Dickens's Christmas Books - complete online versions

The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket On the Hearth, Battle Of Life
& The Haunted Man & the Ghosts's Bargain with Illustrations.

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xxviii
INTRODUCTION.
to be done at all, as the work on Dombey was taking so much time and required so much care. Then, a week later, he wrote again, setting forth all the difficulties of the position, and expressing serious doubts whether it would be wise to go on with it. " Your kind help is invoked," he said. " What do you think ? Would there be any distinctly bad effect in holding this idea over for another twelvemonth ? Saying nothing whatever till November; and then announcing in the Dombey that its occupation of my entire time prevents the continuance of the Christmas series until next year, when it is proposed to be renewed. ... If I had no Dombey I could write and finish the story with the bloom on—but there's the rub."
Mr. Forster's opinion coincided with what was evidently Charles Dickens's own inclination, and a repetition of the dis­tressing overwork which was involved in the production of the Carol simultaneously with Chuzzlewit, and of the -Battle of Life with Dombey, was happily avoided by the postponement of the Haunted Man until the following year.
When the time came for the story to be written it gave no serious trouble, and was published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans in due course, just before Christmas, 1848 (the date of which year it bore), in a volume of one hundred and eighty-eight pages, in the old foolscap octavo form, and at the old price of five shillings. The frontispiece and title were engraved on wood after John Tenniel, and there were fourteen woodcuts by Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., John Leech, Frank Stone, A.E.A., and John Tenniel. There was neither dedication nor preface.
A captious (and rude) critic wrote in the April number of Fraser's Magazine for 1840: "We can hardly believe him (Boz) implicitly when he tells us that the artists designed after his hints. In fact, many of his sketches are little more than catalogues of what we find in the pictures, done with the minuteness of an appraiser." If by sketches this gentle­man meant Sketches by Boz, as is probable, he stultified him­self entirely, as most of them were originally published without illustrations at all; if he intended to suggest that it is possible in a novel to " write up " to the artist exclusively he was even more absurd. I may quote here a couple of extracts from letters to Frank Stone about the Haunted Man,
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