Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870)
was an English writer and social
critic. He created some of the world's best-known
fictional characters and is regarded by many as the
greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works
enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his
lifetime, and by the 20th century, critics and
scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His
novels and short stories are still widely read today.
Short Story ‘The Signalman’
On June 9, 1865 at 3:13 in the afternoon, an elderly
Charles Dickens was travelling by train with his mistress and her mother in southeastern
England when the Folkestone-to-London train derailed near Staplehurst
due to a signalman’s negligence. The Staplehurst Rail Crash took the lives of ten
and left forty injured – some of whom died in Dickens’ arms. The author was
traumatized. He lost his voice for two weeks afterward, and avoided trains with
phobic anxiety. Dying five years later on June 9, 1870, Dickens, as his son stated,
“never fully recovered” from the event.
Written a year after the disaster, this cathartic ghost tale features a responsible
signalman haunted in an emotionally exhaustive sense by Dickens’ own wasting
phantom: the helplessness to save life in spite of one’s best efforts. The titular
railroad man’s angst mirrors Dickens’ eerily. He is a man who accepts his
unnecessarily menial role in society, not daring to change his station or aspire to
better himself.
“The Signal-Man” is a grim and chilling study both in man’s desperate inability to
alter the fates of others, and in his stubborn unwillingness to affect the one life
which he may reasonably hope to better, or even save: his own. ‘The Signalman’ is
one of the most celebrated of all Victorian ghost stories.
The ‘The Signal Man’ - Short Animated Film
(3.53 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=uL-2IrYOiG8&t=4s
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