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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—As Dead as a Door-Nail:
The most famous simile in A Christmas Carol (and arguably one of the most famous similes in literature overall) appears on the very first page:
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
The narrator repeats this line in the next paragraph to emphasize that Marley is, indeed, dead. Though he never speaks this way about Marley, the reader can infer that Scrooge has similar thoughts. A doornail is notably small and insignificant, but it can be used to build things. This idea recalls Marley's role as a sort of tool in Scrooge's business. Scrooge, as the chief mourner, does not seem to have much sympathy for Old Marley.
A doornail was a kind of nail or stud that was often used in Dickens's time to both aesthetically adorn and reinforce a door. Generally speaking, nails can usually be used more than once. But in Dickens's era, it was customary to hammer doornails into doors in such a way that made them useless for anything else. If the nails were hammered so their tips extended to the other side of the door, and then hammered flat against that side, they could not be extracted. Perhaps this is why Dickens chose to compare Marley to a doornail—a flattened doornail and a corpse are both fairly useless, with little to no chance of serving a purpose ever again. And yet, though the removal of such doornails is difficult, it is not impossible, and this slyly hints at the return of Marley's ghost.
The simile first appeared in Shakespeare's Henry IV. When Jack Cade leads a rebellion against the king, he declares that "if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more." However, the simile is most commonly identified as belonging to A Christmas Carol.
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