This early work by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was originally published in 1894 and we are now republishing it with a brand new biography of the author. 'The Christmas Hirelings' is one of Braddon's novels in the sensation literature genre. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in Soho, London, England in 1835. She was educated privately in England and France, and at the age of just nineteen was offered a commission by a local printer to produce a serial novel combining the humour of Dickens with the plot and construction of G. P. R. Reynolds What emerged was Three Times dead, or The Secret of the Heath, which was published five years later under the title The Trail of the Serpent (1861). For the rest of her life, Braddon was an extremely prolific writer, producing more than eighty novels, while also finding time to write and act in a number of stage plays.