Why Scaring The Dickens Out Of Your Wayward Friend Is The Ultimate Christmas Gift

Christmas break begins!

An unblinking Frank Finlay as Marley’s ghost in 1984’s A Christmas Carol

Jacob Marley is the first character introduced in A Christmas Carol. “Marley was dead: to begin with” is the famous opening line. Charles Dickens quickly establishes that Marley is “dead as a doornail” and that Ebenezer Scrooge was Marley’s “sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.” Marley died alone in the world on Christmas Eve, but he did leave behind one friend. It’s not much of legacy, of course, as his former business partner is a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” … or in less poetic terms, a big jerk.

Yet, Scrooge and Marley were friends, and like Marley’s death, that point “must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story” Dickens tells. Scrooge’s reclamation, courtesy of the three spirits, is Marley’s posthumous gift to his old friend. Marley offers Scrooge the chance at redemption he never received or perhaps rejected. Regardless, Marley is now condemned to an eternity of torment and he fears that Scrooge might follow him.

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Scrooge lives in Marley’s former residence, which is depicted in most adaptations as an actual house, but Dickens describes it as merely “a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard” that “was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.” It’s fitting that Scrooge would dwell in what we’d consider today an old office building.

Marley haunts Scrooge but his intent isn’t malicious. He explains his torturous existence:

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

“Happiness” here doesn’t only mean one’s personal pleasure but the opportunity to bring joy to other people’s lives. As Scrooge notes about his former boss Mr. Fezziwig: “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Mr. Fezziwig used his wealth and resources to make others happy, even if just briefly on a cold winter’s night in Victorian England. Scrooge and Marley didn’t, and for no good reason other than selfishness and greed. Some adaptations of A Christmas Carol have shown Mr. Fezziwig paying a cost for his generosity, but I think that misses the point. The lesson is not that Scrooge is a canny businessman in a cruel world. No, the world is only cruel because men like Scrooge are so cold. Dickens presents Mr. Fezziwig’s kindness as a model for any employer, without qualification.

Ebbie, the 1995 version of A Christmas Carol starring Susan Lucci — hey, it’s pretty good! — shows us Marley’s death. As Ebbie derides their unhappy employees as “greedy little children,” a visibly unwell Marley (Jeffrey DeMunn) fondly recalls the Christmas parties their former Fezziwig-like bosses used to throw each year. A smug Ebbie has no interest in his sudden sentimentality.

“It’s a world gone by, Jake,” she says. “It’s not the way things are done today.” Like every Scrooge, fictional or living, Ebbie mistakes her cynicism for wisdom. “I have better things to do with my money … like saving it.”

Marley’s dying words are simply, “What are you saving it for?”

DeMunn delivers this line with understated depth. His face is a deathly combination of confusion and inspiration. He’s reached the end of his life with nothing to show for his material achievements but regret. Unfortunately, this realization comes too late for Marley to alter the course of his life. He was a business who’d failed at his most important vocation.

“Mankind was my business,” Marley tells Scrooge. “The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Yet Marley’s unfinished business is personal. He’s spent the seven years since his death in an “incessant torture of remorse,” burdened by the chain he “forged in life,” a “ponderous chain” that he sees Scrooge forming for himself. He’s tried to reach Scrooge, to steer him away from his own doomed path.

“I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day,” Marley tells a horrified Scrooge. Yet, this particular Christmas Eve, he can finally communicate with Scrooge. It’s his own gift, which he pays forward.

“That is no light part of my penance,” pursued the Ghost. “I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”

Dickens doesn’t offer any explanation for why Marley is finally able to intervene — escaping his own damnation if but briefly. Marley is equally circumspect: “How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell.” (The cynics at CinemaSins might nitpick this as a plot hole, but there was once a time when we appreciated mysteries.)

Scrooge recognizes Marley’s gift but initially rejects it.

“You were always a good friend to me,” said Scrooge. “Thank’ee!”

“You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three Spirits.”

Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s had done.

“Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?” he demanded, in a faltering voice.

“It is.”

“I—I think I’d rather not,” said Scrooge.

In fairness to Scrooge, if a friend’s gift involved my socializing with people after midnight, I’d also turn it down.

Marley shows Scrooge the countless others who never escaped their chains. It’s not just fellow businessmen but also politicians. The source of their torment is not fire and brimstone but the inability to help others:

He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Scrooge reconciles with his estranged nephew and materially improves Bob Cratchit’s financial situation, which in turn literally saves Tiny Tim’s life. Through Scrooge, Marley was able to positively influence the world at last.

Scrooge says he fears the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come the most of all the spirits he encounters, but the future is far less terrifying than the past and even the present, which are settled matters. Still, cynics and misers dread the future because they can’t imagine the world as a better place. When Scrooge accepts Marley’s gift, it means he finally has the wisdom necessary to escape his chains. He realizes the good everyone can do in the world if they only try.

In 1951’s Scrooge starring the great Alistair Sim, a redeemed Ebenezer can’t contain his laughter as he exclaims, “I don’t deserve to be so happy.” However, Scrooge must have done at least one decent thing in his life. He made a friend, one who cared enough about his welfare to save his soul from beyond the grave. A second chance is the greatest gift of all.