Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter

Abstract

among them. marley’s ghost may appear and speak, but it cannot un-sign the burial register, erase the funeral and its solitary mourner, nor change the lifetime of detached cruelty that preceded it. Scrooge’s revelation is not that the dead can walk, but that they cannot atone for their previous sins. The reprehensible actions of marley’s life are embodied as heavy, restrictive objects after his death—a chain made of “ash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel” (15)—and he is left with Scrooge’s agency as a substitute for his own, explaining that it is only by persuading the living to change their ways that his eternal soul can be freed. In presenting ghosts as essentially restricted figures—catalysts to another’s action rather than the agents of their own—Dickens places marley’s ghost in a long tradition of the limited dead. marley’s chains represent not merely the consequences of his actions but the negation of action itself, a fate shared with the procession of other specters Scrooge views from his window: “The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever” (22). In this, the ghosts echo specters as distant as the ineffectually vengeful Old Hamlet, or the mournful Achilles, explaining to Odysseus that he “would rather work the soil as a serf on