A Christmas Carol — Book Club Kit (Companion Classics)

Everything your book club needs for the Christmas book of Christmas books.

This printable kit (19 pages, US Letter) is built from A Christmas Carol — The Companion Edition itself, so the kit and the book can never drift apart:

• A three-meeting reading plan (Dickens's Preface + Staves I–II; Stave III; Staves IV–V) — or the one-sitting plan, if your group would rather do what Dickens hoped and read it whole in a single festive evening.

• The edition's Who's Who: Scrooge, Marley, the Cratchits, Fezziwig, the three Spirits, Ignorance and Want, and the rest.

• The edition's explainers, in full: the Victorian Christmas revival, the 1834 Poor Law and the workhouse world behind the story, counting-house London, and the architecture of the haunting.

• All forty discussion questions from the book — the same questions, re-arranged into the three meetings so nobody reads a spoiler before its stave.

• "Spot the Plate": John Leech's four hand-coloured etchings from the 1843 first edition, printed without their captions. Find the five hidden details in each — the fiddler at Fezziwig's ball, the name on the gravestone — and work out which moment you are looking at. A full answer key sits at the back.

Print it, pour something warm, and argue about whether Scrooge was ever really the villain of his own story.

For use with A Christmas Carol — The Companion Edition (Companion Classics ebook or print). The novel and illustrations are public domain worldwide (1843).