Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol ( Guide)

After Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the writer in English whose effect on the world’s readers transcends the apparent limits of literature and so teaches us that imaginative invention itself can be a form of life. Together with The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol seems as though it has always been there, just as Hamlet and Falstaff give us the strong illusion they did not require Shakespeare’s art to have awarded them life.