This (the last of Dickens' five Christmas novellas) is also the longest and densest of the bunch, and has a return to a focus on the Christmas spirit, morality, and redemption that echo back to the best known of the bunch, A Christmas Carol. Redlaw is a lonely and sad Chemistry teacher at a lonely and sad old college tucked into the city of London. Many years ago his best friend betrayed him by marrying Redlaw's fiancée instead of Redlaw's beloved sister, as he had planned. Redlaw's sister ended up dying young and Redlaw has nursed his hurt and anger at his former friend for years. On this cold and dark Christmas eve, a phantom (who looks a lot like the haunted Redlaw) appears to him and offers to make him forget all his sorrows and wrongs. As a twist, he will also bestow this same "gift" upon anyone he encounters. Redlaw agrees but, as you might expect, soon comes to regret his decision.

Like many of these novellas, the real fun of the story is in the characters that orbit around our protagonist. In this case, we have the family of servants that keep the college and take care of the on-site faculty, as well as a large and poor but happy family who are boarding a sick student of Redlaw's. There is a lot of humor and love in the description of these characters and a willingness to sink into descriptive reveries that probably have something to do with this being the longest of the novellas. The pacing and flow on this one is a little... odd, which makes it sometimes difficult to follow the thrust of the story or get one's mind around the more philosophical parts of the text, but a little patience is well-rewarded. There is a semi-happy ending to this one, but even in that semi-happiness, this is a pretty dark tale.

It also includes one of the best and most semi-colon-laden location descriptions ever, in this paragraph about the old college where Redlaw lives and works. If this kind of writing is your jam, then add this one to your list: "His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still."