The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol launched Dickens’s Christmas novellas; The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain brings the series to an end. Professor Redlaw is haunted by a ghost-like creature that looks astonishingly like him. The spirit relieves Redlaw of his miseries from years gone by, but there are unforeseen consequences of forgetting the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Feb 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411435186

Charles Dickens

An international celebrity during his lifetime, Charles Dickens (1812­–1870) is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His classic works include A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities, one of the bestselling novels of all time. When Dickens was twelve years old, his father was sent to debtors’ prison, and the boy was forced to work in a boot-blacking factory to support his family. The experience greatly shaped both his fiction and his tireless advocacy for children’s rights and social reform.

Reviews for The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[therebelprince · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really have no idea what this is, and I'm not sure I care to find out further.

No, no, that's not fair. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain is the final of Dickens' Christmas novellas, and the 15th all up of his 24 major works. Published in 1848, at the height of Dickens' busy career as playwright, social avenger, board member, husband, father, traveller, speechmaker, celebrity, and Dombey and Son churner-outer, this is perhaps my least favourite of the Christmas novellas. Well, The Battle of Life is less powerful but at least it's not as long.

The story of a man given the power to obliterate the past feels needlessly repetitive. With Ebenezer Scrooge, each of the three ghosts brought a different aspect, and the story moved fairly swiftly toward its character development. Redlaw is not Ebenezer Scrooge, and the moral he learns - while powerful - could have been told in one of Dickens' short sketches.

Regardless, CD is a strong writer, and his descriptions of a bleak and luminous landscape, of the world inhabited by Redlaw, make me glad I read through this at least once (even if the height of summer - a Southern Hemisphere Christmas! - is ill-fitting). Thankfully, from here on out, Dickens will write nothing but gems. Consider this one a blip on an otherwise crisp record.

[souloftherose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The fifth and final of Dickens' Christmas Books and the one I thought was most like A Christmas Carol in quality and in its themes.Mr Redlaw has had many sorrows in his life although he is known as a generous man if gloomy and solitary. He is thinking of his sorrows one Christmas when he is visited by a ghost or spirit which offers him the gift of forgetting all the wrongs and sorrows which weigh on him so heavily."I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!"Believing that he would be happier without this remembrance, Redlaw agrees and the spirit takes these memories from him but also leaves him with the gift of passing this forgetfulness on to all others that he meets. Dickens uses this gift of forgetfulness powerfully among the strong cast of characters he has included in this novella to teach that it is the memory of our sorrows and sufferings that is the source of our compassion and enables us to forgive others and that without suffering, there can be no true joy.A very powerful story.