The Gothic and Ghostly Charles Dickens
A Christmas Tree (1843)
December 11, 2025
When whirls of snow come in December, when we withdraw to the home fires of familial gatherings, or when we make our own solitary festivities with the simple joy of a tiny lit evergreen and a warm slice of pie, I urge you to light one candle and settle in with Charles Dickens for 40 minutes. Follow him into the nostalgia of his deepest thoughts in A Christmas Tree.
This short story—although it reads more like a personal (autobiographical) essay—will harken the reader back into a fairy tale realm of snuff-boxes and tapers, the aroma of roasted chestnuts and pumpkin pie, tiny rosy-cheeked dolls hanging on a green fur banch, toy fiddles and drums, trinkets and fairy lights, and in Dickens’s words . . .
“What we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.”
But hark! This story is not without the recollections of the thick darkness in the evening air, the haunted bedchambers, ghost walks through the woods, and the magic and necromancy that Dickens brilliantly gives us in his work.
His old house was full of great chimneys where wood burned, dogs rested at the hearth, and grim portraits hung distrustfully from the oaken walls. A locked door opens, and a pale young woman glides to the fire, her clothes wet as if emerged from the river.
“Ghosts have little originality and ‘walk’ in a beaten track,” Dickens informs us. He recounts a haunted door that will not open and the sound of a spinning wheel coming forth. There is a turret-clock that strikes thirteen at the midnight hour when the head of the family is going to die. And outside this old Victorian house, a shadowy black carriage waits in the stable-yard.
Hark, I’ve told too much already. You must read these adventures for yourself. It is the hour of twilight, and you must hurry if you are going to experience the Orphan Boy peeking out of the nailed-up closet that has refused to be opened no matter what.
Dickens’s A Christmas Tree has cheer, delight, and profound gloomy shadows. Peer into your Christmas tree with its dark black spaces between the branches. What do you see there?
Read A Christmas Tree at Gutenberg.org. Scroll down to Page 1: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1467/1467-h/1467-h.htm
Listen to the audio here (40 minutes):
I have many of Dickens’s works here at Reading Fiction Blog. Please browse the Index above for more of his stories.
Every year at Christmas, I post my own holiday story, Christmas River Ghost. A tale that haunted me for months until I wrote it down at the midnight hour.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas full of whimsey and
all the holiday cheer and abundance of the ages.
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