A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings

[First read: 2010 or thereabouts. 4 stars.
Second read: Christmas 2015. 4 stars.
Third read: Christmas, 2016. 4 stars.]

Ghost stories were the theme of Christmas during Victorian times and it's a tradition that is sorely missed. Charles Dickens is pretty much King of Christmas, and all these stories have a spectral vibe to them. They all contain the same kind of feeling to them, and give us a meaning to Christmas that I think we've let go of a little. Even I of a Scrooge nature feels blessed after I have read these stories, not only because I enjoy all of Dickens' works, but because it gives me faith of a non-religious kind that Humans are pretty much alright, actually.

'Christmas Festivities': Under the pseudonym 'Tibbs', Dickens implores those who are less enchanted by Christmas than they used to be to let it back in to their hearts. Fairly relevant today, but his arguments do not convince me wholly.

'The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton': pre-cursor to A Christmas Carol and is an evocative imaginative short tale. Humble but with a lot to say.

'A Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey's Clock': Just a small segment from this story, which was serialised in several of his other novels, which shows how a kindness done at Christmas time can bring you more joy than you ever really appreciate.

'A Christmas Carol': With a transformation that would make Bumblebee turn green, Scrooge is the epitome of a Christmas junkie: too much and all at once after all those years of refusing. I'm surprised be didn't die of such an overdose of turkey and whooping. Surprisingly shorter than I ever remembered it to be.

'The Haunted Man': Very enjoyable and surprisingly longer than A Christmas Carol, though without the overall worldy blesséd live that emanates from that one: the same kind of feeling and plot, with poor families and various deaths. I think it was perhaps longer than it should have been, though the ending and message was not so bad because of that. A great memory to all the dead and how we should never forget them.

' A Christmas Tree': An odd little story that doesn't quite make sense. A good reference for what a Victorian tree would have been decorated like, but vague and rather tedious altogether.

'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older': quite droll and rather boring in truth, but I think it is a nice insight in to how Dickens thought about a lot of things.

'The Seven Poor Travellers': A condensed version of A Christmas Carol in a way, though not so much Scrooge than someone trying to make themselves feel better by helping others. Fairly archaic in plot and tone, but an ideal sentiment nevertheless.


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“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”

A classic Christmas tale, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserable old man, who is visited by his deceased business partner and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come one Christmas Eve. Their intention is to help Scrooge realise the error in his ways and to help his transform into a better person.

Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol – the story has been adapted numerous times and these movies are watched by a lot of people each Christmas. Admittedly, A Christmas Carol was never my favourite Christmas movie, I think I watched it once as a child and just didn’t “get it”. So I thought it was time to read the story instead, and safe to say, I really enjoyed it. I even went on to watch A Muppet’s Christmas Carol after with a renewed interest in it and have a feeling I’ll now revisit it annually.

It’s a great book to get yourself into the Christmas spirit, Dickens really excels at creating that atmosphere and the way you feel around the festive period. Scrooge’s character development and overall tale of redemption is well-executed and he becomes pretty likeable by the end. I love how it really represents what Christmas is all about – showing empathy and generosity and generally trying to be a better human. Well, to be honest, that’s how we should be all year around! But we all know Christmas is the time that people do show extra compassion towards each other. So, yeah, I really enjoyed A Christmas Carol and would give it 4 stars.

Dickens is known for being “wordy”, but thankfully A Christmas Carol does not fall victim to this. However, the same cannot be said for the other stories and essays found within this edition. Oh my godddddd, some of them just went on forever and it felt like Dickens was just babbling about a lot of nonsense. My eyes were glazing over and I sincerely regretted not just buying the novella on its own! Some of the other stories WERE enjoyable though, such as The Story of the Goblins who Stole A Sexton. However, the worst for me was The Haunted Man – actually longer than A Christmas Carol, it had me skimming through parts in sheer boredom. The stories almost felt repetitive at times, as if Dickens was trying to hammer home the same idea over and over again. Some kind of spectral being appears and makes you realise what Christmas is really all about… I got it! So that’s why I’ve rounded down the overall rating to 3 stars.

Reread 2023. Hugh Grant narration on audible this year. Although I didn't really like his narration, it wasn't bad. Not my favourite version though.

Annual reread 2022. Every year I try and find a new edition to read or listen to. This year was the audio with Anton Lesser narrating. I enjoyed it, Lesser does a good job of creating different voices for the spirits and Scrooge. Not much else to add really - this has become a yearly tradition that I love.

