A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time

A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time by Mary Pope Osborne puts 7 year olds in foggy Victorian London with Charles Dickens, and a plan involving three ghosts.

What happens

Merlin has asked Jack and Annie to help four creative people give their gifts to the world. They have done Mozart, Louis Armstrong and Lady Gregory. Dickens is the last one.

They land in 1843 dressed as two smart young gentlemen, with a magic violin in a green velvet bag and actual money in their pockets. Annie has to tuck her pigtails under a cap and pretend to be a boy.

Finding him is the easy part. A woman in the park knows the address. He is already famous and he lives in a lovely three storey house behind an iron gate.

So what on earth is his problem?

The answer comes later, down by the river. Dickens points into the fog at where a shoe polish factory used to stand. A tumbledown building full of rats, where he was sent to work at twelve, pasting labels onto pots of black polish for eleven hours a day, six days a week. His father was in a debtors' prison across the water because he could not pay his bills, and his mother chose to go and live there with him.

Your reader will see where the ghosts come in before Jack does. Annie's plan is to make up her own version of A Christmas Carol, except with Charles in the Scrooge seat.

The Victorian detail is the best of it. Black smoke from hundreds of chimneys. Donkey carts pulling benches alongside elegant black coaches. A cab driver so thrilled with his tip that he thanks all the good, hardworking people of the world on the spot.

Some of it is hard, and the hard parts are the point rather than the scenery. Children working in factories and mines. Parents in prisons and workhouses. A thin man on a crutch and a thin boy looking in through a restaurant window at people eating, while a rich diner asks whether there are no poorhouses. Dickens also talks a policeman out of taking an innocent boy to jail, because the boy has soot on his face and holes in his shoes.

None of it is gruesome. It is just properly sad, and a sensitive reader may want to talk about it afterwards.

What to read next

If your reader likes the ones where they help a real person, Leprechaun in Late Winter is the mission just before this one. Jack and Annie meet an Irish girl who wants nothing to do with the life in front of her, and a hillside of fairies who have opinions about it.