Before You Begin

“Marley was dead: to begin with.” With seven of the most famous words in English, Charles Dickens opens a ghost story that has never stopped being told. It is Christmas Eve in foggy, frost-bitten London, and old Ebenezer Scrooge — “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” — sits alone in his counting-house, hoarding his coal and his coins, snarling “Bah! Humbug!” at every kindness the season offers.

What follows is a single night that has shaped how the English-speaking world imagines Christmas itself. The clanking chains of Marley’s Ghost; the radiant Ghost of Christmas Past with the jet of light springing from its head; the jolly Giant of Christmas Present enthroned among holly and roast goose; the silent, hooded Phantom of Christmas Yet to Come pointing toward a neglected grave — these are figures Dickens conjured in a few weeks in 1843, and they have haunted our houses pleasantly ever since.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was already the most celebrated novelist in Britain when he wrote this “Ghostly little book,” but few of his works have travelled so far or endured so long. Its power lies in its warmth as much as its chill: in the threadbare devotion of Bob Cratchit, in the small brave voice of Tiny Tim, and in the radical, comforting idea that no one is ever too far gone to begin again.

The story is told in five “staves” — Dickens’s word for the chapters of a carol. Turn the page and step into the wintry world that follows: the counting-house and the Cratchits’ crowded hearth, the spirits and the snow, and the longest night of one old man’s life.