Why Does Dickens Hang Cashboxes From a Ghost?

Why would a writer who could invent any supernatural punishment choose a set of accounts? In the opening of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley drags the tools of his old working life through the door of his former partner. This episode examines that opening visitation in detail, with spoilers for Marley’s warning and discussion of Scrooge’s opportunity to change. Follow the cashboxes and keys, listen to the chain approach through the building and look through the window at spirits who desperately want to help. Each detail changes the meaning of wealth in the story. Marley once had the means to act when somebody needed him. The terror for a living man who recognises every item on the chain is discovering what happened to that freedom.