A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas WritingsA Dickens Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts


Christmas Festivities


The Story Of The Goblins Who Stole A Sexton


A Christmas Episode From Master Humphrey's Clock


A Christmas Carol


The Haunted Man And The Ghost's Bargain


A Christmas Tree


What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older


The Seven Poor Travellers




Appendix I: Dickens's Prefaces to Collected Editions of The Christmas Books
Appendix II: Dickens's Descriptive Headlines for A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man
Appendix III: Dickens and The Arabian Nights
Notes

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.

Michael Slater is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck College, London & a past President of the Dickens Fellowship & the Dickens Society of America.