A Christmas Carol

There is nothing more Dickensian than the Dickens Christmas. His was a vision of sizzling geese with the stuffing falling out, puddings like cannonballs blazing with brandy, bowls of punch, hoards of children and Dickens himself in the role of storyteller. And nowhere was his vision more ebulliently immortalised than in A Christmas Carol.

When the cruel and hard-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge retires to his bed on Christmas Eve, he is visited by three spirits; the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet To Come. Faced with the lost opportunities of his own past, the cold loneliness of his present, and the terrible future that awaits him, Scrooge is transformed. This classic Christmas story, so beloved of the festive season, is now synonymous with the holiday itself. This is Dickens in miniature, containing all the pathos, wonder and imagination of his longer novels, as well as the best-loved hallmarks of the ghost-story tradition: clanging chains, hooded figures and creeping terror. But Dickens’s main intention was, in his own words, to create a ‘kind of whimsical masque which the good-humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts’.

Resplendent in Christmas colours in its new Folio Collectables binding, A Christmas Carol features a capering Scrooge on the front, while the spectre of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come lurks expectantly on the spine and back cover. Michael Foreman’s atmospheric black-and-white illustrations evoke both the ghostly nature and the sprightly humour of this classic story.