Scan barcode
A review by tomleetang
Christmas Books by Charles Dickens
3.0
A mixed bag of Dickens, though all inferior to his longer works - he seems to thrive more on a large canvas. Christmas Carol is easily the most magical and inventive (which accounts for its continued popularity). The Chimes is insipid and partly a knockoff of A Christmas Carol, while The Cricket on the Hearth and The Battle of Life are pleasant but pedestrian love stories. None have much of the verve, wit and semantic gymnastics that make a true Dickens classic.
Interesting to compare A Christmas Carol to the final Christmas book, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, which I thought second best in this collection. Where the first Christmas book is all fizz and bubble, the final one is dark and mournful; the message of the former is to be charitable and loving to all, whereas the message of the latter is to remember our sorrows because they make us better people. One gets the feeling that in the intervening years between writing the two, Dickens' attitude to life changed. To quote Coleridge, "A sadder and a wiser man / He rose the morrow morn."
Interesting to compare A Christmas Carol to the final Christmas book, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, which I thought second best in this collection. Where the first Christmas book is all fizz and bubble, the final one is dark and mournful; the message of the former is to be charitable and loving to all, whereas the message of the latter is to remember our sorrows because they make us better people. One gets the feeling that in the intervening years between writing the two, Dickens' attitude to life changed. To quote Coleridge, "A sadder and a wiser man / He rose the morrow morn."