A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

Illustrated by Michael Foreman

Michael Foreman’s illustrations perfectly complement Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in this stunning Folio Society edition, revised with hardcover and slipcase. A striking red binding adds a suitably seasonal flourish.

$75.00
$75.00
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There is nothing more Dickensian than the Dickens Christmas. His was a vision of sizzling geese with the stuffing falling out, puddings like cannonballs blazing with brandy, bowls of punch, hordes of children and Dickens himself in the role of storyteller. And nowhere was his vision more ebulliently immortalised than in A Christmas Carol. Resplendent in a seasonal red cloth binding, with deep green endpapers, A Christmas Carol features a capering Scrooge on the front, while the spectre of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come lurks expectantly on the spine and back cover. Michael Foreman’s atmospheric black-and-white illustrations evoke both the ghostly nature and the sprightly humour of this classic story.

Bound in blocked cloth

Set in Centaur

184 pages

29 integrated black & white illustrations

Red printing on title page

Coloured page tops

Plain slipcase

9˝ x 5¾˝

Celebrating the seasonal nature of this classic tale, the edition is designed around traditional Christmas colours of red and green, with metallic blocking on the binding. Illustrated by renowned children’s book illustrator Michael Foreman, there is a wonderful sense of nostalgia as Dickens’s memorable characters intertwine with the story in 29 integrated black-and-white drawings. Foreman also created the distinctive binding design that features Scrooge, as Dickens himself would have pictured him.

I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.

When the cruel and hard-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge retires to his bed on Christmas Eve, he is visited by three spirits: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. Faced with the lost opportunities of his own past, the cold loneliness of his present, and the terrible future that awaits him, Scrooge is transformed. This classic Christmas story, a long beloved feature of the festive season, is now synonymous with the holiday itself. This is Dickens in miniature, containing all the pathos, wonder and imagination of his longer novels, as well as the best-loved hallmarks of the ghost-story tradition: clanging chains, hooded figures and creeping terror. But Dickens’s main intention was, in his own words, to create a ‘kind of whimsical masque which the good-humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts’.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Landport, England. His family moved to London in 1816, and then to Chatham in 1817, where Dickens spent the happiest years of his childhood. They returned to London in 1822, and two years later Dickens’s father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens was sent to work in a shoe-polish factory – a period that would come to influence much of his later writing. In 1833 he began contributing stories and essays to newspapers and magazines, and The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was serialised in 1836. He went on to complete 15 novels – including Oliver Twist (1838), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861) – all now considered classics of English literature, and became a celebrity in America as well as in Britain. He also established, edited and regularly contributed to the journals Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–70). Dickens died in 1870; he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Michael Foreman was born in Suffolk in 1938 and grew up near Lowestoft. He studied at Lowestoft Art School, and at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and his first children's book was published while he was still a student. After leaving college, Foreman travelled widely, making films and television commercials, and working as an art lecturer, before becoming a full-time author and illustrator. As well as illustrating books by Dickens, Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl and Rudyard Kipling, Foreman also writes and illustrates his own books, War Boy: A Country Childhood (1989) and After The War Was Over (1995), which was shortlisted for a Kate Greenaway Medal and won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 1993. Other publications include The Littlest Dinosaur's Big Adventure (2009), A Child's Garden: A Story of Hope (2009) and The Tortoise and the Soldier (2015).

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