THE SIGNAL-MAN 📚: with John Bowen

Dominic is joined by the inimitable Professor John Bowen who returns to this series to explore the hidden depths beneath the pages of one of Dickens' most iconic ghost stories -The Signal-Man

Written only a year after Dickens  survived the Staplehurst Rail Crash, The Signal-Man finds an author grappling with trauma and the conflicted feelings of fear and wonder at the new railways, mixed with a desperate yearning to know in advance where danger lies …

Reading excerpts from the haunting tale is the fantastic actor and director Oliver Dimsdale

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd / Original cover headshot of John Bowen © Paul Shields / Illustration "The Signal-Man" (1894) by an unknown author Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Transcript

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The Mystery of Dickens' "The Signalman"

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hi everyone. In the Christmas of 1866, Dickens wrote a deeply powerful ghost story set on a remote stretch of railway. The narrator guides the reader down a steep cutting at the start. Suddenly, the earth underfoot starts to vibrate, and our descent is violently interrupted by the sudden passing of a train. In this story, we not only experience the danger of this physical environment, but also the risk of looking too deeply into the troubled psyche of the signalman waiting below. Written only a year after Dickens himself survived the Staplehurst rail crash, the signalman finds the author grappling with his trauma, his conflicted feelings of fear and wonder at the new railways, and a desperate yearning to know in advance where danger lies. With each read of this haunting tale, more questions rise to the surface, such as who or what are these two men that meet alone in a tale that feels almost claustrophobically male. Exploring the hidden depths in the pages of this story, I'm thrilled to welcome back to the podcast one of the brightest lights in Dickens' scholarship, Professor John Bowman, who I last spoke to in our episode on Barnaby Rudge. And reading excerpts from The Signalman is the fantastic actor and director Oliver Dimsdale. John, welcome back to Charles Dickens of Brain on Fire. It's so good to see you again.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Well, it's a great pleasure, Donick. Thank you for asking me back.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Not at all. And you were one of the very, very first guests on this series. So I'm I'm absolutely thrilled to get you back. And you may remember that we talked about Barnaby Rudge that time.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

We did. It's a bit shorter than one we're going to do today.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Yes, the signalman probably runs in at 30 minutes, doesn't it? If you read it aloud. So as it's Halloween, I thought it would be really exciting to have a special episode dedicated to the Signalman. And uh what are your thoughts on this story, John?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

I think it's the best short story Dickens ever writes, is what I think. It is astonishing. And I'm I don't know how many times I've read it. It's only it's like 12, 13 pages. But every time you go back, you suddenly notice a bit of detail or a bit of uncertainty. And it's part of the greatness of it is the tightness and just the way that you can never quite resolve it. And but all the time it kind of cranks up the mystery and the uncertainty and the suspense. It's an absolute kind of uh you know, it's like built like a watch, really. You know, it's beautifully intricately fitted together. It's like a masterclass in storytelling. But critics have radically disagreed with each other about what it's about.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

For anyone listening who doesn't know the story, how would you set it up a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Okay, it's like this. Uh Dickens, for most of the latter stage of his career, he has a set of Christmas stories in in his magazine All the Year Round, in which he writes a framework, and then he will write one or two stories, and then others will contribute. So this is one of these, and it's the last but one that he does in 1866. And the framework is about a figure who's had a Scrooge-like figure who then learns to kind of love again. And he says, and here are some stories that I picked up around Mugby Junction, which is based on Rugby Junction, a big railway junction. So that's the kind of framing. And then there's this story in which the narrator, we don't know if it's the same person as the main one, is walking along and he looks down and sees a very deep cutting uh with a railway track going into a tunnel. He waves to the signalman.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Hello! Below there!

SPEAKER_02 4:18

He starts behaving in slightly odd and unusual ways.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came. But instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the line.

