I read this in Pickwick Papers. He’s describing pubs in The Borough.

Great, rambling queer old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any

The bit about the stair case being ‘wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories’ reminded me of this bit in A Christmas Carol, which was published 6 or 7 years later

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.

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