SOURCE: “Fairy-Tale Form in A Christmas Carol,” in Readings on Charles Dickens, edited by Clarice Swisher, The Greenhaven Press, 1998, pp. 74–81.

In the following excerpt from Stone's 1979 study Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making, Stone asserts that Dickens uses fairy-tale elements in A Christmas Carol.

Dickens wrote five Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848). … The Christmas books draw their innermost energies from fairy tales: they exploit fairy-tale themes, fairy-tale happenings, and fairy-tale techniques. Indeed the Christmas books are fairy tales. As Dickens himself put it, he was here taking old nursery tales and “giving them a higher form.” …

The design could hardly be simpler or more direct. A protagonist who is mistaken or displays false values is forced, through a series of extraordinary events, to see his errors. This familiar, almost...