Every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding’Dickens’s story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the season. Dickens’s other Christmas writings collected here include ‘The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton’; ‘The Haunted Man’; and shorter pieces, some drawn from the ‘Christmas Stories’ that Dickens wrote annually for his weekly journals. In all of them Dickens celebrates Christmas as a time of geniality, charity and remembrance. Edited with an introduction by MICHAEL SLATER; 336 pages; 30/10/2003