#63 The Signal Man- Charles Dickens
Sorry for the brief hiatus, i was away for the weekend. I'll catch up over the next few days.
A haunted track worker tells the tale of a ghost appearing
near his signal light:
“…the left arm is across the face, and the right arm is
waved. Violently waved.”
“Halloa! Below there!” Each time the aberration shows
itself, horrible deadly events take place.
Like many of Dicken’s works, this one uses real-world
references. The first warning to the
signalman occurred as the Clayton Tunnel disaster of 1861 (tunnel seen below).
The narrator although sympathetic to the fear in the
signalman’s eyes, believes his mind is playing tricks. He agrees to take him to
a doctor the next day, but its too late, the ghost had already appeared and
forewarned of the man’s own demise. At
the start, the signal man mistook the image of the narrator as another
appearance of the ghost, perhaps he was right.
This is very much a Dickens story.
Notable Passage: “men of common sense did not allow for
coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life.”
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