SPEAKER_02 4:40

The signalman is obviously quite disturbed because he's seen ghosts, he's having ghostly communication. It's a very simple ghost story, tripartite. There are three ghosts that visit uh the signalman. Quite screwed, and three occasions on which the narrator goes down. But the narrator is a deeply mysterious figure.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

In your chapter on Dickens and the Gothic, in the Cambridge History of the Gothic, volume two, um, you mentioned something that really, really surprised me. And I I've read the signalman many times over the years: the idea that the narrator may be actually an apparition himself.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Yeah. He is very odd. And what he says is, like when he first speaks, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

So first of all, he is a bit of a quote of speech, and he shouts down to the um to the signalman, and he says When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, that's an odd thing to say about your own voice.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

As if he's kind of making himself kind of impersonal or not like a kind of normally voiced thing. So already there, the phrasing by Dickens introduces some kind of uncertainty and doubt. And he talks about himself as being kind of long buried. So you don't know if there's a totally naturalistic explanation, right? He's been buried in some boring job. But also, particularly because it's all the ghostliness and gothicness and the way that this deep cutting in the earth smells, you know, earthy. That feels like a grave. So there's a way in which already we're having doubts about the narrator right from the first page. And that's particularly true at the end. The narrator's last word to us. So the signalman had told him various things that these ghostly figures were here gesturing or speaking. And then the narrator then interviews the engine driver that kills the signalman at the end. And the engine driver tells him the words that he shouted out to the signalman who ignored them and was mown down by the train. And the words are ones that the narrator, the person telling the story, imagined in their head but didn't speak when the single man was telling him about the ghostly appearance. So then you think, well, what's going on there? Is it that the narrator is haunted or somehow he's infected with this ghostliness? How did he know it? Did he know in advance? So is he a more sinister figure? Is it purely chance? And all those possibilities that he's malevolent, he somehow has some strange foreknowledge, or it's just a coincidence, because it's quite a short phrase. All those are left floating in the air at the end, and that's part of the cognitive disturbance, or the to use it fancy word, the epistemological doubt that is so radical in the story.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

That's amazing, John. And I think what's very interesting also that if the narrator is a ghost, it seems to me possibly that he's not aware. In a bit like the film The Sixth Sense, uh, Bruce Willis unaware that he's a ghost all the way through the film until the end. Because he's always putting the rational case to the Cygnaman about the appearances that the Signaman believes he's seeing. He's always saying, No, no, no, no, listen to the, you know, the wind and and the telegraph wires. They sound ghostly, but they're not they're not at all.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight. As to an imaginary cry, said I. Do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Part of the brilliance of the story is the way that the signalman had studied natural philosophies as a young man and then had fallen in the world.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

He had been, when young, a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures. But he had run wild, missed used his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

But also that he was rational and organized and trustworthy, and these are all the things that the narrator tells us about him.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

In a word, I should have sat this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

And yeah, and the narrator too is always saying, I'm sure there's a rational explanation. And so, of course, the fact then that at the very end he has something that can't be explained in that way, um puts him in, in a way, a similar position to the signalman. But also means that we take it seriously, that here's someone who's resisting with all their might a supernatural explanation, and yeah, and so cutting off the possibility that it might be anything other than supernatural by the end. That's that kind of release, disturbing release we have, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, that's really interesting. There's something else that I come across this quite a lot, and you will definitely have done, John, the term Dickensian and what that means. And you know, often it's the frothiness, the fun, the jollity, and other times it's very dark and morose. But there's something that I find very undeckensian in this story that only occurred to me reading it again last night, is that neither character is named. We don't know their real names, we don't know their names beyond the signalman. We don't know the name of the narrator, which I think is very interesting. That distancing effect, you can't quite get close to the characters in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

