Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
Is there any name more synonymous with ghost stories than Charles Dickens? Certainly he wrote one of the most famous entries in the genre, with A Christmas Carol being adapted multiple times (most faithfully by Muppets,) but even beyond that, his talent for blending the gothic with a keen sense of social satire and an interest in the paranormal (like Robert Aickman, he was a member of the Ghost Club) led him directly to tales of the supernatural. His play The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain marked the first time the “Pepper’s ghost” illusion was used onstage. “The Signal-Man” is a curious tale in this vein, comparing an actual supernatural event with the life of a man trapped in a liminal space, effectively haunting the world at a point of transition between one place and another. In comparing a haunted person who’s fallen out of the world with an actual ghost, Dickens outlines a social tragedy, forcing the reader’s attention toward the people we tend to overlook, the ones who fall through the cracks… existing, but not exactly alive.
In the story, a man with a passing interest in railways happens upon a steep cutting (a manmade stone valley used to create a level path for trains) leading to the entrance of a train tunnel, where he meets a railway signal operator. The signal-man unnerves our narrator, but is happy enough to strike up a conversation while he relays signals and messages up and down the tracks, trying to stay one step ahead of any potential disasters. It is in this gloomy and disconcerting space that the signal-man tells the narrator of his unusual encounters with a ghost that appears in and atop the cutting, a spirit that perpetually covers its face and whose presence warns of oncoming but uncertain disaster. With no way of knowing the nature of the looming disaster, so unable to warn anyone, and with seemingly no end to the hauntings, the question remains: Who is this spectre, and why has it chosen the signal-man?
By the time “The Signal-Man” starts, the signal-man is already a ghost.
Dickens’ odd titular character lives in a small house he barely seems to leave, his days consumed by his duties guiding trains into the tunnel and trying to get ahead of accidents. His only real contact with the outside world occurs via telegraph, trains, and the occasional passers-by, one of whom (the narrator) only comes down because he notices the strange man in the cut. The intrusion of the unnatural into the story includes the “cutting,” a transitional and liminal space, a gloomy and preternaturally quiet, narrow corridor that encompasses the signal-man’s entire world. There’s a horror in that, a human being reduced to something animate but not fully alive through a combination of bad luck, circumstances, and the very narrow band by which they connect with the outside world. The cutting is literally a place carved out of the world and out of time, inhabited by a man that’s already haunting the world when the story starts. If ghost stories in Hartwell’s “fantastic” stream in this anthology redefine the definition of the word “ghost” (as seen in Lieber’s “Smoke Ghost” some weeks back,) then Dickens’ unusual tale of the isolated railroad signal-man is one in which the ghost doesn’t even have to be dead.
In his own quiet way, the signal-man admits he’s practically dead already and removed from the rest of humanity, having an education as a “natural philosopher” (a kind of science-adjacent discipline that attracted such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Margaret Cavendish) but squandered all his opportunities, finding himself with no way back up again. By the time he’s running the signal box in the, he’s one of the sad, forgotten people who populate the world doing jobs few would even notice. His duties, performed with near-mechanical precision, are executed perfectly alongside his ritualistic mannerisms. His life outside of that is practically nonexistent, as it seems he barely leaves his liminal space; at this point, it’s unclear if he even wants to. The signal-man is bound to the area—for eleven hours a day, he can’t leave his post or even sleep, as the signals require constant attention. He’s kept in a purgatory of train signals and now the occasional haunting, as unnerving a figure as anything he recounts about his experiences with the ghost that calls to him. Outside his hut, he dwells in a transitional space full of gloom, the only light being the red light by the mouth of the tunnel and the occasional sliver of sky.
The liminality of the signal-man’s cutting adds to the quiet, intimate horror of his situation. Liminal spaces are a phenomenon where a location feels out of step and out of time with the rest of the world, giving the place an eeriness that makes it feel haunted and forlorn. The cutting is almost an eldritch setting where time barely has any meaning (at one point the signal-man talks about entering his hut and it being night when he finally emerges, with the sensation that very little time has passed.) The small hut, claustrophobic stone embankment, and single red light (which would probably leach the cutting of any color depending on how light it was outside, as strong red light creates the illusion of a black-and-white space) are textbook imagery for modern liminal horror, which uses shadowy doorways and low light, illuminated by exit signs and very small oases of human-friendly space to suggest surroundings that are vast and full of very quiet horrors lying in wait. In this case, the space is haunted, though the entity doing the haunting still has a heartbeat.
These elements make the signal-man’s end more of a relief than a tragedy. The tragedy was his life, forced to haunt the liminal space of the cutting as a living ghost, beset at night by a spirit warning him of disasters he can do nothing to stop. His final act—warning a train of disaster at the cost of his own life—resolves both the tragic state of his haunting (the ghost was a version of the signal-man himself) and allows the poor signal-man to finally pass on from the eerie gloom where he was all but trapped. While it’s still not an ideal ending (no ending with a sad death can be ideal, of course), the truth is that the signal-man is finally free from a situation that was inescapable in life—he is no longer bound to the hut, the cutting, the eerie red light, and his own ghost.
Ghosts are spirits trapped in this world and unable to pass on to the next. Sometimes they remain behind to deliver a warning, sometimes they have unfinished business, and some of them are just trapped, unable to escape. In “The Signal-Man,” Charles Dickens challenges the expected definition of the ghost as an ephemeral spirit by presenting us with two—the traditional spectre with its haunting and deadly portents, and the human signal-man trapped in a liminal space, perpetually bound to his half-life in the hut. The clear similarities between the two paint a disturbing and tragic portrait, drawing our attention and concert to one of the helpless people who has fallen through the cracks in the world while outlining the horror of the eventual fate of such unfortunates. “The Signal-Man” is unnerving—but even more so when we face the knowledge that we’ve all encountered this type of ghost ourselves, more than once.
And now to turn it over to you. What are your thoughts on the story? Is Dickens’ liminal space the first use of such a thing in post-industrial revolution horror? Did the Muppets really do the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol? And do you know of other English authors who were members of the Ghost Club?
Please join us in two weeks for our final trip to Stephen King’s door with the Lovecraft riff “Crouch End.”
