Charles Dickens : The Christmas Books (5 vols) A Chrismas Carol, The Chimes etc

THE CHRISTMAS BOOKS (Complete in 5 vols)

By Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol
The Chimes
The Cricket on the Hearth
The Battle of Life
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

All published by Chapman & Hall, London, 1899. Complete in 5 volumes uniformly bound in half green leather with cloth sides. Each volumes measures 15.5 x 10.5. All with colour title pages and colour frontispieces.

CONDITION
A very good complete set. All leather bindings are very good with no cracking or damage. All endpapers good. Two of the volumes have bookplates pasted to the inside front boards. All contets present to all 5 books and the pages are very clean throughout all. No foxing, stains etc. Overall a very good set.

ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS BOOKS
After the success attained with A Christmas Carol in 1843 Charles Dickens continued the series throughout the 1840s, maintaining what he called "the Carol philosophy" (Letters, 1974, v. 4, p. 328) to strike a "sledgehammer blow" for the poor, uneducated, and repressed. In typical Dickens fashion he drove his message home with a mixture of humor and good cheer. Margaret Lane points out in her introduction to the Christmas Stories "when he had a pill to offer he confected it expertly with spice and sugar" (Christmas Stories, p. vi-vii).

Although subsequent Christmas books sold well at the time of their initial release, they have not enjoyed the staying power of A Christmas Carol.

The Christmas books, particularly The Chimes, the Cricket, and the Carol, were the centerpiece of Dickens' public reading tours in the 1850s and 60s with A Christmas Carol far and away the most popular with audiences.

Dickens discontinued the Christmas books after The Haunted Man, devoting his "spare" time to the publication of weekly magazines, Household Words (1850-1858) and All the Year Round (1859-1867), in which he included annual Christmas stories. These Christmas stories, together with the Christmas books, forever linked Dickens with the celebration of Christmas.

(Loc : Platform, Antique Bindings)