In the Library
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 28k words
Read in the app, yours for good.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Charles Dickens
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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.