Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp. Judith Dean

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      CHARLES DICKENS

      A Christmas Carol

      A CHRISTMAS CAROL

      Ebenezer Scrooge is a cross, miserable, mean old man. When his nephew visits him on Christmas Eve to wish him a merry Christmas, Scrooge is not at all pleased. ‘Bah! Humbug!’ he says. ‘Christmas is humbug! Everyone who goes around saying “Merry Christmas” should have his tongue cut out. Yes, he should!’

      Oh yes, Scrooge is a hard, mean man. His clerk, Bob Cratchit, gets only fifteen shillings a week, and has to work in a cold little office, with a fire too small to warm even his toes.

      But that Christmas Eve Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his long-dead partner, Jacob Marley. And after him come three more ghostly visitors … It is a long night, and a frightening night, and when Christmas Day finally arrives, Scrooge is a very different man indeed.

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First published in Oxford Bookworms 1996

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ISBN 978 0 19 479113 7

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Word count (main text): 10,385 words

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e-Book first published 2012

      1

      Marley’s ghost

      It is important to remember that Jacob Marley was dead. Did Scrooge know that? Of course he did. Scrooge and Marley had been partners in London for many years, and excellent men of business they were, too. When Marley died, Scrooge continued with the business alone. Both names still stood above the office door: Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people who were new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. He did not care what name they called him. The only thing that mattered to him was the business, and making money.

      Oh! He was a hard, clever, mean old man, Scrooge was! There was nothing warm or open about him. He lived a secretive, lonely life, and took no interest in other people at all. The cold inside him made his eyes red, and his thin lips blue, and his voice high and cross. It put white frost on his old head, his eyebrows and his chin. The frost in his heart made the air around him cold, too. In the hottest days of summer his office was as cold as ice, and it was just as cold in winter.