| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780809597741 | | Publisher: Wildside Press | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 36272416 | | Item#: BV4R9P | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.25H x 6L x 0.5T | | Pages: 108 |
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| | | I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D., December, 1843.
Annotation:
A CHRISTMAS CAROL is Dickens's tender and comic tale of the Cratchit family, Tiny Tim, and Ebenezer Scrooge--a favorite ever since it was written, in 1843. Badly in need of money, Dickens produced A CHRISTMAS CAROL in six weeks; the first printing of 6,000 copies sold out instantly. In Dickens's original version, Tiny Tim was Tiny Fred, and Scrooge said "Bah!" but not "Humbug!"
| Author Bio| Charles Dickens | | In the words of George Orwell, "the strongest single impression one carries away" from the novels of Charles Dickens is "a hatred of tyranny"--a passion that began in Dickens's own early life. Son of a navy pay clerk, Dickens had an idyllic childhood until he was 12, when his improvident father was imprisoned for debt and young Charles was sent by his parents to work in a London blacking factory to raise money to pay off his father's creditors. He was there only a few months, but the experience left a harsh impression on him: he not only wrote frequently in his novels about oppressed and victimized children, but, after he became famous, was a tireless crusader against child labor and other social evils. In time, the young Dickens did return to school, and in his teens, he acquired a reader's ticket to the British Museum, where he educated himself further, reading Shakespeare and other classics. He became a law clerk and a shorthand reporter, and then began writing for various periodicals, becoming a successful and sought-after journalist. In 1833, he published his first short story, and his first full-length book, THE PICKWICK PAPERS, was published three years later, when he was 24--the same year he was married to Catherine Hogarth. As he and his wife began to produce children--10 in all--Dickens also produced literature, most of which was published serially, including OLIVER TWIST (1837), NICHOLAS NICKELBY (1839), and A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843). He wrote according to a rigorous schedule (daily, between breakfast and luncheon), and from the 1840s on, he traveled widely, giving speeches and readings, and lived in Italy and in Paris briefly in the mid-1840s. His marriage was never a happy one; in 1858, he and his wife separated, and from that period until his death Dickens was romantically involved with the young actress Ellen Ternan. Among Dickens's later works are DAVID COPPERFIELD (1850), HARD TIMES (1854), and LITTLE DORRITT (1857), which drew on his own troubled childhood, as well as A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859) and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (1865). His last novel, a suspense tale, was THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, left unfinished at his death in June, 1870, from a stroke that may have been brought on by his strenuous schedule of public appearances. Though he lived to be only 58, Dickens's output was prodigious and varied, both wildly comical and deadly serious, and he remains one of the most enduring and beloved writers in the canon of English literature. |
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter One MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, hi Click to read more... Chapter One MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot-say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance-literally to astonish his son's weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often 'came down' handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you? when will you come to see me?' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was 'oclock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, 'no eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!'
But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge.
Once upon a time-of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve-old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed. Continues...
Excerpted from A Christmas Carolby Charles Dickens Copyright © 2004 by Charles Dickens. Excerpted by permission.
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