Dimensions
130 x 202 x 28mm
With All the Original Illustrations.
Written in the so-called "Hungry Forties", when Britain's landscape was scarred by poverty and social unrest, Dickens's Christmas is presented as a time when class differences can be dissolved and enmities suspended. In 'A Christmas Carol', the comically grotesque Ebenezer Scrooge ("I don't make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry") eventually learns the value of human warmth and reciprocity. But the joyful winter festivities around which each tale revolves are shown to offer only a temporary respite from the social inequalities of Victorian Britain. In three of the stories domestic misery and childhoood deprivation are an ever-present possibility which only the social conscience of Dickens's readers could hold at bay; in the other two domestic happiness is also threatened but it is human passions that spin the plot.
