Recency

In the first post I made on this blog, I referred to the opening line in Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol. Today I watched the video version of that story as told by Jim Henson’s Muppets. In doing so, I discovered a mistake.

I quoted the opening line of the story this way:
“The Marleys were dead, to begin with.”
In reality, Dickens wrote:
”Marley was dead, to begin with.”

Where did I go wrong? Why did I make a plural where it should have been singular?

Dickens told of only one man named Marley (Jacob) who had died and returned in spirit to warn his mortal colleague, Ebenezer Scrooge, of the horrors that awaited selfish men in the next life. To make use of their existing characters, the Muppet team pluralized that figure into two men named Marley (Jacob and Robert) and used the two old hecklers (Statler and Waldorf) to represent them. For any Muppet fan, having Statler without Waldorf or the other way around is just not right.

My error was likely caused, in part, by the recency effect. It has been a long time since I read A Christmas Carol. I have seen the Muppet retelling several times after my initial reading, giving my brain a chance to accept that version as correct simply because it is the most recent in my memory.