Did a terrifying Roman ghost story inspire Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol?

A ghost in clanking chains is an image indelibly linked with A Christmas Carol. Now a historian claims that Charles Dickens lifted the description of Marley’s ghost from a story written 1,700 years earlier by Pliny the Younger.

Daisy Dunn, who has written a biography of the Roman senator, explains here for The Telegraph how she was struck by the similarity between Dickens’s description of hearing the ghost, and a passage in Pliny’s tale of Athenodorus.

She found that Dickens owned a book, The Philosophy of Mystery, by W C Dendy. Published in 1841, two years before A Christmas Carol, it featured Pliny’s ghost story.

In 1842, Dickens also saw shackled prisoners when he visited the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and wondered if they were “nightly visited by spectres”. He wrote to a friend: “What if ghosts be one of the terrors of these jails?”

I was sitting by the fire a few days ago, A Christmas Carol in my lap, when a peculiar ghost appeared before me. At first, I doubted my vision, and blamed it on indigestion but there was no denying it, mirabile dictu, the likenes was irrefutable: Jacob Marley had met his hideous match.

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 the chains that confined him.

It was while I was reading these words that my ghostly apparition announced himself. He was at least middle-aged, ugly, and rose from the pages, shifting me from the comfort of my armchair.

For I had the strangest feeling that I had seen this clanking, fettered line – or something very like it – before I had even opened Dickens’s book. Sure enough, 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 did not belong to Dickens. They were originally written in Latin some 1,700 years before he was born. And they described not Jacob Marley, but a similarly grotesque spirit, who now had the audacity to appear to me on this yuletide night.

I put my Dickens aside and continued reading what turned out to be a very early, very eerie ghost story.

A man named Athenodorus, it begins, has moved into a large old villa in Athens, surprised at finding it so cheap. On his first night in his new home, he hears the horrid trembling of chains, and realises that the rumours must be true. There is a spirit about this place.  

Athenodorus sits up as the clanking draws nearer. Suddenly, the ghost of a petulant man looms up and begins shaking his chains and shackles aggressively over his head. Athenodorus does his best to avoid meeting the spirit’s gaze, only to find it impossible.

Marley’s ghost summons Scrooge to the window. Athenodorus’s visitor summons him rather to the courtyard, where he mysteriously vanishes. Athenodorus goes to bed, and on the next day, has his terrace dug up. Beneath it lie the chained remains of a slave. The spirit, like Marley’s, had been unable to rest in peace. The bones are given due burial and the ghost is never seen again.  

The 19th-century novelist Andrew Lang described “the old-fashioned phenomenon of clanking chains” in Dickens’s story as “derived from classical superstition”. Scrooge himself knows that ghosts “were described” as dragging chains. 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 best known for surviving the eruption of Vesuvius that smothered Pompeii in AD 79. Pliny in fact wrote the only known eyewitness account of the disaster, in which his uncle of the same name sadly died.

The eruption held a lurid fascination for readers in Charles Dickens’s time. There was even an attempt to stage a re-enactment of it as part of a fireworks display in Vauxhall when he was a boy.

Dickens himself was so intrigued by the volcano that he decided to climb it in 1845. Two years after A Christmas Carol came out, he described, like Pliny before him, the terror of Vesuvius as he inched towards its fire, “desolate and awful”.

As ancient writers go, Pliny was rather a serious-minded one, more at home at his desk than at ease. Like Scrooge, too, he 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 and businesses closed. Reluctant to join in the festivities, the workaholic Pliny shut himself away in a room so soundproof that he couldn’t hear the chatter of his household. It was tradition in Rome for slaves to swap places with their masters as part of the fun of the season. Bah humbug! In Pliny’s house, they could keep their holiday in their way, provided they let him keep it in his. This solitary oyster had work to do.

Intrigued by the possibility that Dickens was inspired by this rather grouchy Roman writer, I set about some Christmas sleuthing, the servile ghost breathing all the while down my neck. After arranging my presents around the tree, I began to hunt down inventories of Dickens’s household goods, eager to discover which books were on his shelves.  

In reality, the next bit involved a trip to the British Library, but let’s not disrupt this Christmas scene. Dickens’s collection proved to be remarkably rich. 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, including a dictionary of antiquities, the poems of Horace, and William Cowper’s translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. But there was no sign of Pliny.  

It was only after some more digging that I got my lead. Précised in English 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 scepticism – was written by a surgeon named W. C. Dendy and published in 1841 – two years before A Christmas Carol.

This may not have been incontrovertible proof that Dickens used the tale as inspiration, but it certainly increased the likelihood that A Christmas Carol had its origins in the ancient world. I remain convinced that 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.”

I was on the verge of securing my windows, fearful I should be flown back over the most awkward years of my youth, when the spirit vanished. No one can say that Classics is dead. I crept to bed, Dickens tucked safely into my dressing-gown pocket, and slept through to Christmas morning. At the foot of my stocking was a silver chain.

Daisy Dunn is the author of In the Shadow of Vesuvius (HarperCollins). She thanks John Byron Kuhner for pointing her to the passage in Seneca