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- Herausgeber: Moon Hare Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Step into the warmth and wonder of The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens, a heartwarming Christmas classic from the beloved author of A Christmas Carol.
When misunderstandings threaten to break apart a humble family, an unseen household spirit—the cricket on the hearth—guides them toward forgiveness, faith, and love. First published in 1845, this touching Victorian tale celebrates the beauty of ordinary life and the quiet miracles that happen at home.
Filled with Dickens’s trademark humor, compassion, and vivid storytelling, The Cricket on the Hearth reminds readers that joy often comes from the simplest acts of kindness. This Moon Hare Books edition offers a beautifully formatted and accessible version of Dickens’s cherished Christmas story—perfect for fans of classic literature, cozy winter reads, and timeless tales of redemption and family.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH (Annotated)
A Fairy Tale of Home
This edition of The Cricket on the Hearth was published in 2025 by Moon Hare Books. The text is based on the original 1845 edition by Charles Dickens and has been carefully edited and typeset by Élodie Scott for clarity, readability, and digital accessibility.
The cover design was created by Moon Hare Books.
Moon Hare Books is committed to preserving the world’s classic literature with care and authenticity—reviving timeless works for a new generation of readers while upholding the beauty and craftsmanship of the originals.
Text: Public DomainEditorial Content © 2025 Élodie ScottDesign and Formatting © 2025 Moon Hare Books
Published by Moon Hare Books
Table of contents
Introduction
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Afterword
About the Author
About the Editor
About Moon Hare Books
landmarks
Title page
Cover
Table of contents
Book start
Introduction
by Élodie Scott
When The Cricket on the Hearth was first published in December 1845, Charles Dickens had already captured the public’s heart with A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. Yet this third of his “Christmas Books” offered something gentler—an intimate domestic tale that traded ghosts and grand moral reckonings for the quiet poetry of family life, hearthlight, and the power of simple faith. In this story, Dickens’s social conscience takes a softer tone, his pen warmed by affection rather than indignation. It is a fable about love’s endurance, disguised in the humble setting of a working-class home, where a cricket’s chirp becomes a symbol of unseen guardianship and hope.
The novella follows John and Dot Peerybingle, a carrier and his young wife, whose marriage is tested by jealousy and misunderstanding. Around them revolve figures both comic and poignant: the toymaker Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter Bertha, the cold-hearted Tackleton the toy merchant, and a mysterious stranger whose identity provides the tale’s central revelation. The cricket itself—never anthropomorphized, yet imbued with meaning—acts as the household spirit, a domestic angel echoing Victorian folklore that a chirping hearth cricket brings good fortune. Through this simple motif, Dickens transforms the everyday into the enchanted, reminding readers that even the humblest lives are touched by grace.
Critics of the time noted that The Cricket on the Hearth was more sentimental than its predecessors, and indeed, Dickens’s sentimentality here is deliberate. He sought to comfort rather than to confront—to offer his readers a Christmas story that soothed weary hearts after the darker tones of The Chimes. Published in an era of industrial hardship, the book provided a moral counterbalance to urban alienation: the ideal of the happy home, lit by affection and kindness, standing against the coldness of commerce. In that sense, it is not merely a domestic fantasy but a moral argument rendered in miniature—a defense of warmth, generosity, and loyalty as essential virtues in a mechanizing age.
Beyond its Victorian context, The Cricket on the Hearth endures because it speaks to something universal: the fragile trust that sustains human relationships and the small miracles that restore it. Dickens invites us to believe that love, even when shaken by doubt, can be renewed through compassion and understanding. His prose, rich with humor and tenderness, turns a simple fireside tale into a meditation on faith in others—a reminder that joy and redemption often dwell, not in miracles of the grand kind, but in the quiet constancy of home.
Nearly two centuries later, the cricket still sings by the hearth. Its voice, like Dickens’s, calls us to look inward—to find wonder in the ordinary, warmth in forgiveness, and light in the heart’s simplest music.
Dedication
TO LORD JEFFREY THIS LITTLE STORY IS INSCRIBED WITH THE AFFECTION AND ATTACHMENT OF HIS FRIEND
THE AUTHOR
December , 1845
Chapter 1
Chirp the First
The kettle began it! Don’t tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn’t say which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a chirp.
As if the clock hadn’t finished striking, and the convulsive little Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn’t mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all!
Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows that. I wouldn’t set my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But, this is a question of fact. And the fact is, that the kettle began it, at least five minutes before the Cricket gave any sign of being in existence. Contradict me, and I’ll say ten.
Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have proceeded to do so in my very first word, but for this plain consideration—if I am to tell a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it possible to begin at the beginning, without beginning at the kettle?
It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill, you must understand, between the kettle and the Cricket. And this is what led to it, and how it came about.
Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of substance, patten rings included—had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle’s toes, and even splashed her legs. And when we rather plume ourselves (with reason too) upon our legs, and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of stockings, we find this, for the moment, hard to bear.
Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn’t allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn’t hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble, a very Idiot of a kettle, on the hearth. It was quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle’s fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived sideways in—down to the very bottom of the kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again.
It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, ‘I won’t boil. Nothing shall induce me!’
But Mrs. Peerybingle, with restored good humour, dusted her chubby little hands against each other, and sat down before the kettle, laughing. Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and fell, flashing and gleaming on the little Haymaker at the top of the Dutch clock, until one might have thought he stood stock still before the Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but the flame.
He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second, all right and regular. But, his sufferings when the clock was going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry, plucking at his legs.
It was not until a violent commotion and a whirring noise among the weights and ropes below him had quite subsided, that this terrified Haymaker became himself again. Nor was he startled without reason; for these rattling, bony skeletons of clocks are very disconcerting in their operation, and I wonder very much how any set of men, but most of all how Dutchmen, can have had a liking to invent them. There is a popular belief that Dutchmen love broad cases and much clothing for their own lower selves; and they might know better than to leave their clocks so very lank and unprotected, surely.
Now it was, you observe, that the kettle began to spend the evening. Now it was, that the kettle, growing mellow and musical, began to have irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it hadn’t quite made up its mind yet, to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least idea of.
So plain too! Bless you, you might have understood it like a book—better than some books you and I could name, perhaps. With its warm breath gushing forth in a light cloud which merrily and gracefully ascended a few feet, then hung about the chimney-corner as its own domestic Heaven, it trolled its song with that strong energy of cheerfulness, that its iron body hummed and stirred upon the fire; and the lid itself, the recently rebellious lid—such is the influence of a bright example—performed a sort of jig, and clattered like a deaf and dumb young cymbal that had never known the use of its twin brother.
