Old Joe is a disreputable, seedy pawnbroker in Charles Dickens's short novel A Christmas Carol . He appears only in the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sequence, when the undertaker, the charwoman and the laundress all get together to sell him the furnishings they stole from Scrooge's room (and from Scrooge's body) as he lay there dead. The three of them behave with no respect whatsoever towards the memory of Scrooge, and Old Joe shows feigned shock. The live Scrooge witnesses this scene with the Ghost, but is completely unaware that he is the dead man they are all talking about.Old Joe is featured in some of the film versions of A Christmas Carol , but is completely omitted in others, notably the 1938 M-G-M adaptation with Reginald Owen as Scrooge.