Charles Dickens
251) Oliver Twist
Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author's brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.
In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted 'Top Tens' across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why
...257) The Holly Tree Inn
Over the course of his career, Charles Dickens wrote a series of Christmas-themed short stories that were serialized in popular magazines of the era. The Holly Tree Inn, like many of these tales, reflects on the deeper meaning of the holiday, using the loneliness of the solitary traveler as a lens through which to examine society.