Ben Landau-Taylor

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/

The thing people overlook in A Christmas Carol is the depth of Scrooge and Marley’s friendship. Scrooge is this horrible old loner who everyone hates… except Marley, his business partner, who *comes back from the dead* for Scrooge. 2/

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/

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/

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/

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/