A Christmas Carol: And Other Christmas Stories (Signet Classic)
Rating: 
(199 reviews)
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Signet Classics
Product Description
A timeless collection no miser should be without.
Every Christmas season, this heartwarming tale stirs in us the feelings of forgiveness and repentance that transform Scrooge from miser-”Bah, humbug!”-to merrymaker. Dickens’s other Christmas stories in this collection also evoke both the tragedy of those who lack the Yuletide spirit and the joy of those who raise a wassail cup to goodwill toward men.
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5 Comments
After reading many reviews on several different versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, I decided this one sounded like the version I was looking for. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the fact that it’s unabridged and its illustrations are beautiful. I watch this story every Christmas, in most versions, but never had the written story. A professional stage production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL is offered every Season and I’d taken our sons when they were young and wanted to take our grandsons this year (2009). Well, I bought each of them a copy of the book and put their ticket for the performance inside the front cover. What a hit that was. The boys now have the memory of seeing the live performance and owning their own copy of this remarkable classic. Don’t hesitate. The price is unbelievably affordable and the quality of the book is impeccable. Enjoy!
There are a lot of different reprints for this book and I really wanted one with some beautiful pictures that was fun to read and not just words on a page. I was so impressed by the illustrations. There is one on almost every page! I highly recommend this and honestly couldn’t believe the book was so cheap for the quality of it!!
This book remains on our coffee table. Our grandsons love the illustrations. It is a book they pick up again and again for us to read to them. They enjoy this book as much as we do.
“A Christmas Carol” is not just A Christmas story, but one of THE Christmas stories — not only is it instantly recognizable by pretty much everybody, but it’s relentlessly copied and spoofed in countless Christmas specials. But taken just by itself, Charles Dickens’ yuletide novella is a pretty bleak and bittersweet affair, with brilliant imagery and lots of ghostly weirdness.
Scrooge is… well, a scrooge — a professional miser who hates Christmas, goodwill, charity, puppies, kittens, his relatives, his employees, and virtually everything else except money.
And on Christmas Eve, his dead partner Jacob Marley comes back, wrapped with supernatural chains, and claims that Scrooge is doomed to the same fate. But he has a chance at redemption: three ghosts representing will visit him that night, taking him on a guided tour of Christmases past, present and yet to come.
So Scrooge is transported on a trio of hourlong trips through time. The childlike Ghost of Christmas Past takes him to his bleak childhood, when he was less jaded and hard. The jolly Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to people’s homes on the very next morning, specifically of of his nephew and the poor miner Bob Cratchit. And finally a Ringwraith-like spirit gives him a glimpse of Christmas years in the future… a bleak and terrible future, unless he changes his ways.
You can read plenty of symbolism into a story like “A Christmas Carol”; I’ve heard speculation about Dickens’ father, the Industrial Revolution, spiritualism, and all sorts of other stuff. But at its heart, “A Christmas Carol” is the most powerful when appreciated for its story alone — a story about a greedy, miserable man who redeems himself by learning to love all humanity.
Dickens’ writing is utterly brilliant here. Most of the book is bleak, grimy and painted in shadows, with Dickens only rarely holding back from showing the dark situation of England’s poor. A great example is the symbolic children Want and Ignorance (“a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds”). As for the Grim-Reaperlike third ghost, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
But all isn’t dark here. Occasionally Dickens splashes it with moments of crystalline brilliance (“It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and… its dress trimmed with summer flowers”). And as dark as the book is, Dickens offers hope for the future.
He also does a brilliant job with 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.” Having worked hard to make us hate Scrooge, Dickens then deftly displays his skill at slowly revealing how Scrooge became who and what he is, and slowly redeeming him.
Charles Dickens created one of the greatest Christmas stories with “A Christmas Carol” — bah humbugs, merry Christmases and all. God bless us, every one!
What does one expect with a thrift edition? It is best used as an inexpensive stocking stuffer. This version of the immortal Xmas classic cannot be destroyed by splotchy editing and a difficult to read font size. Purchase a magnifying glass the size of a frisbee, click on the fireplace, snuggle into a Snuggie, sip some Swiss-Miss, curl into the La-Z-Boy and read this timeless work while drifting like a ghost into Xmas past.
Personally, I would purchase a finer edition than this. Dickens Christmas Carol is the type of read that must be completed via a REAL book, preferably an old leather bound edition with decorative end papers and such. The tactile creases in the paper, the creak of the bindings, light dust thumbed away on the top ream, the smell of old musks radiating from text, natural oils reflecting off the leather binding…The Kindle serves a purpose but nothing beats an old book.