The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home is a novella by Charles Dickens, published by Bradbury and Evans, and released 20 December 1845 with illustrations by Daniel Maclise, John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield and Edwin Henry Landseer.[1] Dickens began writing the book around 17 October 1845 and finished it by 1 December. Like all of Dickens's Christmas books, it was published in book form, not as a serial

"The Battle of Life: A Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1846. It is the fourth of his five ""Christmas Books"", coming after The Cricket on the Hearth and followed by The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.The setting is an English village that stands on the site of an historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title.Battle is the only one of the five Christmas Books that has no supernatural or explicitly religious elements. (One scene takes place at Christmas time, but it is not the final scene.) The story bears some resemblance to The Cricket on the Hearth in two respects: it has a non-urban setting, and it is resolved with a romantic twist. It is even less of a social novel than is Cricket. As is typical with Dickens, the ending is a happy one.It is one of Dickens's lesser-known works and has never attained any high level of popularity - a trait it shares among the Christmas Books with The Haunted Man."

The Cricket on the Hearth is the third in Charles Dickens' series of Christmas classics that started with his beloved A Christmas Carol. In this tale the Peerybingle and Plummer families find themselves at odds with crotchety toymaker Mr. Tackleton, who hates children as much as he hates making toys. This is a free digital copy of a book that has been carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online. To make this print edition available as an ebook, we have extracted the text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and submitted it to a review process to ensure its accuracy and legibility across different screen sizes and devices. Google is proud to partner with libraries to make this book available to readers everywhere.