Crachet

Marley

In Dicken's A Christmas Carol, we meet Scrooge, "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." He is in conflict with everyone, his nephew (to whom he says his famous "Bah! Humbug!"), two gentlemen seeking a "slight provision for the Poor and destitute" plus, of course, his humble clerk Bob Cratchit. Scrooge takes refuge in the law and established social structures - prisons, Union workhouses, the "Treadmill and the Poor Law". The presenting conflict between Scrooge and Cratchit is about Cratchit being off work, with pay, on Christmas Day. "You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?" said Scrooge. "If quite convenient, Sir." "It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not fair. If myself was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself badly favoured, I'll be bound?" The clerk smiled faintly. "And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used, when now I pay a day's wages for no work." The clerk observed that it was only once a year payment. "A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning! "The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The rest of the story is a mediation process between Scrooge and humanity, that is between the epitome of the difficult, cynical, selfish, dysfunctional SOB and all that is good in the human heart and spirit In Chapter Two, the ghost of Scrooge's dead partner Jacob Marley appears before Scrooge to convene the mediation. Weighed down by a chain "made of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel", Marley's tormented Ghost fills Scrooge with fear. He was straight from Hell. Marley uses strong or even coercive measures to "persuade" Scrooge to participate in the "mediation" to be conducted by the Three Spirits, as co-mediators. However, we have a clue that something inside Scrooge is ready for, or even seeking, the transformation that he is about to experience. Marley's Ghost says: "How is it that when I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and truly many a day."