Jacob Marley

[1] On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness.

[5] Originally intending to write a political pamphlet titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, he changed his mind[6] and instead wrote A Christmas Carol[7] which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice.

[8] In the novella, Marley and Scrooge 'were partners for I don't know how many years'[3] and were indistinguishable, both being 'good men of business', grasping of money and unconcerned about the well-being of their 'fellow travellers to the grave'.

[3] While it appears that Marley had died without being punished in life for his lack of social responsibility and his indifference to the well-being of his fellow Man,[9] unbeknown to Scrooge after death Marley is forced to roam the earth in Purgatory,[10][11] fettered in chains, cash boxes and ledger books, desperately wanting to help the poor and needy but unable to do so.

It was long and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.

Marley tells Scrooge that he will not see him again and leaves the room through the open window where he joins other souls in limbo outside who are tormented by their inability to help the poor and needy in death, as they should have done in life.

His presence in the story is to provide a warning in Stave One concerning the miserliness and misanthropy of Scrooge[16] and to act as a herald for the three Ghosts of Christmas who are to come.

The book makes it clear from the start that Old Marley was as "dead as a door-nail,"[3] a phrase first recorded in Langland's Piers Plowman of 1362 where it appears as "ded as a dore-nayl.

It becomes clear that Marley's punishment is not to be condemned to Hell, a place of eternal torment from which there is no release and no escape, but that he is in Purgatory,[14] as he has been constantly wandering the earth in the seven years since his death.

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.

[22] Clearly, these tormented souls outside the window, like Marley and Scrooge, are guilty of having failed to help those in need while they were alive; now they are dead, it is too late, and the chains with which they too are fettered were also forged by them in life and girded on of their own free will.

Attached to Marley's chain are ledgers and cash boxes, with each object symbolising money-making – his priority in life – and how he failed to act to help others.

[21] One theory for Marley's origin put forward by the film-writer and author Roger Clarke[24] and the historian Daisy Dunn is that Dickens was influenced by the writings of Pliny the Younger,[25] who related a celebrated account of a haunted house from the ancient classical world (c. 50 AD).

Pliny wrote to his friend Sura that "In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of fetters; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediately afterward a phantom appeared in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and squalid, with a long beard and bristling hair; rattling the gyves on his feet and hands.