Seven years ago tonight, Jacob Marley died. His name is still painted above the warehouse door, because Ebenezer Scrooge never saw the profit in taking it down.
It is Christmas Eve. Scrooge has refused his nephew's invitation, sent two charity collectors away with a remark about the prisons and the workhouses, and left his clerk a fire the size of a single coal. He will go home to a gloomy set of rooms in a building where every other door is an office and nobody else lives at all.
Tonight the knocker on that door will not be a knocker.
Three spirits are coming, and between them they will show him a boy left alone at school over Christmas, a young woman who releases him from a promise, a clerk's family counting out a small goose, and a neglected grave with a name cut into the stone.
A Christmas Carol is 28,402 words. At an average adult reading pace of 300 words a minute that is about 1 hr 35 min, or roughly 1 hr 11 min if you read quickly and 2 hr 22 min at a more deliberate 200 words a minute.
That count is measured from the complete public-domain text rather than estimated from a page count, so you can compare all the books side by side.