The Holly-Tree
1899
A Victorian Christmas anthology that weaves together memory, mystery, and the quiet magic of being stranded by snow. The frame story opens with a lovelorn traveler who finds himself snowed in at the Holly-Tree Inn, the frost creeping up the windows as he settles in for what promises to be a dreary week. To fill the hours, he turns storyteller, recounting the inns and encounters of his past while the other guests their own tales. The result is a rich tapestry of Victorian life: a barmaid's romantic history, a landlord's colorful past, and most intriguingly, a Gothic mystery from the hand of Wilkie Collins himself, that master of suspense who practically invented the detective novel. The collection pulses with the contradictions of Christmas: the ache of loneliness resolving into connection, the weight of old love giving way to new possibility. Dickens writes with his characteristic warmth and wit, but the real surprise is how the anthology holds together, each story a candle lit against the winter dark. For readers who want to curl up with something that smells of wood smoke and feels like a handknit scarf.
Editions
X-Ray
“What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree?... An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travelers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice head. "Forgive them, for they know not what they do!””
— Charles Dickens
