The Book that Made a Reader of Me

Published on this day 175 years ago was Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, a book that has always held a special place in my affections – not because it's a favourite regular read of mine, but because it was the first Dickens I read, almost the first 'proper book' I read, and the book that first revealed to me what literature could do, and how deep, intense and life-enriching the experience of reading could be. It was the book that started me on the course to becoming a reader.
  I was nine years old, rising ten, and at a state primary school when I somehow came across A Christmas Carol. Instantly I was swept away by its heady mix of chilling ghost story, affecting account of poverty and suffering, and uplifting, heart-cheering tale of redemption, all with the happiest of happy endings. I read it and reread it, and looked around for more Dickens, alighting next on Oliver Twist, which, in its early chapters, had the same electrifying effect on me – as did the childhood chapters of David Copperfield (how could they not?). Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities followed in my early secondary-school years, along with Nicholas Nickleby and parts of Pickwick Papers (which I came to enjoy much more in later years). A decade or so after my discovery of A Christmas Carol, I was reading the Big Ones – Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorritt, Dombey and Son – what reading stamina I had in those days! But I might never have become a serious reader at all had it not been for that boyhood encounter with A Christmas Carol.