Absolutely. I mean, it's completely mysterious where he comes from, the narrator. We know a bit about the backstory of the signalman, i.e., that we know that he was had opportunities in life and then messed them up. But we don't know where either of them go when they're not there in the in the cutting together. So he doesn't say, so I went back to the pub and then I chatted to my man lady. Nothing at all. Um, we don't know if the singleman is married, we don't know if he has a relationship. They're not given all those wonderful Dickensian names that you normally expect. Uh it's got that beautiful kind of austerity, I think, to its storytelling. Um so the at the beginning, the singleman thinks he might have seen a narrator before. So that's slightly worried, you know, and you think, well, what's the nature of that? And is it that he saw him as a ghost or that he they know each other some past life? And then very early on, he's saying, the light was part of his charge, was it not? So this is what the narrator says to the signalman. And so he answered in a low voice, don't you know it is? So that implies that it could be a totally natural thing to say. Of course it is, I'm a bloody signalman, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah, you saw my flag waving, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

You of all people should know, because maybe you're the ghost or you're some supernatural power or something. And then he says, the narrator.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

The monstrous thought came into my mind as I peruse the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

So the signalman is thinking he's a ghost. The narrator's thinking perhaps the signalman is a ghost. So like immediately from the most banal thing, you're walking along, typical modern landscape, having a stroll at the evening, see a blow, wave to him. Immediately both of you are charged with this kind of monstrous thinking that the other person might be might be a spirit. Yeah. The key bit where the the narrator is characterized a bit. And he says, In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, who being at last set free, had a newly awakened interest in these great works. He had a boring job, or has he are those narrow limits the grave? Um we we just don't know. And on and quite often he talks about his life, on my life, or as I'm a living man, he says. So all of that just makes you start to doubt whether he is a living man, I think. And and I don't want to say we know for sure ever, but so much of it increases our doubts about the most kind of normal assumptions about reading, that this is a character, they're alive, they're human on both sides.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yeah, it's interesting. And and that strange projection onto each other. I think you're a ghost. No, I think you're a ghost, you know, that's that's very odd as well, isn't it? But something else that came up in your chapter, John, which I'd which I'd spotted a little bit as well, is that when you see adaptations of the signalman today, or even publications of it, they drop the hyphen out of the word signalman. And so when you see it, you don't think beyond signalman. But when you have that hyphen in there, suddenly that opens up a whole world of possibilities of who the signalman actually is. And maybe it's not the man waving the red flag down in the cutting.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

I'm so pleased you pointed that out. You know, I think it's shocking that quite often critics will call it the signalman without a hyphen. Because I think the whole thing hinges on that hyphen because it's all about signaling. The story, this is a story about signaling. So that his job is to signal, and it's got lots of different signaling technology in it. You know, that there's the flag and there's the telegraph, all this modern signaling technology, and the fact that he ignores the signals of the driver who pulls his whistle at the end and shouts at him, and then the narrator shouts down to him. So there's a way in which, as it were, all human communication is a sign system, as in a sign or signalling system. So it's it's asking these very deep questions about the relationship between communication technology or communication in general and the human, what it is to be human on the other. And both of those are under radical doubt. And what puts the nature of the human or man in doubt is the sheer strangeness of the signaling and the ghostliness of the signaling. Um, and that connecting those two things to think of people as kind of semiotic or signalling or signing beings, I think is is why it's a story that runs so deep, really. So, yeah, I totally agree.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

It's interesting because on a simple level, the the narrator signals, doesn't he? It's the very first thing he does. He signals, he waves whilst the signalman is unfurling his flag and and and all of that. They're both signalmen throughout this story. Spot on.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

And of course, he signals down, he shouts down to him. And the signalman looks in the wrong direction. He looks towards the tunnel where the ghost has been, instead of up towards him. So there's a way in which already at the beginning they're unhinged. So the voice doesn't seem to come to the signalman from where it actually comes from.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Something that you said that I found really interesting is that um you say ghostly figures, plural, a few times. Do you think it's a different figure that appears in the tunnel each time that's seen by the signalman?

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Yeah, I think they're different because what they have different gestures.

