The Penguin Classics edition, ed. Michael Slater (2003)
The Carol, with Dickens’s other Christmas writings.
A Christmas Carol was one Christmas story among many that Dickens wrote, and it reads differently next to the others.
You want to read the book itself, and to see it next to the other things Dickens wrote for Christmas.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the complete text of A Christmas Carol.
Changes: nothing in the story. Around it, Michael Slater gathers “The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton,” “The Haunted Man” and shorter Christmas pieces from Dickens’s weekly journals.
Whose story is it?
Scrooge’s, told by Dickens’s own narrator, who keeps stopping to talk to you.
How much time does it ask?
336 pages in Penguin Classics paperback. The Carol itself is a short part of it.
Penguin Classics, 30 October 2003, 336 pages, edited and introduced by Michael Slater.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More Christmas Carols: The Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2008) · The Annotated Christmas Carol, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (2004) · A Christmas Carol: The Original Manuscript Edition (2016)