A Christmas Carol
By Charles Dickens
(Puffin, Paperback, 9780141324524, 160pp.)
Publication Date: September 11, 2008
Categories: Classics, Holidays & Celebrations - Christmas & Advent, Social Issues - Values
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On Christmas Eve, Scrooge sits in his house with not a kind word for anyone; he just wants to be left alone until the “humbug” of Christmas is over. But four ghostly visitors—his former business partner, followed by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come—show him the error of his ways, and by the time Christmas Day dawns, Scrooge is a changed person.
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.
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