IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE not to know how it opens. “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” has been filmed at least forty-two times and dramatized for the stage in dozens of versions–the first almost immediately after the book’s publication in 1843, a pirated play that Dickens spent 700 in court costs fighting before he won an uncollectable judgment against its producers (and thereby found material for the great Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that lies at the center of “Bleak House,” but that’s another story). “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail,” the famous first paragraph of “A Christmas Carol” ends.

But who remembers how the second paragraph runs? “Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”