The Signalman: A Ghost Story

By Simon Bradley and Charles Dickens

On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens was travelling aboard the Folkestone to London Boat Train with his mistress and her mother, when it derailed while crossing a viaduct near Staplehurst in Kent. The train plunged down a bank into a dry river bed, killing ten passengers, and badly wounding forty.

Dickens was profoundly affected by the disaster, and a year later, he published The Signalman, a supremely atmospheric ghost story in which the narrator, while investigating a dank and lonely railway cutting, meets the signalman who works there. His new acquaintance appears to live under the shadow of an unbearable secret, haunted by an apparition whose appearance prefigures terrible rail accidents.

Drawing on Dickens own experiences, and introduced by Simon Bradley, author of The Railways, The Signalman is both an important piece of rail history, and a sinister tale which will make you think twice next time you enter the quiet carriage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Sep 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781782832263

Simon Bradley

Simon Bradley is editor of the World Famous Buildings of England series, founded by Nikolaus Pevsner, to which he has contributed a number of notable revised volumes. He lives in London.

Book preview

Introduction

‘The Signal-man’ is Dickens’s last finished masterpiece. He lived for another three and half years after its publication at Christmas 1866, famously leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, incomplete at his death. It is also his finest ghost story – perhaps the finest of all English ghost stories.

The tale first appeared in a Christmas double number of Dickens’s own weekly magazine All the Year Round. It was one of several narratives published under the general title Mugby Junction, of which only the first four were by Dickens himself. Numbers one and two are the longest of these, and serve to introduce the rest. They tell of a lonely and burnt-out City financier, ‘a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire’, who is seeking a fresh start after dissolving the firm of Barbox Brothers to which he has given his best years. We meet him just as he gets off a night train on impulse at Mugby, a railway town where life is dominated by the rhythms and demands of the service. An encounter on the platform with the station’s lamp-man leads to further conversation, and later to a meeting with the man’s daughter, Phoebe, crippled since childhood, who spends much of her time lying by an open window. Through this window she teaches visiting children to write.

Barbox Brothers – real surname Jackson, an identity eclipsed in the stories by the name of his old firm painted on his luggage – duly befriends Phoebe. She in turn encourages him to travel away from Mugby and report back on his findings. On a trip back to London to buy a present for Phoebe, he meets a little lost girl wandering in the street. Seeking to help, he arranges for the girl to stay at his hotel. Her mother duly appears and proves to be the woman Barbox had loved as a young man, but who had run off with his closest friend instead. That former friend, father of the little girl, is now mortally ill. Barbox returns the girl and forgives the errant couple. He has advanced further out of his blind alley, back into the full flow of human life.

All of which sounds too creaky and treacly for words – and it is. Yet the ghost story that follows is written at an infinitely higher creative pitch. Despite its publication at Christmas there is neither seasonal cheer nor moral reward in this gripping psychological study. Its genesis must be sought in the railways themselves, and the role they had come to play in the author’s own world.

Since 1858 Dickens had been living a double life. Legally separated from his wife, Catherine Hogarth, he had set up a household at Gad’s Hill Place, a mansion in north Kent. The housekeeper was his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, who looked after the younger children of the marriage. But the centre of Dickens’s emotional life was a young actress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, with whom he had fallen in love when she was just eighteen. By 1862 Dickens appears to have established Nelly and her widowed mother in a chalet near Boulogne, in northern France. The journey from Gad’s Hill by train and steamer was reasonably quick, and the set-up allowed the relationship to remain discreet. The public learnt of it only in 1935, after the death of Dickens’s last surviving child.

The separation from Catherine and the advent of Nelly were the first great crises of Dickens’s later years. A fresh one followed on 9 June 1865, on a return journey from France in the company of Nelly

Reviews for The Signalman

[empressreece · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"A Ghost Story for Christmas"- 2.5 stars...

Introduction Excerpt:

"The telling or reading of ghost stories during long, dark and cold Christmas nights is a yuletide ritual which dates to at least the eighteenth century, and was once as much a part of Christmas tradition as decorating fir trees, feasting on goose and the singing of carols. During the Victorian era many magazines printed ghost stories specifically for the Christmas season. These "winter tales" did not necessarily explore Christmas themes in any manner. Rather, they were offered as an eerie pleasure to be enjoyed on Christmas eve with the family, adding a supernatural shiver to the seasonal chill. This tradition remained strong in the British Isles (and her colonies) throughout much of the twentieth century, though in recent years it has been on the wane. Certainly few in North America-in Canada or the United States-seem to know about it any longer. This series of small books seeks to rectify this, to revive a charming custom for the long dark nights we all know so well here at Christmas time."

The Signalman is a short ghost story written by Charles Dickens...When a guest at a nearby hotel is out taking a stroll, he comes upon a signalman working at a train tunnel. They start talking and the signalman tells him that he has encountered a ghost several times warning him of dangers on the tracks and each time something has happened. He's worried because he just saw the ghost again while the man was visiting him and he's at a loss at what to do and hopes the man can help him.

The story is written in the old style language so it took me a couple of paragraphs to get use to it but once I did the style didn't bother me too much. As for the plot, it started out great and the story was very atmospheric but then the ending just fell completely flat. Even after reading the last paragraph several times, I'm not sure that I even actually understood it. It really had the potential though to be a nice little ghost story but unfortunately the ending wasn't very satisfying. It's not something I would recommend to anyone on the hunt for a good ghost story.

*I received this ARC from Consortium Book Sales & Distribution and Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

**I read this for my 2016 Halloween Book Bingo: ~Ghost Stories & Haunted Houses~ square

[passion4reading_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In my opinion, 'The Signalman' is Dickens's finest and best-known ghost story and when I read it about 40 years ago, it made quite a lasting impression on me. This is the first time I've re-read it, and it has lost none of its mysterious atmosphere or sense of doom. (Forget the hammy TV adaptation repeated over Christmas this year.)This edition also contains the short story 'The Boy at Mugby', a broadly satirical story that pokes fun at the so-called service travellers could expect in refreshment rooms at various train stations on lengthy train journeys in Dickens's time. In tone it is about as far away from that of 'The Signalman' as a vegan would be from an all-you-can-eat meat buffet.Simon Bradley has written an illuminating introduction that offers an insight into Dickens's mind and the events that likely inspired these two stories.

[sarahebear · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you are looking for a quick and entertaining read, then "The Signalman" offers a delightfully spooky outing. In a dark railway alcove, near the end of a tunnel, the signalman sees a grim spectre whenever danger is imminent. A wonderfully creepy short story by the master Charles Dickens. This edition also includes the story "The Boy at Mugby" about the goings on behind the scenes at a railway station canteen. It is worth reading for the introduction by Simon Bradley alone, who offers an insight into Dicken's later life and the impact that his involvement in a major train accident had on his writing and well-being.

[altheaann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(1866) I believe I read this one years ago... it seemed familiar.

Out for a stroll, a man decides on a whim to strike up a conversation with the railroad-worker he encounters. The signal-man seems intelligent and interesting - but something is clearly bothering him. When he starts talking about strange spectres and phantom bells, his new acquaintance begins to seriously consider trying to get him to seek help.

However, there may be more to the eerie manifestations the signal-man reported than those of a more scientific bent would have credited...

Nicely creepy, classic ghost story.