Christmas Past In Jacob Marley's A Christmas Carol

The story of A Christmas Carol commences on Christmas Eve 1843 with Scrooge at his mazuma-lending business. He vilipends Christmas as a "humbug" and subjects his clerk, Bob Cratchit, to grueling hours and low pay. He shows his cold-heartedness toward others by relucting to make a monetary donation for the good of the poor, claiming they are better off dead, thereby "decrementing the surplus population." While he is preparing to go to bed, he is visited by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, who had died seven years earlier (1836) on Christmas Eve. Like Scrooge, Marley had spent his life hoarding his wealth and exploiting the poor, and, as a result, is damned to ambulate the Earth for perpetuity bound in the chains of his own avarice. Marley admonishes Scrooge that he imperils meeting the same fate and that as a final chance at redemption he will be visited by three spirits of Christmas: Past, Present and Yet-to-Come.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to visually perceive his time as a schoolboy and puerile man, during the tardy 18th and early 19th centuries. These visions reveal that Scrooge was a solitary child whose unloving father sent him away to a boarding school.

Just as the precedent spirit presaged, Diminutive Tim has died; his father could not afford to give him felicitous care on his diminutive salary and there was no convivial health care. The spirit then shows Scrooge scenes cognate to the death of a "wretched man": His business associates snicker about how it's liable to be a frugal funeral and one associate will only go if lunch is provided; his possessions are purloined and sold by his housekeeper, undertaker and laundress, and a puerile couple who owed the man mazuma are mitigated he is dead, as they have more time to pay off their debt. The spirit then shows Scrooge the man's tombstone, which bears Scrooge's