Classic Christmas Short Stories

About this edition

Seven Christmas stories from the writers who shaped how the season is imagined in English, collected in a single illustrated volume.

A young wife in a New York flat sells the one thing she owns of value to buy her husband a Christmas gift. A stolen gemstone turns up in the crop of a goose on Tottenham Court Road, and Sherlock Holmes traces it back through a Covent Garden poultry stall. Santa Claus is pulled from his sleigh on Christmas Eve and chained in a mountain cave. A little girl writes to a fairy asking for Christmas every day of the year, and gets exactly what she asked for.

The complete contents:

• The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle
• A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
• A Letter from Santa Claus by Mark Twain
• The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
• The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen
• Christmas Every Day by William Dean Howells

About this edition:

• Original illustrations, one for each story
• Complete and unabridged texts
• Timeless formatting for easy reading

The stories range from the comic to the genuinely dark. Twain's letter to his daughter and Baum's tale of the Daemons of the Caves sit alongside Andersen's match girl, who freezes in a doorway on the last night of the year. Together they show a holiday that nineteenth-century writers treated as an occasion for satire and sorrow as readily as for sentiment.