Tag: Charles Dickens

The Signalman by Charles Dickens

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A railway journey could be a dangerous undertaking in the 19th century. We take safety for granted today, but most of the devices that ensure it came into use after several awful accidents. Dickens himself was a passenger on a train that was involved in a serious accident in 1865. He helped rescue the survivors of the Staplehurst crash in Kent. Out of that experience came his short ghost story The Signalman, published in 1866.

No other form of transport has produced as many ghost stories as the railway. Here, I think, is the first suggestion that there is something uncanny about railways, the whole apparatus of awaiting, arrival and departure, the particular architecture of stations, embankments, cuttings, and viaducts.

The signalman lives out his life in a strange and gloomy environment, alone in his signalbox at the bottom of a deep cutting. In one direction is a dark and foreboding tunnel entrance, in the other the dripping and dank walls of the cutting as far as one can see. Not much light penetrates to the bottom of this place.

His job is a strange one, calling for him to be in attendance and constantly alert, but leaving him with long stretches of inactivity. We learn that he is a man of some intelligence, but who missed opportunities earlier in life and has accepted his role in life. He tries to fill the time with academic exercises, such as algebra and language learning.

The narrator thinks that the signalman might be a contented man, until he reveals that he is haunted by a mysterious figure that appears as a premonition. Indeed, right at the beginning he mistakes the narrator, who calls down to him from above the cutting, for the spectre. Why this should be we find out at the end of the story.

The wind produces an eerie moaning in the telegraph wires. The spirit announces its arrival by a ghostly ringing of the telegraph bell that only the signalman can discern.

The apparition has appeared twice, and the narrator has made two visits. His third and final visit reveals the real meaning of the ghost. Part of the eerie power of the story comes from the feeling that there is some kind of connection between the narrator and the ghost. It has something in common with other “double” stories of the era, such as Conrad’s Secret Sharer. It deserves its reputation as one of the truly great ghost stories.

Neither the signalman nor his visitor are named. It is written in a plainer prose style than is usual for Dickens, a bit more like his writing in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens had written earlier about the impact of the railway in Dombey and Son (1848), which has a description of the destruction of old buildings in Camden to enable the lines to reach Euston.

The Signalman was unforgettably filmed by the BBC in 1976 as part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series. It was an early screenplay adaptation by Andrew Davies. The film is very faithful to the story and Denholm Elliott gives a wonderful performance as the tormented signalman.

All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook

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I bought this when it came out in 2002. I knew at once that it was a book I just had to read, from a very short review that said the author David Seabrook had applied a sort of Iain Sinclair approach to the Medway towns and Thanet area of Kent. It was most definitely one for me.

I couldn’t know then what an influence it was to have on me over so many years.

If I had never read this book, I would probably not have read The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. And therefore, I would not have had the experience, years later, of feeling that I had stepped into the pages of Drood when I visited the area around Rochester cathedral. Nor would I have stood in front of the house that is believed to have been the inspiration for Satis House in Great Expectations.

In my earlier post Site-specific Reading I describe how I looked for the original thirty nine steps down to the beach at Broadstairs. It was from Seabrook’s writing that I found out about John Buchan’s stay at a house there, on the North Foreland and the origin of his most famous novel’s title. That, in turn, led me to think about Ian Fleming’s connection with Kent in a new way, that inspired my own writing on spy stories with particular reference to Moonraker.

The shelter on the seafront at Margate where T S Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land is a heritage site now, re-painted and well cared for. That too, is largely down to Mr Seabrook and, like so many others, I would probably not have sat there if it were not for him. I suspect that the 2018 exhibition at Turner contemporary, Journeys with the Waste Land, would not have happened had All the Devils are Here not been published.

In a broader way, Seabrook’s knack of making connections between places and writing inspired by them set my mind running down a particular track and that has continued to this day. You can see his influence on my own writing in other pieces on this blog.

Who was this mysterious figure who died at a comparatively young age, after publishing just one more book? He hints at personal tragedy and a difficult private life. Iain Sinclair wrote about him and his work far more eloquently than I am able to.

I was never able to find out if the “Thomas Jerome Seabrook” who wrote Bowie in Berlin was the same person, having a little joke with the name of the character played by Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. So rest in Peace, Mr Seabrook, whoever you were. You inspired me, although it took me years to realise it and you never knew.

And just what is it about this particular corner of England that has made it such fertile ground for literary endeavour? There is that marvellous 1940s landscape mystery, The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. If we look a little further west into Sussex, we find that at one time, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, and H G Wells were living not that far from one another. Lamb House in Rye, was home to Henry James, then E F Benson and much later, Rumer Godden. It must be something in the air; or the countryside, perhaps.

The title, by the way, comes from Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s Ariel who says “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”.