A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is a novella by the English writer Charles Dickens, published in 1843, telling the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly London moneylender who is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley and then by three further spirits, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, who show him the consequences of his greed and isolation. Confronted with visions of his own lonely past, the hardship of his clerk Bob Cratchit's family, especially the ailing Tiny Tim, and a bleak, unmourned future death, Scrooge wakes transformed and resolves to embrace generosity and goodwill. Written partly in response to the economic hardship and social neglect Dickens had recently witnessed, the novella combines ghost-story structure with an explicit moral fable about compassion, charity and the true meaning of Christmas. An immediate and enduring bestseller, A Christmas Carol did more than any other single work to shape the modern, family-centered, charitable image of Christmas in the English-speaking world and has remained continuously in print and constantly adapted since its first publication.