The Signalman by Charles Dickens
Info and Resources created by Jose Lin, Chris Nah and Baxter Holgate-SimpsonAbout the authorCharles Dickens is an English writer who was born in 1812. He was fortunate to be sent to school at the age of 9. But this was short-lived due to his father was in bad debt. Which then, the family, including Charles, are sent to work at the ‘blacking factory’ and experienced dreadful living conditions, as well as isolation (loneliness) and despair. His childhood memories were never forgotten and has formed some of the most important aspects in his stories.
Charles Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst Rail Crush on 9th June 1865, which is caused by a gap where the rail was removed for maintenance. Dickens carriage was not fallen into the river, but suspended. MrsW says: Dickens is considered one of THE writers of all time. From Schmoop: Charles Dickens did not invent the urban poverty that we now call "Dickensian." He did not dream up the poor Victorian orphans that populate his fiction. Nor the appalling conditions in factories characterizing the Industrial Revolution. Nor the injustice of the debtors' prisons. Nor the class system that kept the poor trapped in wretched circumstances. He simply saw these things unfolding around him in mid-nineteenth century London, and then he thoroughly documented them in the form of truer-than-true novels such as Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House. Dickens became one of the most popular and prolific writers of his time, and he remains the gold standard of English novelists. Charles Dickens knew how to write a page-turner. Almost all of his novels were written in the form of monthly installments in popular magazines. But he also had a keen eye for social injustice. While everyone else was yammering on about how super the Industrial Revolution was, Dickens made sure that the public remembered the middle class – the very class squeezed between industrial progress and its dark underbelly. For all of his success, Dickens's personal life was like something out of . . . well, a Dickens novel. Dickens's cash-strapped parents sent him to work at a boot-blacking factory when he was just twelve years old, an experience that left a deep and painful impression upon him. His father was thrown into debtor's prison, a completely legal practice at that time when people could not pay their debts (declaring bankruptcy was not an option then). His mother was neglectful. Dickens and his wife had ten children before separating bitterly. And Dickens didn't seem to like being a father any more than being a husband. By the time he died at age 58 in 1870, Dickens seemed always to be striving for some happiness just out of reach, very akin to his fictional characters. "Why is it," he wrote near the end of his life, "that as with poor David [Copperfield], a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, one friend and companion I have never made?"1 Charles Dickens was a complicated character. Could a novelist of his insight and talent be any other way? |
In a nutshell:
The short text focuses on a lonely railway signalman, who is entangled with a phantom ghost or the hallucinations within his mind. He often dreamt of prophecies given from the ghost about terrifying tragedy – to which then happens on his railway, one by one. Despite knowing the possible danger, the Signalman is incapable of preventing and gives an atmosphere/mood of despair and hopelessness. The last prophecy ghost has given him is that, he will die on the railway. He then becomes completely forlorn, isolated and abandoned the desire to survive. Accepting his fate/destiny.
The plot is very simple but Dickens is a master at constructing atmosphere. Characters are vividly portrayed, true to life. The story is short, but profoundly meaningful. It contains a lot of unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions, which gives the read a great space to extend their imagination. In addition, the description and the character of the ghost is merely given, remaining as the final enigma of the story.
PRIORITY: MEDIUM
POSSIBLE ESSAY PAIRINGS WITH:
The short text focuses on a lonely railway signalman, who is entangled with a phantom ghost or the hallucinations within his mind. He often dreamt of prophecies given from the ghost about terrifying tragedy – to which then happens on his railway, one by one. Despite knowing the possible danger, the Signalman is incapable of preventing and gives an atmosphere/mood of despair and hopelessness. The last prophecy ghost has given him is that, he will die on the railway. He then becomes completely forlorn, isolated and abandoned the desire to survive. Accepting his fate/destiny.
The plot is very simple but Dickens is a master at constructing atmosphere. Characters are vividly portrayed, true to life. The story is short, but profoundly meaningful. It contains a lot of unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions, which gives the read a great space to extend their imagination. In addition, the description and the character of the ghost is merely given, remaining as the final enigma of the story.
PRIORITY: MEDIUM
POSSIBLE ESSAY PAIRINGS WITH:
- Yellow Wallpaper (oppression of women by patriarchy, change, isolation, unbreakable cycle, conflict);
- Games at Twilight (childhood, innocence lost, change, isolation, gender, age/youth);
- Five Twenty (age/youth, oppression of women by patriarchy, change, isolation, colours and physical symbols)
Deeper analysis:
Symbolism
The Signalman – First world view:
The world we see using the five senses is not the limit. There are more beyond the true reality. They believe that there is a supernatural reality hidden in this world. When the Signalman sees the ghost, he believes that the ghost is trying to communicate with human.
The Narrator – Second world view:
The world is not supernatural – things that we can sense is referred to as the world. Anything else contrary is just an illusion. The world is regarded as ordinary.
Symbolism
The Signalman – First world view:
The world we see using the five senses is not the limit. There are more beyond the true reality. They believe that there is a supernatural reality hidden in this world. When the Signalman sees the ghost, he believes that the ghost is trying to communicate with human.
The Narrator – Second world view:
The world is not supernatural – things that we can sense is referred to as the world. Anything else contrary is just an illusion. The world is regarded as ordinary.
Ways of Seeing Psychoanalytic Interpretation: We can view the signalman in a psychoanalytic way, in that the ghost can be seen as a representation of the signalman's isolation as his mind is left to wander as he works his lonely shifts with nothing to do but try "algebra" and "work at fractions and decimals". We could also look at in this perspective through siderodromophobia (fear of trains/rail roads) as Charles Dickens was in the Staplehurst rail crash where he may have been mentally effected and may have developed siderodromophobia. We can see this as the story revolves around train crashes and deaths in a gothic horror like setting. Mrs W asks: so in a psychoanalytic interpretation, what does the train represent? According to Freud, trains were symbolic of sex. To others, it is a symbol of transition or even death... Marxist Interpretation: The society of where Dickens had lived were of great worship to money and power as a representation of social status. Socially, the Signalman can be significant when we see him as the general laborers and the bottom of the society, most working in harsh conditions and lack societal status. Where the Ghost can be the higher class, who is holding the fate and destiny of those ones who work for them, they are the ones who has power and control (in comparison and contrast to the ghost’s prophecy power) over the workers. The Signalman, like the society’s commons, are bound by fate and is set to what the ghost (upper class) states. Inescapable and incapable of resisting their destiny. |
Enquiry
|