Grim Exaggeration
From A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens:
The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant’s cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.
You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.
Here is one among the many examples of Dickens’ liberal use of the grandiose within A Christmas Carol.
It’s wonderful in its ridiculousness. A hearse flying up a staircase; sideways. And with room to spare — “easy.”
The impossibility Dickens’ proclaims here is more than a joke or a bit of playfulness with language. To be sure, he does at every opportunity use extreme comparisons to pit the good versus the evil. Here, though, I think he digs deeper.
Dickens writes in this passage about the first time that Scrooge is in any danger.
Scrooge was, before this, content to keep living his miserable life in his counting shop. But at this point he has seen the ghost of Marley within his front door knocker. He has walked in darkness from shop to home, and now barely lights his way in conditions not fit for the bare eye to navigate. It’s so gloomy within the foyer that even the staircase as wide as a coach-and-six isn’t easily found. Scrooge’s nerves have been rattled. He’s hallucinating.
All of this, but the miserable man would never admit fear or imbalance to himself. The narrator must do it for him.
So we shake in the reverberance of this abandoned space as a symbol of the emptiness of Scrooge himself. We witness visions of the future — of death — from the hearse. We walk with Scrooge in his dim light as a reminder that, in this moment, he carries little ability to comprehend, let alone stop, what is coming.
It could have been anything large to ascend the stairs. Dickens’, ever deliberate, foreshadows and amuses with his choice, suggesting what may pass if the miser remains unchanged.