Somebody's Luggage, and Mugby Junction

Dickens's Christmas writing for his own magazines, where each Christmas number was built around a company of tellers: a Christmas tree seen from a corner of the room, what Christmas becomes as we grow older, the tales of a poor relation, a child, a schoolboy and nobody at all. Then the head waiter who finds a departed guest's luggage stuffed with manuscripts, and the man who gets off a night train at Mugby Junction, calls himself after the label on his boxes, and stays for the sake of a railway porter's bedridden daughter. They are the quietest of his Christmas pieces and the least concerned with reforming anyone. Fifty-eight plates from Turner to Edward Hicks, 1812 to 1900, gather the peaceable kingdoms, ruined temples and English landscapes that keep these Christmas tellings company.