Fiction · 1845
The Cricket on the Hearth
A Fairy Tale of Home
A humble carrier and his much younger wife, a blind toymaker's daughter kept from a painful truth, a gruff old rival, and a cricket whose chirping on the hearth is said to bring luck to the house it favors — all come together in a Christmastime story of jealousy nearly wrecking a marriage before it can be set right.
Charles Dickens published The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845, the third of his five annual Christmas Books, following A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Chimes (1844); more purely domestic than its two predecessors, it was by some measures the most commercially successful of the five in its own day.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
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.
Source mind
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.
Adjacent records
