Jacob Marley
Jacob Marley is a fictional character in Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, a former business partner of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who has been dead for seven years. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited at home by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Marley tells Scrooge that he has a single chance to avoid the same fate: he will be visited by three spirits and must listen or be cursed to carry much heavier chains of his own. However, the spirits will offer a chance of redemption. Importance to the story By early 1843, Dickens had been affected by the treatment of the poor, and in particular the treatment of the children of the poor after witnessing children working in appalling conditions in a tin mine and following a visit to a ragged school. 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 and instead wrote A Christmas Carol which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice. The ghost of Jacob Marley in Stave One