“Marley was dead: to begin with,” begins Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghostly morality tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, through a series of encounters with spirits in the early hours of Christmas morning, realises he needs to change his ways.
It is an imagined story – there is no Scrooge and, unlike his unfortunate business partner, he is not dead. But that does not appear to have mattered to a vandal in Shropshire, where a gravestone of Scrooge used in a 1984 film adaptation has been smashed into multiple pieces.
