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.—the opening paragraph of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, a novel by Charles Dickens, was published on this date in 1843 by Chapman & Hall. It has never gone out of print. (A photograph of a reprint of the first edition is seen at top.)

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Robert Ripley’s first “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” cartoon made its debut on this date in 1918 in the New York Globe newspaper.

He first named it “Champs and Chumps,” and it was about sports, but within weeks, he began to add other items of note (the strangest, the largest, the most mostest of anything) to his drawings, and by October of the following year he changed the cartoon’s name to “Believe It or Not.”

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Raging Bull, the film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, opened in theaters on this date in 1980.

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Dr. Alois Alzheimer died on this date in 1915. V. C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic) died 30 years ago today. Marcello Mastroianni died 20 years ago on this date. Pops Staples died on ythis date in 2000. Dock Ellis died on this date in 2008.

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Sir Ralph Richardson was born on this date in 1902. Jean Genet was born in 1910 on this date. Edith Piaf was born on this date in 1915. “Hymne à l’amour”:

 

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