Book description
In October 1843, Dickens hit upon the idea of writing a story that would not only celebrate Christmas but alert people to the desperate needs of England’s poor.
The Christmas Carol was the result. With the character of Scrooge, Dickens gives us one of his most delightful grotesques, in a story that is a perfect blend of comedy and horror, and which continues to haunt our houses at Christmas time.
The Chimes, his second Christmas book, is a topical satire set on New Year’s Eve. Written by Dickens “wrathful and red-hot” at the attitudes of the comfortably rich, it holds some of the concentrated powder of “hard times” and it created, as he had hoped, ‘a great uproar’.
