FIGURE 3.1 A demon train breaks into the kitchen; from George Cruikshank’s Table-Book (1845).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
He had taught himself a language down there—
DICKENS, “The Signal-Man” (21)
MELODRAMA, RAILWAY TRAUMA, AND SYSTEMIC RISK
On this dangling car sat Charles Dickens, together with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother. Concealing the identities of his companions, Dickens recounted the moment in a letter to his childhood friend Thomas Mitton three days later.
The old lady cried out “My God!” and the young one screamed.
I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite, and the young one on my left) and said: “We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.” The old lady immediately answered, “Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul, I will be quiet.” The young lady said in a frantic way, “Let us join hands and die friends.” We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: “You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?” They both answered quite collectedly, “Yes,” and I got out without the least notion of what had happened. (“Letter” 56)
Dickens made his way from the wreckage, found the key to unlock the carriage, helped his fellow passengers to safety, and aided the injured and dying amid the piles of twisted iron. At last, after he saw he could do little more, it occurred to him that, on the dangling carriage, lay the only copy of a recently completed manuscript—and so he was forced to make a delicate journey back to rescue the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend.
While Dickens’s account of the accident was undoubtedly the stuff of melodrama, it was followed by a darker and more confusing state of affairs. Further on in the same letter to Mitton, Dickens confessed, “I don’t want to be examined at the Inquest, and I don’t want to write about it,” and ended by admitting that even “in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and am obliged to stop.” For a man as prolific as Dickens, this sudden writer’s block came as a shock. Dickens’s suddenly intolerable wrestle with words and meanings temporarily cost him his voice—“I most unaccountably brought someone else’s [voice] out of that terrible scene,” he said—and it was two weeks before he “recovered” his own speech again (Dickens, “To Thomas”; Ackroyd 961; Slater 537). Meanwhile, he continued to suffer from the shake for some time after Staplehurst, felt “faint and sick,” had a low pulse, and, when traveling by train, experienced the persistent illusion that the carriage was lower on the left side (Ackroyd 963; Slater 551; Kaplan 460–461).
Dickens was to die five years after Staplehurst, on the exact day of the disaster; such are the plot devices that make Dickens the scorn of so many so-called realists. If one of the central crises of mid-Victorian society was the almost unbearable dissonance between Industrial Age trauma and the melodramatic imagination, then this final act (if we can call it an act) of Dickens’s life marks the culmination of a life spent wrestling with that opposition. For Dickens’s life ended with both melodramatic and anti-melodramatic gestures, affirming, in over-coded style, the signal haunting of his later life and, at the same time, dictating an ambiguous judgement of the man. How, after all, are we to read his accident, trauma, and death? As with so many of Dickens’s own stories, the prima facie reading is the melodramatic one: the ghosts of train wrecks past have returned to claim the one who slipped their grasp at the appointed hour and so to render ultimate judgement for sexual sin, exemplified by the presence (more hackneyed plotting) of the mistress and aging mother at the site of the accident. But, as again with so many of Dickens’s own stories, there is a deeper reading as well, a reading that cuts against the melodramatic and points toward something more slippery and less speakable.
The railroad disordered Victorian nerves in ways that strain our imagination today and very nearly baffled theirs at the time. Confronted with these rivers of moving steel—blasting through hills, reshuffling populations, altering time itself—Victorians drew from their common narrative stock. Though no genre was more deeply embedded within Victorian culture than that of melodrama, this mode of cultural imagination suffered from the strains not only of competing narrative conventions but also of social upheavals that resisted easy comprehension and incorporation. Trains as monsters, massacring innocents in fiery explosions; such images were common enough in the period to reflect a widespread political unconscious but were also increasingly found inadequate. As the mid-nineteenth century turned toward the fin de siècle, it became clearer that the dangers posed and the traumas inflicted by the railway arose from crises that resisted translation into the familiar terms of melodrama.
One of the central quandaries of representation in the Victorian period was this: how might one represent an ill that is not villainous but systemic? The question involved both the neurological sciences and the theatrical arts, the former of which wrestled with the etiology of a bewildering variety of nervous ailments that seemed to accompany railway travel, the latter of which attempted to place these disorders into meaningful conventions of narrative and performance. This chapter traces the ways in which a number of Victorian neurologists and artists struggled to address this central quandary, especially during a brief period of paradigm shift: the middle years of the 1860s.
This chapter has three parts. The first explores ways in which railroads drove a new discourse of nervous trauma, as mysterious symptoms were linked to the vibrations, overstimulations, and fatigues of railway travel—to say nothing of the aftereffects of railway accidents themselves. The second part discusses how Victorians attempted to make sense of their railroad anxieties by incorporating them, with greater and lesser success, into familiar modes of melodrama. And the third part focuses on Dickens’s ghost story “No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-Man” (referred to here as “The Signal-Man” [1866]), published in Mugby Junction, the Christmas number of Dickens’s literary journal All the Year Round. Unlike most of the artworks considered in this book, this is a short story rather than a drama or performance, but it is a story that reveals with particular clarity the crisis of melodrama in an age of rapidly industrializing nervous sensation. Written a year after the Staplehurst disaster, the story gropes toward a new language for a traumatic condition, a language haunted by melodrama even as it moves beyond it.
It is hard, now, to recover the shock of industrial accidents for the moral universe of the Victorian middle classes, and nowhere was this shock felt more severely than in the horror of railway accidents. In large part because of the massive mid-century increase in rail travel in England, the notion that railways were becoming ever more dangerous had become deeply entrenched in the public consciousness by the 1860s. According to a table provided by historian R. W. Kostal, railway accident casualties rose steadily from an average of 20.2 in 1845–1850 to 50.2 in 1865–1870, and the number of injuries paralleled this rise (281). These increases were more than offset, however, by the vastly greater increase in the number of rail travelers in the same period; railroads carried 30.4 million passengers in 1845 and more than ten times that many (332.2 million) in 1870 (281). While railway officials could, therefore, argue with justification that train travel was, in fact, becoming ever safer, such arguments did little to reassure the general public.
Even regular train travel was considered to have damaging effects on the nervous system—not only by the general public but by much of the medical profession as well. In 1862, the British medical journal The Lancet published a multi-part report by a Commission on “The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health,” and the report documented a wide variety of adverse health effects of regular train travel. It noted the “short sharp jolts” of the third-class carriages, and described an “eminent surgeon” whose “third-class passengers complain for days from the constant knocking together of the knees which successive jolts during the journey produce” (January 11, 1861: 48). While the “shocks” are “less violent” in second-class carriages, “the total amount of motion communicated … remains the same,” and in first-class carriages “an almost incessant repetition of mere vibrations” sways “the body according to the direction of the impulse” (48). The Commission concluded that “[t]he jolting of a railway carriage is a series of small and rapid concussions” (51), noting that the impact of these concussions upon the spine and cranium are especially severe, as “[c]erebral or spinal concussions, in their higher degree, annihilate the functions of those organs. In the milder forms they lead up to disease which, remaining for a long time latent, may still end up in paralysis” (51). At the least, “[t]he frequency, rapidity, and peculiar abruptness of the motion of the railway carriage keep … a constant strain on the muscles,” resulting in “bodily fatigue” (51). Such deleterious effects occur even if the rider is unaware of them, for, though “[t]he traveller’s mind takes little note of the thousands of successive jolts which he experiences, … every one of them tells upon his body” (March 8, 1862: 258). These concussions may have been minute, but they were quantifiable. An “eminent scientific chemist” quoted in The Lancet counted “90,000 movements in a first-class carriage from Manchester to London” (January 11, 1861: 48), while another rider, in a subsequent issue, put the number of “short, sharp vibrations felt in a railway carriage” “upwards of 20,000” per hour—and each and every jolt “resembles, on a small scale, the jerk and violent motion produced by a collision, from which it differs only in degree” (March 1, 1862: 234).
Micro-concussions were but one posited source of railway fatigue; another was rapid visual stimulation. In railroad travel, “[o]bjects on the road are passed with such velocity that they only produce momentary impressions on the retina; and thus the visual powers are severely tried” (January 11, 1862: 51). The trouble is exacerbated when “the traveller sets himself to read” on a train, as “he imposes yet further labour on the eye in tracing the shifting characters of his book or newspaper, and also on the brain” (52). Similarly, the “rattle and noise which accompany the progress of the train create an incessant vibration on the tympanum, and thus influence the brain through the nerve of hearing” (52). Thus
[a]ssailed through the avenues of the eye and ear, and subject to concussions due to vertical movement and lateral oscillation communicated through the trunk, and actually transmitted by the bony walls of the head when it rests against the back of the carriage, the brain is apt to suffer physiological changes. Amongst the well-known effects are—occasional dizziness, headache, sickness, and mental fatigue. (52)
Over the course of seven issues, The Lancet created a picture of railway travel in which nervous shock is the rule rather than the exception, the repetition rather than the interruption.
Such attention to the supposedly fatiguing neurological effects of viewing a rapidly passing landscape points to a blurring of the line between psyche and body, and indeed the Lancet report charted a wealth of nervous conditions that would be difficult to neatly classify. “The very power of locomotion keeps persons in a state of great nervous excitement,” writes the Commission, quoting Lord Shaftesbury (January 4, 1862:15). Commuters are “especially subject” to the nervous strain, as they must catch the train twice daily and “to a certain extent all their actions prior to departure in the morning and afternoon are influenced by the pervading sense of this anxiety” (50). To understand just why this daily rhythm should have been so disturbing, we must recall just how revolutionary was the industrialization of time brought about by the railroads: one of the many consequences of the need for precise timekeeping initiated by the railroads was the national synchronization of clocks. Such conditions included a general “condition of uneasiness” about a network in which time was of the essence and “[t]he possibility of collision is constantly present” (51). A thousand exacerbating factors roiled this unease.
[I]f by chance a train stop at some unusual place, or if the pace be slackened, or the whistle sound its shrill alarm, a head is projected from nearly every window, and anxious eyes are on the look-out for signs of danger. So, too, the frequent lateness of trains, and the bad time which they keep, are causes of anxiety. The pace, also, prevents the traveller from observing natural objects and sights of interest on the road, which made coach travelling a source of mental relaxation and a pastime. The passenger is forced into subjective sources of mental activity; and where the tendency to excitement exists, this also, quantum valeat, must be esteemed an undesirable feature belonging to this manner of locomotion. (51)
Time began to strain the nerves in nearly contradictory ways: while delay produced anxiety, rapidity produced mental exhaustion.
While many industrial disasters—mine explosions, factory fires, and so forth—could be restricted to industrial laborers, the train wreck affected all classes, and, as a result, no disaster so broadly crystallized the underlying fear of industrial trauma in the 1860s and 1870s. But again, the nervous strain was not limited to incidents of accident. Railroad travel forcefully reminded riders of all classes of the brutal underbelly of industrial society not only when trains went off the rails but also when they stayed smoothly on them. For railway lines often cut through the heart of industrial zones, exposing the upper orders of their human cargo to living and working conditions that might otherwise be hidden safely from view. The “Morbid Effects” of such sights, as one physician wrote in a letter to The Lancet, could be neurologically traumatic.
Persons travelling at night through the iron and coal countries, where all around lies in the lurid glare of kilns, forges, and furnaces, and the figures of the workmen are seen distorted and moving to and fro (presenting a picture of what one may suppose aptly to resemble the ancient domains of Pluto and the infernal regions),—persons travelling in such districts may undergo a shock to the nervous system which it will require weeks to remedy. From my observations, made when superintendent to a large lunatic asylum, I consider that such shocks are very detrimental to a constitutionally weak person, and that their frequent occurrence in a subject of low mental power would materially assist in aggravating any tendency to mental disease. (March 1, 1862: 236)
Travel by rail was the closest many Victorians were to approach to the regime of factory life, but even that distance threatened distemper that could slide toward disease.
Shortly after the publication of the Lancet Commission series, two of the most significant works on railway-induced trauma appeared: Thomas Buzzard’s “On Cases of Injury from Railway Accidents; Their Influence upon the Nervous System, and Results” (published as a series in The Lancet in 1867) and John Eric Erichsen’s On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (1866). Both works wrestled with the etiology of railway traumas, investigating to what degree such disorders were mere matters of hysteria—a question of more than medical interest, as compensation cases against railroad companies in England increased rapidly in the 1850s and 1860s (Harrington 41). These cases, in turn, led to a demand to have nonphysical injuries certified by medical authorities, and courtroom battles over railway-induced traumas increasingly featured medical professionals representing both plaintiffs and defendants. Thomas Buzzard, a physician who was soon to be appointed (in 1867) to London’s National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic, leaned toward psychological explanations for railway traumas, concluding that “mental anxiety alone is often sufficient to give rise” to phenomena such as partial paralysis, amnesia, and other curious effects of railway travel (May 25, 1867: 623). While Buzzard suggested that mysterious psychological elements might be at play in railroad traumas, John Eric Erichsen, Professor of Surgery at University Hospital in London, attempted to put this genie back in the bottle. In his enormously influential book-length treatise, Erichsen argued both for and against the exceptionality of railway traumas, but strongly in favor of their physiological character. On one hand he noted that
[t]he rapidity of the movement, the momentum of the person involved, the suddenness of its arrest, the helplessness of the sufferers, and the natural perturbation of mind that must disturb the bravest, are all circumstances that of a necessity greatly increase the severity of the resulting injury to the nervous system, and that justly cause these cases to be considered as somewhat exceptional from ordinary accidents. (22)
But on the other hand, Erichsen insisted that the difference between railway-related and non-railway-related concussions was one of degree rather than kind. In the final analysis, Erichsen considered the phenomenon of “railway spine”—a controversial mid-century term used to describe a variety of mysterious ailments that seemed to accompany railway travel—to be nothing more nor less than spinal concussion. It is this sort of skepticism about the uniqueness of railway trauma (Erichsen at one point called the appellation of “railway spine” “absurd” [23]) that made him an especially popular medical source for railroad companies defending themselves against accident litigation.
And yet, no sooner had Erichsen tidied up the mystery of railway trauma by describing it as simply another form of concussion than the riddle reasserted itself. It now lay in the apparent fact that so many railway-accident patients exhibited a striking “disproportion” between the “apparently trifling accident that the patient has sustained” and the “most serious, progressive, and persistent character” of the invisible trauma (72). Holding to his entirely physiological explanation, Erichsen argued that this disparity is the result of internal concussive effects that would seem to shake the “nervous force … out of a man” much as a magnet struck by a heavy blow can lose its magnetic power (73). Erichsen’s argument by analogy is a sign that he was groping toward darker regions, and sure enough, he ultimately conceded that he could not “say with certainty” “[h]ow these jars, shakes, shocks, or concussions of the spinal cord directly influence[d] [the patient’s] action” (73). The point on which he had to insist, however, was that these conditions were not signs of hysteria, which “is a disease of women rather than of men, of the younger rather than of the middle-aged and old, of people of an excitable, imaginative, or emotional disposition rather than of hard-headed, active, practical men of business” (92). The notion that “a man advanced in life, of energetic business habits” would have “suddenly become ‘hysterical,’ like a love-sick girl” was sufficiently absurd on its face to rule out of consideration (93).
Much of the anxiety around train travel was connected with the fact that the risks of the railway were increasingly understood by the broad public to be systemic in nature. The dangers of systemic breakdown, particularly of communications technology, was widely understood among the Victorian public in the mid-sixties, if only because the two most sensational train wrecks of the early sixties—the Clayton Tunnel disaster of 1861 and the Staplehurst disaster of 1865—were due to signaling failures in an overcrowded rail network. According to a London Times piece in the wake of Staplehurst, the fault lay in an unmanageable “pressure of traffic” rather than in the poor judgement of overworked signalmen. The underlying problem was neither personal nor moral, but systemic.
Safety is made to depend on a complex system, first of timing, and then of signals to counteract failures in punctuality. Such a system requires constant and unfailing care. But the officials upon whom the observance of these rules depends grow so accustomed to the danger that they slip into all manner of irregularities, which go on increasing until some frightful disaster suddenly reveals the rottenness of the whole system. (Times 11; emphasis added)
Disaster functions, here, less as accident than as sign, pointing to the hidden nature of the sublimely complex network that produces it.
The mid-nineteenth century was beginning to discover what, in future decades, was to become a familiar dynamic, in which the increased efficiency of industrial systems entailed that the disasters those systems produced would be ones of ever increasing severity. This emerging dynamic helped produce a fundamental change in the understanding of “accident.” The cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that
[i]n Diderot’s Encyclopédie, “Accident” is dealt with as a grammatical and philosophical concept, more or less synonymous with coincidence. The pre-industrial catastrophes were natural events, natural accidents. They attacked the objects they destroyed from the outside, as storms, floods, thunderbolts, and hailstones. After the Industrial Revolution, destruction by technological accident came from the inside. The technical apparatuses destroyed themselves by means of their own power. The energies tamed by the steam engine and delivered by it as regulated mechanical performance destroyed that engine itself in the case of an accident. The increasingly rapid vehicles of transportation tended to destroy themselves and each other totally, whenever they collided. (131)
While Schivelbusch emphasizes changing definitions of “accident,” “disaster” also assumed new meaning in the period. Literally and originally meaning “ill-starred,” “disaster” took on, around 1600, the additional sense of “[a]nything that befalls of ruinous or distressing nature; a sudden or great misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). Through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and much of the nineteenth century, the word seems to have been used mainly to refer to personal or social disorders (as, for example, with Lear’s lament that “[w]e make guilty of our disasters the Sun, the Moone, and Starres”). Then, a little after the mid-nineteenth century, we find an emerging understanding of disaster as systemic. A short sentence on the Second Empire from John Morley’s On Compromise (written 1874, published 1886) is an early linguistic indication of this new sense of disaster as the necessary result of a disturbed system. “Such a system must inevitably bring disaster,” he writes.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the railway had become so thoroughly embedded in everyday life that it had come to seem a sort of second nature, and this naturalization gave rise to a queasy impression that the ubiquity of the system came at the cost of an ever present possibility of catastrophic breakdown. “We all of us have Damocles’ swords hanging over our turtle-soup dishes,” reads an essay entitled “My Railway Collision,” in the 1860 issue of All the Year Round (Thornbury 176). The author, George W. Thornbury, recalls riding a train after having read of a “TERRIBLE RAILWAY ACCIDENT” in the Daily Telegraph earlier in the day. Looking out the train window, he finds himself irritated, as though by direct impulses to his nerves.
Still that mosquito of evil. Still the demon gnat flying over my nerves. What can it be that pinches me like a tight boot, and yet has no name? I have it! It was the railway accident I was reading, falling upon that previous presentiment; it was that which, finding some unguarded loophole of my nerves, had got in, disagreed with me, and done the mischief. (177)
In this case, his presentiments come true, as his train crashes into a goods train ahead of it because of a signalling error. Shocked, at first, by the disaster itself, the author soon finds himself shocked by something else entirely: the quickness with which the disaster is erased and the system resumed, without blame or consequence or even recollection.
The line would soon be cleared. We should soon be on to Basingstoke, where the Salisbury train was waiting us. It was no one’s fault; no guard present had ever been in more than two collisions before. The head porter at Farnborough thought it better not to speak; it was “not his place, you know,” and the company did not like speaking. You never, from anybody, could have gathered that we, the express train, had run into the goods train that ought not to have been on the line. (179)
In the author’s conclusion—“It was no one’s fault”—one hears an echo of Dickens’s original title for Little Dorrit (1857): Nobody’s Fault. The clearing of the line, the smooth resumption of traffic, the lack of accountability; these enflame rather than quell the nerves. This silent coupling of efficiency with disaster produces a new form of humour among the surviving passengers, as they “asked the guards at what o’clock the next collision would take place” (179). And the next morning, also with clockwork predictability, the narrator finds himself reading of his own “FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT” in the daily paper. If the accident itself had produced one psychological trauma on the author, the quick, easy, mechanical resumption of the system in the accident’s wake seems to produce a second trauma. Time and again in Victorian reports, we find that the railway system disturbed nerves both through its accidental interruption and through its proper functioning.
Especially at mid-century, the railway posed fundamental problems for melodramatic representation in particular and artistic representation more broadly. How might one narrate, paint, sing, or stage this newly industrialized time and space? An early response to the question, entitled “Poetry on the Railway,” appeared in Dickens’s journal Household Words in 1855. Its author, George A. Sala, ponders, “How the deuce … are you to get any poetry out of that dreariest combination of straight lines, a railroad:—straight rails, straight posts, straight wires, straight stations, and straight termini” (415). It’s a thorny question, as the machine-like quality of the whole railroad system seems to strip even violent death of its fascination.
There is poetry even for the murderer on his gibbet; but who cares to sing the railway victims? who bids the line restore its dead? who adjurates the engine to bring back the true and brave? They are killed, and are buried; the inquest meet; the jurymen give their verdict, and forget all about it two days afterwards. Someone is tried for manslaughter and acquitted, for, of course, there is nobody to blame! (417)
The trouble Sala identifies—the absence of poetry for railway victims—begins as one of sheer lack of imagination (“who cares to sing the railway victims?”) but soon becomes the more fundamental and familiar narrative problem of a lack of villainy (“there is nobody to blame!”). This narrative lack makes memory short, death meaningless, and space empty, such that the “very spot where the earth drank up blood” is now just another nowhere passed over gaily by an excursion train (417).
The systemic nature of railway risk and railway-related trauma was especially ill suited to melodramatic narrative conventions. To see how this is so, let us recall some typical features of nineteenth-century melodrama. A principal engine of the genre is the emergence of an intolerable confusion between good and evil. Whether by machination or circumstance or some combination of the two, right is mistaken for wrong, and wrong for right. Generally speaking, melodrama ends only when this intolerable confusion is set right again, and proper perception is restored. This is the moment in which the temporarily hidden moral order of the world, what Peter Brooks calls melodrama’s “moral occult,” is suddenly, redemptively exposed. Melodrama thus strives to demonstrate, in Brooks’s words, “the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men” (20). Villainy’s centrality to melodrama arises from its role as a mask for the underlying moral occult and accounts for what Eric Bentley describes as melodrama’s “paranoid” vision, the sense that “[e]ven the landscape has come to life if only to assault us” (Life 202). The case is almost syllogistic: if all evil is the consequence of villainy, and evil is everywhere, then villains must be ubiquitous and vastly cunning. The hero’s task, to unmask and defeat these monsters, is as straightforward as it is difficult.
Also typical of nineteenth-century melodrama is an insistence on outward expression as a reliable indicator of inner feeling. The moral imperative of this equivalence is so central to melodrama that much of the tension of melodramatic narrative hinges on the perversion of this equivalence: the pure soul mistaken by family and friends for a villain is as reliable a melodramatic leitmotif as the evil seducer whom all take to be good hearted. At the same time, signs may always be found by the discerning (which usually includes the audience), signs that serve as outer indicia of hidden inner truth. For Oliver Twist, say, the equivalence between inward condition and outward appearance is perverted from the start, as character after character mistakes his poverty for a sign of his inward character, a perversion that is a source of much of that novel’s narrative energy and moral outrage. But at the same time, the novel insists on an equivalence between appearance and inner condition through the fact that, despite his desperate upbringing, Oliver always speaks like a young gentleman. From a Naturalist standpoint, Oliver’s refined speech is an absurdity, but from a melodramatic perspective it is just as necessary as Fagin’s “villainous-looking and repulsive face” or Mr. Brownlow’s “very respectable-looking” appearance (50, 57).
A genre that needs personifications of good and evil confronted an insuperable obstacle when faced with a crisis that was systemic in nature. Similarly, a genre that relies upon simple correspondences between inner life and outer appearance simply had no room for such bewildering phenomena as the mysterious “railway spine.” It was not even clear, on the most basic level, what Dickens’s exterior symptoms (his shake, his slow pulse, his writer’s block, etc.) revealed about his inner condition: were his ailments the result of invisible lesions on his brain? Shocks to his psyche? A concussion to his spinal cord? Crushing feelings of guilt? The conventions of melodrama were of no help here.
It was a crisis that melodrama avoided by returning to the tried-and-true figure of the monster. This association of trains with the monsters of Gothic melodrama, stronger in Britain than the United States, emerged in the wake of a “Railway Panic” that Britain suffered in October 1845, a panic that swept through the securities markets and erased fortunes virtually overnight. The crisis exacerbated a tendency to draw from the well of Gothic melodrama for nightmare images of trains. An entirely typical satirical essay from the 1845 edition of George Cruikshank’s Table-Book, for example, speaks of a
terrible creature in every sense of the word—a fright of a creature, an encounter with which would be a new edition of a “monster meeting”—a dragon more terrible than the dragon of Wantley, more fierce than the dragon of St. George; aye, fiercer than any of his Christmas brethren, the tribe of “Snap-dragons”—this monster, hatched in “Capel Court,” as they hatch chickens in Egypt, by “artificial means”—in fine, the Dragon of the Panic has gone triumphantly forth—abroad himself when installed in the homes of everybody else—starting with his evil eye, promising schemes out of all countenance, and blowing by his pestiferous breath the new lines of projectors into anything but pleasant places! (Reach 261)
The inexorable, snake-like rhythm of these clauses, linked like rambling carriages by means of dashes, captures the serpentine monster-machine, and an accompanying illustration depicts a demon train breaking into a kitchen and terrifying a cook and cat (Figure 3.1).1 (Dickens may have subsequently borrowed this literary technique of hurtling run-on clauses to depict an impression of a satanic train in Dombey and Son [1846–1848].)
FIGURE 3.1 A demon train breaks into the kitchen; from George Cruikshank’s Table-Book (1845).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
The demon-railway motif reached its apogee in the dramatic scenario that has since become virtually synonymous with melodrama: the victim tied to the tracks and rescued in the nick of time.2 The history of the tied-to-the-tracks sensation is a complex one, but it roughly parallels the emergence of sensation drama in the 1860s. A species of melodrama, “sensation drama” emerged with the premiere of Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn at the Adelphi Theatre in London on September 10, 1860. The subgenre is typified by one or more “sensation scenes”: overwhelming spectacles produced by extraordinary theatrical effects, often featuring disasters such as shipwrecks, avalanches, burning buildings, and volcano explosions.3 On March 23, 1863, a sensation drama by Charles Bolton, entitled The Engineer, opened at London’s Victoria Theatre, featuring a scene in which the villain is crushed by a charging locomotive as the heroine narrowly escapes in a ballast truck. A similar scene was soon incorporated into another melodrama, the anonymous The London Arab, which opened at the Victoria on March 29, 1866 and was then recycled into several other plays in England, Paris, and the United States. The scenario then hopped from stage to print, with a tied-to-the-tracks incident forming the climax of a story entitled “Captain Tom’s Fright,” published in the March 13, 1867 issue of The Galaxy. The popularity of the scene reached its apex in London, in the summer of 1868, when versions of it appeared in at least five sensation dramas: Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight; Dion Boucicault’s After Dark; Watts Phillips’s Land Rats and Water Rats; George Spencer’s Rail, River and Road; and Alfred Rayner’s Danger (N. Daly, Literature 10). The two plays that did most to popularize the tied-to-the-tracks sensation on both sides of the Atlantic—Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867) and Boucicault’s After Dark (1868)—were widely marketed by illustrations of murderous trains (Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3). Of these two, Under the Gaslight in particular exhibits some of the complications of melodramatic conventions we have been examining.
FIGURE 3.2 Advertising poster for a production of Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight.
Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-63108.
FIGURE 3.3 An issue of Tales of the Theatre illustrating the most famous sensation scene from Dion Boucicault’s After Dark.
Calthrop Boucicault Collection, University of Kent.
