Author: Charles Dickens

Publisher:

Published: 2017-03-11

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 9781520813080

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol & The Chimes - 2 Books in One Deluxe EditionNOTE: This edition has a linked "Table of Contents" and has been beautifully formatted (searchable and interlinked) to work on your Amazon e-book reader, iPad e-book reader, iPhone e-book reader, iPod e-book reader, and your Amazon Desktop Reader.A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of the holiday season as is mistletoe or Santa's reindeer. Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future--it is impossible to go anywhere during the month of December and not hear these names, time and again.This is a wonderful gift for the holiday season--featuring delightful illustrations--this superb volume will delight the heart of readers young and old.The Chimes is the second of Dickens's "Christmas Books." Written in 1844 it came a year after A Christmas Carol. Set on a New Year's Eve rather than on Christmas proper, The Chimes is a story about self-respect and the consequences of our choices. The main character, Trotty Veck is an inverse of sorts to A Christmas Carol's Ebeneezer Scrooge. He is poor and thinks so little of himself that he threatens to destroy himself and his family. Only through supernatural intervention can things hope to be set right.About Charles Dickens:One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.