Christmas Tales

Charles Dickens – 1812–1870 – a classic of English literature, one of the greatest prose writers of the 19th century. Dickens had an incredibly rich imagination; his stories are populated with a variety of dramatic, comedic, and tragic characters, people of all classes, as well as a multitude of everyday details. The pages of the writer's novels capture the life of the entire English society of the 19th century. "Christmas Tales" were written by Dickens in the 1840s and were published as separate books for Christmas. The tales were conceived by the writer as a social sermon, as an appeal addressed to the rich and the poor. In them, Dickens combines reality with fairy tale, truth and fiction, the fantastic and the mundane. The main character of "A Christmas Carol" – the mean and greedy Scrooge – is the embodiment of selfishness, cruelty, and soullessness, despising the poor and thinking only of his own enrichment, transforms into a kind, caring uncle on Christmas night and visits his impoverished relatives. Dickens makes the reader ponder the cruelty and injustice, about what he himself could never reconcile with until the end of his life. The book also includes the tales "The Battle of Life" and "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain."