The Signal-Man

“The Signal-Man” is a gothic short story about the potential, as well as limits, of human communication in facilitating responsible action. It focuses on the titular signal man’s deep anxiety as a result of receiving repeated warning signals, exploring the pain—and trauma—of ethical existence.

The story explores the themes of The Burden of Responsibility, The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding, and Communication, Connection, and (Social) Mobility in the aftermath of the 1840s railway boom in England. The supernatural is not relegated to the decrepit ancestral castles or haunted Victorian mansions that are the typical staples of gothic fiction. Instead, it inhabits modern technology, asserting itself on an alternative acoustical plane via the electric bell and appearing on the railway track itself. Dickens brings the ghostly to a modern infrastructure designed to bridge physical and informational gaps as he explores the limitations of human communication, obligation, and agency.

The story, in fact, begins with cross-class miscommunication, or at least misperception. The middle-class narrator reaches out to the working-class signal man and finds that the latter challenges many of his preconceptions. Having initially assumed that the signal man’s underground workplace is inherently “dismal,” the narrator revises his assumptions after listening to

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