Annual reread 2021, a Christmas staple. Fun fact: until I read this a few years ago I always thought there were 2 Marleys due to A Muppets Christmas Carol. Thankfully I didn't question the absence of Rizzo the rat in Dickens original.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I might have not profited, I dare say…Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round…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 there, 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!”
-tNephew Fred in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

As near as I can tell, A Christmas Carol is perfect. It embodies, in a very real way, Christmas itself.

Charles Dickens is justly famous for his big, sprawling, shaggy-dog serials, in which he spun intricate and twisty tales with the loquaciousness of a man being paid by the word. They are filled with dozens of characters, all of them lovingly observed, most with a laundry list of quirks. They are filled with ups and downs and more ups and more downs. They are seemingly designed to avoid reaching any sort of conclusion. Indeed, many of his epics, such as Bleak House and Great Expectations, have an ad hoc feel to them, as though Dickens himself was as uncertain of his ending as the reader.

Not so with A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol is short, efficient, and tightly focused. It has a natural symmetry and a wonderful simplicity, with just a handful of characters and an all-time killer hook: greedy old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited, upon Christmas Eve, by four apparitions (Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come) who teach him a powerful lesson about the meaning of the day.

This is a book with a message, a thesis statement, yet it entertains while it preaches.

The visit from his long-deceased partner Jacob Marley (“dead these seven years”), sets out the parameters of the story: that three other ghosts will visit Scrooge to teach him the meaning of Christmas, and by extension, how to live a better life all the year long. The first meeting of man and ghost, a seriocomic scene set in Scrooge’s bedchambers, is classic Dickens, and manages to balance pedantry with humor (by way of some un-improvable dialogue).

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.”

After Jacob’s departure, Scrooge repairs to his bed, to await the other ghosts. First is the Ghost of Christmas Past (“Long past?” “Your past”),who transports Scrooge to his childhood, where we learn of Scrooge’s strained relationship with his father, his close relationship with his sister, and the lost love of his life, a woman named Belle, who Scrooge forsook for money. The scenes with the Ghost of Christmas Past have always been my favorite, because they toy with the very foundations upon which Christmas is built: a slightly melancholic nostalgia for the way things were, or how we remembered them to be.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow…

Next, the Ghost of Christmas Present arrives. He presents as a jolly man, but the longer we spend time with him – meeting Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his crippled son, Tiny Tim; looking in on the Christmas party of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred – the more of a dark pedagogue he becomes. By the time Christmas Present takes his leave, he is lecturing us about Ignorance, Want, and Doom (in many ways, he is the drunk uncle we all know and tolerate).

Finally, there is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who shows Scrooge the misery and death that awaits if he does not change his ways. The silent specter is an oppressive presence, and represents Dickens at his most on-the-nose, banging away at his points with a hammer. Yet, it all sets up exquisitely for a rousing finale.

A Christmas Carol has been adapted hundreds of times. Thousands, if you count local theaters. It is a testament to Dickens’ creation that most of these adaptations hew so closely to the original. There is no need to add, subtract, or tinker.

(On the subject of adaptations, if you ever see me at a Christmas party, I will be happy to explain my theory on how every Christmas movie springs from A Christmas Carol).

This particular volume also includes other Christmas stories and writings by Dickens. Frankly, they barely rate a mention, at least relative to A Christmas Carol. It is hard to be interested in these minor offerings when compared to the alpha dog of all Christmas literary offerings. It’s a bit like having your Bugatti test drive interrupted by some dude who wants you to try his skateboard.

In the spirit of charity, I suppose there is some merit in studying these other stories, if only to compare and contrast them to A Christmas Carol. For instance, in The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, you see many of the elements (a Christmas humbug, ghosts) that Dickens would later use to better effect. In The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, written post-Carol, Dickens introduces another pedagogic specter. This ghost allows a man named Redlaw to lose all memories of his sufferings and sorrows, with generally bad consequences. This story blatantly attempts to capitalize on the popularity of A Christmas Carol – complete with a lesson! – and unfortunately indulges in Dickens’ weakness for overly-wacky characters.

Dickens has been called “the man who invented Christmas.” Obviously, that is not literally true. And it is not really figuratively true, either. Dickens was, in fact, building on traditions that far predated his classic fable. His bit of genius was to take this holiday and give it transformative power. Not only a day of celebration, but a day of contemplation. Not just a time to think about mulled wine and plum pudding, but to ponder those who are poor, sick, or struggling.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Jo grumbles at the start of Little Women, twenty-six years after the publication of A Christmas Carol. Such is the current state of Christmas. Those Cratchit kids, though, would never think such a thing. They’d never dare utter such a complaint; even the smallest goose was enough to satisfy them.

