A Christmas Carol Stave 1: Marley's Ghost

The book starts by making sure we know Marley is dead. Then it introduces Scrooge as an extremely mean, cold, unfriendly old man who seems to carry coldness around with him.

The novella begins with total certainty about one fact: "Marley was dead, to begin with." Dickens insists on this because the whole ghost story that follows depends on the reader accepting it without doubt. Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner, has been dead for seven years, and Scrooge himself was the only mourner at the funeral, and later the sole executor of his will. From here Dickens turns to Scrooge himself, describing him in a famous rush of harsh adjectives as a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." Scrooge is so cold in nature that he seems to carry his own personal winter with him wherever he goes, and no warmth, human or otherwise, ever seems to reach him. He keeps to himself, discourages visitors, and is feared and avoided in the street.

On Christmas Eve, Scrooge works in his office and keeps his clerk Bob Cratchit in a freezing side room with barely any coal for a fire, showing how badly he treats him.

It is Christmas Eve, and Scrooge sits working in his counting-house, a small, dim office attached to his home. His clerk, Bob Cratchit, works in an even smaller, colder side room, because Scrooge refuses to give him enough coal for a proper fire. Bob is poor, good-natured and uncomplaining, but Dickens makes it clear how unfairly he is treated simply through the detail of that meagre fire, which Bob dare not build up in case Scrooge objects. The scene establishes, before a single ghost appears, the human cost of Scrooge's miserliness: it is not just Scrooge who suffers from his coldness, but the people who depend on him for a wage and a decent working day.

Scrooge's nephew Fred visits to invite him to Christmas dinner, but Scrooge rudely refuses, saying "Bah, humbug!" about the whole idea of Christmas.

Scrooge's nephew Fred arrives, glowing from the cold and full of Christmas cheer, to invite his uncle to Christmas dinner as he does every year. Fred argues that Christmas is a time when people are kinder to one another, even if it has never put a scrap of gold in his pocket. Scrooge's reply is his most famous line in the whole stave: "Bah, humbug!" He dismisses Christmas as a waste of time for people with no money to pay their bills, and refuses the invitation with open irritation. Fred takes the rejection with good humour rather than anger, wishing his uncle a merry Christmas anyway as he leaves, which sets him up as a quiet contrast to Scrooge's bitterness.

Two men collecting money for the poor visit Scrooge, but he refuses to give anything and coldly says the poor should just die and reduce the "surplus population."

Two portly gentlemen arrive next, collecting money for the poor so that they might have food and warmth at Christmas. They expect Scrooge to give generously given his wealth. Instead, Scrooge asks coldly whether the prisons and workhouses are still operating, and when told that many of the poor would rather die than go to such places, he delivers his most chilling line, that they had better do it, and "decrease the surplus population." This moment is the harshest expression of Scrooge's character in the whole stave, reducing suffering human beings to a number that is inconvenient to him, and it is the line most often used to show Dickens's target: the hard, uncaring attitudes some wealthy Victorians held toward poverty.

Bob Cratchit asks for Christmas Day off. Scrooge grumbles but agrees, then walks home alone through the cold fog to his lonely rooms.

As the office finally closes for the night, Bob Cratchit asks, carefully and a little nervously, whether he might have the whole of Christmas Day off. Scrooge grumbles that it is unfair for him to pay a full day's wages for no work, but when Bob points out that it is "only once a year," Scrooge agrees, though only on the condition that Bob comes in earlier than usual the next morning. This small scene shows a flicker of Scrooge giving ground, even if resentfully, which later contrasts with the greater change to come. Scrooge then walks home alone through the fog and frost to his gloomy set of rooms, which once belonged to Marley, carrying his usual sourness with him into the dark.

At home, the ghost of Marley appears in heavy chains he made through his own greed in life. He warns Scrooge that three spirits will visit him, and this is his only chance to change before it is too late.

At home, Scrooge is startled first by the strange sight of the door knocker briefly appearing to show Marley's face, and then, once inside, by the arrival of Marley's ghost itself, transparent and dragging a long chain made of cash boxes, keys, padlocks and ledgers. Marley explains that the chain was forged link by link and yard by yard through his own greed and selfishness while he was alive, telling Scrooge directly, "I wear the chain I forged in life." He warns that Scrooge's own chain, unseen, is at least as long and heavy, built by the same kind of living. Marley tells Scrooge that he has one chance to escape a similar fate: he will be visited by three more spirits, on three separate nights, and these visits are his only hope of avoiding Marley's own miserable existence after death. Shaken and exhausted, Scrooge goes straight to bed once the ghost departs, falling instantly into a deep sleep as the stave ends.