Christmas Stories
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a collection of tales by Charles Dickens. It was Dickens'custom to write each year some Christmas tale or a short magazine sketch that would lead families to live in happiness and harmony. Collected in book form, the Christmas Stories comprise about fifteen short stories and five of somewhat greater length. Some stories are included which are not distinctively Christmas stories. The best known of these tales are A Christmas Carol, published in 1844, The Chimes, 1845, and The Cricket on the Hearth, 1846. These are the best Christmas stories ever written. Lord Jeffrey said that since Christmas, 1842, Dickens "had done more good, and not only fostered more kindly feelings, but prompted more positive acts of benevolence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals." A Christmas Carol is the tale of a rich, miserly, hard-hearted old fellow, who, under the guidance of a ghost and three spirits, is awakened from his selfishness to feelings of generosity and human kindliness. Thackeray says of it: Was there ever a better charity sermon preached in the world than Dickens's Christmas Carol? I believe it occasioned immense hospitality throughout England; and was the means of lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas-time; caused a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys, and roasting and basting of Christmas beef. The Cricket on the Hearth is a picture of domestic happiness and contentment. The progress of the story gives glimpses of possible misery--such misery as selfishness and disloyalty may bring--but all ends happily. Everybody develops the "capacity of being jovial" and of hearing the cricket's chirp, the fairy voices and "everything that speaks the language of hearth and home." The Chimes is a "Goblin Story of Some Bell That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In." It shows us something of the deprivations and sorrows of the poor, but more of the blessing and happiness that may be theirs; something of the harm done by "fears and jealousies, and doubts and vanities, more of the good accomplished by the honest affection of those "who trust and hope, and neither doubt themselves nor doubt the good in one another." In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. Christopher North. See Wilson ; J
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's confidence in 1910 that these are "the best Christmas stories ever written" has held for one of them and quietly collapsed for the rest: A Christmas Carol is now among the most adapted stories in any language, filmed since the silent era and carried on by Alastair Sim in 1951 and the Muppets in 1992, while The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, ranked beside it here, are little read outside Dickens scholarship. The dates given have also been tidied up: the Carol appeared on 19 December 1843, The Chimes in December 1844 and The Cricket in December 1845, each a year earlier than Aiton's states, probably because Victorian publishers post-dated the title pages of Christmas books. The original handwritten manuscript of A Christmas Carol is now in the Morgan Library in New York, where it is put on display at Christmas. Otherwise the account of the plots and of the book's charitable effect reads much as it did in 1910.
Written for this edition, 2026.