The Christmas Books

Viac o knihe

The Cricket on the Hearth , Dickens's third, eagerly awaited Christmas book, was the most popular of all. Set in a pantomime world of toys, it was acclaimed by an amused and delighted Thackeray as a fancy 'crammed with extra bonbons, French plums and sweetnesses...a Christmas pageant which you witness in the arm-chair -- your private box by the fireside'. The Battle of Life , subtitled 'A Love Story', has little in common with the other Christmas books, although it does share the theme of the morally beneficial effects of memory, which runs throughout the genre and is central to The Haunted Man. This last Christmas book contains one of Dickens's greatest comic families -- the Tetterbys -- and a horrifying, concentrated poignancy in its depiction of the Hungry Forties which foreshadowed the achievement of Bleak House. The Christmas Books , Volume 1, containing The Christmas Carol and The Chimes , is also published in Penguin Classics.