Excerpt from A Christmas Carol, And, the Cricket on the Hearth IT is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when its mighty Founder was a child himself. So wrote Charles Dickens, who was, in a peculiar sense, a living embodiment of the true Christmas spirit. He gave to the observance of the festival a merry conceit, a quaint jollity, and a tender thoughtfulness that radiated peace and good will to all who came within the magic circle of his earnest and beautiful influence. In his own home the holiday time was given up to men'y-mala'ng and hospitality, to which Dickens lent himself with all the ardor of a child, originating charming and novel games, and writing and acting in plays for the amusement of his family and guests, never losing sight of that broader helpfulness which found expression in love and charity toward all mankind. Such was the attitude toward Christmas which Dickens brought to the construction of the Christmas Carol, one of the masterpieces of English literature, and, next to Pickwick and David Copperfield, the most popular of his works. The Carol was the first and best of his Christmas books, and it is interesting to note, by the way, that at the first of those public readings with which Dickens delighted his hearers, he chose selections from the Carol, it' ever afterward being a great favorite with his audiences. For a number of years Dickens had wished to write a book Of about the same length as the Vicar of Whitefield, and when in October, 1843, the idea of the Carol occurred to him, his mind at once reverted to his original project, and in this way Goldsmith's novel determined the length, and, to some extent, influenced the writing Of Dickens's first Christmas book. His purpose, as he himself explains, was in a whimsical kind of mask, which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts never out of season in a Christian land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.