A Christmas Carol (Illustrated): A Ghost Story of Christmas

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Dickens’ immortal holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, includes the original color illustrations by John Leech, as well as another 20 woodcut engravings by Sol Eytinge Jr. from the 1869 American edition by Ticknor & Fields. Beautifully designed and carefully edited, this hardcover edition also includes a short introduction and bio.

Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old curmudgeon who spurns Christmas as a “humbug,” is given the chance to redeem himself through the intervention of four spirits on Christmas Eve—the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come. The story not only reformed Scrooge, it transformed the way we celebrate the Holiday itself. If reading Dickens’ most beloved story doesn’t put you in the true spirit of Christmas, you may very well be beyond hope.

As Scrooge’s nephew Fred said, “I have always thought of Christmas time...as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Or as Tiny Tim put it more succinctly, “God Bless Us, Every One!”