A Christmas Carol

On a freezing Christmas Eve in London, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley, wound in the chains he forged in life, and warned that three Spirits will come. The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come carry Scrooge through his own youth, the thin Christmas of his underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit, the threatened life of little Tiny Tim, and the lonely end he is making for himself — until he wakes a changed man.

Written in six weeks in the autumn of 1843 and published that December, A Christmas Carol sold out its first printing by Christmas Eve and has never been out of print since. Beneath its warmth runs a fierce argument about money, poverty, and the Victorian doctrine that the poor were merely a “surplus population” — a theory Dickens puts in Scrooge’s mouth and then forces him to face.

Told in five “Staves” that move with the speed and compression of a song, it is the book that fixed the modern image of Christmas — the family gathering, the open hand, the feeling that a single day can change a life.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Dickens, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.