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The word Change doesn't seem to make much sense in this quote from A Christmas Carol. To emphasis the sentence, I kept it in bold-type.

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, & the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

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The meaning of the sentence relies on the word 'Change, which is a shortened form of Exchange - the stock exchange. The sentence means that Scrooge had a good reputation on the stock exchange and that his signature carried weight. There is a clue to working out the meaning, since Change begins with a capital letter, indicating that it is a proper noun and not a verb or abstract noun in this context.

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    The other clue, of course, being the apostrophe - indicating one or more missing letters in that proper noun.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 12:49
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    @Mari-Lou: Actually, there's more to it than that. Note this definition 3 for change in the full OED: A place where merchants meet for the transaction of business, an exchange. (Since 1800, erroneously treated as an abbreviation of Exchange, and written 'Change.) Now chiefly in phr. on 'Change, at the Exchange. So it's not a "Dickensism" anyway, and strictly speaking it's not an abbreviation either (or wasn't, until 1800 a few decades before Dickens perpetuated the "erroneous" usage complete with errant apostrophe).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 14:16
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    @FumbleFingers Interesting. Well, I vote for a Dickensism tag. We have one for Shakespeare.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 14:20
  • @Mari-Lou: But as established by my earlier comment, Dickens used it at least 4-5 decades after the "erroneous" usage had already been recorded, so it's not really what most people would consider a "Dickensism" (which would tend to imply a usage either coined or massively popularised by the man). Which might perhaps apply in rare instances, but I don't think Dickens changed the actual language to anything like the extent Shakespeare did (or at least, seems to have, from the current perspective).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 16:24
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    @FumbleFingers Well, the tag is dickens, there are a number of questions related to passages/terms taken from his books. I think he merits a tag all to himself. I had considered, momentarily, 19th-century-english but then thought better of it. The meaning tag is too vast and general IMHO
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 16:30
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This is a note by Michael Slater:

'Change: The Royal Exchange in the City of London, which functioned as a trading centre from 1570 to 1939.

Michael Slater. Notes, p. 275. In. Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

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This basically means that because Scrooge deals with a lot of stock exchange and holds a good reputation, his name is well known as very reliable when he puts it down on something, which suggests that Marley is indubitably dead. Later on in the story, when Marley's ghost visits Scrooge, this should make us believe that spirits are real, because of how certain Dickens has made Marley's death seem at the start of the novella.

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