It is one of the single most startling visions in fiction: the door knocker of Ebenezer Scrooge shapeshifting into the visage of his accursed — and 'dead as a door-nail' partner, Jacob Marley — thus ...

Marley was dead.” Those are the first words of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, although he still pops up again a couple of times: Scrooge sees his old partner’s face in the door knocker, looking ...