Ghost Stories [Hardcover]

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Throughout his illustrious writing career, Charles Dickens often turned his hand to fashioning short pieces of ghostly fiction. Even in his first successful work,The Pickwick Papers, you will find five ghost stories, all of which are included in this collection. Dickens began the tradition of the ghost story at Christmas, and many of his tales in this genre are presented here including the brilliant novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain, which deserves to be as well-known asA Christmas Carol. While all his supernatural tales aim to chill the spine, they are not without the usual traits of Dickens flamboyant style, his subtle wit, biting irony, humorous incidents and moral observations. It is a mixture which makes these stories fascinating and entertaining as well as unsettling. To paraphrase the Fat Boy inThe Pickwick Papers: Charles Dickens wants to make your flesh creep.

This collection brings together all Dickens' ghost stories - twenty in all - including several long tales. Here are chilling histories of coincidence, insanity and revenge.

Illustrated by various artists, with an afterword by David Stuart Davies.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk. Living in London in 1824, Dickens was sent by his family to work in a blacking-warehouse, and his father was arrested and imprisoned for debt. Fortunes improved and Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a parliamentary reporter. His first piece of fiction was published by a magazine in December 1832, and by 1836 he had begun his first novel,The Pickwick Papers. He focused his cls-