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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.