The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (Annotated)

• New foreword and afterword
• Author biography and historical glossary
• Illustrations from the 1848 edition

Redlaw has learning, respect and a room of his own beside a winter fire. What he cannot dismiss are the memories of sorrow and wrong. When a figure bearing his own face offers to take them away, the promise seems to reach the very source of his unhappiness.

Beyond his door, Christmas gathers other lives into the old college and the crowded rooms of a little newsman’s shop. An aged keeper repeats the stories of his youth. The Tetterbys struggle to fill their children’s plates. Milly moves between the sick and the lonely, while a nameless boy carries the marks of a childhood without protection. The scholar’s wish brings a disturbing question into their company: what else is bound to the pain a man would gladly lose?

Published in 1848, The Haunted Man is the fifth and final volume of Dickens’s separate Christmas Books. Its double, its wintry shadows and its lively household voices give the bargain a world of its own. This edition presents the story with the original illustrations, an introduction, an afterword, an author biography and a glossary of its historical references. A quiet prayer runs through it: “Lord keep my memory green!”

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