Reading for Christmas
Christmas classics,
A2 to B2.
Nine Christmas texts sorted by how hard the English is, from a ten-page Beatrix Potter to the Dickens books nobody reads. All original, all free, no account and no simplified retellings.
Tap any word you do not know and its meaning appears. That is what makes a real Victorian Christmas readable at B1: not shorter sentences, but help with the words inside them.
New on the shelf · A2 to B2
Six books added for the season, shortest first: ten pages of Beatrix Potter, Santa’s own life story by the author of Oz, and four Dickens.
Dickens wrote five of these
A Christmas Carol in 1843, then one a year: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. Almost everybody has read the first and almost nobody the rest. All five are now on this site, which is not true of anywhere else we could find.
That is a pity, because they are not weaker Carols, they are different books. The Chimes is a furious one about what the comfortable say of the poor, written in nine weeks. The Cricket on the Hearth is the warmest thing he wrote. The Battle of Life is the odd one out, the only one with no ghost in it, about a sacrifice nobody is told about for six years. The Haunted Man asks whether a man would really want his griefs taken away, and answers no.
Already on the site · A1 to B2
Three Christmas texts that live on other shelves: the one everybody knows, the twenty-minute one, and the shortest of all.
Questions
Which Christmas story should I read if my English is still weak?
The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter. Ten pages, one sitting, and a proper Christmas story: a tailor falls ill with the Mayor’s wedding coat unfinished, and the mice finish it for him. After that, The Gift of the Magi takes about twenty minutes.
How many Christmas books did Dickens write?
Five. A Christmas Carol in 1843, then The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man, one a year. Almost everybody has read the first and almost nobody the others, which is a pity: The Chimes is angrier and The Haunted Man is stranger than anything in the Carol.
Are these simplified versions?
No. Every text here is the original, complete and unedited. What makes them readable at a lower level is the help around them: tap any word for its meaning and read a chapter at a time.
How long are the Dickens Christmas books?
About thirty thousand words each, which is a third of a normal novel, but they are divided into only three or four chapters. One chapter is roughly forty minutes, so plan for a long sitting rather than a short one.
Why these
Christmas reading written for learners is almost always a retelling, and a retold Dickens is not a shorter Dickens, it is a different writer. These are the texts as they were published, and the help sits around them instead of inside them.
About 190 thousand words in all. If English is still hard work, start with ten pages of Beatrix Potter and come back for Dickens next year.