Charles Dickens' The Signalman
Introduction
I have studied pre-1900 short stories by different authors, which all
follow a similar format and historical content of their time. In my
essay I will discuss and describe what necessary ingredients are
needed to make these murder mystery short stories effective and
successful.
Short stories became an extremely favoured form of fiction and
entertainment during the nineteenth century... In the days before
electrical advantages for entertainment, (e.g:-radio, television,
films and videos) adventure was generally only discovered/only existed
within the imagination of mystery and supernatural stories, and were
especially popular in the Victorian age, where people would escape
into the mystifying worlds the words described in the stories.
(Perhaps these authors’ fulfilled the need for excitement in this
relatively oppressed society...). It was during this era that many
writers began to capture readers’ curiosity about death, vengeance,
trickery, imprisonment, hanging, ghosts and fear...
A first impression may affect/ determine the way the words will
communicate with its reader throughout a story. So I feel it important
that the begining of a mystery story must be (engaging, compelling,
intriguing, appealing, capture the imagination/ attentions of the
audience) immediately for it to be successful.
Mystery= arcane, baffling, curious, enigmatic, incomprehesible,
inexplicable, insoluable, magical, miraculous, mystifying, obscure,
perplexing, puzzling, secret, strange, uncanny, unexplained,
unfathomable, unknown, wierd, bizarre, puzzle, problem, riddle,
abnormal, supernatural.
Murderous= barbaric, bloodthirsty, brutal, cruel, dangerous, deadly,
ferocious, fierce, homocidal, pitiless, ruthless, savage, vicious,
violent, assassin.
The overall effect of the above ingredients, if successfully combined,
will ensure the reader is first drawn in, by capturing their
imagination, and they are then compelled to keep reading until the
end.
Beginings
In the begining of our first story The Adventure of the Engineers
Thumb by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892) (who is the creator of the
famous characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson’s detective
adventures) He tells this strange, dramatic story, which he believes,
had been told more than once in the newspapers - to stress how
significant this mysterious account was. The following quotation is
the paragraph introducing the story:-
‘One morning, at a little before seven o’clock, I was awakened by the
maid tapping at the door, to announce that two men had come from
Paddington, and were waiting in the consulting room. I dressed
hurriedly, for I knew by experience that railway cases were seldom
trivial, and hastened downstairs. As I descended, my old ally, the
guard, came out of the room, and closed the door tightly behind him.
‘I’ve got him here,’ he whispered, jerking his thumbs over his
shoulder, ‘He’s all right.’ ‘What is it then?’ I asked, for his manner
suggested that it was some strange creature which he had caged up in
Suspense and Tension in The Red Room by H.G.Wells and The Signalman by Charles Dickens
The aim of this essay is to explore the way in which the two authors
A Comparison of The Signalman by Charles Dickens, The Red Room by H.G. Wells and The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
Macdonald, Ross. "The Writer as Detective Hero." Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs, London: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Room' is a story made to prove that there is no such thing as the
and hopes the monkey's paw can do it for him. Mr White then makes a
Another man - we are not told who the man is or why he is present, are
Both Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in their respective novels, explore the relationship between detective and criminal. Many mystery novels employ this opposition, but in ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays’ and ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,’ the authors, while spending appropriate time with this juxtaposition, add additional elements by spending a majority of their time investigating the idea of justice. Justice is the central theme of both respective novels because both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot attempt to discover the truth regarding their respective cases by any means necessary.
doesn't see why she had to take him in and "bring him up by hand", she
Suspense and Tension in Charles Dickens' The Signalman In the Charles Dickens' story the narrator meets the signalman who is confessing to him his problems. The narrator comes every night to find out that the signalman was seeing a ghost of a man, who was pointing out that certain train accidents are going to happen. After a few days the narrator goes peacefully to the signalman's shed, and finds out that he mysteriously died. The signalman at the train station sees sightings of a ghost in the distance.
Atmosphere in Charles Dickens' The Signalman 'The Signal-man' is a ghostly thriller by Charles Dickens. Based on an apparently hallucinating signal-man and the tales of his hallucinations, the story is seen through the eyes of the narrator, a man told of the signal-mans troubles during conversations with the signal-man himself. From the beginning of the story, the atmosphere is both eerie and gloomy. To produce this type of atmosphere, Dickens had to draw on several different aspects of English literature-mostly through description and use of language. The setting is described meticulously, producing vivid images in the mind of the reader.
Mysteries have always held great fascination for the human mind, not least because of the aura that surrounds them and the realm of the Unknown into which they delve. Coupled with the human propensity of being particularly curious about aspects which elude the average mind, the layer of intrigue that glosses over such puzzles makes for a heady combination of the literary and the popular. In the canon of detective fiction worldwide, no detective has tickled the curious reader’s imagination and held it in thrall as much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The 221-B, Baker Street, London ‘amateur’ detective combines a rare blend of intellectual prowess and sharp wit to crack a series of baffling riddles.
mind and it did not exist. We are told by the narrator that he thought
A mystery or ghost story is a story that contains a ghost or a supernatural element. Like in ‘The Signalman’ ghosts often appear as prophets of things to come.
Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times critiques the use of extreme utilitarianism as an acceptable means to governing a society in which citizens are able to lead happy, productive, flourishing lives. “Just the facts,”19th century English utilitarianism argued, are all one needs to flourish. Those answers that we can arrive at by way of mathematical, logical reasoning are all needed to live a full human life. Hard Times shows however that a “just the facts” philosophy creates a community inhospitable to the needs of one another, a society nearly void of human compassion, and one lacking in morality. Underlying the novel’s argument is the Aristotelian concept that the primary purpose of government is to correctly educate citizens in morality and, consequentially, to cultivate an upright social environment where all are inspired to flourish.