Was A Christmas Carol based on a 1,700-year-old story?

ONE HISTORIAN DIGS DEEP

A ghost in clanking chains is an image indelibly linked with A Christmas Carol. Now, historian

Daisy Dunn claims Charles Dickens lifted the description of Marley's ghost from a story written 1,700 years earlier by Pliny the Younger. Dunn, who has written a biography of the Roman senator, explains how she was struck by the similarity between Dickens' 1843 description of hearing the ghost and a passage in Pliny's tale of Athenodorus.

Iwas sitting by the fire a few days ago, A Christmas Carol in my lap. Scrooge was by the hearth when he heard “a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar.” A few moments later, he saw the culprit, seven years dead and brandishing chains. It was while I was reading these words that my own ghostly apparition shifted me from the comfort of my armchair.

I had the strangest feeling I had seen this clanking, fettered line — or something very like it — before I had even opened Dickens' book. I retrieved from my desk a volume of letters I had been reading a few days earlier, and fell upon this sentence: “Through the silence of the night, the clanking of iron could be heard, and, if you listened more closely, the sound of chains, distant to begin with, but then close by.” These words were written in Latin 1,700 years before Dickens was born. And they described not Jacob Marley, but a similarly grotesque spirit.

I continued reading what turned out to be a very early ghost story. A man named Athenodorus has moved into a large old villa in Athens, surprised at finding it so cheap. On the first night, he hears the horrid trembling of chains. Athenodorus sits up as the clanking draws nearer. Suddenly, the ghost of a petulant man looms up and begins shaking his chains and shackles over his head. Athenodorus does his best to avoid meeting the spirit's gaze. His visitor summons him to the courtyard, where he mysteriously vanishes. The next day Athenodorus has the terrace dug up. Beneath it lie the chained remains of a slave. The spirit, like Marley's, had been unable to rest in peace, but once given due burial the ghost is never seen again.

The 19th-century novelist Andrew Lang described “the old-fashioned phenomenon of clanking chains” in

Dickens' story as “derived from classical superstition.” Scrooge himself knows ghosts “were described” as dragging chains. In 1842, Dickens saw shackled prisoners at the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, Pa., and wondered if they were “nightly visited by spectres.”

As I contemplated the two ghosts, I began to wonder, was Dickens inspired by the ancient story? The tale of Athenodorus and the ghost was preserved by Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator known for surviving the eruption of Vesuvius that smothered Pompeii in AD79. Pliny in fact wrote the only known witness account of the disaster.

Like Scrooge, Pliny despised this time of year. While the Victorian had Christmas to contend with, the Roman had the Saturnalia — a festival of eating, drinking and merriment, when work ceased. Reluctant to join in the festivities, the workaholic Pliny shut himself away in a soundproof room. It was tradition in Rome for slaves to swap places with their masters as part of the fun. Bah humbug! In Pliny's house, they could keep their holiday in their way, provided they let him keep it in his.

Intrigued by the possibility that Dickens was inspired by this rather grouchy Roman writer, I set about some sleuthing. I hunted down inventories of Dickens's household goods. In his library were books on the history of magic, the curiosities of dreams and the philosophy of apparitions. There were even some Classical tomes, but there was no sign of Pliny.

It was only after some more digging that I got my lead. In a book Dickens owned called The Philosophy of Mystery was none other than Pliny's ghost story. This curious title — which examined ghosts, faith and skepticism — was written by a surgeon named W.C. Dendy and published two years before A Christmas Carol.

This may not have been inconvertible proof Dickens used the tale as inspiration, but it certainly increased the likelihood that A Christmas Carol had its origins in the ancient world. I am convinced Dickens was familiar with the older ghost story when he wrote his own. Satisfied, I looked up from my desk, only to find that the ghost of Christmas Long Past had not quite finished with me yet. With an insistent finger, he pointed to a copy of Seneca's first-century philosophy on my bookshelf and bade me open it.

“Life is divided into three phases,” I read aloud, “what was, what is, and what will be.” I read on: “No one willingly turns back on his life gone past unless everything he has done sits well with his conscience, which is never deceived.

“He who has greedily coveted, proudly scorned, viciously conquered, treacherously cheated, avariciously seized or wantonly squandered, must absolutely fear his own memory.”

THE SPIRIT, LIKE MARLEY'S, HAD BEEN UNABLE TO REST IN PEACE.