The values espoused in A Christmas Carol are timeless and meaningful. But it is more than a parable. More than any other book or movie or song or play, A Christmas Carol draws us intimately into the best parts of this yearly celebration.

That is why I have never tired of the story, no matter how many times and in how many ways I have experienced it. I love A Christmas Carol, whether it is in Muppet form, or Magoo form, or George C. Scott form, or Patrick Stewart form, or the original novella, which I read every year. In Scrooge’s rebirth, marked by a turkey as big as a child, and the promise of parties featuring a bowl of smoking bishop and Blind Man’s Bluff, we are given a version of an idealized Christmas: the table is full, family is present, and the children are healthy.

In presenting this idealized Christmas, Dickens manages to capture the importance of memory. When you were young, time started to slow in December, and then stopped completely during that hour-long church service standing between you and your gift-wrapped toys. As you get older, Christmas comes and goes much quicker, and leaves you weighing this year’s festivities (often unfavorably) to all that came before.

Years pass, and the composition of your family changes through addition and subtraction, through birth and death. Coming as it does so near the end of the year, Christmas becomes a transitory signpost. Our Christmas traditions, though, push back against mortality, and place us instead along a continuum. Sure, maybe Grandma is gone, but her ornaments are still on the tree, glittering like they have since World War II. Tradition keeps her alive, and will keep us alive when we are gone.

Dickens used Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come to change Scrooge. Those are also the very elements that we require in our own celebrations: the memories of the past; our friends and family (and some wine) in the present; and the knowledge in the future that this will always exist, even if we are not there to enjoy it.

Another re read of this excellent novella. It's an annual tradition for me which began in 2013.
It delights me everytime.
Merry Christmas everyone

I love A Christmas Carol. Every film adaption from the black and white one to the muppets.
But I have never read the story. So this year I vowed to finally read the original.

Along with a few of Dickens’ other Christmas writings I really enjoyed it.

I won’t bother with a synopsis, as everyone knows the story more or less. It was wonderful to read and be reminded of what makes this such a powerful tale of kindness and generosity to our fellow human at this time of the year.

After the introduction to, and before the main tale of A Christmas Carol begins, there are three short stories: Christmas Festivities, The Story Of The Goblins Who Stole A Sexton, and A Christmas Episode From Master Humphrey’s Clock.
The first is about a family’s Christmas, focusing mostly on the dinner.
The second is very much akin to Christmas Carol, as an old (very Scrooge-like) miser called Gabriel Grub is visited, not by spirits but by the King of the Goblins and his associates.
The third is a tale of friendship and combating loneliness around the festive season, as an elderly gentlemen befriends a younger man in a tavern who happens to be deaf. The way their friendship is described by the end is rather quite lovely.

And so begins the age-old tale of Ebenezer Scrooge. Due to the nostalgia and comfort that Dickens’ writing brings with this particular story, I could not rate this collection anything other than five stars. It was my introduction into ghost stories around Christmas time, and now I always link those types of stories to this time of year, even if they aren’t festive based like this one is.
Whether it be via the original text, one of the countless film adaptations or on stage, I always make sure A Christmas Carol is part of my festive season every year.
Scrooge proves that even the most irredeemable people can be changed, enlightened to the error of their ways. Yes, of course it does get very mushy at the end, but that’s what you come to expect reading something based around Christmas.
Picturing The Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come as a child always used to frighten me, even seeing it in the Muppets movie did, this ghastly grim reaper type figure. Makes me think of The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water (if you get that reference, I applaud you!)

The following tales are The Haunted Man And A Ghost’s Bargain, A Christmas Tree, What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older and The Seven Poor Travellers.

The Haunted Man has quite a slow, very dialogue heavy, start so I always skim read through until it reaches the part where the phantom visits Redlaw. The conversation between them is when the story starts to pick up for me and ends the first chapter on a good note.
Upon finishing it, I realised that I really didn’t take to the characters of the Tetherbys and found them honestly quite tedious.
The conversation between Redlaw and the student in the second chapter was a lot more enjoyable to read. Then as soon as the Tetherbys are the main focus again the in the third chapter, it really nose dives for me again.
The highlighting of archaic, conservative views also make it rather off-putting.
If I didn’t enjoy Christmas Carol so much, this particular Dickens would have caused me to rate this collection overall much lower. On its own, I would rate it 2 stars.

