What Kind of Business Did Scrooge&Marley Indulge In?

[Max_Torque]

In what I consider the definitive movie version, a Muppet asks Scrooge not to yell at him, but he’s late with his mortgage payment. Given that, I’d guess some sort of moneylender/landlord combination, making his money from real estate.

[Sampiro]

Per Dickens himself, Scrooge was based in part on John Elwes. His fortune came through real estate, moneylending (though per wiki he lost a lot of money by loaning to titled noblemen who he would not ask to repay), neurotic miserliness, and investments.

Marley refers to himself as a money-changer:

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Stave 1: Marley’s Ghost

… in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!"

From Stave 2 there’s this when Scrooge is afraid he’s slept an entire day:

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth, would have become a mere United States’ security if there were no days to count by.

So to at least some extent he invested in securities.

[rowrrbazzle]

@Alan_Smithee

Personally, I prefer to stick with the actual text or the Rich Little version.

I vividly remember a TV interview in which Little told this eerie story. In 1963 he did an LP version titled “Scrooge and the Stars”. One of the impressions was of JFK for the Ghost of Xmas Present. The LP actually appeared in stores on November 22. And JFK had the line, straight from Dickens:

My life upon this globe is very brief. It ends to-night.

Little said they withdrew the album and re-recorded the part with another voice. However, a few albums had been sold and were still out there. Just last year I obtained an mp3 of the album.

[rowrrbazzle]

@jjimm

We definitely say “maize” but I’ve never even heard the term “Indian corn”.

I got it from Frank Muir on one of the reruns of “My Word!”

[Sampiro]

I wonder if Scrooge & Marley’s firm name on the London Exchange was just S&M, and if that had anything to do with how they made their money.

[SciFiSam]

I’ve never heard maize said in real life, and seen it more in American sources than British. ‘Indian Corn?’ I would have assumed that meant corn. We say corn for corn and wheat for wheat.

Corn=wheat did used to be true, but hasn’t been for at least a century.

@Miller

Maybe - it could also have been a standard warehouse for fresh fish that set up a fry stand out front to get a little extra cash from the local dock workers.

Dictionary.com lists "*British . a large retail store," as a definition for the term “warehouse,” which I take to mean things like Best Buy. Hard to imagine a shop on that scale only selling fish and chips, though, so I assume that wasn’t the specific usage Dickens had in mind.

[sub]*Heh.[/sub]

No - remember, we say shop, not store. A warehouse is a place where retail or wholesale goods are stored, not where they’re sold. There are a couple of shop chains with Warehouse as part of their name, but that’s just their name. Dictionary.com messed up. I reckon you’re right about the fried fish stand being a sideline of a main warehouse on the docks; you do see such in old pictures.