In the afterward to a 1988 edition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jane Yolen points out this was not the only attempt at a yuletide tale from the famous author. She mentions the four others: The Chimes, The Cricket On the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. Most of us have never heard of these stories. And there’s a reason for that. Yolen says:
They never caught on the way the first story did. They lack the universality of A Christmas Carol, its range, its zest. A Christmas Carol was not written for children, but rather for an adult or family audience.
Notably, it also features time travel, 52 years prior to the publication of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This sort of time-travel, along with the special Dickens-brand of ghosts has given the genre of science fiction a handy and mutable thematic structure, which pops up in everything from Kurt Vonnegut to Deep Space Nine.
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