Signaling in "The Signalman"

SPEAKER_02 16:01

So the second one, when the young woman dies on the train, yeah, and there's a figure standing in a mourning gesture. And I think the narrator says it is I've seen it sometimes beside tombs. Yes. So it's not a going outwards kind of gesture, but a self-enclosing kind of gesture. So yeah, I think they are different.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

I hadn't spotted that. I thought it was the same figure doing different gestures, but that's so interesting. The the the weeping angel kind of gesture of that second one. What I'm interested in also is the pattern that it follows, is that you have the waving gesture with one hand across the eyes and the other arm waving that appears first. Then you have the face buried in the hands gesture, and then you have the waving one at the end, which is the engine driver. But then does it suggest that something's going to come out of the one with the hands again? Possibly that there's this pattern of a wave and then face in the hands, and then a wave and then face in the hands again. Is there more possibly to come to the narrator that we don't ever get to know because he finishes his tale at that point?

SPEAKER_02 17:04

I mean, it's it's a classic kind of ghost story thing. There are three things. There are three visits by the narrator and there are three ghosts appearing, three terrible accidents on the train. And what the nature of the next bit of the sequence is is, yeah, really problematic. Because of course, the other thing that this is a story about is about modernity, it's about modern technology and about repetition. So that the thing about the single man's life is it's a life of repetition, mechanical, and the word mechanical appears quite a lot. So Gothic and ghost stories love the modern. So you think of Frankenstein or Dracula. It's the mix of the argument, you know, Dracula, the novel, is full of modern technology, you know, stenography, telephones and typewriters, and it's and it's almost as if the mechanical and the machine-like and the repetitious modern somehow gives birth to the archaic and the ghostly and the mysterious. Um, so yeah, you're absolutely right to say what happens next in the sequence. Because this is a book all about someone trapped within endless sequence. So, one way, one man is liberated, the narrator, from this very constricting life, and the other man is trapped within it. He's almost like buried alive down there, trimming the lamp, signaling the trains, day after day after day, for repetition.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

It's such an interesting point as well, about the technology pulling closer antiquity. That's such an interesting idea, isn't it? When when the Sigmund asked the narrator, had you no sense that these words were conveyed to you in any kind of supernatural way, and at the same time, you have telegraphic instruments sending messages in that same kind of telepathic way.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Well, Dracula's great example of that, because Dracula, of course, is wholly archaic, comes from this ancient funeral society in Middle Europe. When he comes to England, he's surrounded by modern technology. So Gothic tends to push those two temporal orders or two ways of thinking about time kind of apart.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Another spin I got from reading your chapter and rereading the story was possibly the idea, and I've not had this thought at all, the idea that the signalman himself being in possibly some kind of purgatory. I connected it, you know, the idea that, you know, that that line, it's so it's so blatant in a sense, the idea that where the narrator talks about how the signalman had misused his youthful opportunities and gone down and never risen again, and here he is literally down in this tunnel, which has this unnatural quality that the narrator describes it as if he's left the natural world. And the the description of the signalman's face at the end when he's been knocked down is that it's quite composed, that he's in a restful, peaceful state, that somehow the Sigma, all of these appearances could have been something that the signalman had to work out to get to heaven or or out of that. I don't know. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Heaven's a jump. I mean, it is a story about anxiety. He's anxious. So it's something about modernity or technology, and also about ghosts that they make you they make you anxious. Uh and he's in an acutely anxious state all the time. Um, and yeah, absolutely, he's composed at the end. Compose is a funny word. I mean, it both means calm, but also it means like you get a written composition. So do we also think it might be something about being written in a particular way? Or the more sinister side of it would be that somehow the narrator has composed him into a story, which is death. So I mean I I think he he's clearly come to an end of his anxiety. I mean, there's something you might say hellish about the red light in the big tunnel ground. But I don't think there's any truth, redemptive, or Christian kind of framing of it, I don't think. Unlike, say, Christmas Carol, which clearly has got a strong Christian thematics in it. Um he does look calm at the end. But of course that calmness may have involved the transfer of all the anxiety to the narrator. There is a phrase early on.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

