This edition brings together the complete Christmas books and short stories of 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. Along with these novels is included a complete collection of Dickens' Christmas short stories which include the following: A Christmas Tree, What Christmas is as We Grow Older, The Poor Relation's Story, The Child's Story, The Schoolboy's Story, Nobody's Story, The Seven Poor Travellers, The Holly-Tree, The Wreck of the Golden Mary, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, Going into Society, The Haunted House, A Message from the Sea, Tom Tiddler's Ground, Somebody's Luggage, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy, Doctor Marigold, The Trial for Murder, The Signal-Man, Mugby Junction, and No Thoroughfare.
