A Classic Bookish Christmas

Submitted: 22nd December 2025

A Classic Bookish Christmas

I don’t know about you but there is never a better time than to read a classic. There’s something very unique about reading a classic this time of year. The pace of life slows down, the decorations go up and the nights are as dark as they are going to get. Log fires burn for the lucky few and if not, log fires can be found on line for the noise of the crackles to accompany your reading.

Reading a hard back at Christmas is especially good – it’s like how books were back in the olden days. Hardback editions of Jane Eyre or Dickens are a particular favourite of mine. Dickens was renowed for novels set at Christmas (A Christmas Carol anyone?) but it’s Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop that I really love to read.

Books by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Great Expectations has been a favourite for years. Not a Xmas novel but there’s something about spending time in Satis House that I really like.

Now that Barbara Havelocke has reimagined Estella from the novels and made the Dickens world her own, there’s even more of a reason to want to live in the Dickensian world this time of year.

Barbara Havelocke novels

Estella's Revenge Barbara Havelocke

Books by Charles Dickens

Classics remind me of the time we were encouraged to read them at school. I didn’t always like what I read but the old language, the style, the new words….I spent time pouring over them in the holidays wanting to access this strange new world.

Dickensian on BBC DVD

Books by Bronte Sisters

I remember when I had read my first Henry James novel and finished it one Christmas Eve when mum was decorating the tree. I remember reading Bleak House by Dickens after we had watched the BBC programme ‘Dickensian’ for the umpteenth time. This is a mashup of a few Dickens novels where characters live side by side and the stories intermingle – it’s VERY clever! I also remember going to visit the Bronte Parsonage when there was snow on the ground, then standing in the very room where the Bronte sisters would sit and write in front of the fire.

And all the time I imagine sitting in a huge armchair, crackling fire beside me, cup of hot chocolate too, dog curled up at my feet. A house in silence with just me reading as there was no TV and no mobile phones back in the day. Just books. And that would be the most classic Christmas of them all.

Susan x

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