• Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• 486 pages
• Fiction: Classic, Short Stories

'As the inventor of this sort of story, I may be allowed to plead that I think a little dreaminess and vagueness essential to its effect.'

In these five short novels, written for Christmas 1843 to 1848, Dickens is at his most characteristic. 

A Christmas Carol finds him at the peak of his powers and it has earned its place as 'the greatest little book in the world'.

With The Chimes it also gives the reader a powerful vision of Dickens' criticism of the destructive economic theories of his day.

Both Scrooge, and Redlaw in The Haunted Man, discover that memory is the source of moral growth.

The Cricket on the Hearth evokes the domestic ideal held dear by Dicken's contemporaries.

In The Battle of Life Dickens engages with a favourite theme, the heroism of ordinary men and women. 

In all five books Dickens' humour, geniality, social conscience, and imaginative vitality foreshadow themes and concerns that dominate his later novels.