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The Signal-Man

Charles Dickens · 1866

A ghost story by Charles Dickens about a haunted railway signalman, written after Dickens himself survived a serious train crash.

Dickens wrote this ghost story, drawing on the dangers of railways and possibly his own experience of a train crash.

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Scanned page 20 of the December 10, 1866 issue of Mugby Junction, in two columns of small printed text. The right column ends with the start of 'No. 1 Branch Line, The Signal-Man', a Dickens story whose opening lines are about a signal-man speaking to a traveller.
Charles Dickens, 'The Signal-Man,' in Mugby Junction, 1866.

About this source

What it is

'The Signal-Man' is a short horror story by Charles Dickens, first published in 1866 as part of the Christmas edition of his magazine All the Year Round. It is narrated in the first person and tells of a railway signalman haunted by a ghostly figure that appears before each disaster on his line.

Why it matters

The story may draw on a real train disaster that Victorian readers would have recognised, and some believe it reflects Dickens's own experience surviving a serious railway accident shortly before he wrote it. It shows Dickens using short fiction to explore fear, technology, and the dangers of the new railway age, rather than the longer social novels he was best known for.

Look closer

  • Why might Dickens have chosen a railway setting for a ghost story?
  • What details in the story make the narrator, and the reader, uncertain whether the ghost is real?
  • How does the story use repetition of words and gestures to build tension?

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