SOURCE: "The Christmas Books: 'Giving Nursery Tales a Higher Form'," in Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making, Indiana University Press, 1979. Reprint, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1980, pp. 119-45.

Below, Stone examines Charles Dickens' use of supernatural events in his five Christmas books, and maintains that while the Christmas stories are unsatisfactory as literature, they played an important role in the development of fantasy elements in Dickens' later novels.

In the interval between the beginning of Martin Chuzzlewit and the completion of Dombey and Son, 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).¹ The Haunted Man, the last of the Christmas books, straddles the later limits of this interval. The Haunted Man was conceived and partly written in the interval, but not finished until Dombey was completed.² With the exception of The...