Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by David Wilkie, William Quiller Orchardson and William Powell Frith. A carrier's kettle and a cricket keep house for a big slow man with a young wife, and a stranger with a false wig sits by their fire while the neighbours decide what the marriage is worth. This was Dickens's third Christmas book and outsold both "A Christmas Carol" and "The Chimes" in its first weeks; London theatres were staging it within weeks. The suspicion is comic until it stops being comic, and the machinery of the ending is unashamed. Forty-six plates of quiet English interiors and family portraits by painters such as David Wilkie and Thomas Faed give the hearth its due, matching the domestic warmth and unease of Dickens's tale.