You can learn a lot about a culture by reading their fiction and noticing what they take for granted. In honor of the season, let’s look at A Christmas Carol. 1/
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And they weren’t just business partners! They were extremely close! Scrooge is still torn up about Marley’s death seven years later! He was Marley’s “sole friend, and sole mourner”! 3/
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This type of very close, lifelong friendship between colleagues might seem remarkable to us now, but Dickens *never once remarks on it*. It’s just taken for granted that of course a misanthropist like Scrooge has this transcendent friendship with his business partner. 4/
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If A Christmas Carol were published today, the story would need to justify why Scrooge and Marley were so close. Or more likely, Marley’s role would be filled by e.g. Scrooge’s father rather than a colleague, since returning from the grave for your son makes sense to us. 5/
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We can infer that relationships like these were relatively common when the story was published, not because Dickens depicts it, but because Dickens expects his audience to take it in stride without any background or development. This wouldn’t happen in a story today. 6/
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It’s not that business partners today are *never* staunch lifelong friends. Rather, it’s that (1) this is much less common for us than it was in Dickens’s time, and (2) it’s not a socially recognized script for us like it was for them. 7/
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(To be fair, a single story isn’t enough to be highly confident in an interpretation like this. I confirmed this in other British literature, and in letters between actual business partners. I’d guess this was a thing in Britain from maybe the mid-1700s to the late 1800s.) 8/
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This thread was mostly about how to do anthropology through fiction, but for more on the role of friendship between business partners as a load-bearing social technology, check out Samo’s thread: https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1109849875061960705 … 9/9
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