• A new single-volume edition of all Dickens's Christmas books, with a selection of the original illustrations and a full critical introdution.
• New edition includes a selection of 20 of the original illustrations.
• Excellent introduction by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst contextualizes the Christmas stories, the social questions they set out to address, their reception and the enduring popularity of 'A Christmas Carol', and how their style and themes resonate in more complex ways in his major fictions.
• Lively notes point to parallels with Dickens's other writings.
• Up-to-date bibliography.
• Two appendixes including Dickens's article, 'What Christmas Is As We Grow Older', and facsimile pages from Dickens's reading version of 'A Christmas Carol'.

New to this Edition:

• New editorial apparatus including introduction, notes, bibliography, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
• Three appendixes containing facsimile pages from the first printing of 'A Christmas Carol' and the article 'What Christmas Is As We Grow Older'.
• A selection of 20 of the original illustrations.

  
'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?'

Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim 'to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land'. 
 
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