Charles Dickens is most notable for his work
A Christmas Carol, but that tale wasn’t the only Christmas ghost story
that he wrote. The Signal-Man was published in the Christmas edition of All
the Year Around in 1866. It is a fantastical ghost story and full of foreshadowing.
Not only is it the kind of tale that Victorians would have loved, but the
author had very intimate knowledge of the subject for he was in a train
accident, the Staplehurst rail crash in June of 1865.
It was the 9th of June, it was midafternoon, and the train was crossing the viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent. A signal man was dispatched by the railroad company to warn the train that a small length of track was being repaired. In the Board of Trade report, the signal man was 554 yards away from the track being installed, instead of the 1000 yards that was the regulation standard, so by the time that train engineer saw the signal man, it was too close to stop in time. No 199 locomotive, along with the brake van and the second-class carriage, made it across the viaduct when it derailed, the rest of the carriages, seven in all, wound up in the muddy riverbed. One of the witnesses said of the incident "two terrible jolts and in an instant ... all became darkness ... and chaos". Victims who were able help those who were trapped inside the derailed train cars, would talk about the violent screaming coming from the carriages as the seriously wounded were hauled away from the train. These people were treated on scene until carriages and wagons could get them to a doctor. In all 10 people were killed and 40 people were injured. One of these brave souls who helped the wounded and dying was 53-year-old Charles Dickens. Dickens recalled a scene from the tragedy including seeing a man covered in blood, who he gave water to and helped him lie on the grass, where he died. He later wrote about the incident as, “No Imagination Can Conceive the Ruin”. Dickens worked all throughout the afternoon and into the evening carrying water from the river in his top hat and giving brandy to shocked passengers from his flask. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Out of all of this, Charles Dickens will
write the Signal-Man in during the summer of 1866. The story, a
first-person narrative, is a stroke of genius. It involved an unnamed narrator
and his meeting with a signal-man in his office, which was basically a
telegraph and signal bells on a table located in a cutting, which was a hill
that was cut into two for the tracks to be placed. During their brief time
together, the signal-man relates that he is haunted by an apparition that
always appears right before a tragedy. During the conversation between the signal-man
and the narrator, only the signal-man hears the warning bells go off
periodically. The narrator, a skeptical man who doesn’t believe in the
supernatural, believes his new friend is overtaxed and needs to see a doctor.
The next day, the narrator comes to see the signal-man, but he sees what he
first thinks is a ghost, but it is just a railroad official; investigating the
newest accident on the track, the death of the signal-man. The signal-man was
struck by an oncoming train. The train operator said he was standing in the
middle of the tracks and staring at something. The train operator then called
out to him, "Below there! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!"
The story ends with the narrator contemplating the last words of the engineer
and the last words of the apparition that the signal-man related to the
narrator.
It is a weird tale that is part horror, part
mystery. A tale that I would be more inclined to attribute to Poe or his ilk,
but not Charles Dickens. But what is more shocking than the tale itself is who
Charles Dickens was travelling with. Her name was Ellen Ternan, an actress of
minor repute, and her mother who was traveling with Dickens on a tour. They met
in 1857, when Dicken was 45 and Tenan 18. She was hired for a play that Dickens
wrote with Wilkie Collins called The Frozen Deep. Dickens’ marriage to
Catherine Dickens was on the rocks for many years and he, according to some,
sought to have her institutionalized, which of course failed, and they
eventually became separated. In 1860, Dickens made a bonfire behind his home,
where he burned all of his correspondence, saving only his financial letters.
Ellen in her home did the same, which makes the relationship between the two
speculative, at best. Was Ellen the mistress of famed writer Charles Dickens,
or was she something else, an illegitimate daughter? There was always the
scandalous writing of their contemporaries who say that Dickens and Ternan has
a child together but the child died in infancy. But this is only hearsay and
very little is known about the relationship between them. On his death, Dickens
settled an annuity for Terran which made her financially independent. Which he
would have done for his mistress, or his daughter.
After the incident, Dickens became very
nervous when he traveled by train, and he sought many ways to avoid it. In
1866, Dickens wrote, “have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a
hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable."
Dickens would take his son, Henry, on some book tours. Henry recalled, “I have
seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When
this happened, he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both
hands." The Staplehurst incident affected Charles Dickens for his
remaining years. He continued to write and did a final tour to the United
States in 1868, making sure he visited American writers such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He then returned to England and he did
a tour of “farewell readings” and when he was on that tour, he suffered a
stroke which took place in April 1869. The tour was cancelled. It was June 8,
1870, and he was working all day on the manuscript of Edwin Drood, he
suffered another stroke, and he never regained consciousness. He died the next
day, June 9th, which was the five-year anniversary of the
Staplehurst incident.