I have speculated since whether there may have been infection in his mind.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

And what happens with the stories, of course, is that then the narrator might think that his mind's infected at the end in some way. And also we as readers, I think, I mean, part of the way the power of the story works is that that anxiety and that infection might transfer to us too.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah. That's so interesting that line. I love that sentence that you say about the narrator about yeah, in whether the sigman has infection in his mind, of course, because that leads us to then never believe that the narrator is going to believe it. The narrator is actually quite fixed in his position of skepticism, isn't he? And he never sees the figure. He never himself sees the figure.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Except possibly in the form of the engine driver at the end reenacting the gestures.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

Yeah, which is why some people think think of him as the figure, in a way. Which is kind of what the Sigmund thinks at first. You think, oh god, the bloody ghost, it's appearing up there now. He's against an angry sunset. So, in a way, he's like the the figure of the ghost against. The red tunnel, Angry Sunset's an interesting phrase again. So that it must be that looking up for the singleman, he must think of the narrator as being very akin, the gestures, in the words, and in the framing with a red light, like the ghost. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Something else, though, that I find quite under Keynesian is the crack in the belief of free will, the belief in free will. You think of Scrooge, how he's able to change, he's able to learn and change the outcome. Same with Trotty, same with Red Law in those Christmas stories. And here there seems to be no, you said a moment ago about heaven being a bit of a stretch, a bit of a leap. There is no redemption. There is no escape from what's mapped out in the sequence ahead of you, which I find very interesting in this one.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Certainly, I think here there's a sense that there are just bigger forces and desires. I mean, even in Christmas Carol, I'm not sure that I necessarily think of that as a free will story because, of course, Scrooge is so reluctant, he has to be kind of violently forced, you know, against every everything in himself. Dickens can't imagine Scrooge changing through choice or through free will. He has to be kind of, you know, the ghost and forces him, and he has to see his own grave and his own bed being stripped. It's a sense that it's hard to change. Um, but yeah, you're right. I mean, there is a sense totally in this that they're caught within signalling and other kinds of processes, mechanical and non-mechanical that dominate them. Um even their sense of self is radically uncertain, I think. I mean, just on the the how it's under Kenzie, I mean you know, Dickens by this point has written a lot of Christmas stories, and he's getting a bit fed up with it, I think. That he's you know, that he He's doing a reverse scrooge, doesn't he? Yes. It's become a bit of a burden by this point, I think. And the next year, no thoroughfare, he does it just jointly with Wookiee Collins, and then he stops. So he doesn't do it again. And if you think of the late Christmases in Dickens, great expectations. Pip has the Christmas from hell, really, you know, when Liz Magritt's there on the beginning, and all the grown-ups are being horrible to him. Uh, and Joe just gives him a bit of gravy. That's not a not a great Christmas, that one. And then they go pursuing the convicts across the marshes. And then you think of Edwin Drude, where the murder happens on Christmas Eve. Um, so Dickens, by the end, has some pretty negative Christmases, I think. Um, uh, and clearly ghost stories are part of the Christmas thing. You tell ghost stories of Christmas, um, but certainly they're not particularly affirmative ones, the late Dickens stories built around Christmas. The frame story of um Mugby Junction, which is where this occurs, that is a much more traditionally redemptive, you know, it's about a miserable old man who had been forced to be a moneylender and who was illegitimate and all those sorts of things. And he meets a working-class man called Lamps, whose daughter is called Phoebe, so she's named after light. Um, and they lighten his life, and then he's reconciled his friend who betrayed him and the woman who left him through their child. So it's a very traditional Dickens redemptive Christmas story, and it's pretty good, but not mainly it's because the single model is much darker, and he's not playing the same familiar tune.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Yeah. I had a question about the hauntings in this story, and it made me wonder. I mean, you can think of other Dickens examples where this happens, but it made me wonder: is it rare in a ghost story for a ghost to be from the future? You know, a lot of ghost stories, they're from the past, they're re-emerging from the past or they're reenacting something from the past. But Dickens seems in a number of places to throw in premonitions as ghosts. And is that rare? Is that something that he does perhaps more than other writers?

