Physical description

Our Mutual Friend.
Author: Charles Dickens.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, London.
Date: 1956 (See note section this document for more information on Edition).
Blue leather hardcover, Spine has Author and Title in gold lettering. The spine has a Library label and no Volume information.

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with typed text PAT. 823. DIC
Front fly cover has Title and Publisher Details for year 1987.

Summary

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was one of the great English novelists of the Victorian era, famous for vivid characters, social criticism, and stories that were first published in serial form. He began as a journalist, rose to enormous popularity during his lifetime, and wrote major works such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.
This volume gathers five separate Christmas stories rather than one continuous novel. The best known of them, “A Christmas Carol”, follows Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral transformation after visits from supernatural spirits, while the others mix ghostly, sentimental, and domestic themes around Christmas, memory, family, and social feeling. Together they show Dickens using Christmas as a setting for moral instruction, sympathy for the poor, and festive storytelling.
This Oxford University Press London, Christmas Books volume is a collected edition of Dickens’s five Christmas novellas, “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes”, “The Cricket on the Hearth”, “The Battle of Life”, and “The Haunted Man”. It is not the original 1840s publication; the Oxford publication is a later reprint from 1956.