Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, explored practical kindness in inns, lodgings, and marketplaces. The Ragged School Union (founded 1844 under Lord Shaftesbury) and philanthropic ventures such as Urania Cottage (1847–59, with Angela Burdett-Coutts) informed Dickens’s blend of sentiment and social critique.

Rapid urbanization transformed London from the 1820s to the 1860s. Rookeries like Saffron Hill, courts near Smithfield, and the Borough teemed with the precarious, conditioning the criminal networks of Oliver Twist and the lodging-house economies evoked in Somebody’s Luggage and the Mrs. Lirriper tales. The Metropolitan Police, founded in 1829, professionalized order even as popular anxieties about thieves, fences, and receivers lingered. Inns and coaching houses, memorialized in The Holly-Tree and across Pickwick’s rambles, adapted to the age of rails as refreshment rooms and hotels. These spaces—workhouse, prison, lodging, inn—served as Dickens’s social laboratories, staging encounters across class lines and dramatizing the commerce of hospitality and survival.

Victorian public health crises sharpened Dickens’s sense of environmental injustice. Cholera epidemics in 1832, 1848–49, and 1854, the 1842 sanitary report by Edwin Chadwick, and the Great Stink of 1858 drew attention to sewage, water, and overcrowding. Household Words campaigned for sanitary reform through reportage; narratives like Nobody’s Story embodied the anonymous poor buffeted by impersonal forces. Joseph Bazalgette’s metropolitan sewer system, begun in 1859, answered the crisis that Dickens had graphically described in journalism and fiction. In seasonal pieces such as The Seven Poor Travellers, charity intersects with civic duty, implying that the spirit of Christmas requires structural as well as personal transformation in streets, courts, and dwellings.

Industrial modernity arrived on rails and wires. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, followed by Railway Mania in the mid-1840s; the electric telegraph, patented by Cooke and Wheatstone in 1837, collapsed distances in news and trade. Mugby Junction (1866), containing The Signalman, meditates on the new tempo and risk of travel, shadowed by catastrophes like the Clayton Tunnel crash (1861) and Dickens’s own survival of the Staplehurst accident (1865). Postal reform under Rowland Hill’s Penny Post (1840) broadened correspondence, crucial to serial publication and plot devices in Great Expectations and beyond. The railway hotel, the refreshment room, and the junction itself became emblematic Dickensian stages of chance encounter.

Law, prisons, and punishment permeate Dickens’s world. He lampooned administrative obstruction—the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit—as well as harsh penal legacies. The Fleet Prison closed in 1844, the Marshalsea in 1842, yet their cultures endured in memory and on the page. Great Expectations pivots on the convict system and transportation to Australia, a policy curtailed in the 1850s and formally ended in 1868. The river hulks on the Thames and Medway, near which Dickens later lived at Gad’s Hill, supplied enduring imagery. In No Thoroughfare, secrets of guardianship, identity, and commercial rivalry intersect with legal processes, reflecting fascination with equity, evidence, and the paperwork that ordered Victorian life.

Sea lanes and empire knit Dickens’s Britain to the wider world. The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856) was published as gold rush migrations transformed the Pacific after 1848; maritime perils, emigrant hopes, and shipboard communities mirror a globalizing economy. A Message From the Sea draws on Cornish coasts, sailors’ lore, and questions of trust and inheritance. Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), co-written with Wilkie Collins, registers anxieties about colonial violence in the year of the Indian Rebellion, recasting imperial peril as melodrama. Great Expectations channels Australia both as penal destination and source of remade fortunes, while shorter pieces measure the moral weather of ports, packets, and wreckers’ myths.

Gender and domestic ideology in mid-century Britain framed Dickens’s depictions of hearth and home. The Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) eased divorce through civil courts, provoking debate about marriage, custody, and reputation; Dickens’s own separation from Catherine in 1858 fed public scrutiny. Domestic sanctuaries in The Cricket on the Hearth or The Battle of Life coexist with economic strategies visible in Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings and Legacy, where a widow’s enterprise sustains community. Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions dramatizes nonbiological care and disability in a marketplace idiom. A House to Let (1858), produced with Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Adelaide Anne Procter, probes property, occupancy, and urban safety from a distinctly domestic vantage point.

Religious feeling and moral philosophy inflect the collection without sectarian dogma. Dickens’s Christianity championed pity, humility, and festivity while resisting Sabbatarian rigor and reductive political economy. The Chimes challenges the Malthusian calculus that deemed the poor redundant; What Christmas Is As We Grow Older weighs memory and grief against convivial duty. Through satire of Utilitarian abstractions and the Statistical Society mentality, he insisted that numbers never excuse cruelty. Temperance rhetoric and philanthropic activism circulate in the background, but Dickens continually relocates ethical life in scenes of shared food, forgiveness, and interclass recognition—from Scrooge’s reformation to the collective rituals that animate the collaborative Christmas numbers in this volume.

