The Complete Christmas Books of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens

While readers will be most familiar with «The Christmas Carol» in which Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts who endeavor to show him the error of his miserly ways just in time for Christmas, Dickens also wrote four other Christmas themed books. These include «The Chimes», the story of Toby «Trotty» Veck, a poor working-class man who has lost his faith in humanity and believes that his poverty is the result of his unworthiness; «The Cricket on the Hearth», the story of John Peerybingle and his family who are visited by a guardian angel in the form of a cricket who is constantly chirping on their hearth; «The Battle of Life» a charmingly uplifting and romantic Christmas story; and «The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain», which is the story of Redlaw, a chemistry teacher constantly brooding over the grief caused by wrongs done to him in the past. These five books are collected here together in this edition of «The Complete Christmas Books of Charles Dickens.»