A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens. I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea. I shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay in it. Their Faithful Friend and Servant, C.D. December 1843. End of Preface A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Stave 1. Marley's Ghost. Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register on his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge's name was good upon change. Anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind, I don't mean to say that if I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail, I might have been inclined myself to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of iron mongry in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a doornail. Scrooge knew he was dead. Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners. For I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and so lemnized it with an undoubted bargain. The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful could come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamler's father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable than his taking a stroll at night in an easterly wind upon his own ramparts, and there would be nothing in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot, say St Paul's Church Show for instance, literally to astonish his son's weak mind. Scrooge never painted out old Marley's name. There it stood years afterwards above the warehouse door. Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people knew to the business, called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him. Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,