A Christmas Carol

On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who answers every greeting with 'Bah! Humbug!', is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, dragging the chains he forged in life. That night three more spirits take Scrooge to his Christmases past, present and yet to come, including the poor home of his clerk Bob Cratchit and his sick son, Tiny Tim.

Dickens wrote the story in six weeks and published it in December 1843, and it sold out in days. It helped shape how the English-speaking world celebrates Christmas, and its message of generosity has been retold in countless films and plays. For Dickens's longer novels, start with Great Expectations.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.