The Signal-Man – Charles Dickens

The Signal-Man is a short but superb ghost story, in which any ghastly manifestations must be assessed in terms of a psychological interpretation of the narrative. It is those psychological implications which cause the narrative to assume a shifting and uncertain form.

For instance, are there three characters: signal-man, narrator and spectre? Or two? We see the spectre only through a series of filters, relayed from the signal-man’s perception, to the narrator, and subsequently to the reader.

While the number of players remains uncertain it is difficult to assign the roles of protagonist and antagonist, roles which here may not be immutable.

From the beginning…

The narrator comes, perhaps unexpectedly, across a railway signal-man deep within his embankment and calls out to him idly. Both his words and the concept of the idle impulse will echo through the narrative. Another echo of sorts is in the dread evoked in first one man and then the other. The motivation of the narrator is unclear but the phrase ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’ seems to emanate, ghost-like, from the text.

The narrator’s descent into the cutting irresistibly evokes the descent into hell, and the cutting itself finds parallels with the grave in more than just the description:

‘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 which massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’

Interesting that Dickens should choose to demonise the railway, this symbol of the Industrial Revolution. But we learn that the signal-man has ‘misused his opportunities,’ and the progress which the railway symbolises is a progress which rushes past him. He is indeed buried in this back water.

The motives and provenance of the narrator are never disclosed, and his impact on the signal-man is a matter for readerly conjecture, derived largely in respect of the closing incident and the complex tangle of coincidence that the narrator chooses to reveal.

In this short story Dickens slips into none of the weaknesses which his detractors justly cite in some of his longer works, and the result is a masterful piece of story-telling which is (unequivocally!) faultless.