Dickens' definitive Christmas tales including A Christmas Carol and four other stories are collected in a beautifully produced volume with cloth covers by leading illustrator Joe McLaren. The Christmas Books were first published in a single volume in 1852, bringing together five stories which Charles Dickens wrote specially for the Christmas season, beginning in 1843 with A Christmas Carol. Over the next three years Dickens published "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," and "The Battle of Life." There was no story in 1847 but a fifth, "The Haunted Man," appeared in 1848. The Christmas Books, and in particular A Christmas Carol, are considered so influential that they are credited with inventing our modern notion of Christmas itself.