The Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol; The Chimes; The Cricket on the Hearth; The Battle of Life; The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain.

DICKENS, Charles.

$7,200.00

Item Number: 141512

London: Chapman and Hall/Bradbury & Evans, 1845-48.

Complete set of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books. Octavo, 5 volumes, original cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panels, all edges gilt. A Christmas Carol is an eleventh edition, plates hand-colored, recased by Morrell [1845]; The Chimes: A Goblin Story is a sixth edition, recased [1845]; first edition of The Cricket on the Hearth,  second state of advertisement leaf, spine repaired and new endpapers [1846]; first edition of The Battle of Life with vignette title-page in fourth state without imprint (Todd’s E1) [1846]; first edition of The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain [Bradbury & Evans, 1848]. All but A Christmas Carol with additional vignette titles. In very good condition.

A Christmas Carol "may readily be called the Bible of Christmas. It was issued about ten days before Christmas, 1843, and 6000 copies were sold on the first day"(Eckel, 110). "It was a work written at the height of Dickens’ great powers, which would add to his considerable fame, bring a new work to the English language, increase the festivities at Christmastime, and contain his most eloquent protest at the condition of the poor" (John Mortimer). "Suddenly conceived and written within a few weeks, [A Christmas Carol] was the first of Dickens’ Christmas books (a new literary genre thus created incidentally) it was an extraordinary achievement—the one great Christmas myth of modern literature."