A Christmas Carol, the Penguin Classics paperback
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
- Edition
- Edition A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (Penguin Classics)
- ISBN
- ISBN 9780140439052
- Form
- Form Novella
The book itself, by post, in our packaging.
Posting to
Postage £3.50, tracked, 2 to 4 working days.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
In the parcel
The book, the Penguin Classics edition, in a rigid mailer.
An ex libris stamp pressed into the title page, the Daily Canon mark, with a line for your name.
A bookmark embossed with the mark, made for us by Mount Street Printers in London.
A postcard of the book’s own sky, the painted scene the app opens on.
Packed in London in one evening and posted tracked. UK postage is in the price; elsewhere by zone at checkout.
If you like this, try
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Dickens returns to the same theme of moral transformation, but gives Pip a lifetime where Scrooge gets a single night.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
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Tolstoy confronts a man with his wasted life the same way, but there are no second chances in Russia.
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Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Hugo builds the same argument that people can change, but needs fifteen hundred pages where Dickens needs thirty.
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About the book
Marley was dead, to begin with. His partner seven years in the grave, Ebenezer Scrooge spends his evenings alone in a cold counting house, treating kindness as waste and pleasure as debt, until the dead man's chain comes dragging up the stair. Dickens built it as a ghost story, but the terror runs backward. The three spirits who come for Scrooge do not threaten him with hell. They walk him back through his own life: the boy left alone at school, reading by a low fire while the other children went home for Christmas; the young woman who loved him and watched him choose the ledger over her. Scene by scene the cruelty is given a source and a cost, until the last and most fearful spirit shows him a neglected grave with his own name cut into the stone. That is why Scrooge waking on Christmas morning, breathless and laughing and good, is among the most joyful figures in fiction. The warmth is no trick of the season. It was earned out of everything that first went cold.