Everyone knows Ebenezer Scrooge. But who was he before he became the haunted miser of A Christmas Carol?
This is the exciting story of how Scrooge and Marley turn from junior clerks, dismissed for bad behaviour, into the sharpest young hustlers in the Victorian City of London. They claw their way into a series of audacious deals that culminate in a deadly battle with the corpse-like Sir James Owtright. The combination of Marley’s bold flamboyance and Scrooge’s skills as a human calculating machine prove formidable.
Yet at the same time Scrooge’s personal life is turning dark as his beloved sister dies and his fiancée is alienated by his sceptical view of charity. Finally we can see the beginning of his journey towards becoming the solitary figure we know, destined to spend Christmas Eve with only ghosts for company.
Scrooge and Marley is an imagined prequel to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: a darkly comic tale of ambition, achievement, threat, loss and self-deception that asks not whether Ebenezer Scrooge can be redeemed, but how he came to need redemption in the first place.
A GALLERY OF CHARACTERS
Billy Mangell
“I ain’t for hire, Mr Skoojum,” said Billy with dignity, “nor I ain’t some ruffian that hands out beatings, neither. A gentleman pugilist finishes fights, but ’e don’t start ’em.”
Mrs Magurch
It would not, indeed, have been very misleading to say that the Society was the continuation of Mrs Magurch by other means; Mrs Magurch militant, and Mrs Magurch omnipresent. She wielded an absolute authority of a kind no Empress has ever enjoyed.
Hiram Tickflint
He had plenty of clients, and no woman need be tempted to apply for the position of his wife, left vacant by the demise of poor Mrs Tickflint seven years earlier. Tickflint was done with matrimony as he was done with all unnecessary expense.
Belle
Scrooge loved to hear her laugh better than any music – he thought she was the prettiest and most amusing young lady in the world, and I will not be the one to put up any opposition to him on that score.
Jacob Marley
I will happily swear an affidavit any day of the week to the simple fact of Marley’s liveliness. He fairly fizzed with animal spirits. The bright red weskit and old brown coat he wore proclaimed his zest no less than the jovial smile on his broad features.
Ebenezer Scrooge
He was a young man of the rational kind that prefers the regular canal to the wild cataract. He would not have been pleased to hear that his life was about to be diverted from its established path and channelled down foaming falls through his friend’s intervention.
