Читать книгу Miss Marley: A Christmas ghost story - a prequel to A Christmas Carol - Rebecca Mascull, Vanessa Lafaye - Страница 6

Author’s Note

This story is one of pure invention. I have long been fascinated by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, finding new meaning and new dimensions with every version that I have studied. However, the one character who intrigued me the most, the one on whom the whole tale seems to hang, appears in only three brief scenes: Jacob Marley.

Doomed to drag his chains across the earth for all eternity, yet determined to help Scrooge avoid his fate, Marley seems to me an extremely complex character. I wondered what Marley had done to deserve his desperately severe punishment. Surely, I thought, it would take more than what he quotes to Scrooge – the fact that he neglected his fellow man and never left the counting house?

Since Dickens chose to deny us any more insight into this enigmatic figure, I started to wonder about Marley’s life story, an exercise which gradually consumed my imagination. I wanted to understand the events which shaped him, which led him to be the man he is as Scrooge’s partner – and then to regret this so bitterly that he returns from the grave to put things right.

I have invented a sister, Clara Belle Marley, to give us the answers to these questions. I confess that the idea of inhabiting Marley himself felt too much like trespassing. Through the eyes of Clara, a character purely of my own creation, I can tell my invented story freely.

That said, I was so conscious of the love and reverence felt for the original, that it was almost impossible not to be paralysed by self-consciousness as I wrote this. I hope that other devotees of A Christmas Carol, and Dickens’ work in general, will grant me license to explore Marley and his unseen, yet pivotal, role in this classic tale.

Vanessa Lafaye, February 2018