Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Scrooge was as dead as a door-nail.
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
Ebenezer Scrooge would never forget those words told to him by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley. Even after his own death in 1866, Scrooge remembered every work as he tugged on his own chains in Limbo. However, Scrooge’s chains were not as long as Marley’s and his stay in the place between life and death not as long. Scrooge changed in a single night in 1834 thanks in great part to the help of Marley and three additional spirits – those of the past, present and future.