Literature as a whole has developed and built upon the foundations laid by the many great authors of the past. As a result, many works now are able to easily evoke feelings and emotion; such as tension or suspense, within a reader. One of the most influential and crucial of these older works is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses a detailed description of the scenery, exaggeration, and language tailored to the audience to masterfully generate a sense of tension and suspense.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.
In this passage, Dickens ensures to describe exactly what is occurring to Scrooge and the thoughts racing through his mind. Due to the confusing nature of the situation, the reader is left to ponder the nature of what is going on and what could be causing such oddities. This begins to instill a sense of suspense and anticipation for what will happen next. Moreover, Dickens describes the noise that Scrooge is hearing as if it were created by a ‘person’. This contradicts earlier events in which Scrooge meticulously checks his home for the sign of any other person: of which there is none. As a result of this, Dickens plants a seed in the audience’s mind that there may be some kind of supernatural or paranormal activity at play, pushing the sense of tension further. Dickens also exaggerates that the amount of time it took the ringing bells to cease ‘seemed an hour’. This is done to emphasize the overwhelming presence that Scrooge is experiencing and reinforce the suspense of what is to come. Furthermore, Dickens slightly limits his usually omniscient narrator. Instead of flat out telling the reader what or who is generating this concerning disruption, the narrator withholds information to leave the audience guessing about how the story will proceed: helping add to the sense of tension and suspense. However, this could be interpreted in the complete opposite way. A reader might see the commotion as a figment of Scrooge’s imagination and that there is no real threat being posed. Due to the fact that there is no tangible being or source of the noise being stated, an individual could feel no sense of tension or suspense whatsoever. As a link to the context, Dickens wrote Scrooge as a means to represent the rich and greedy of Victorian society. Dickens’ resentment toward the social system at the time can be clearly seen, with this passage clearly representing the beginning of the repercussions and suffering that Scrooge will have if he does not change his selfishness, greed and harsh treatment of the poor. Moreover, A Christmas Carol is a children’s novel. Dickens uses the comparison of ‘ghosts in haunted houses’ to help portray the sense of tension and suspense to his target audience: young Victorian readers.
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