About the Author
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He has been termed a literary genius and his novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was put in a debtors’ prison. Despite lacking a formal education, Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens’s works documented.
Book Description
The story starts in a charity hospice in Rochester-a place that Dickens himself was familiar with from his own childhood. According to the will of the founder, Richard Watts, at Christmas the hospice must provide lodgings and entertainment for one night as well as some money to six poor people, an amount that is substantial enough to allow the travelers to buy a hearty meal. On Christmas Eve there are six people in the inn and the novels is composed from the six stories of the travelers who find shelter in the hospice, plus the narrator himself. The stories told by the travelers and the meal shared create a kind of harmony and a sense of community between the seven people-they all leave the inn the following day and life will probably take them to different places, but they will all cherish the memory of this one serene evening.