Jacob Marley

Jacob Marley
Jacob Marley's ghost visits Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
First appearance	A Christmas Carol 1843
Created by	Charles Dickens
Information
Nickname(s)	J.M.
Species	Ghost (Formerly Human)
Gender	Male
Occupation	Business Partner/ Accountant
Family	unspecified (no stated family)
Relatives	The Ghost of Christmas Past The Ghost of Christmas Present The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

Jacob Marley is a fictional character who appears in Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. He is Scrooge's deceased business partner, now a chained and tormented ghost, damned to wander the earth forevermore as punishment for his greedy, selfish and uncaring attitude towards mankind. Marley roams restlessly, witnessing the hardships others suffer and lamenting that he has lost his chance to help them forever. Through unknown means, it is Marley who arranges for the three spirits to visit Scrooge and gives him his opportunity for redemption, which Marley tells him was "...a chance and hope of my procuring."

In A Christmas Carol, Marley is the first character mentioned in the first line of the story. Jacob Marley is said to have died seven years earlier on Christmas Eve (as the setting is Christmas Eve 1843, this would have made the date of his passing December 24, 1836).

In life, Jacob Marley was the business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge. They co-owned the firm of Scrooge and Marley, and he refers to their offices as 'our money-changing hole'. They became successful yet hard-hearted bankers, with seats on the . Scrooge is described as Marley's "sole friend" and "sole mourner", and praises Marley as being a good friend to him.

It would be Marley's ghost who would be Scrooge's first visitor (before the three other spirits to come); Marley preys upon Scrooge's mind in many different ways, notably his face manifesting on the knocker on Ebenezer Scrooge's front door and causing the bells in his house to ring. The ghost maintains the same voice, hairstyle and sense of dress that he had in life, but is translucent. He wears a handkerchief tied about his jaws, and "captive, bound and double-ironed" with chains which are described as "long, and wound about him like a tail; it was made... of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel." He often, in moments of great despair or impatience at Scrooge's scepticism, flings these upon the ground before him and almost induces his former partner "into a swoon". He explains that it is the chain he unknowingly forged himself in life, as a result of his greed and selfishness. As he spent his life on this earth obsessing over money and mistreating the poor and wretched to fill his pocket, Marley is condemned to walk the earth for eternity never to find rest or peace, experiencing an "incessant torture of remorse", lamenting that Christmas is the time he suffers most of all.