SPEAKER_02 26:26

Well, it's a jolly good question. And the short answer is I don't know. Um I mean, your Christmas Carol, there was a prefigurative one, but he sees the future and he sees his own death. And that might be part of the inventiveness of that story. Do you think this is a story about a ghost from the future?

SPEAKER_01 26:44

I don't know. I suppose it's just because the gesture with the figure in the tunnel. Yes, possibly, I suppose, because the gesture in the tunnel is seen by the signalman before the narrator appears on the cutting doing the same gesture, and before the engine driver at the end does that same gesture. So there is

Ghosts and Premonitions in Dickens' Stories

SPEAKER_01 27:00

a kind of Yeah, it's prefigurative.

SPEAKER_02 27:01

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Exactly. It feels rare to me, but I'm not I don't have as many frames of references that you do on it.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

It's a jolly good question. I mean, I mean, I think one thing that ghosts do is they might warn or predict, which is what one thinks about the ghost that appears in signalman. It's not that they're from the future, but that they have some foreknowledge of the future. There's also the ghost that wants, as it were, something in its past to be sorted out, like the one that Dickens tells, where they want their bones buried properly, for example. So yeah, I think there probably are ghosts that are prefigurative or warning in that way. And that perhaps for Dickens is that then it then becomes the narrator who somehow comes to be the same as, but might not know that he has.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

I just wondered that because you you know, you think of the ghost of Christmas yet to come and it's a shadow pointing, and then you have hundreds of ghosts of Christmas yet to come above Trotty's head as he tries to prevent Meg from jumping in the river. In my mind, I then follow that through to the shadows that are described at the end of Great Expectations, where he's saying he sees no parting from a stellar. And I just wondered if that's a unique bit of Dickensian language there in Ghosts or Shadows or something. Just thinking of other authors, I can't, I don't know of other ghost stories where it's a future echo that's feeding back into the present.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

The Great Expectations one's interesting because of course he gets troubled by that and then rewrites that line from the shadow of no parting to no shadow of another parting. And what's not clear about that one is how deluded Pip is at that point. You know, is it that he's got everything wrong so far in his life, particularly when it comes to a style? And here he is again getting it wrong once more. She says, We'll continue friends apart. And he says, No, there'll be no right to go apart. And you think, oh, you you learned nothing. Or is it we're supposed to think more positively about it?

SPEAKER_01 29:06

I always think positively, I can't help it. I'm determined to think that surely, surely now, surely. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Well, I mean, Estella says we'll continue friends apart. That's her final word. So there's nothing from her to affirm that. So, how much that future-looking thing is there in Dickens or distinctive to Dickens? I'm not sure I can.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Well, that's fantastic. That's brilliant. We open up another little sort of question, and that's up for crabs. But um the word gothic, what do we mean by the gothic? I've certainly read that word a lot and it's been talked about a lot. I've never had it quite drilled down to exactly what it refers to. If I hear the word gothic, my first image in my mind is of a twisted gargle face on an old cathedral.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

