Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol & Other Christmas Books (5 Books in One Edition). Charles Dickens

      Table of Content

      A Christmas Carol (1843)

      The Chimes (1844)

      The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)

      The Battle of Life (1846)

      The Haunted Man (1848)

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

       main TOC

      IN PROSE

      BEING

      A Ghost Story of Christmas

      With Illustrations By John Leech

      First Published 1843

      PREFACE

      I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

      Their faithful Friend and Servant, C. D.

      December, 1843.

      Contents

      Stave I: Marley's Ghost

      Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits

      Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits

      Stave IV: The Last of the Spirits

      Stave V: The End of It

      List of Illustrations

       Marley's Ghost

       Ghosts of Departed Usurers

       Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball

       Scrooge Extinguishes the First of the Three Spirits

       Scrooge’s Third Visitor

       Ignorance and Want

       The Last of the Spirits

       Scrooge and Bob Cratchit

STAVE I

      MARLEY'S GHOST

      Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

      Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

      Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

      Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

      The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

      Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

      Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

      External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could