The next few, much shorter, stories/passages are fine. I find What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older to be a very poignant piece of writing about the feeling of loss that Christmastime brings and how we remember those who are no longer with us.
Also, I would give ANYTHING to get that magical feeling of Christmas back that I felt as a child.

In conclusion, I find Dickens’ short stories to be very hit and miss. But A Christmas Carol will always have a very special place in my heart.

A Christmas without Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol seems unthinkable, and therefore it’s eminently appropriate that this Penguin Books edition of A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Dickens is introduced with the well-known anecdote of how a child in London responded to the news of Dickens’s 1870 passing - by crying out, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” The great British novelist’s influence on how people around the world think about the Christmas holiday remains just as strong today as it was when A Christmas Carol was first published in 1842.

As Michael Slater of the University of London points out in a perceptive foreword, Dickens associated his writings about Christmas with the importance of memory, including the remembrance of loss. Additionally, Dickens achieved the neat trick of linking the holiday with Christian ideals of charity while avoiding any overt expressions of religious ideology that could be mistaken for sectarianism. That recipe for tempered holiday cheer has been charming readers for over 170 years now.

What makes this edition of A Christmas Carol a particularly good Christmas present for any thoughtful reader, and God bless us every one, is the way in which this edition situates A Christmas Carol within the larger context of Dickens’s writings about Christmas generally. The presence of these other writings reminds one that A Christmas Carol was neither the first nor the last time that Charles Dickens wrote about the Christmas holiday.

This Christmas collection proceeds chronologically, and begins with a brief 1835 newspaper sketch titled “Christmas Festivities.” The sketch is relatively general in nature, but looks ahead to A Christmas Carol in Dickens’s assertion that “That man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas” (p. 1) – a descriptor that could remind many readers of Ebenezer Scrooge.

The story that follows, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” is one that you may already have if you own a copy of Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), in which the story appears as Chapter 28. In its depiction of a mean-spirited sexton named Gabriel Grub (good Dickensian name, that) whose abduction by goblins late one Christmas Eve results in dramatic changes to his life and character, one sees a foreshadowing of the basic plotline of A Christmas Carol.

This first of Dickens’s ghost stories of Christmas is followed by what is described as “A Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey’s Clock,” the 1840-41 periodical for which Dickens was author and sole contributor. This concise episode looks ahead to A Christmas Carol in the way it depicts its narrator observing a lone diner in a tavern at Christmas, befriending him, and helping that stricken and lonely soul to move forward from the paralysis of grief with which “His mind was wandering among old Christmas Days” (p. 22).

And then there is A Christmas Carol itself. I have read it a number of times before, but a number of facets of the story stood out to me this time. First is the story’s brevity – 85 pages, in this edition. No wonder some of the “stand-alone” printings of A Christmas Carol have had to resort to expedients such as large type fonts and wide margins in order to extend the story to something seeming more like modern book length.

The story’s brevity has no doubt also contributed to the manner in which generations of filmmakers have been drawn to it; the Internet Movie Database lists over 200 Christmas Carol movies and TV episodes, including versions that feature the Muppets, Mr. Magoo, Mickey Mouse, the Smurfs, Barbie, the Flintstones, Dora the Explorer, Bugs Bunny, and the Jetsons, not to mention Christmas Carol-themed episodes of The Love Boat, Family Ties, and The Six Million Dollar Man. Indeed, it’s amazing that A Christmas Carol has survived all that so-often-uninspired adaptation.

It survives because it’s a great story, one that draws its characters quickly and economically. On my first reading of A Christmas Carol, many years ago, I was not over-optimistic at the story’s beginning, particularly when the narrator requires the whole first paragraph to inform the reader that Jacob Marley is dead, and the entire second paragraph to expatiate on the possible reasons for the existence of the phrase “dead as a doornail.” But from that point forward, the story moves forward like Yuletide gangbusters.

I find Scrooge to be more human and more believable than the cartoonish caricature of many of the adaptations. One mistake that many readers make is to think of Scrooge as a one-dimensional archetype of greed -- someone we can comfortably distance ourselves from, telling ourselves, "I could never be like that." The film adaptations usually make that mistake, too; as far as I'm concerned, Alastair Sim in the 1951 film adaptation and George C. Scott in the 1984 TV-movie are the only actors who've really gotten the character right. Scrooge is a man who became bitter and emotionally dead only by degrees. His anxiety that "There is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty" (p. 65) has misled him, along a cold and lonely life path. How many of us, if we looked at our lives honestly, might not find ourselves somewhere along that grim continuum?

