Getting Your Hands on W H Ainsworth's December Tales
William Harrison Ainsworth published several collections that fall under what you might see catalogued as December Tales. The full title often appears as December Tales by W H Ainsworth or sometimes just William Harrison Ainsworth. If you are trying to track down a copy or understand what this collection actually contains, here is what you need to know. The book is a collection of short stories tied together by the Christmas setting. Ainsworth wrote primarily historical fiction, but his shorter Christmas pieces are more domestic than his larger novels. The collection came out during the Victorian era when serialized fiction and holiday editions were big business. Publishers would put together annual volumes specifically for the winter reading season, and this fits squarely into that tradition. I ran into this exact problem when trying to source a clean copy. Most listings on Amazon and eBay show either the original 1860s edition with yellowed pages and brittle binding, or a modern reprint that has been poorly OCR-scanned. The text in those mass-produced versions has line breaks every six or seven words because the scanning software could not handle the ornate typefaces Ainsworth used. I spent about forty minutes manually fixing the broken paragraphs in one copy before I gave up and found a better source.
For anyone working with this text, the biggest issue you will face is finding a reliable digital version. The Project Gutenberg entry for Ainsworth exists but it is scattered across multiple files rather than consolidated. What you get from standard sources is usually a single volume compiled from separate story texts, and the formatting is inconsistent between them. I recommend checking the Internet Archive directly if you need something you can read without fighting the layout. December Tales W H Ainsworth William Harrison Ainsworth is not one of his more famous works. People tend to look for Rookwood or The Tower of London instead. That means fewer people have digitized it carefully, and the versions floating around online were likely converted by someone who did not pay much attention to paragraph structure or footnote placement. If you want to read the actual stories, they cover a range of Victorian social settings. Some take place in London households, others in country estates. The tone is generally lighter than his historical novels. The Christmas framing device gives him an excuse to include supernatural-tinged tales alongside purely domestic ones, which was the standard approach for holiday fiction at the time.
I also learned that the original publisher was Longman. If you see a reprint that lists a different publisher without noting it as a facsimile, double-check the source. Several modern paperback versions claim to be from different houses when they are actually just rebadged scans of the same public domain text.
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Where to Find It
The most straightforward option is the Internet Archive. Search for December Tales by William Harrison Ainsworth and you will find scan copies of the original edition as well as borrowed digital versions. The text is public domain, so there are also cleaned-up versions on sites like Standard Ebooks, though the quality of those varies. I have seen at least two different Standard Ebooks versions with conflicting story orderings, which tells you that no single standardized edition exists online. Amazon carries printed reprints, but the quality control is unpredictable. You can get a decent copy if you read the reviews carefully and look for mentions of font size and readability. The Kindle versions are hit or miss. Some readers report correct formatting while others say the text runs together with no paragraph breaks at all. For academic or serious reading purposes, the British Library holds original copies. If you have access to university libraries or interlibrary loan systems, that is your best route for a physically intact first edition. The text itself does not change between editions since it was never revised by Ainsworth after the initial publication, but seeing the original typography gives you a sense of how the stories were meant to be encountered.
The stories inside are not particularly long. Each one runs anywhere from fifteen to thirty pages in most modern print formats. That makes the whole collection digestible in a single sitting if you have the time. Ainsworth was not writing dense literary fiction here. He was writing entertainment for people who wanted a few hours of reading around the holidays, and he was good at that job. One thing that catches people off guard is how much the Christmas atmosphere matters to these stories. If you read them in July, some of the social dynamics feel thin. The warmth and obligation and family gatherings that Ainsworth describes lose their edge without the seasonal context. It is not a flaw in the writing, it is just a feature of the genre. These were Christmas books meant to be read in December, and they work best that way. There is also a practical matter worth noting about searchability. When you download a PDF from the Internet Archive, the image-based text is not searchable unless you run it through OCR yourself. Ainsworth's name appears in older prints as "W. Harrison Ainsworth" with a period after W, and search algorithms sometimes miss that variation. If you are looking for specific stories within the collection, I would suggest using a broad search term rather than the author's full name.
The individual stories in this collection include pieces that were originally published in magazines before being compiled. Knowing that background helps if you are researching citation or attribution. Some versions list slightly different titles for the same stories because magazine publications and book compilations often differed on naming conventions. I found one story listed as "A Christmas Guest" in one edition and simply "The Guest" in another, and they turned out to be the same text. If you are just looking to read the book, grab the Internet Archive scan, read through the table of contents first, and pick whichever story catches your interest. Ainsworth writes clearly enough that any opening chapter will tell you quickly whether your taste aligns with his style. The Victorian prose can be slow for modern readers, but it is never pretentious, and the holiday settings keep things grounded even when the plots get fanciful.
