Fiction · 1843
A Christmas Carol in Prose
Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and then by three spirits — of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come — who show him what he was, what he is and what he will become. By morning he is a changed man.
Charles Dickens wrote the story in six weeks and published it on 19 December 1843. It sold out by Christmas Eve, and it has been read aloud, staged and adapted every year since. Its five “staves” made the Victorian Christmas — and the phrase “Bah! Humbug!” — part of the language.
Known everywhere simply as A Christmas Carol, it is given here complete, with Dickens’s preface and all five staves. John Leech’s illustrations for the first edition are not reproduced.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Short Classics, Victorian Fiction.
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About the author
1812–1870 · Victorian
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Portsmouth and worked as a child in a blacking factory while his father was imprisoned for debt — an experience he drew on for the rest of his life. A parliamentary reporter by twenty, he became the most popular novelist in English with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and never lost that place: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861) followed. He died at Gad’s Hill, Kent.
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