SOURCE: “A Christmas Carol: Giving Nursery Tales a Higher Form,” in The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature, edited by Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas, The Scarecrow Press, 1999, pp. 11–18.

In the following essay, Stone praises the stylistic framework of Dickens's novella, perceiving the story as “a myth or a fairy tale for our times, one that is still full of life and relevance.”

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