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.
The Good Reader 