A Christmas Carol

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1838)

Oliver Twist is a quintessential orphan story showing the rigidity and intractability of poverty and how institutions designed to “aid” the poor actually perpetuated their situation.

• Oliver Twist on SuperSummary

The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In by Charles Dickens (1844)

Dickens wrote other Christmas stories. They were well received by the public but never gained the popular traction or critical approval of A Christmas Carol. Of these other works, The Chimes is probably the most famous.

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (1855)

Several of Dickens’s novels explore issues of poverty in Victorian England. Little Dorrit illustrates the system of debtors’ prisons, in which people who couldn’t pay their debts were imprisoned until their debts were paid—presumably by any friends or relatives they might have, since the prisoners themselves could not work to earn money.

• Little Dorrit on SuperSummary

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)

Cooper’s fantasy classic—the second in The Dark Is Rising Sequence—won a Newberry Medal. It takes place around the winter solstice and concerns the pagan origins of the holiday.