Eine Weihnachtsgeschichte

Charles Dickens's 1843 Christmas novella follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a cold, miserly London businessman who despises Christmas and everyone who asks him for kindness. On Christmas Eve the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley warns him that he is forging a chain of his own making, and that three spirits will visit him.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come show him his lonely childhood, the warmth of the Cratchit household and his nephew's party, and the bleak future that awaits a man nobody mourns. Will he change while there is still time?

Published by Chapman & Hall on 19 December 1843 and illustrated by John Leech, it became one of the most beloved and most adapted stories in English, and helped shape how Christmas is celebrated in the English-speaking world. It is told in five chapters, which Dickens calls staves.