Joulun-Aatto
1878
It is the book that invented Christmas. Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" in 1843 to rage against Victorian England's brutal indifference to poverty, and in doing so, he created something that transcends its era. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miser whose calculations have calcified his heart. He treats his clerk's son as an idler, dismisses his cheerful nephew's invitations, and refuses to give a penny to the poor. Then comes Christmas Eve, and the ghost of his partner Marley, wandering eternity bound in chains forged by a lifetime of selfishness. Three spirits descend: Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Each forces Scrooge to see his life anew. The joy he abandoned. The warmth he rejected. The death he will cause. What follows is one of literature's most profound transformations - a man who begins as a monument to cruelty becomes, in the span of a winter's night, capable of genuine love. The prose crackles with Dickens's wit and fury, the supernatural is genuinely eerie, and the emotional punches still land with full force.
Editions
X-Ray
“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.””
— Charles Dickens
“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.””
— Charles Dickens
“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?""I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.””
— Charles Dickens
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.””
— Charles Dickens
“No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused””
— Charles Dickens
“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.””
— Charles Dickens
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!””
— Charles Dickens
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round”
— Charles Dickens
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!””
— Charles Dickens
