30 pages • 1 hour read
Charles DickensThe Signal-Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1866A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer who was concerned with social justice—especially child labor, education, and class inequalities. His own father was imprisoned for debt when Dickens was 12; as a result, Dickens had to leave school to work in a decrepit factory that produced shoe polish. Dickens did eventually return to school, but these early experiences with the criminalization of poverty, dangerous working conditions, and the exploitation of children’s labor provided a foundation for his literary work.
Though Dickens advocated for the poor and his works pay detailed attention to class relations (Marx praised Dickens’s class insights), he became a rich man as a result of his publications. He may have survived the Stapleton train wreck of 1865 because he was in a first-class carriage, one of the few that did not fall off the bridge on which the train wrecked. The circumstances of the train wreck, involving frantic signal men and a conductor who saw the danger ahead but couldn’t stop, inform the events and terror of “The Signal-Man.” Dickens tended to the wounded and dying in the aftermath of the crash and was traumatized by the accident, avoiding train travel from then on.
Dickens is well known for his interest in psychology and character development. He created some of the most famous characters in Western literature, such as the aptly named Ebeneezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol, whose characterization rang so true that the term “scrooge” now denotes any miserly person unaffected by kindness and joy. Dickens continues to be considered a canonical author, with novels including A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Druid widely taught and read.
“The Signal-Man” explores the lives of those left “below”—geographically, socially, and psychologically—to do traumatizing work. While the story does not argue for any specific reform, it draws the reader into a sympathetic relation with the signal man, who can no longer bear the burden of his responsibilities, and it examines the contradictions of his class position in its consideration of Communication, Connection, and (Social) Mobility.
Literary Context: Gothic Fiction
Although Dickens typically wrote in a realist mode, “The Signal-Man” is a ghost story and part of the artistic/literary tradition of Dark Romanticism and the related gothic genre. Both Romanticism and the gothic began in Europe in the late 18th century as a response to the Enlightenment’s humanist emphasis on reason and rationality. Whereas traditional Romanticism values the emotional and intuitive as a source of knowledge, Dark Romanticism focuses on that which is unknown or unknowable. As a result, gothic fiction’s characters often exist in a state of confusion, with neither reason nor emotion guiding them to make sense or meaning of their world.
This confusion likewise informs the gothic attention to the experiences of those who are outcast from society and consequently do not “fit” traditional typologies. This category encompasses social outcasts (e.g., the poor, villains, the “mad,” the neurodivergent, those resisting gender conventions) and those outcast due to more supernatural or symbolic hybridity (e.g., werewolves, vampires, ghosts). The confusion experienced by gothic characters is often passed on to the reader, who may similarly be unable to make “sense” out of what is front of them—an experience that can be frightening and contributes to the gothic’s overlap with the horror genre.
The interest of “The Signal-Man” in The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding—i.e., in ghosts and the signal man’s inability to “read” them—are hallmarks of the gothic. Unlike the spirits in A Christmas Carol, who walk Ebeneezer Scrooge through his past, present, and future lives to show him how to be a better person, the ghosts in this story are not didactic and do not provide a lesson about achieving a better outcome. They merely confuse the conscientious signal man, leaving him tormented and unable to perform his job, his (conscientious) distraction a liability.
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By Charles Dickens
