Inside the story
Meet Jacob Marley
Jacob Marley is Ebenezer Scrooge’s deceased former business partner, returning as a ghost on Christmas Eve. He visits Scrooge in his counting house to warn him about the grim consequences of the life he has chosen.
On the page
The SPECTRE of Scrooge's dead partner: a TRANSPARENT, SEE-THROUGH apparition glowing with a cold spectral light, the room's furniture and door visible straight through his body, his edges dissolving into vapour. His HAIR IS GHOSTLY WHITE — colourless, drifting slightly as if underwater — tied back in a pigtail. Deathly pale, sunken-eyed, in the waistcoat, tights and boots he was buried in, his jaw bound up in a white cloth. A ghostly chain of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks and ledgers is clasped about his middle and trails away, itself half-transparent. Unmistakably a ghost, never a solid living man; no dark or coloured hair.
