The opening line of
A Christmas Carol has a curious punctuation:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Why the colon? The frustrating second half of this conjunction, which would suggest an appropriate list begins with 'to begin' and yet stops right as it's begun, as if a metaphor for the snuffing of a life just started. The phrase 'To begin with' is only used, well, to introduce the beginning of a tale. In many electronic version and editions this opening line has been corrected with a comma in the colon's place, but we can trace back to the original editions to see Dicken's chosen punctuation.
The use of it is a style of rhetorical punctuation: the form of the mark overwhelms the exact function. In this case, Dickens is exacting a pause in reading which is a bit longer than a comma in a sentence, but shorter than a period. The carol (itself divided into 5 stanzas) is written to be read out loud and with specific elocution staging built in, from the first sentence to the last:
And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
(I won't even get started on enforced capitalization influencing inflection)
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