Crime, detection, and reportage helped Dickens map the modern city. He accompanied Inspector Charles Field of the Metropolitan Police and turned observation into essays like On Duty with Inspector Field (1851), strengthening a taste for investigative narrative that shapes No Thoroughfare and the linked stories of social invisibility such as Nobody’s Story. Schooling, storytelling, and self-fashioning mingle in The Schoolboy’s Story and The Child’s Story, in which the city’s temptations and consolations are refracted through memory. The Poor Relation’s Story exposes respectability’s fragile scaffolding. Together these pieces assert that surveillance, confession, and narrative technique evolved side by side in a metropolis learning to see—and police—itself.

Dickens’s editorial rooms orchestrated notable collaborations that generated several items here. Household Words (1850–59) and its successor All the Year Round (1859–70) issued Christmas numbers framed by Dickens with contributions from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Anne Procter, George Augustus Sala, and others. The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), A House to Let (1858), The Haunted House (1859), A Message From the Sea (1860), Tom Tiddler’s Ground (1861), Somebody’s Luggage (1862), the Mrs. Lirriper series (1863–64), Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions (1865), Mugby Junction (1866), and No Thoroughfare (1867) exemplify this multi-voiced form, where Dickens’s framing, scene-setting, and moral pitch harmonize diverse hands into a single seasonal experience.

Performance and international circulation amplified Dickens’s Christmas appeal. He began public readings in 1853 and, after 1858, made them a major enterprise, refining renditions of A Christmas Carol and Dr Marigold that drew vast audiences in Britain and on his American tour of 1867–68. The American visits bracketed long-standing disputes over international copyright that had plagued earlier works like A Christmas Carol, widely pirated after its 1843 debut. The theatre fed back into publication: No Thoroughfare opened as a Christmas melodrama at the Adelphi Theatre in December 1867, confirming the seasonal marketplace where book, magazine, stage, and platform reinforced Dickens’s fusion of sentiment, satire, and spectacle.

Place anchors memory across these works. Dickens’s Kent—Gad’s Hill near Rochester, purchased in 1856—nourished Great Expectations with marshes, hulks, and the Medway, and furnished the charity site for The Seven Poor Travellers at Richard Watts’s seventeenth-century house in Rochester High Street. The coaching road and inn, elegized in The Holly-Tree, link provincial England to the capital, just as Pickwick’s itineraries sketch a comic map of the nation. Lodgings, prisons, counting-houses, and parlors compose a social panorama in which Christmas functions as ethical amplifier. When Dickens died in 1870 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, he left not merely stories but a civic imagination that still organizes how we picture Victorian life.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

A Christmas Carol

On Christmas Eve, miser Ebenezer Scrooge is led by three spirits through visions of his past, present, and possible future, prompting a profound moral awakening.

The Chimes

An impoverished porter, disheartened by society's judgments, is shown admonitory visions by the spirits of the church bells that challenge fatalism and restore hope.

The Cricket on the Hearth

A domestic fable in which a household's cricket, a symbol of hearthside cheer, guides a young family through jealousy and misunderstanding toward reconciliation.

The Battle of Life

Set at a rural festival, the story turns on the self-sacrifice of two sisters whose choices preserve love and harmony amid mistaken intentions.

The Haunted Man

A melancholic scholar bargains to forget his sorrows and unwittingly spreads emotional coldness, discovering that memory's pains are bound up with compassion.

A Christmas Tree

A nostalgic essay that uses the ornaments of a Christmas tree to evoke childhood memories, popular tales, and the season's mingled wonder and melancholy.

What Christmas Is As We Grow Older

A reflective meditation on how Christmas deepens with age, honoring absent loved ones while reaffirming charity and fellowship.

The Poor Relation's Story

A modest relative narrates an imagined life of success that contrasts poignantly with his actual circumstances, revealing consolation in fantasy and dignity in endurance.

The Child's Story

An allegory of life's journey in which a traveler passes through stages of youth, adulthood, and old age, meeting figures who reflect changing selves.

The Schoolboy's Story

A former pupil recalls an eccentric schoolmaster and the formative lessons of character learned in an austere, idiosyncratic school.

Nobody's Story

A parable of an everyman worker confronting social injustice and indifference, urging recognition of common humanity and reform.

The Seven Poor Travellers

At a Rochester charity, a host gathers six fellow wayfarers for a Christmas meal, framing tales that celebrate resilience, fellowship, and practical kindness.

The Holly-Tree

Snowbound at a coaching inn, a traveler passes time by recalling past journeys and the inn's linked stories, tracing chance meetings and quiet acts of kindness.

The Wreck of the Golden Mary

A first-person account of a ship bound for California that is wrecked at sea, followed by harrowing survival narratives marked by endurance and shared hope.

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners

An adventure of piracy, captivity, and rescue in a colonial outpost, highlighting loyalty, courage, and the hazards of imperial enterprise.

