A Christmas Tree
Harry Furniss
1910
13.8 x 8.9 cm framed
Dickens's Christmas Stories, Vol. 10 of Charles Dickens Library Edition, frontispiece.
Again, as in "Captain Murderer" in "Nurse's Stories," one of the essays entitled The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens reveals his abiding interest in tales of horror and the supernatural in this, his chief contribution to the initial Christmas number of his recently launched weekly journal Household Words, although the clicheéd scenario involving an anxious nobleman in the haunted room of a great country house is merely a long paragraph in a personal essay on the joys of the Christmas season, and does not constitute a short story or even a sketch in the Victorian sense. [Commentary continued below.]
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.