Consider, in that regard, the scene in which, the evening before his hauntings begin, Scrooge is shown taking some gruel. Film versions of A Christmas Carol conventionally treat that moment as if Scrooge is actually eating gruel for dinner, so that we can be knowing and superior while thinking, “What a cheapskate.” In fact, however, Scrooge has already taken “his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern” (p. 41), and is eating the gruel only because he “had a cold in his head” (p. 43). How many busy businesspeople today, here in this 21st-century Christmas season, took a melancholy dinner in a melancholy tavern last night – think of your least-favorite national chain restaurant, one of those that serve the oddly-coloured mixed drinks – and followed it up at home with their own favorite head-cold remedy, purchased perhaps at CVS or Walgreens? Perhaps there is more of Scrooge in all of us than many of us would care to admit.

Dickens's Christian-humanist ethic is on abundant display throughout A Christmas Carol, and is perhaps displayed most memorably in the scene from Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," when the ghost of Jacob Marley has just informed Scrooge of the impending visits of three Christmas Ghosts, and has then “floated out upon the bleak, dark night” (p. 52). Scrooge, “desperate in his curiosity”, looks out the window, and here is what he sees:

“The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.” (p. 52)

I find that passage to be one of the most powerful depictions of hell in all of literature. Dantean portrayals of Hadean cruelty have never done much for me; in such a moral system, the only reason for following the rules is in order to stay out of the cosmic equivalent of a medieval torture chamber or a Nazi death camp. But the idea that one day, our eyes could be opened, truly opened, to the evil we have done and the good we can no longer do? Terrifying. Fundamentally and existentially terrifying.

Dickens scholar Slater’s notes for the story are also helpful. I learned, for example, that when Dickens uses the phrase “the wisdom of our ancestors” early in the story, he is poking fun at Tory phraseology and policies of his time. Similarly, consider the famous moment from Stave Three when the Ghost of Christmas Present opens his green robe to reveal two hideous children. In the quoted passage below, I am boldfacing the passages that most adaptors of the story leave out:

“ ‘They are Man's,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!’’ (p. 94)

As a footnote by Slater helpfully explains, this passage is not simply an all-purpose reminder that ignorance and want are bad things. Rather, the passage provides "A glance at something that always enraged Dickens, the delay in the reform of provisions for public education because of sectarian disputes about the nature of the religious instruction to be provided" (p. 280). This edition of A Christmas Carol is rich in contextual explanations of this kind, all of which help one look at Dickens's classic Christmas novella in new ways.

At the same time, in looking at all these subtle features of the story, I do not want to neglect Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – all those features that have helped A Christmas Carol to live for generations of readers. It is a great story, pure and simple. And every time we read it, we behold Scrooge's transformation and reclamation, and hope for our own.

The subsequent Christmas stories and tales in this volume show that Dickens continued to return to the Christmas holiday as a subject, if not always with the same degree of success that he achieved in A Christmas Carol. The novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) engages an interesting philosophical concept – that it is our memories of sorrow and loss that make us capable of compassion – but it is neither as concise nor as successful as A Christmas Carol. There is much that is interesting in the story’s account of the chemist Redlaw, who willingly accepts a phantom’s Christmastime offer to relieve him of his sad memories, only to find that in the process he has lost all that is good in his humanity, and that his malady of emotional death spreads to everyone he encounters – but it’s slow-paced and generally grim, like much of Dombey and Son (1848), the novel that Dickens was working on at the same time.

“A Christmas Tree” (1850) is a delightful essay in which Dickens evokes powerfully the way in which the ordinary toys and decorations of Christmastime can be strongly evocative of multiple layers of memory. “What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older” (1851) is a somewhat somber examination of how the meaning of the Christmas holiday changes, in some ways, and remains consistent in others, as people we love go before us, leaving us to observe future Christmases without them. And “The Seven Poor Travellers” (1854) provides a striking look at a Christmastime visit to a hostel in Dickens’s hometown of Rochester, Kent; founded by the bequest of a 16th-century nobleman, the hostel provides one night’s lodging to six poor travelers. Dickens makes himself a seventh of these poor travelers, and arranges a Christmas evening’s entertainment for them.

A Christmas Carol is the centerpiece of these Dickensian Christmas tales, as it should be; but this very fine volume shows where A Christmas Carol came from, and where it fits within Charles Dickens’s literary treatments of the holiday that would forever after be identified with him. I encourage you to make this edition of A Christmas Carol a part of your future Christmas celebrations.