The tied-to-the-tracks scene of Under the Gaslight opens with a signalman working at a lonely railroad station on a moonlit night. Enter Laura, a damsel fleeing the villainous Byke, who seeks to murder her. The Signalman takes Laura under his wing, and, for her own safety, locks her in a railway utility shed for the night. Another goodly character, the one-armed American Civil War veteran Snorkey, enters and demands that the Signalman stop the train to report the danger to Laura’s life. But the train, inexorable as ever, cannot be halted.
SNORKEY: … There’ll be murder done, unless I can prevent it!
SIGNALMAN: Murder, or no murder, the train can’t be stopped.
SNORKEY: It’s a lie. By waving the red signal for danger, the engineer must stop, I tell you!
SIGNALMAN: Do you think I’m a fool! What! disobey orders and lose my place; then what’s to become of my family? (Exit R.U.E.) (41–42)
Daly’s Signalman is in a bind; if he should stop the train to stop a murder, he places his own family at risk. Aiding the damsel on the one hand but refusing to aid the damsel on the other, the Signalman occupies a radically ambiguous moral position—is he a hero or a villain?—that destabilizes the melodramatic structure of the work. The climactic scene in Under the Gaslight begins, then, with the suggestion that villainy has been replaced by moral and narrative crisis.
No sooner is this crisis introduced, however, than it is diffused, and the key to this diffusion is the tied-to-the-tracks scenario. The shift occurs as the Signalman exits, never to return, and the destabilization he represents exits with him; he is replaced, a moment later, by the utterly brutal Byke. Byke quickly attacks Snorkey and ties him to the tracks. As if to leave no doubt in the minds of the audience that a melodramatic structure has now been restored, Daly has Snorkey cry, “My God, you are a villain!” as Byke “Fasten[s] him to [the] rails” (42). The thematic transformation is absolute; now the crisis arises not from the efficiency of the industrial system itself but from a human attempt to interrupt that system. The villain returns as the true cause of this industrial crisis, and the solution, once again, will be the hero. Or in this case the heroine, since it is Laura who will break out of her railroad shed to save Snorkey in the nick of time, causing the veteran to cry out, “And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote!” just as the train “rushes past with a roar and whistle” (43). While Daly gives this early railroad-rescue sensation a suffragist twist, this progressivism does not alter the fundamentally conservative character of the railroad-rescue scenario itself. The scenario, even in Daly’s liberal version, functions as a melodramatic rescue on a deeper level; its reintroduction of the black-hearted Byke actually rescues the audience from the far more troubling vision of the good-hearted Signalman, who cannot stop the train without losing his position.
The disturbances of railway risk, then, were made all the more nerve wracking by their resistance to melodramatic narrative structures and modes of performance. In the face of this difficulty, writers and cartoonists attempted to return the threat of the railroad back to the familiar tropes of Gothic melodrama. In this respect, Sala’s “Poetry of the Railroad,” the dragon trains of the Railway Panic, and Daly’s Under the Gaslight all exemplify a widespread cultural response in which melodramatic conventions were alternately baffled and desperately reaffirmed.
For a further sign of this broad cultural transformation, we may turn from drama to law: specifically, to a court case in New York State in 1868. The subject of the case was a legal claim brought by Augustin Daly against Dion Boucicault; the charge was that Boucicault committed copyright infringement by using the tied-to-the-tracks rescue sequence of Under the Gaslight in After Dark. Daly v. Palmer (Henry Palmer was one of After Dark’s American producers) became a milestone in the development of US copyright law, and provides a further marker of the transition from melodrama to sensation drama to sensation pure and simple.
The background of the lawsuit requires some explanation. After it became clear that After Dark was packing houses in London, the American theater managers Henry Palmer and Henry Jarrett secured the rights to bring it across the ocean. The US premiere was set for November 16, 1868, two weeks after a revival of Under the Gaslight was scheduled to open. Daly won a provisional injunction against the New York staging of After Dark, and took the matter to court, alleging that the railroad scene from Under the Gaslight was original to him and that Boucicault had stolen it. Invoking the 1856 Copyright Act—a law Boucicault himself had been instrumental in getting passed—Daly claimed ownership.4 Palmer and Jarrett’s defense rested on three main claims. First, the defense argued that the railroad rescue scene was not original to Daly. Second, the defense argued that the two railroad scenes differed so greatly that no copyright was violated. Lastly, the defense argued that the rescue scene was not a literary creation at all, but a mere matter of stage business, and therefore not within the scope of the statute. The New York court rejected all three arguments, and awarded Daly a royalty for every performance of After Dark performed in America. In the end, the cost of the battle may have been worth it even for Boucicault, as the publicity of the court case helped launch After Dark to success in the United States that rivaled its success in England.
A crucial part of Judge Blatchford’s decision was the argument that the central sensation scene is essentially the same in both plays—essentially the same not only because of characteristics of the scene itself, but also because of the effect that the sensation caused by the scene has on the mind of the spectator. Thus Blatchford concluded that “[a]ll that is substantial and material in the plaintiff’s ‘railroad scene,’ has been used by Boucicault, in the same order and sequence of events, and in a manner to convey the same sensations and impressions to those who see it represented, as in the plaintiff’s play” (“Augustin” 297; emphasis added). Sensations and impressions were now the coin of the dramatic realm; so was attraction. “The ‘railroad scene’ in Boucicault’s play contains everything which makes the ‘railroad scene’ in the plaintiff’s play attractive, as a representation on the stage,” reads the decision (297). In other words, it was the scene’s ability to attract that was judged central to its originality, and therefore copyright-ability. But what is it that makes a scene “attractive”? The decision continues as follows:
it is a piracy, if the appropriated series of events, when represented on the stage, although performed by new and different characters, using different language, is recognized by the spectator, through any of the senses to which the representation is addressed, as conveying substantially the same impressions to, and exciting the same emotions, in the mind, in the same sequence or order. (298; emphasis added)
The defining features of a dramatic scene, for Blatchford, were neither lines of play text nor elements of staging, but rather the ways in which a scene operates upon the impressions and excites the emotions in the mind of an observer. For the first time, Daly v. Palmer made theatrical sensation a matter of discrete mental states in the eyes of US law. It is a remarkable decision, and typical of the broader shift, felt with particular force in the 1860s, from representation to sensation.
To deepen our sense of the ways in which this shift played out in the melodramatic imagination of the period, it will help to return to Dickens, and specifically to his ghost story “The Signal-Man,” written a year after his brush with death at Staplehurst.5 While not itself a theatrical work, this short story is a profound meditation on the ways in which emergent psychological understandings of trauma and systemic understandings of risk disordered melodramatic conventions. “The Signal-Man” is a tale of a consciousness traumatized not by a single event but by a system in which disaster hovers forever overhead, and it is a story that wrestles with ghosts not only of dead passengers but of a dying genre as well.
The narrator of the story is a gentleman out for a stroll in the countryside who encounters a signalman occupying a lonesome signal box by a tunnel in a deep railway cutting. The signalman is able to send and receive warnings of danger on the line by means of a telegraph and an alarm bell. Three times in recent days he has heard his alarm bell ring in a mysterious fashion, and each warning has been followed by the appearance of a phantom. Shortly after each appearance, a railway disaster occurs by his post. The first time, two trains crash in the tunnel; the second time, a young woman dies aboard a train; and the last time, it is the signalman himself who is struck down by an oncoming train.
Throughout the tale, the signalman goes pale for no clear reason, stares at the alarm bell even when it doesn’t ring, looks again and again toward the red light in the tunnel: all nervous conditions that recall Dickens’s own post-traumatic stress, with its shake, its loss of voice, its persistent illusions. The modernity of this trauma is underscored by the fact that Dickens locates the signalman’s experience within a profoundly industrialized environment. Over and again, Dickens draws the reader’s attention to the technologies that structure the signalman’s sense of space and time. The “unnatural valley” of the railroad cutting vibrates to the “wild harp” of the wind blowing through telegraph wires (23). The signal box contains “a desk for an official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken” (21): instruments for the notation of train times and electronic communications to ensure that the train runs smoothly. The bell in particular is no mere tool for the signalman; it inhabits his consciousness and compels his constant attention. The signalman is “at all times liable to be called by his electric bell,” and even during his brief moments in the upper level of the valley “listen[ed] for it with redoubled anxiety” (21). Controlled by bell, clock, telegraph, and timetable, the signalman observes his hourly routine with machine-like precision.
He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. In the discharge of his duties, I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was done. (22)
Unlike the narrator, who saunters to and fro at his leisure (“Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it” [24]), the signalman is a conduit for the language of information. (The idea was on Dickens’s mind beyond this story: in “Barbox Brothers,” the opening story of Mugby Junction, Dickens similarly describes the junction as resonant with “[u]nknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters” [1].) So deep is the gulf between the non-industrial time embodied by the narrator and the industrial time embodied by the signalman that even looking down into the signalman’s trench changes the narrator, renders him more mechanical: “[b]efore pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down” (24).
The Victorian signalman stood at the fulcrum of a profound transformation in space and time. The word first emerged in 1840, designating, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “railway employee who attends to the signals which show whether the line is clear or not.” Whoever held that position was responsible for, among other things, monitoring the timing of trains to ensure safety and reliability along the line. The signalman was therefore the standard-bearer in a “process of harmonization that before the end of the century would lead to world time” (Mattelart 52). Exact chronological measurements were essential to the functioning of railroads in a way that they never had been for pre-industrial transportation, and one of the many consequences of the railroads’ need for precise timekeeping was a national synchronization of clocks across England. Before rail, London time was four minutes ahead of time in Reading, seven and a half minutes ahead of time in Cirencester, and fourteen minutes ahead of time in Bridgewater (Schivelbusch 43). But rail made such discrepancies unacceptable, and in 1847 the Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time (or “railway time”) as the British standard. In the United States, though matters were more complicated, the rail system ultimately forced a similar evolution toward standardized time (see Uniform Time). Individual American railway companies kept their own standard times until 1889, when universal railway times were at last adopted; these standard railway times became legally accepted as regional “time zones” in the United States in 1918.
The industrialized zone of the signalman’s railway tunnel is interrupted by visitors from different worlds. The narrator, whose rambling stands in marked contrast to the signalman’s precision, is one such visitor; the ghosts are another. The three apparitions who haunt the signalman and warn him of impending disaster are figures not only of trauma but also of genre. Each of the phantoms adopts a stock melodramatic gesture: the first holds his “left arm … across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved” (22); the second adopts “an action of mourning” such as one sees “in stone figures on tombs” (23); and just before the signalman, too, is killed by an oncoming train, the engine driver adopts the first phantom’s “gesticulation of ‘For God’s sake, clear the way!’ ” (23).
