Scrooge is visited by his dead partner and then by three spirits, and has one night to see what his life has cost the people in it. Dickens wrote it in six weeks in the autumn of 1843, walking London after dark, and published it at his own expense when his sales were falling. It sold out by Christmas Eve and largely invented the season as the English-speaking world now keeps it — a strange fate for a ghost story about a man alone. Ninety-nine plates, from Constable's Salisbury Cathedral to a winter landscape, gather the cold streets and warm rooms of the season the story fixed in place.