The Christmas Books Vol. 2 by Charles Dickens [U.K. PAPERBACK] 1978 • Penguin

The Christmas Books Volume 2 by Charles Dickens (Cricket on the Hearth, Battle of Life, The Haunted Man) Edited with Introductions and Notes by Michael Slater and original illustrations by Maclise, Doyle, Leech Stanfield, Landseer, Tenniel and Frank Stone

VINTAGE U.K. PAPERBACK [1978] PENGUIN ENGLISH LIBRARY

Deluxe hardcover treasury w. decorative gilded frontispiece and sewn in silken red bookmark, collecting all of Dickens Christmas themed works in one complete volume for the first time.

Vintage UK paperback.  Like new and unread with minor corner crease to cover.

Reads like new with a hint of tanning.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.