English · Intermediate
Read A Christmas Carol in Englishwith every sentence explained
Charles Dickens · 1843
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was first published in 1843. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and historical fiction. It runs to about 28,400 words.
One cold Christmas Eve. Three ghosts. A last chance to change.
Ebenezer Scrooge is the meanest man in London. He hoards every penny, keeps his clerk Bob Cratchit shivering over a tiny fire, and answers every "Merry Christmas" with a scornful "Bah! Humbug!"
Then, on Christmas Eve, the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley appears in chains with a warning: three spirits will visit him before the night is over. Swept through Christmases past, present and yet to come, Scrooge is forced to see his life — and the lives he has touched — as never before.
Short, funny and deeply moving, A Christmas Carol practically invented the modern Christmas story and has been adapted for stage and screen more times than anyone can count.
- Author
- Charles Dickens
- First published
- 1843
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Fantasy, Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 28,400 words
How it opens
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Reading A Christmas Carol in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
