Christmas Books

'What a jolly thing it is for a man to have written books like these and just filled people's hearts with pity.' (Robert Louis Stevenson)

An unsurpassed blending of vibrant storytelling and social conscience, A Christmas Carol is one of Dickens's most perennially popular stories. It tells of Scrooge, now a byword for misanthropy and avarice, who is transported through time to the Christmasses of his childhood, of.the present and of the future. Heeding the dreadful warning of what is to be if Scrooge does not mend his ways, the old miser repents and is suffused with Christmas spirit. Along with The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, A Christmas Carol celebrates the joys of the festive season. Each of these books is politically provocative and aims to
stimulate the reader's pity and charity for the poor, but the tone is so intimate and the style so humorous that poverty and ignorance yield to generosity and compassion.

The cover shows a detail from an original illustration by Arthur Rackham entitled Scrooge and the Ghost o/Cfiristmds Past from Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' in a private collectii. (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)