The Battle of Life: A Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1846. It is the fourth of his five "Christmas Books", coming after The Cricket on the Hearth and followed by The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.
The setting is an English village that stands on the site of a historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title.
"Battle" is noteworthy in that it is the only one of the five Christmas Books that has no supernatural or explicitly religious elements. (One scene takes place at Christmastime, but it is not the final scene.) The story bears some resemblance to The Cricket on the Hearth in two aspects: It has a non-urban setting and it is resolved with a romantic twist. It is even less of a social novel than is "Cricket." As is typical with Dickens, the ending is a happy one.
It is one of Dickens' lesser-known works and has never attained any high level of popularity, a trait it shares among the Christmas Books with The Haunted Man.
An adaptation of The Battle of Life by Albert Richard Smith was produced with success at the Surrey Theatre in 1846.
Charles John Huffam Dickens ( 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters. Many of his novels, with their recurrent concern for social reform, first appeared in magazines in serialized form, a popular format at the time. Unlike other authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next installment. The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.
His work has been praised for its realism, mastery of prose, comic genius and unique personalities by writers such as George Gissing, Leo Tolstoy, and G. K. Chesterton; though others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, criticized it for sentimentality and implausibility.
