“Marley was useless: to start with,” begins Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghostly morality story of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, by way of a collection of encounters with spirits within the early hours of Christmas morning, realises he wants to alter his methods.
It’s an imagined story – there isn’t any Scrooge and, not like his unlucky enterprise associate, he isn’t useless. However that doesn’t seem to have mattered to a vandal in Shropshire, the place a headstone of Scrooge utilized in a 1984 movie adaptation has been smashed into a number of items.
The prop, a heavy piece of stone a number of centimetres thick engraved with the identify “Ebenezer Scrooge”, has lain within the graveyard of St Chad’s church, Shrewsbury, for the reason that film 40 years in the past starring George C Scott.
Whereas Scrooge is unquestionably fictional, the stone might have belonged to an unknown actual particular person whose identify was weathered away over lots of of years, based on a BBC interview with Martin Wooden, Shrewsbury’s city crier, who was a physique double within the movie.
It may be seen within the scene the place Scrooge, described by Dickens as “a squeezing, wrenching, greedy, scraping, clutching, covetous, outdated sinner”, is taken to the grave of an unloved man by the Ghost of Christmas But to Come and discovers it bears his personal identify.
City council clerk Helen Ball stated the prop was a well-liked attraction within the village. “It’s a kind of issues that could be very expensive to all people’s hearts,” she informed BBC Radio Shropshire. “While you have a look at the Fb messages that folks placed on yesterday, it’s united a neighborhood by way of the disgust that anyone can try this.”
The film was filmed round Shropshire and is one in every of numerous beloved variations of the e-book, which additionally features a 2019 Stephen Knight miniseries for the BBC with Man Pearce, a Disney model with Jim Carrey and, arguably probably the most devoted of all, the Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine as Scrooge and narrated by Gonzo as Dickens.
Ball stated the harm had been reported to the police when it was found on Sunday morning however the id and motive of the offender was unknown.
She stated: “Perhaps if it’s somebody of their drunken revelry, they may have posted it on Fb or one thing, and perhaps anyone with a little bit of conscience may tell us who that’s.
“Or equally,” she stated, offering a doubtlessly satisfying ending, “the one that did it could have a conscience and resolve to personal up”.
Ball added, in true Victorian model, it might be a “good motive to convey the shares again”.
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