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GtrsRGr8 · 12-11-2014, 09:43 PM

I'm not a fictionista, but so that no one can say that I'm not in the Christmas spirit, I am making this post to this fiction thread. That, and the fact that I enjoy Dickens' A Christmas Carol (well, the audio and theatrical versions of it, anyway), even though it is a work of fiction. Who knows, maybe I'll even like this one, too. I do hope that it's available in audio or video somewhere, though.

There is a website which is offering Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man or the Ghost’s Bargain. It's in pdf, which "format" some of you may not like. Like I said, I generally don't like fiction. So, I'm not aware if this book is available elsewhere, and I didn't check around to see.

I got the following information from this site: http://www.mbird.com/2011/12/dickens...e-haunted-man/. There is much more information there about the book than what I'm putting in this post.

Some say that Charles Dickens invented Christmas as we know it. At least, that A Christmas Carol rescued the celebration from post-Cromwell piety and prompted the Victorians to introduce many of the traditions that we have come to cherish: the tree, the presents, the holly and the ivy, etc. A little less well known is the fact that A Christmas Carol rescued Dickens’ career as well, proving so popular that he would go on to write four more Christmas novellas, three of which had supernatural elements but only one of which was an out-and-out ghost story a la A Christmas Carol. Oddly enough, despite the lasting popularity of A Christmas Carol, one of the Victorian traditions which has been lost in our Halloween-saturated culture is the propensity for telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve being the darkest day of the year, both spiritually and daylight-wise, the time when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest and ghosts could roam free. (As an aside: regardless of what the haters say, early Christians were not somehow unaware that they were aligning Christmas Eve with Winter Solstice. It was not an arbitrary decision. If you are celebrating light coming into the world, when better to begin than on the day after the darkest day of the year?!).

Anyway, Dickens would return to the ghost story model for his final Christmas novella, 1848’s The Haunted Man or the Ghost’s Bargain. It’s a bit more grisly than A Christmas Carol, and while certainly less iconic, contains an explicitly Christian potency that cannot be ignored (or is ignored for that reason…) . . . .

The link for the book, on the website that I gave the URL for above, is tiny and is buried amongst a lot of text. So, let me give you that link here. It's http://www.mbird.com/wp-content/uplo...12/haunted.pdf.

I hope that this post is useful. If it is, I might even consider posting on a fiction thread more often. Naaaaah!

12-11-2014, 09:43 PM	#116
GtrsRGr8 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,334 Karma: 27815322 Join Date: Aug 2012 Location: Southeastern U.S., ya'll Device: Kindle; Kindle (10.1.1) for PC; Kindle Cloud Reader	Charles Dickens’ OTHER Christmas Ghost Story--Free (but Pdf) I'm not a fictionista, but so that no one can say that I'm not in the Christmas spirit, I am making this post to this fiction thread. That, and the fact that I enjoy Dickens' A Christmas Carol (well, the audio and theatrical versions of it, anyway), even though it is a work of fiction. Who knows, maybe I'll even like this one, too. I do hope that it's available in audio or video somewhere, though. There is a website which is offering Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man or the Ghost’s Bargain. It's in pdf, which "format" some of you may not like. Like I said, I generally don't like fiction. So, I'm not aware if this book is available elsewhere, and I didn't check around to see. I got the following information from this site: http://www.mbird.com/2011/12/dickens...e-haunted-man/. There is much more information there about the book than what I'm putting in this post. Some say that Charles Dickens invented Christmas as we know it. At least, that A Christmas Carol rescued the celebration from post-Cromwell piety and prompted the Victorians to introduce many of the traditions that we have come to cherish: the tree, the presents, the holly and the ivy, etc. A little less well known is the fact that A Christmas Carol rescued Dickens’ career as well, proving so popular that he would go on to write four more Christmas novellas, three of which had supernatural elements but only one of which was an out-and-out ghost story a la A Christmas Carol. Oddly enough, despite the lasting popularity of A Christmas Carol, one of the Victorian traditions which has been lost in our Halloween-saturated culture is the propensity for telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve being the darkest day of the year, both spiritually and daylight-wise, the time when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest and ghosts could roam free. (As an aside: regardless of what the haters say, early Christians were not somehow unaware that they were aligning Christmas Eve with Winter Solstice. It was not an arbitrary decision. If you are celebrating light coming into the world, when better to begin than on the day after the darkest day of the year?!). Anyway, Dickens would return to the ghost story model for his final Christmas novella, 1848’s The Haunted Man or the Ghost’s Bargain. It’s a bit more grisly than A Christmas Carol, and while certainly less iconic, contains an explicitly Christian potency that cannot be ignored (or is ignored for that reason…) . . . . The link for the book, on the website that I gave the URL for above, is tiny and is buried amongst a lot of text. So, let me give you that link here. It's http://www.mbird.com/wp-content/uplo...12/haunted.pdf. I hope that this post is useful. If it is, I might even consider posting on a fiction thread more often. Naaaaah! Last edited by GtrsRGr8; 12-11-2014 at 09:46 PM.