![]() ![]() The Lord of the Rings triumphed Pride and Prejudice was runner-up and David Copperfield was third. ![]() ![]() More than ten thousand members of the Society voted in 1998 for their favourite books from any age. Those who are justifiably skeptical of the claim that the bestselling is necessarily the best, might point to a poll conducted by the Folio Society, a de facto private members club for bibliophiles, as a more objective way of judging the best of Dickens as opposed to the most popular. True, in terms of pure brute statistics, we would be forced to concede that A Tale of Two Cities is most people’s favourite because it is usually listed as the bestselling novel of all time, with sales exceeding 200 million (though Don Quixote, which is excluded from official statistics and has never been out of print since its first publication four hundred years ago, has probably sold more copies). Each of us has our favourites and each invariably begs to differ with his neighbour’s choice. His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading list than it is to choose which to include. It could be argued and has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language. ![]() “A Christmas Carol” is, as might be expected of a meditation on the spirit of Christmas, a literary work that operates most profoundly on the level of theology. ![]()
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