How do the Spirits, and Marley, reform Scrooge, and, in your opinion, how successful are they?.
Ebenezer Scrooge is, at the beginning of the novel, a selfish, egotistic, miserly, stingy, voracious, greedy, tight fisted, cold hearted, reclusive, bitter, callous, harsh, heartless, unfeeling, cruel man who cares only about making money. "A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" He thinks of Christmas as a "humbug", "Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer", "if I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with merry Christmas on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart". He doesn't see how poor people with hardly any money can be happy, "What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough". .
He was so set in those ways, that the spirits had a difficult challenge ahead of them. When the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley, who had been dead for seven years, appears to warn him of his fate, Scrooge argues with him, and refuses to believe in ghosts, or indeed, him. "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato". He is in denial, and trying to convince himself that what he is seeing isn't real. At first, Scrooge argues with Marley, and angers him. "The ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked it's chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the wand would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance." Marley scares Scrooge, and he starts to listen to what he is saying, and takes it in. He is left shaken, when the ghost finally leaves. "And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the invisible world, or the dull conversation of the ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of response; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.