TIMELESS CHRISTMAS CLASSIC WITH ARTWORK BY THE EXCEPTIONAL STEVEN APPLEBY
Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man. A Christmas Carol captures the heart of the holidays like no other novel.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth where his father was a clerk in the navy pay office. The family moved to London in 1823, but their fortunes were severely impaired. Dickens was sent to work in a blacking-warehouse when his father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences deeply affected the future novelist. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, and in 1836 started the serial publication of the Pickwick Papers. Thereafter, Dickens published his major novels over the course of the next twenty years. He also edited the journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens died in June 1870 and remains one of the world's most popular writers.
Steven Appleby (born 27 January 1956) is an absurdist cartoonist, illustrator and artist living in Britain. He is a dual citizen of the UK and Canada. His images of rockets feature on the Pixies album sleeve, Trompe Le Monde, and in 2014 he produced over 100 drawings for The Good Inn, a novel by Pixies frontman Black Francis & writer Josh Frank, which was launched with events in New York and at The British Library, London. His work first appeared in the New Musical Express in 1984 with the Rockets PassingOverheadcomic strip about the character Captain Star, which also appeared in The Observer, Zeit Magazin(Germany), as well as other newspapers and comics in the UK, Europe and America. Other comic strips followed in many publications including The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. His comic strip Steven Appleby's Normal Life was translated into German and published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and also made into a radio series for BBC Radio 4. An earlier comic strip, Small Birds Singing, ran for eight years in The Times. Appleby has also had numerous exhibitions of drawings & paintings, written and drawn many books, and collaborated on a musical play, Crocs In Frocks. Appleby lives in Camberwell, south London with his wife, her partner, his two sons and three stepsons. He writes, paints and draws in The Shop, a studio he shares with animation director Pete Bishop.