Lesson 4 Dickens - Worksheet PDF

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Lesson Four: Charles Dickens, “The Signalman” Dickens and the Ghost Story Charles Dickens is arguably the most famous writer of the nineteenth century. Certainly any introductory course that calls itself “Victorian” would be remiss in not including any of his works. What people sometimes don’t realize about Dickens, however, is how much of his large body of writing is inspired or based on either the ghost story or the fairy tale. There is his most famous book, A Christmas Carol, where three spirits visit the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge. But Dickens’ affinity for the magical and the supernatural extends into his other novels and, as we see here, into his short stories as well. My favorite ghost story of his occurs in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in the installment Dickens published on Halloween in 1836. Mr. Pickwick finds a ghost haunting his rooms and sensibly points out to him that, as far as haunting places go, his shabby apartments are not particularly interesting or nice, and wouldn’t the ghost rather spend his afterlife in more pleasant surroundings? After a bit of thought, the ghost has to agree, and disappears, hopefully in search of less cramped quarters. What we will see in reading “The Signalman” is Dickens’ technique. A good ghost story is not just about the plot, or the hint of the supernatural. Dickens’ over-the-top writing, his appeal to both emotions and sensations, and his packing on descriptive words all contribute to the feeling of ominous dread of this story. “The Signalman” is one of those stories where you can see the fog, the haze of the railroad signals, and the sense of powerlessness a person may feel when confronted with his fate. In Victorian England, the railway was arguably the most prevalent and most important bit of industrial technology. No one was untouched by the railway, from the way it changed people’s sense of time to its omnipresence—both in sight and sound—on the landscape. Before mechanical semaphores, signalman was a job for a man to literally signal the trains, usually using a signal-box but sometimes manually if necessary, when they were approaching a station or when they would be changing tracks. This story is based on Dickens’ experience surviving a horrific train crash. The Stapleton Railway Crash in 1863 made headlines and biographers maintain that it took a long time for Dickens’ trauma to subside. (We discuss the possibility that he suffered from PTSD below.)

Passage Analysis and Use of Language Let’s look at a descriptive passage early in the story: I resumed my downward way, and, stepping out upon the level of the railroad and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping wet-wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way, only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction,

terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthly deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world. If horror writing thrives on creating a feeling of uneasiness, then this uneasiness is often accomplished by words and phrases that can be read both realistically and supernaturally. The other is by use of signs, or words, which can refer to both a tangible description (a signifier or a denotation) and a reference (a signified or a connotation). Look at the word “downward,” for instance. This is not the only time Dickens uses the word in the story. On a denotative level, the downward walk is exactly what the narrator is doing in order to reach the signalman. On a connotative level, however, he is descending into the abyss where, at the end of the story, the signalman will meet his doom. The “sallow” complexion of the man, which usually means that he lacks a natural blush, contributes to his ghostly appearance, and emphasizes the character as a man who foresees his own death. Dickens also layers the adjectives to create an image of a place that has one foot in the world of the dead: notice the words “solitary,” “dismal,” the wall “excluding all but a strip of sky,” “gloomy,” and the hellish colours red and black. The tunnel is likened to a dungeon, and the smell is earthly and deadly. In case the reader doesn’t get it, the narrator ends the passage by drawing on his sensations and the chill that he experiences as if, he says, he has already left the natural world.

Dicken’s Horrific Pathos Although the word pathetic derives from pathos, do not confuse the two. Pathos is a rhetorical term that is a direct appeal to the emotions and both the words “sympathy” and “empathy” derive from it. Dickens’ work in “The Signalman” is meant to evoke pathos as much as unease. Like the narrator’s sense being in two worlds at once, Dickens’ ghost story, as mentioned before, keeps us in the world of the real and the supernatural. The signalman is haunted by what is often called a sending or a fetch, a premonition of his own death, although he doesn’t recognize it as such. Dickens implies that he is more sensitive to this sort of supernatural occurrence because he is already haunted, in a more psychological way, by the death of the lady he could not prevent. Haunting and guilt therefore go hand in hand here. A modern-day reading using a psychological approach, where literature is used as a case study to explore different psychological phenomena, might (although it is not mandatory to do this) look at “The Signalman” as a case in PTSD. Since there is a suggestion in some biographies that Dickens himself might have suffered from it, although it would not have been conceived in those terms in his lifetime, he writes his own trauma into the character of the Signalman. The Signalman’s trauma, Dickens suggests, is what enables him to see that vision of his own death; but it is that vision that causes his final and irrational act of deliberately putting himself in harm’s way. What caused what, then? Where did this sending come from? Was it solely supernatural or was his trauma so intense as to create a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Discussion Questions 1. Where in the story can we see Dickens using language to convey a sense of going into the underworld? 2. Is there anything to the theory that the story might be a literary representation of PTSD, bearing in mind that we’re talking about a nineteenth-century author here, rather than a contemporary trauma specialist?...