Sink your teeth into this doozey of an opening paragraph... again, the key is to remember that he was paid per word, and by a certain point in his career he knew he'd have a classic no-matter how redundant it was...
Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and scrooge's name was good upon 'change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowlege, 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 wistom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.
Dickens went on to get paid the equivalent of 14 million dollars. His editors were fired.
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(and by reading e.e. cummings, I mean staring at the graffiti on the drug corners of the gayborhood, and getting just as much out of it...)