MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
What a triumph of tone and punctuation! Dickens unnervingly resurrects Marley at the opening of his now near immortal Christmas Carol with this supremely creepy aside. How knowingly his narrator delivers the revelation of resurrection. And how cleverly the evidence of Marley’s death piles up , strangely unconvincing in the light or darkness of the opening aside. i love the slightly meandering style of the voice. We are being told a ‘real’ story but someone whose natural propensity is to meander and reflect and then return to the subject they first introduced. Losing one’s way has never been such fun!