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.

$8,800.00

Item Number: 141205

London: Chapman and Hall/Bradbury & Evans, 1843-48.

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, in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a second edition in brown cloth with red and blue title-page dated 1843, ‘Stave One’ and corrected text, Smith’s second state, plates hand-colored (2 repaired), spine repaired, new endpapers, 1843; first edition of The Chimes; A Goblin Story with advertisement leaf for the tenth edition of A Christmas Carol, first state of vignette title-page, recased, 1845, Chapman & Hall; fourteenth edition of The Cricket on the Hearth, new endpapers, 1846; first edition of The Battle of Life with the vignette title-page in fourth state without imprint (Todd’s E1), recased, 1846; first edition of The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, 1848, Bradbury & Evans; all but The Christmas Carol with additional vignette titles, illustrations. 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."