On a freezing Christmas Eve in London, a money-lender named Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to give his clerk Bob Cratchit a coal for the fire, his nephew Fred a kind word, or two charity collectors a single penny. He goes home through the fog, sits down to gruel, and is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley, dragging the chains he forged in life.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks in the autumn of 1843, to pay overdue bills. It became the book that more or less invented the modern English Christmas. Across one night, three more ghosts visit Scrooge — Past, Present, and Yet to Come — and show him scenes that change him by morning. The Cratchit family Christmas dinner with the small lame boy Tiny Tim is the most-quoted scene in nineteenth-century English literature.
Dickens wrote in the most accessible English of any of the great Victorian novelists — short scenes, vivid characters, dialogue that sounds spoken. A Christmas Carol is also short — eighty pages in the original. Storica's adaptation preserves the four staves and brings the novella to B1 across twenty-five chapters.
A Christmas Carol is the right length and the right register for B1. Short staves. Vivid scenes. Dialogue that drives the action. Dickens's vocabulary here is concrete — coins, coal, fog, dinner, ghost, chain — not the dense legal vocabulary of his longer novels. A B1 reader can finish it in a month.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. A Christmas Carol was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
A Christmas Carol is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.