I do, I mean, I do a lecture for um the students about Gothic, and then I I kind of go, in this context, it doesn't mean this, and I put a picture of a Gothic cathedral. I then put some goths up from you know the Whitby Goth weekend. I go, and I don't mean this either. And then I put some pictures of some ancient Romans being beaten over the head by goths and vandals. I go, I don't mean this either, right? So those are all legitimate uses of the term, you know, in art history, in ancient history and so forth, and in modern sociology. But I'm going to talk about these novels that seem to emerge in England in the 1750s, probably. They get deeply accelerated in the period of the French Revolution, where you get terror on the streets, literal terror and terror in fiction, and then talk it through the the 19th century. So I think it's a word, you know, if you look at the OED, the semantic range is incredibly wide. Um I tend to think of it as a particular kind of genre of fiction with something about modernity. Um it's also got a complicated history then. You know, so by the time Dickens is writing, Gothic is slightly old-fashioned and slightly ridiculous. He hardly ever uses the word, uses it like four times, I think, ever. Gothic window. Just doesn't use it. Never really writes a gothic text or a gothic novel. But the kind of colouring of Gothic as a way of talking about unconscious processes or the power of the state and imprisonment, or the particular vulnerabilities of women and children, just irrigates his work. You know, it's there in Oliver Twist, it's there in Great Expectations, it's there in Edwin Drew. So right from the beginning to the end, it's a repertoire. So he often uses it ironically or complex and innovative ways, like he does here, I think. And it's also a way to talk about sexuality. I mean, that's the other thing. You can often talk about things that you can't talk about within quote realist fiction. You know, Gothic allows you to talk about desire much more explicitly and illegitimate kinds of desire.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

It's interesting that it's old hat by the time Dickens is writing, and at the same time, he he weaves it into so many things. I was reading George Silverman's explanation for an episode. And when you get to the Houghton Tower section. But what I find interesting about it is when he does it, he takes it seriously. I feel, you know, um, and you mentioned in your in your chapter as well about the murder, the murder of Nancy and when Sykes is fleeing and he sees her eyes and he sees her body limping after him. Again, that's that's very, very serious. There's no there's nothing, I don't think, even darkly comic about that, is there?

SPEAKER_02 32:45

No, I mean, I mean the George Hilman's explanation example is brilliant, and that there's the kind of gothic moment in that where he's staying at Horton Towers and looks down into it. And it's I mean, interestingly, there, and I think also in the Sykes example, it's about the birth of consciousness in a way. So that um it's there that he starts to have a complex, self-reflective understanding of his own position. So he's brought up in a kind of feral way, in this brutal way, and then he starts to, it's at that gothic-y falling in love moment that he becomes more complex. And the same with Sykes, anyway, Sykes is a brute, an absolute thug, all the way through. Then he kills Nancy, and this is part of the why it's such a disturbing book, is that then he sees Nancy's eyes, and we don't know if that's Dickens wants us to think of that as Gothic, i.e., like she's literally there, or that this is he's kind of projecting it outwards, or he's that he's externalizing his own terror. But that's the moment that psychologically Sykes becomes interesting. That's the moment he gets a soul in a way, that's the moment he gets uh uh an inwardness. Uh, and so in both those cases, I think Gothic is is linked to complex internal state. Dickens uses it, as he does, I think, with Miss Habersham and Pitt. Um, it's an astonishing moment of deepening of consciousness, is the moment he encounters Miss Habisham and thinks of it as being like a waxwork and a corpse. So I think that's often how Dickens kind of transforms it.

SPEAKER_01 34:21

Wow. I think you have answered my question on that. I think that's really clear. That's that's that's excellent. Especially that moment of extra sensory awareness and understanding and seeing beyond your immediate is a is a really interesting way. And of course, that immediately means that ghost stories can spring up all over the place with that in mind, yeah. The other thing, just a just this is just a feeling that I've got a little bit, and maybe it's how I feel towards the story over time, but with the signalman, is the feeling that it's a kind of a bit of a love story in a strange sort of way. I mean, if you see it performed, there is that closeness of these two men that meet.

