Set in a pantomime world of toys, Dickens' Christmas stories were accclaimed by Thackeray as a "crammed with extra bonbons, french plums and sweetnesses...a Christmas pageant which you witness in the arm-chair". Of the stories in this volume "The Battle of Life", subtitled "A Love Story" has little in common with the other Christmas tales, although it does share the theme of the morally beneficial effects of memory, which runs throughout the genre and is central to another story in this collection, "The Haunted Man". This last christmas story contains one of Dickens's greatest comic families - the Tetterbys - and a horrifying, concentrated poignancy in its depiction of the "hungry 'forties" which foreshadowed the achievement of Bleak House. "The first novella in this volume, "The Cricket on the Hearth" is regocnizeably Dickensian - a morality tale of literal and figurative blindness and an admonishment for charity.
One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.
