Celebrating the birthday of Charles Dickens (BOTD 7th February) with a look at how travel and trains impacted his literary output ...
Charles Dickens loved London, and he particularly loved travelling around
London. Those travels, as critics like Jonathan Grossman observe, affected both his
view of the city and the ways in which he portrayed that city in his novels. In Dickens
Networks: Public Transport & the Novel, Grossman explains how the author focuses on
a city of walkers in The Old Curiosity Shop, of stagecoaches in The Pickwick Papers, and
of railroads in Little Dorrit. This expansion of the geography of the novel, according to
Grossman, affected the ways and kinds of stories which Dickens could tell. In particular,
Grossman identifies “a coordinating ‘Meantime…’ logic,” which ties together diverse
characters and distant locations (6). ‘This’ happens here, to one character, while
“Meantime” (i.e. simultaneously) ‘something else’ happens there to another. The city’s
streets, railways, or even ferries link these characters to one another in the omniscient
narrator’s capacious “now.”
Railroads in particular fascinated Dickens, in part because he experienced their
speed and beauty, but also their unpredictability and danger. As Peter Ackroyd explains,
on 9 June 1865, Dickens survived what came to be known as the Staplehurst railway
accident, which killed ten and injured more than three dozen. With the train speeding
along at 50 miles per hour, track repairs and a signalman’s error derailed it near a
viaduct. Dickens was traveling with the actress Ellen Ternan and her mother as they
journeyed from Paris for London, and though none of them suffering serious injuries,
the accident left the author scarred (Ackroyd 190-200).
Dickens then helped the injured, giving water collected from the river in his hat
and brandy from his flask. “And then he did a remarkable thing. He remembered that
he had left that month’s manuscript of Our Mutual Friend in the swaying carriage. So in
the calmest possible way he clambered back into the compartment and rescued it. But
he was not calm very long. He felt the effects of nausea for days afterwards; his pulse
was unsteady, and he experienced all the physical tremors of nervous anxiety” (Ackroyd
191-192).
Jill Matus, in “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian
Connection,” suggests that today we might call the trauma of his response PTSD (413).
And she joins other scholars like Norris Pope whose “Dickens's ‘The Signalman’ and
Information Problems in the Railway Age” links the author’s experiences in the
Staplehurst disaster with that short story about an accident he composed the following
year (Pope 437).
You can listen to the full version of The Signalman at The Aural Library:
On a lighter note:
A few years before Dickens experienced the Staplehurst accident, an article about opera singers stuck on a train in a snow drift appeared in Household Words, which formed the basis for our musical farce Snowbound in Song, also on Youtube. You can listen to it here:
Works Cited
Peter Ackroyd, The Life and Times of Charles Dickens (Irvington, N.Y.: Hydra
Pub.: 2003.
Jonathan H. Grossman, Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the
Novel (OUP, 2012).
Jill L. Matus, “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian
Connection.” Victorian Studies, 2001-03, Vol.43 (3), p.413-436.
Norris Pope, “Dickens's "The Signalman" and Information Problems in the
Railway Age.” Technology and Culture , Jul., 2001, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 436-
461.
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