A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
Three ghosts, one night, and the cheapest man in London forced to look at what his life has actually cost.
Charles Dickens
1812–1870
Dickens writes with a reporter's eye for the city and a soft spot for people the world has overlooked, and his plots move fast on coincidence, money trouble and second chances. Start with «A Christmas Carol» for one tight, strange night, or «Great Expectations» if you want a long, plain-spoken look at what a fortune does to a person's loyalties.
Feels like tenderness, dread and love.
Start with A Christmas Carol.
Dickens paid for the first edition himself, insisting on red cloth and hand-coloured plates, and set the price low so people would actually buy it.
The one date on the calendar when people let their guard down.
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew; “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmastime, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—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. Books by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, 1859
London and Paris on the edge of revolution: a man released from eighteen years in prison, a woman who knits a register of enemies, and a crowd nothing will stop.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
A blacksmith's orphan is made rich by a stranger, and finds out what money does to love, friendship and memory.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens, 1850
A boy survives debt, school and unreliable adults, and learns how memory turns a life into a story.
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