Charles Dickens is intimately associated with our ideas of
Christmas through his novels and through a series of books which
have become known as the Chritsmas Books. The first of them, the
familiar A Christmas Carol, was written during 1843. It appeared
in print that Christmas and was so successful that he followed
it up the next Christmas with The Chimes, a Goblin Story. In
1845 came The Cricket on the Hearth, A Fairy Tale of Home,
followed by two more, The Battle of Life in 1846 and The Haunted
Man in 1848.1 A Christmas Carol sets the tone for all the
others. The descriptive passages are filled with animism which
one often finds in storybooks: an ancient church tower strikes
the hours "as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head;"
the fire-plug is "left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly
congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice;" and the shops "have
great round pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the
waist-coats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and
tumbling out into the st