A Christmas Carol is the one and only Dickens story which I intensely dislike.

Full of mawkish sentimentality about poor little Tiny Tim and oppressed Bob Cratchit. The change in Scrooge's personality is almost a true deus ex machina, a magical change from
the gods, as it were, not a humanly explicable character change.
I guess that's a clue to the above-referred-to changelessness of character of almost every Dickens character: It seems that it would take an act of God to make a Dickens character develop.

And the compulsively multiple reprintings and repetitive TV, theatrical, radio productions make the story so predictable that it's truly emetic!

I have to back off a little on my first paragraph above. I found Pickwick Papers dull and slow.

Dave Oesterreich