A ghost in clanking chains is an image indelibly linked with
A Christmas Carol. Now a historian claims that Charles Dickens lifted the description of Marley s ghost from a story written 1700 years earlier by Pliny the Younger. Daisy Dunn, who has written a biography of the Roman senator, explains here for
The Daily Telegraph how she was struck by the similarity between Dickens s description of hearing the ghost, and a passage in Pliny s tale of Athenodorus. She found that Dickens owned a book,
The Philosophy of Mystery, by W C Dendy. Published in 1841, two years before
A Christmas Carol, it featured Pliny s ghost story.
The great Victorian author may have taken Marley and the three spirits from ideas in Classical writings
22 December 2020 • 6:00am
Reginald Owen s Scrooge meets Leo Carroll s ghostly Morley in the 1938 film version of A Christmas Carol
Credit: Everett
A ghost in clanking chains is an image indelibly linked with A Christmas Carol
. Now a historian claims that Charles Dickens lifted the description of Marley’s ghost from a story written 1,700 years earlier by Pliny the Younger.
Daisy Dunn, who has written a biography of the Roman senator, explains here for The Telegraph how she was struck by the similarity between Dickens’s description of hearing the ghost, and a passage in Pliny’s tale of Athenodorus.