The Signalman - Charles Dickens

 The Signalman - Charles Dickens

Although he is best known for lengthy novels, Charles Dickens wrote some interesting short works. A Christmas Carol is a novella, and, for this reader, all the better for its brevity. However, I most admire his late short story, The Signalman.

It was first published in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round, the magazine that Dickens had founded after falling out with the publisher of Household Words. Dickens seems to have enjoyed collaborative projects with other writers and several of these projects formed themes for issues of All the Year Round. For Christmas 1866, the theme was based around the fictional railway hub of Mugby Junction. Dickens wrote a framing story and the ‘Main line’ story. He and four others then contributed one tale for each ‘branch line’. 

‘No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman’ has associations with two real rail disasters. The Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861 caused 23 deaths and 176 injuries. One of the contributing causes to the disaster was a misunderstanding between two signalmen, resulting in a train crashing into the rear of another standing inside the tunnel. Signalling and safety procedures were changed throughout the railway system after the crash.

In 1865, Dickens had been a passenger on the train involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. Again, one of the causes of the accident was a failure in signalling procedure. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens was one of the passengers who tried to help the injured, carrying water in his hat. According to his son, the incident had a profound effect on Dickens, making him nervous about train travel for the remainder of his life.

By 1866, the tradition of the Christmas ghost story was well established, in part due to the influence of A Christmas Carol. Many of the finer Victorian ghost stories were published in Christmas editions and three of the five branch lines in Mugby Junction feature ghosts. Many of the readers of All the Year Round would have been railway travellers, as the rise of the railways had driven the market for literary magazines. Again, a large part of Dickens’s success and popularity arose from his mastery of the serial form. One can only imagine what it must have been like to have read The Signalman in a railway carriage in the days of steam trains and gas lights.

Dickens wrote his tale long before there was any real exploration of language as a system of signs. Psychology as a science was in its infancy. For the modern reader, the number of ways in which signs and signals are at play in the story is fascinating. Dickens has given us a tale in which signification and interpretation are at the heart of events. 

In many of Poe’s stories, the apparently supernatural events can be explained by reference to aberrant psychology. The Signalman opens itself to psychological interpretation, and still there is a suggestion of the supernatural which cannot be dismissed within the frame of the story. In such a case, it is always worth considering what structure is being supported by the supernatural event. What does it say about a view of life that accepts the fatalism revealed in the Signalman’s experience of the apparition? What does the credulous reader want to believe about life? And why would they want to believe that? What would the pay-off be? Ghost and horror stories ask important questions of the reader, questions that extend beyond the parameters of the society that produced them. Dickens’s readership was largely Christian and, still, likely to accept the possibility of ghosts with much of the same credence that applies to religious faith; though this acceptance should have raised theological questions. A rationalist critic might be concerned with how the story achieves its effect; and also how humans attach significance to things seen, things imagined and things dreamed in order to create narratives. In other words, what does the apparent truth procedure within the story reveal of the truth procedures that we are engaged in?