A bone-chilling ghost story that will keep you reading all night. Download it instantly or read it with KU. Megan Montaigne signed on to be a librarian. But the truth is, she always wanted to be Nancy Drew. Letters From a Patchwork Quilt. Forced apart by the church. Separated by an ocean. Can their love survive? A classic Victorian saga of love and loss.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
Review "A Christmas Carol] seems to be a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. Product details Age Range: Oxford Children's Classics Hardcover: Oxford University Press; 1 edition October 1, Language: Be the first to review this item Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.
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Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf. Flaubert's Parrot Julian Barnes. Phenomenology of Spirit G. Fahrenheit Ray Bradbury. Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When Scrooge asks to see tenderness connected with any death, the ghost shows him Bob Cratchit and his family mourning the death of Tiny Tim.
The ghost then allows Scrooge to see a neglected grave, with a tombstone bearing Scrooge's name. Sobbing, Scrooge pledges to change his ways. Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning a changed man.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories : Charles Dickens :
He spends the afternoon with Fred's family and anonymously sends a large turkey to the Cratchit home for Christmas dinner. The following day he gives Cratchit an increase in pay and becomes a father figure to Tiny Tim. From then on Scrooge begins to treat everyone with kindness, generosity and compassion, embodying the spirit of Christmas. The writer Charles Dickens was born to a middle class family which got into financial difficulties as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In John was committed to the Marshalsea , a debtors' prison in Southwark , London.
Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which heavily influenced his writing and outlook. At the end of December Dickens began publishing his novel Martin Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial; [n 1] the novel was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced financial difficulties.
Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity through the Victorian era.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories
Their practice was copied in many homes across the country. Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was "Christmas Festivities", published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in ; the story was then published as "A Christmas Dinner" in Sketches by Boz In the episode, a Mr Wardle relates the tale of Gabriel Grub, a lonely and mean-spirited sexton , who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future.
Dickens was not the first author to celebrate the Christmas season in literature. Several works may have had an influence on the writing of A Christmas Carol , including two Douglas Jerrold essays: Dickens was touched by the lot of poor children in the middle decades of the 19th century.
It was a parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working class children. Horrified by what he read, Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child , but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. In a fundraising speech on 5 October at the Manchester Athenaeum , Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform, [21] and realised in the days following that the most effective way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative rather than polemical pamphlets and essays.
By mid Dickens began to suffer from financial problems. Sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were falling off, and his wife, Catherine , was pregnant with their fifth child. George Cruikshank , the illustrator who had earlier worked with Dickens on Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist , introduced him to the caricaturist John Leech. By 24 October Dickens invited Leech to work on A Christmas Carol , and four hand-coloured etchings and four black-and-white wood engravings by the artist accompanied the text.
The central character of A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly London-based moneylender, [30] described in the story as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! This psychological conflict may be responsible for the two radically different Scrooges in the tale—one a cold, stingy and greedy semi-recluse, the other a benevolent, sociable man. Scrooge could also be based on two misers: Elwell, Scrooge's views on the poor are a reflection of those of the demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus , [36] while the miser's questions "Are there no prisons?
And the Union workhouses? The treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? There are literary precursors for Scrooge in Dickens's own works. Peter Ackroyd , Dickens's biographer, sees similarities between the character and the elder Martin Chuzzlewit character, although the miser is "a more fantastic image" than the Chuzzlewit patriarch; Ackroyd observes that Chuzzlewit's transformation to a charitable figure is a parallel to that of the miser.
The grave was for Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, whose job was given as a meal man—a corn merchant; Dickens misread the inscription as "mean man". When Dickens was young he lived near a tradesman's premises with the sign "Goodge and Marney", which may have provided the name for Scrooge's former business partner.
The transformation of Scrooge is central to the story. Other writers, including Kelly, consider that Dickens put forward a "secular vision of this sacred holiday". Jordan argues that A Christmas Carol shows what Dickens referred to in a letter to Foster as his " Carol philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomisation of humbug, jolly good temper Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because of how British social policy treated children at the time, and wished to use the novella as a means to put forward his arguments against it.
As the result of the disagreements with Chapman and Hall over the commercial failures of Martin Chuzzlewit , [63] Dickens arranged to pay for the publishing himself, in exchange for a percentage of the profits. The first printing contained drab olive endpapers that Dickens felt were unacceptable, and the publisher Chapman and Hall quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers, but, once replaced, those clashed with the title page, which was then redone.
Chapman and Hall issued second and third editions before the new year, and the book continued to sell well into According to Douglas-Fairhurst, contemporary reviews of A Christmas Carol "were almost uniformly kind". The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, 'God bless him! The poet Thomas Hood , in his own journal , wrote that "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were ever in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease.
There were critics of the book. The New Monthly Magazine praised the story, but thought the book's physical excesses—the gilt edges and expensive binding—kept the price high, making it unavailable to the poor. The review recommended that the tale should be printed on cheap paper and priced accordingly. Following criticism of the US in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit , American readers were less enthusiastic at first, but by the end of the American Civil War , copies of the book were in wide circulation.
In January Parley's Illuminated Library published an unauthorised version of the story in a condensed form which they sold for twopence. I have not the least doubt that if these Vagabonds can be stopped they must. Let us be the sledge-hammer in this, or I shall be beset by hundreds of the same crew when I come out with a long story.
Two days after the release of the Parley version, Dickens sued on the cases of copyright infringement and won.
Editorial Reviews
Dickens returned to the tale several times during his life to amend the phrasing and punctuation. He capitalised on the success of the book by publishing other Christmas stories The Chimes , The Cricket on the Hearth , The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain ; these were secular conversion tales which reflected the societal changes of the previous year, and which social problems still needed to be dealt with. While the public eagerly bought the later books, the reviewers were highly critical of the stories.
By Dickens was engaged with David Copperfield and had neither the time nor the inclination to produce another Christmas book. In the years following the book's publication, responses to the tale were published by W. The novella was adapted for the stage almost immediately. Three productions opened on 5 February , with one by Edward Stirling sanctioned by Dickens and running for more than 40 nights.
Davis considers the adaptations have become better remembered than the original. Some of Dickens's scenes — visiting the miners and lighthouse keepers — have been forgotten by many, while other add scenes—such as Scrooge visiting the Cratchits on Christmas Day, which many think are part of the original story. Accordingly, Davis identifies the original text, and the "remembered version". The phrase " Merry Christmas " had been around for many years — the earliest known written use was in a letter in — but Dickens's use of the term in A Christmas Carol popularised the term among the Victorian public.
In the early 19th century the celebration of Christmas was associated in Britain with the countryside and peasant revels, disconnected to the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation taking place.