Every year I say I’ll ask this and never do, and for those that say there are no such things as ghosts, we all know that, but in the story they may exists. Poll to come.
Was Scrooge visited by the three ghosts and Jacob Marley? Or were they merely a ‘bit of potato’ and a dream?
I can’t really tell as if I was Marley, fuck Scrooge, let him have his chains, why should I help him out and let him get out his problems while I was stuck there forever? I’d want him around just for the company.
None of the above.
He was visited by FOUR ghosts. 
How else would he have known about what was going on with Bob Crachitt’s family/Tiny Tim? The other stuff could have just been stuff he made up or remembered but he’d have no way of knowing who the other Crachitt family members were or any of their problems or issues. Or what their house looked like.
But how do we know that he even knew that much? I don’t remember the book that well so I don’t know if he went at the end or not. However, don’t you think that there are times when Bob talks about his home life to someone even if it’s not Scrooge?
And Peter don’t make me come visit you on Christmas Eve, I have better things to do.
Hmm, it’s been a while since I read it so I checked wiki. Apparently he sends a turkey to the Cratchit family anonymously but spends Christmas Day with his nephew Fred. So I suppose Tiny Tim could have been a dream. In the last movie version I saw (the Muppets, the most awesome version of all time), he does go to see the Cratchit family in person and sees Tiny Tim and the others.
I don’t see that the two are mutually exclusive. There’s plenty of precedent in literature and mythology for spirits using dreams as a medium to appear to people. Even without leaving the season, the Bible has angels appearing to Joseph in a dream telling him to stick with Mary, and to the Magi telling them to avoid Herod on the way home. If angels can do it, why not ghosts (especially considering that three of the four spirits who appear to Scrooge seem to be better-described as angels than as ghosts, anyway).
He wasn’t sleeping when he saw Marley’s ghost.
Isn’t it just. That reminds me that I haven’t watched it yet this year. Maybe tonight.
Regarding the ghosts, I’m going to congratulate Mr. Dickens on being deliberately ambiguous so that anyone can enjoy the story, whether they believe in ghosts or not. Well, done, sir. I applaud your inclusiveness.
Regarding:
How do we know that the portrayal was accurate? If it’s a dream, it could be just what he imagined the house looked like.
I just read the ending, from when Scrooge wakes up he hires a boy to buy a goose to have sent to Bob’s house. He then gets ready to go to his nephew’s house for dinner. The next day he goes to work early hoping Bob comes in late then gives him a raise.
So it is possible that none of it was real and Scrooge’s brain really put all of it together. He doesn’t believe in Jacob when he first sees him and could very well been asleep.
I think he was correct when he told “Marley’s Ghost”
He’s having hallucinations from food poisoning due to an ergot and opium tincture solution Bob Cratchit dumped into his tea. Cratchit’s already made the plans, in collusion with Scrooge’s nephew Fred, to turn over his estate to a conservatorship formed by them once it becomes apparent Old Scrooge is Mental, and talking about ghosts will be just the thing to do it.
Interesting. The idea that it was just Scrooge’s dream explains why the spirits did it all in one night, not in 3 as Marley told him.
On the other hand, what would prompt Scrooge to have that dream? Chance? Just realizing Marley died exactly 7 years ago? Why would that make a difference? There’s no textual evidence for that.
I’ll still go with actual ghosts. It’s the obvious answer. The express treatment is just Dickens surprising us AND Scrooge.
The dream theory can also explain another inconsistency. The Ghost of Christmas Past tells Scrooge it’s “Your past” that we will see. But the last GOCPa scene shows the adult Belle at the time Marley was dying, happily married to another man and with her happy family which as far as we know Scrooge had no knowledge of. Her husband says,
Assume Scrooge knew who her husband was and they saw each other. A passing encounter 7 years ago doesn’t seem to be adequate to even suggest this scene in his dream.
As Dumbledore told Harry Potter, “Of course it’s all in your head. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.”
An interesting theory. However I find it more likely that Cratchit spiked his tea with paregoric, then employed the services of his friends Emilia Clevervetements and Martin Fancibackdrop, respectively the costumier and set designer from the local music hall, to create an ingenious phantasmagoria into which the unwitting Scrooge is led in opiated stupour in order for Cratchit’s dreadful neuromagnetic plan to unfold.
For it not to be what happened, we’d have to have an unreliable narrator. We weren’t told things from Scrooge’s point of view, but from an omniscient narrator. We were told flat out that the ghosts came, not that Scrooge thought the ghosts came.
Now the unreliable narrator is not the default. We need something that doesn’t make sense unless we assume the narrator is giving false information. The examples given are wholly unsatisfactory–a couple ghosts making slightly inaccurate statements is not enough.
Plus I have to think of it this way: what would have led crotchety old Scrooge to have these dreams in the first place? People don’t tend to just dream things that are completely antithetical to their own values. He’d have to be feeling guilty about everything he did. And did we see any sign of this before he saw Marley’s ghost?
No, I prefer to stick with Occam’s Razor. If it it makes sense as shown, trying to change it just results in a different story. And there are an infinite number of stories: what if Scrooge didn’t exist, and this was a fable Tim Cratchet told his grandkids who were starting to hate Christmas? Or what if Scrooge did exist, but never reformed, and this was just what Bob told Tiny Tim before he died, so that Tim wouldn’t worry about him? This way lies madness.
I voted Ghosts.
The feeling of guilt is the clincher for me, especially with regard to Scrooge’s sister and the way he treated his nephew. If real-time Scrooge had heard Fan say “take care of my son” as she lay dying, things might have been different. He didn’t hear her say it, and he felt no guilt until GhostPast took him back to her deathbed.
Well anything can be a dream. “Dallas” wasted a season on a dream, which was copied by “Newhart” which wasted a whole series on a dream and “Married With Children” used it, though that was excusable as it was a tactful way of dealing with Katey Segal’s miscarriage
Unfortunately, the deathbed scene isn’t in the book. It’s in the Sim version (and others, I assume).
Not ghosts. Scrooge was, you see, a mutant. Fortunately for all of us, Peter David figured this out years ago.
What the Dickens
Obviously, to make this point, I’d have to quote the entire essay. Here’s a bit,
“Scrooge’s main power was a combination of time travel. He also had the power of telepathic projection, projecting images of his own devising and also from history or literature.”
Works for me!
“(Peter David, writer of stuff, will next theorize how Mary Poppins was actually a Time Lord, and her carpet bag was actually her TARDIS, which would explain how it was able to transport her (the umbrella was just a prop) and how she could fit so much stuff into it, and… eh, maybe not.)”