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Dickens’s concern for children, their welfare, and parenting crystalized in his first Christmas book: A Christmas Carol. The genesis of the story, which features Ebenezer ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts, arose through Dickens’s desire to strike a ‘sledge-hammer blow…on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. And Christmas conviviality was not a new theme. He had delved into Xmas cheer at Wardles’s Manor Farm at Dingley Dell in Pickwick Papers, Part X. ‘The Ghost of Marley’ by E. N. Ellis is on display in this dramatized version of Dickens’s classic tale.

[Title page from A Christmas Carol or, The Miser's Warning. A Drama in 2 Acts adapted from Charles Dickens' Story by C. Z. Barnett. Wood engravings by E. N. Ellis.]

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C. Z. Barnett ]]>



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Dickens’s concern for children, their welfare, and parenting crystalized in his first Christmas book: A Christmas Carol. The genesis of the story, which features Ebenezer ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts, arose through Dickens’s desire to strike a ‘sledge-hammer blow…on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. And Christmas conviviality was not a new theme. He had delved into Xmas cheer at Wardles’s Manor Farm at Dingley Dell in Pickwick Papers, Part X. ‘The Ghost of Marley’ by E. N. Ellis is on display in this dramatized version of Dickens’s classic tale.

[The Ghost of Marley, illustration by E.N. Ellis opposite page 12 in C. Z. Barnett's A Christmas Carol, Or, The Miser’s Warning: A Drama in 2 acts, Adapted from Charles Dickens’ Story.]

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Did Dickens invent Christmas? No, but he certainly deserves credit for rejuvenating celebrations surrounding the day. Indeed, he is the one writer strongly identified with Christmas – and its spirit. Within a six year period he wrote five Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843); The Chimes (1844); The Cricket on the Hearth (1845); The Battle of Life (1846); and The Haunted Man (1848). Issued ten days before Christmas 1843, A Christmas Carol sold 6000 copies in one day. Nevertheless, and at least initially, it was a commercial failure. It was also the first and last time that Dickens used a colour title-page. The story of selfishness and transformation has become a modern classic of Christmas literature, and is quintessentially Victorian Dickens.

[Title page and frontispiece, illustrations by John Leech, from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.]

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Charles Dickens]]>



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While the change of heart is present in The Battle of Life, there are no ghosts. Dickens wanted to make this anticipated money-spinner ‘a simple domestic tale’. With a mix of the historical – featuring a battle-field scene harking back to his visit to Waterloo – and the personal moral and emotional skirmishes surrounding sisters Marion and Grace, the book became a tough write, indeed ‘desperate work’. At the time, he was also writing Dombey and Son, and travelling back and forth between Lausanne, Paris, and London. Publishers Bradbury and Evans employed Leech, Maclise, and Richard Doyle, uncle to Arthur Conan Doyle, to illustrate this fourth Christmas book.

[Title page and frontispiece, illustrations by Daniel Maclise,  from Charles Dickens's The Battle of Life: A Love Story.]

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Charles Dickens]]>


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Looking suspiciously like Father Christmas, the Ghost of Christmas Present is Ebenezer Scrooge’s third visitor in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

[Scrooge's Third Visitor. An illustration by John Leech from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. ]

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Charles Dickens]]>