“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, A Christmas Carol
It’s Christmas eve, so what better time to re-visit possibly the most famous (not overtly religious) Christmas story Charles Dickens 1843 publishing blockbuster A Christmas Carol. The State Library of NSW holds three copies of the the first edition, one from the Sir William Dixson collection and two others in the Rare Book Collection, one purchased by the Library and another subsequently donated as part of the Donald MacPherson collection.
A post by the The New York Public Library about Dickens’s other Christmas stories prompted the Rare Book librarians to take a look at two other novellas held in the collection, Dickens’ fifth Christmas tale A Cricket on the Hearth (published December 20 1845, this is the second edition soon after in 1846) and his eighth and last The Haunted Man or the Ghost’s Bargain (1848 first edition).
Whilst The Cricket turns to domestic themes The Haunted Man returns to the intervention of a ghostly figure to transform the spirit of a cynical man. Although not as well remembered today, both were huge successes at the time of publication, produced just in time for the Christmas market with Dickens having often only starting to draft the stories less than 6 weeks before printing. Both later novellas were produced as plays with the Christmas Eve 1862 production of The Haunted Man being memorable for the first known stage use of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion technique. These, like other Dickens’s Christmas stories, use personal transformation via miraculous intervention towards the appreciation of goodness and the simple pleasures in life as a theme.
Merry Christmas to all our followers!
Although Father Christmas may not be able to stretch to a first edition Dickens, here’s hoping all the books on your wishlist come your way.