SPEAKER_02 35:02

I mean, I don't think anybody made the argument that it's a queer narrative thing until I did. I think there's reason to think it is. Um, queer theory begins with Eve Sedwick's book, Between Men, which starts off as a book about Dickens, I think, and then she it becomes the book that it is. And her last two chapters, though, are on our mutual friend and Edwin Drude, both of which have these deeply homeerotic, paranoid relationships between men, between Edwin and John Jasper, uh, and between uh Bradley and Eugene. And right in the middle of them is the signalman. So this is clearly a kind of interest of Dickens towards the end of his career, these kind of paranoid relationships, as it were, between two men who have a kind of disavowed eroticism that often leads to violence and death. And that's true in Drude, it's true in Mutual Friend, and sure enough, it's true in the Signalman as well. So that's part of the way of understanding the story. And yeah, it's about one man being drawn down into a deep, dark tunnel of another man.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

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 the 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.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

You know, one thing I noticed was the word bed appears three times in there. There's a bit where he says I felt the I think it's like a cold finger moving up my tracing down my spine, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

No, you can read that metaphorically, right? He's sweating, he's got a cold drip of sweat. But it could also be a physical touch as well. Um, or there's a bit early on where he says, he touched my hand or he we we shook hands and then walked side by side together.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

I placed my foot on the

Gothic Love in Dickens' Works

SPEAKER_00 37:37

first notch of the zigzag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven. He was waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on. I have not called out, I said, when we came close together. May I speak now? By all needs, sir. Good night, then. And here's my hand. Good night, sir. And here's mine. With that, we walked side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door, and sat down by the fire.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

And you think, well, they could be walking ham hand in hand. So I don't think it's it's I I mean, I don't overplay this, but I think there is where you get these 19th century texts, Billy Bird or Oscar Wilde, that have deep epistemological doubt in them. That's often because there's a closeted desire that can't be named between two men. That's also characteristically gothic. Gothic has always had a freedom to talk about illicit or non-normative sexual desire. And yeah, so I don't I don't want to overplay that side of it, but it is an incredibly intimate relationship between the two. Um, there's nobody else in it. And there's a side possessiveness too. He talks about the way he tells a signalman he'll come back, you know, that he's not booking any argument, and then he talks about my signalman uh at one point. So there is this kind of possessive, slightly sinister, eroticized intimacy of the two men that leads to one man's death.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

And I'm just thinking, just as you're saying that, that the the last time the narrator sees the signalman, he's offered to stay the night in the hut with him.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

I could have forgotten that. Well done.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

But he wouldn't hear of it, you know. Throughout the story, physically, they're recoiling from each other and then reaching for each other and then recoiling again.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Even the moment, good night, and here's my hand, good night, and here's mine, moments like that.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

He touched me on the arm at one point. Yeah. Watching the gesturing of it is really another bit of signalling. How are these two men signalling to each other and what are they signaling?

SPEAKER_01 39:57

And the story of the bride that's killed on the train when the signalman recounts that, and they're sat in the hut together, and he says, Well, we laid her down right here in front of you on those floorboards. And the narrator recoils, he does an involuntary shudder, doesn't he? He moves back, I think his chair scrapes back. There's the idea of something coming between them, possibly. I don't I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

That's very good. And I not I haven't thought about that. Oh, yeah. I mean, the two things that the bride dies at the end, when he looks composed, it's like he's he's in a little structure that looks like a bed, so that somehow his anxiety about if you want his desire is now calm. I just found the bit where I said there's something slightly disturbing about the way the narrator talks to single match. But I expressly intend to make you another visit. You can't argue back. I expressly intend. And then he's knocked over, presumably, by an express.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Of course. And and when they walk back after the first visit, I think, and when he says, when you come tomorrow night, don't call out. And of course, you're thinking, well, of course, don't behave like the ghost that's scaring me. Don't do the waving and the calling out. But then if you follow that on, it's again it's that other thing of this needs to be dark, it needs to be in secret. They only meet at night at 11 o'clock.

SPEAKER_02 41:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Gosh. John, this has been this has been so, so brilliant to talk to you about.

SPEAKER_02 41:19

Oh, it's been a pleasure. It's so nice to get, you know, talking about short text, often with thickens, you know, you've got such big things to talk about. You can never get down into the little details of narration and phrasing, but but one of the pleasures of doing this one, of course, has been doing exactly that.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Have a happy Halloween, however, you celebrate that.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Tom.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

Thank you. Bye now.