Stave 1 : Scrooge gets Steampunked

"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."

My image of the locomotive hearse is a composite image, the hearse drawn on tracing paper, which I then set over my drawing of the stairs :

Long before the internal combustion engine, there was steam.  Part of my interest in A Christmas Carol is Dickens's descriptions of the material culture around him.  I've already talked about the gas lines in London, and steam had been in use since about a century before the introduction of coal gas.  The nineteenth century, especially in Britain, was an era of new technology and people were undoubtedly fascinated by it, just as our society is fascinated by digital technology.  Dickens doesn't ignore the environmental impacts - note his description of the London winter fog as "palpable brown air."

This "locomotive hearse" engaged my curiosity.  When I was a little kid, three or four years old, I loved trains.  Anything to do with trains.  So I was struck by that adjective "locomotive."  Why that word?  Because there were such things.  Once again, I am indebted to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.  Following are the links to the research I found, including specific pages for the images.

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_steam_road_vehicles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Steam_Carriage

On Richard Trevithick, creator of the London Steam Carriage : 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevithick

On John Scott Russell, another steam carriage builder :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scott_Russell

On Walter Hancock, yet another steam carriage builder :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hancock

Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, and his steam carriages : 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsworthy_Gurney#Gurney.27s_steam_carriage

Another application of steam power, the traction engine :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine

Article on balusters, which I looked at while developing the stairs (and, BTW, some of Robert Seymour's illustrations include useful depictions of architectural details, including balusters) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baluster


IMAGES ON WIKIMEDIA COMMONS :

Caricature of the steam power fad, 1831 :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1831-View-Whitechapel-Road-steam-carriage-caricature.jpg

Richard Trevithick's London Steam Carriage : 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trevithicks_Dampfwagen.jpg

John Scott Russell's steam carriage :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russell%27s_steam_carriage.png

Walter Hancock's steam omnibus :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PSM_V57_D418_Steam_ominubus_made_by_hancock.png

Hancock's steam carriage named Enterprise :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Entreprise.JPG

A period illustration of Gurney's steam carriage :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goldsworthy_Gurney_steam_carriage_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_12496.png

I used this image, a painting by John Frederick Herring, Sr., as material for a study of the suspension system of a nineteenth-century coach :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Edinburgh_and_London_Royal_Mail_by_John_Frederick_Herring,_Sr.jpg


The following images are all by me.  They show (in reverse order) the development of my final image of the Locomotive Hearse.  I tried to incorporate the logical mechanical parts of such a vehicle (wheels, axle, suspension, chain drive to accommodate the suspension, flywheel gear, connecting rod, piston, steam chest, smokestack, firebox, and coal box) with historical accuracy, but without imitating the above examples.  My drawing of course shows a hearse, not a passenger carriage (indeed, I've found no examples of a steam-powered hearse besides Dickens's mention of it in this story).  I've designed it asymmetrically, with the coffin compartment built above the suspension, on the right-hand side of the vehicle, with the coal box mounted below it.  The firebox is set crosswise on the left-hand side, on the stoker's platform, which hangs off the chassis platform but well below the level of the leafspring mounts.  The steam chest is mounted directly above the firebox, to the left of the coffin compartment, with a narrow gap in between to accommodate the drive chain.  The smokestack is to the left of the steam chest.  If the final image (see above) is obscure, it is supposed to be - the stairway is very dark, so dark that Scrooge cannot be sure if he has seen this contraption or not.

Here is the drawing of the stairs :

And the hearse, on tracing paper :

My draft study for the hearse :

My very rough initial sketch :

My sketch study after John Frederick Herring, Sr.'s, painting (see link above) :  

My sketch after Herring Sr. doesn't do what I intended - I was trying to get figure out the mechanics underneath one of these carriages, and I got some things wrong.  But this is one reason why artists make sketches, to find the problems and figure them out.