Comparing The Signalman and The Red Room

Comparing The Signalman and The Red Room

These stories written pre-1900 at a time when one would have feared

the unknown and hadn’t benefited from travel, TV, and an education

that we have today. These stories have typical features of the 19th

century ghost stories such as a castle, candles at night, an

uninviting setting, a lonely man and so on. The supernatural means

something that is beyond our control and therefore, as humans, we fear

what we don’t understand, in both stories the writers show how this

fear affects people lives.

The Signalman is set outside near a railway line whereas The Red Room

is set inside a castle largely in one room. The outside setting in The

Signalman is described with quite a lot of description, creating an

uncertain spooky atmosphere, “Is there any path by which I can come

down and speak to you?” whereas The Red Room setting is immensely

detailed once he starts to describe the corridor and then the room

itself. The technique Wells uses in The Red Room is a variety of very

powerful adjectives such as “great staircase” and ” vivid black

shadow” to embellish the image of his journey along the corridor. This

gives me a vivid image of what the place looks like without even being

there. The castle seems enormous and its size seems to almost

overwhelm the visitor. The technique Dickens uses to create the

setting is he makes the characters say weird things to set the spooky

atmosphere “I don’t know you. I never saw the face. The felt arm is

across the face and the right arm is waved-violently waved this way”.

This sets a spooky atmosphere and makes you feel as if you are there.

In The Signalman the narrator is the visitor and he is telling the