Dear parents, learners, and everyone else...
At this time of year there are countless versions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol on TV. Some are good; I would rate Patrick Stewart's as the best, and occasionally most terrifying. Some are hideous ("Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol", anyone?). 

But there's nothing like reading A Christmas Carol itself, preferably aloud.  Charles Dickens was down on his luck and living in fear of debtor's prison when  he wrote the small novel. He needed a Christmas miracle.His father had been thrown into prison, along with the entire family, when they owed money to various people. The irony is pretty ugly. You are thrown into prison, where you cannot go to work, until you can pay off the money you owe. Your only hope is that friends and relations will raise the money for you. When Dickens' family was imprisoned, he was 12 and he was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking factory. At the factory he made polish for shoes and stoves. This experience hung over his life, and his novels reflected the struggles of his own family.

Did he succeed with his little book? Well, he almost did himself in from the start! He insisted on gold pages at the beginning and end of the book, heavy, embossed paper, and a beautiful, expensive printing job...and then insisted on selling it for next to nothing.

His first printing made almost nothing.

And he never did make a fortune off of the story itself. But there are other ways to succeed, and the public and the book critics loved A Christmas Carol. Dickens, who had been in a slump, was suddenly back on top. All 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. The book was re-printed 24 times!

There was to be no debtor's prison for Dickens.  Plays, movies, and countless reprintings later, one copy was sold in 1875 for $3,493 to a Dickens collector. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City later purchased it, but they will not say how much they paid for it.

 Here's where you can find A Christmas Carol online, for free, and  you can either print it out or read it from your screen.

You'll find words there that you don't know; you can look them up quickly in www.dictionary.com .

While reading, or when you have a minute, it's fun to explore London as it was in Dickens' time. Try the interactive London map.

And here's the Dickens Game! Will you survive London, England in this time period? It's not pretty. Be strong but be kind. And enter the world of Victorian England.

Enjoy! And have a Happy Christmas! Let me know what you think...email me at amy.lesemann@gmail.com  Below is George C. Scott in the first part of A Christmas Carol, from Youtube.com