A Christmas Carol and the Cricket on the Hearth

by Charles Dickens

Overview

Charles Dickens is considered one of the greatest English authors of all time. Dickens often used the pen name Boz. Much of his work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialized form. Unlike many writers of his time Dickens wrote the entire novel before serializing it. He made frequent use of the cliffhanger to keep the public interested. A Christmas Carol is a traditional favorite about the conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge from a grasping old miser. Three nights in succession, Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and emerges from the experience a totally changed man. The Cricket on the Hearth published in 1845 is a Christmas story. Instead of chapters this book is divided into Chirps. The story revolves around a family with a cricket in the house. The cricket is their guardian angel. At one point the cricket warns the master that his wife may be having an affair. Even though this seems to be a tragic occurrence all is well in the end. Love prevails and a girl may regain her sight. This IS a Christmas tale after all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438534718
Publisher:	Book Jungle
Publication date:	03/09/2010
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is probably the greatest novelist England has ever produced, the author of such famous books as A Christmas Carol, Hard Times, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist. His innate comic genius and shrewd depictions of Victorian life — along with his indelible characters — have made his books beloved by readers the world over. Dickens was born in Landport, Portsea, England and died in Kent after suffering a stroke. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know hunger, privation, and the horrors of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. These unfortunate early life experiences helped shape many of his greatest works.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF CHAELES DICKENS. Chakles Dickens, the most popular novelist of his time, and one of the greatest humorists of any age, was born on the 7th of February, 1812, near Portsmouth, England, where his father held a government office. The family, by successive changes, came finally to live at Chatham, where, until he was nine years old, Charles received the most durable of his early impressions. He was a very sickly boy, being subject to violent spasms, which unfitted him for active exercise ; but this inability to play gave him the inclination to read, so that at this early period of life his imaginative powers were quickened and developed by some of the masterpieces of English fiction. The misfortunes into which the improvident habits of his father had plunged his family compelled Charles, before he was ten years old, to earn his living, and he was placed in a blacking-warehouse, in a tumble-down building near the Thames. His duty was to cover with paper the pots of blacking, and to paste on each a printed label; in his after life he was keenly sensitive to what he regarded as the humiliation of this employment. At this time his father was confined in the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors, where Charles often visited him. Amid the low associates of the warehouse and in the degrading scenes of the prison he passed two years, without, however, losing the animal spirits or the capacity of humorous enjoyment, which were to serve him with such magnificent results. Readers of " David Copperfield " discover more of semi- autobiography in the novel than in any other of Dickens's novels. It is generally understood that the amusing charac4 SKETCH OF CHARLES DICKENS. ter ofMicawber is an extravagant caricature of the author's father; in " Little Dorrit," also, Dic...