A House to Let

A woman intrigued by an apparently empty house sets an inquiry in motion that uncovers hidden histories and reunites separated lives.

The Haunted House

Friends take rooms in a reputedly haunted house and relate uncanny encounters that reveal personal fears and moral truths more than specters.

A Message From the Sea

A recovered letter draws a sailor to a Cornish town to probe an old wrong, unraveling a community mystery and setting records straight.

Tom Tiddler's Ground

Visiting a reclusive landowner on his so-called Tom Tiddler's Ground, the narrator meets eccentric inhabitants and gently satirizes idleness, wealth, and social pretense.

Somebody's Luggage

A hotel waiter acquires unclaimed luggage and, piecing together its contents, traces the owner's story toward reconciliation and renewed prospects.

Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings

The warm-hearted Mrs. Lirriper narrates the comings and goings of her lodgers and takes in an orphan, blending comedy with domestic sentiment.

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy

Continuing the tale, Mrs. Lirriper strives to secure her ward's future amid misadventures, maintaining good sense and generosity.

Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions

A traveling cheap-jack recounts personal losses and the adoption of a deaf-mute girl, offering humane prescriptions—vignettes of sympathy and practical wisdom.

Mugby Junction

A suite of railway tales centered on a busy junction, featuring encounters that reshape a solitary traveler's life and the celebrated ghost story The Signal-Man.

No Thoroughfare

A melodramatic romance and mystery, co-authored with Wilkie Collins, about contested identity, guardianship, and pursuit across Europe arising from a 'No Thoroughfare' notice.

Oliver Twist

An orphan escapes the workhouse only to fall in with a London thieves' gang, testing his innocence against urban poverty and crime.

David Copperfield

A coming-of-age narrative following David from a troubled childhood through friendships, loves, and a hard-won vocation as he seeks integrity and belonging.

Little Dorrit

Interweaving the world of a debtor's prison with the absurdities of bureaucracy, the novel traces the Dorrit family's fortunes and the quiet resilience of Amy Dorrit.

Great Expectations

Orphaned Pip receives mysterious help that propels him toward gentility, forcing him to reassess ambition, loyalty, and the true measure of worth.

The Pickwick Papers

Mr. Pickwick and his club roam England in a series of comic adventures and courtroom scrapes, celebrating conviviality, odd characters, and kindly humor.

Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations)

Main Table of Contents

A Christmas Carol

The Chimes

The Cricket on the Hearth

The Battle of Life

The Haunted Man

A Christmas Tree

What Christmas Is As We Grow Older

The Poor Relation's Story

The Child's Story

The Schoolboy's Story

Nobody's Story

The Seven Poor Travellers

The Holly-Tree

The Wreck of the Golden Mary

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners

A House to Let

The Haunted House

A Message From the Sea

Tom Tiddler's Ground

Somebody's Luggage

Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy

Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions

Mugby Junction

No Thoroughfare

Oliver Twist

David Copperfield

Little Dorrit

Great Expectations

The Pickwick Papers

A Christmas Carol

Table of Contents

Stave I Marley's Ghost

Stave II The First of the Three Spirits

Stave III The Second of the Three Spirits

Stave IV The Last of the Spirits

Stave V The End of It

PREFACE

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, C. D.

December, 1843.

List of Illustrations

Marley's Ghost

Ghosts of Departed Usurers

Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball

Scrooge Extinguishes the First of the Three Spirits

Scrooge’s Third Visitor

Ignorance and Want

The Last of the Spirits

Scrooge and Bob Cratchit

STAVE I

MARLEY'S GHOST

Table of Contents

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 permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.

“Let me hear another sound from you,” said Scrooge, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” he added, turning to his nephew. “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”

“Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow.”

Scrooge said that he would see him—yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

“But why?” cried Scrooge’s nephew. “Why?”

“Why did you get married?” said Scrooge.

“Because I fell in love.”

“Because you fell in love!” growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. “Good afternoon!”

“Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?”

“Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.

“I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?”

“Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.

“I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!”

“Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.

“And A Happy New Year!”

“Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.

“There’s another fellow,” muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: “my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.”

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge’s nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”

“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

“God bless you, merry gentleman!

May nothing you dismay!”

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

“You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.

“If quite convenient, sir.”

“It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself illused, I’ll be bound?”

The clerk smiled faintly.

“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me illused, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s-book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including—which is a bold word—the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven-years’ dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant’s cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bed-room, lumber-room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.

“Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

“It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it.”

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him; Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again.

Marley’s Ghost

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

“How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “What do you want with me?”

“Much!”—Marley’s voice, no doubt about it.

“Who are you?”

“Ask me who I was.”

“Who were you then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade,” but substituted this, as more appropriate.

“In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”

“Can you—can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

“I can.”

“Do it, then.”

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“I don’t,” said Scrooge.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.