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Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

That’s not how the scholars see it. Literary borrowing, even quite detailed borrowing, was accepted practice at the time—“It was just a different way of looking at things back then,” says Archibald. (“American Notes,” for instance, includes many pages of writing by the famed 19th-century physician Samuel Gridley Howe, all without attribution, and apparently without any thought by Dickens that he was doing something improper.)