The Signalman by Charles Dickens

The Signalman by Charles Dickens

The Signalman has been much requested by listeners to the Podcast, and it is a story I'm familar with, having read is several times over the years and seen video and audio adaptations.

When we look at this story, we see why Dickens is famous. The Signalman is an exceptionally well crafted tale.

It contains many familiar features. Firstly, the action happens in a cut off locale, the deep, dank railway cutting that is deep beneath the surface, at one end of which is the forbidding, dripping tunnel with its red-eyed danger light.

It's a unique twist on the ominous and sequestered gothic castle, but the locale serves the same function, moving the story from the everyday day-lit world to a separate underworld where strange things might happen.

The tunnel is like a hell-mouth and its from this mouth that tragedy abruptly appears not once but three times.

The three times motif is as old as the hills and we recognise it and welcome it because this is how things should be in stories. The three times motif is also family to us from fairy tales and this is in fact a fairy tale.

The hero, and victim, the signalman is portrayed as a troubled innocent. He is perhaps the finest of men; vigilant, hard-working, honest; he searches his mind and conscience to understand the signs he is being shown, and of course, like him, we don't see the final twist until it's too late; that it's he himself who is the third victim.

Dickens foreshadows lots of this very well. His unnamed first person narrator feels the threat of a train coming out of the tunnel as he walks away. 

The very words are the same, and the narrator utters them without knowing their significance. This together with the signalman's fate tell us two things: the world is beyond our control, and it doesn't care about us. This is almost Lovecraftian in its pessimism. This terrible thing happened to a good man, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The only thing missing is the sin. There is no real moral angle to the story, the signalman was the best of men, he even taught himself algebra as well as being punctilious in his duties. He did not deserve this.

The device of first person narrator is different from the usual here. Whereas most authors will use a first person narrator to intensify the emotions by putting the reader behind the main character's eyes. The main character here is the signalman, this is his story and his undeserved fate. We are not behind his eyes, but first person narrators of horror stories have a problem. If they die, how come they can tell the tale?

Dickens manages to give us a horrible end and put us close to the action without having this problem, by framing the story within the account of someone else, whose whole character is invisible. All we know is that he stays at an inn and he spent much of his life in confined circumstances but is now free, and that he's middle class of course.

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