In Chapter 1, we examined a certain paradox of eighteenth-century theories of gesture: the paradox that on one hand the language of gesture was natural and universal, while on the other hand it had to be learned. In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks has drawn our attention to another paradox, one typical of melodramatic gesture in particular. The second paradox is this: on one hand the sign system of melodramatic gesture is elaborately and explicitly encoded, while on the other hand melodramatic gestures often attempt to point beyond themselves into an ineffable terrain. Nineteenth-century acting handbooks make melodramatic gesture seem a straightforward correlation of bodily position and emotion; melodrama, as Elaine Hadley writes, “attempts to turn all gesture into rational discourse but at the same time to retain within that discourse the passion and simplicity of gesture” (73). And yet this melodramatic project—to make gesture discursive and to simplify discourse to the level of gesture—is born of a longing for return to the pre-discursive. As Brooks has argued, melodramatic gesture marks a gap in the linguistic code, a mute sign that points toward the ineffable. Thus Brooks notes that melodramatic gesture points toward the linguistic code’s inability “to convey a full freight of emotional meaning. In the silence of this gap, the language of presence and immediacy, the primal language, is born anew” (67). The melodramatic gesture reaches back toward a lost world of immediate spiritual meaning “which the language code, in its demonetization, has obscured, alienated, lost” (72)—a world that is still stubbornly felt by those uncorrupted by society and its discourse. There is a deeply nostalgic desire behind these gestures that haunt the signalman, a yearning for a fault line in the closed system of time books, warning bells, and telegraph wires.
These gestures are at once legible and illegible. On one hand, they are so easily readable that they immediately convey their intended meaning—warning, mourning—to the signalman, as they do to the reader. Moreover, the accuracy of this translation process is repeatedly confirmed, first by the gesture of “warning” preceding a train accident, then by the gesture of “mourning” preceding a woman’s death aboard a train, and lastly by the gesture of “warning” once more preceding a train accident. This gestural system, far from being ineffable, is almost too easily read; it suggests a system frozen to cliché. Yet, for all their readability, these gestures are also maddeningly indecipherable. They signify wrenching emotions and suggest imminent danger, but what the signalman needs is not primal language but linguistic precision. The language of gesture captures, in its mute horror, his traumatized state, but aids him not. The signalman, haunted by these melodramatic tableaux, becomes paranoid in the midst of his haunting, fearful of the bell, fearful of the tunnel, fearful of the innocent passerby.
These gestures give rise to a generalized paranoia for another reason as well: though they are the stuff of the melodramatic stage, they are isolated from melodramatic narrative patterns. They point to no villain; they show no hero; they reveal no line between good and evil; they offer no path to redemption. The deaths of these ghosts are neither caused by cruelty nor cunning and they ask for neither revenge nor expiation. The three specters are visions of victims pure and simple, victims of no clear villainy. The cause of death they share is the railroad itself, but in “The Signal-Man” the train is not, as in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, a demonic beast. Such a narrative structure—victims without villains, a trouble without a hero, a trap without an escape—undermines traditional melodramatic narrative structures at crucial points. More than this, gestures have become uncoupled from their sources, an uncoupling that begins in the story’s opening line of “ ‘Halloa! Below there!’ ” with a shout and an accompanying gesture (left arm across the face, right arm waving) first given by the narrator. But we find that this gesture of warning is actually, unknowingly, a reiteration. For a ghost has already delivered precisely the same gesture to the signalman, and at the end of the story the engineer will once again produce precisely the same gesture and shout. The disturbing element here is not the gesture’s iterability, which is central to melodramatic semiotics, but rather its detachment from the subject even at the moment of its iteration; this gesture of warning floats free, becomes as ghostly as the haunted tunnel itself. In a brief essay, Giorgio Agamben has noted that “[a]n age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them” (53). He might as well have been writing of Dickens’s story, in which gestures are less the stuff of melodrama than the remnants of melodrama—and of the eighteenth-century dream of gesture as a universal and natural language. In a world increasingly governed by nervousness and risk—in a technological system that, even when functioning smoothly, has become nervous—gesture haunts rather than signifies.
Dickens, of course, was haunted by the ghost of his (almost literal) cliffhanger at Staplehurst, barely a year behind him when he wrote “The Signal-Man.” Though he initially wrote himself the role of rescuing hero in his melodramatic account of that event, Dickens’s ultimate inability to shake its horror suggests that even escape can lead to imprisonment, that the hero may be incapable of saving even himself. Such anti-melodramatic thoughts hover over “The Signal-Man” as well. The signalman’s recurring specters of disaster show us how profoundly interlinked are trauma and industrialization, how easily, in the end, melodrama may shift from being a redemptive narrative to being a mere remnant of fixed and haunting gestures. The ghostly tableaux that haunt the signalman are at once utterly transparent and utterly oblique, and the “language of presence and immediacy” they attempt to convey does not give the signalman what he needs. To escape disaster, what the signalman needs is not gesture, but information.
However clear the meaning of these gestures may be in emotional terms, their indecipherability in terms of information renders them useless for the purpose of avoiding accident. For the signalman, the condition is agonizing.
“By this time you will fully understand, sir,” he said, “that what troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre mean?”
I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.
“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire, and only by times turning them on me. “What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?”
He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated forehead.
“If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it,” he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. “I should get into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the way it would work,—Message: ‘Danger! Take care!’ Answer: ‘What Danger? Where?’ Message: ‘Don’t know. But, for God’s sake, take care!’ They would displace me. What else could they do?” (24)
Accident has become at once mysterious and expected—“there is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line”—and yet the signalman’s inability to predict precisely where, when, or how that danger will explode brings him to the edge of madness.
We never learn the name of the signalman, who dies as anonymously as he lives in this story. In this sense he is atypical of primary characters in melodrama who, however much they may be written and performed according to fixed conventions, are almost invariably named—at least by the end of the narrative; indeed, the typical melodramatic narrative may be said to end with the figurative or literal right naming of the central characters. But the signalman’s ultimate namelessness points to the fact that his is a new form of typified character, a form that arises with the sped-up industrialization and regularization of masses. While his namelessness subverts melodrama’s desire to tell all, it also indicates that this haunted figure represents a new direction in the genealogy of the Gothic. In the story’s last sentence, his designation suddenly gains a capital letter, growing from “signal-man” to “Signal-man.” Suddenly we can glimpse a world to come, a desiccated realm of desperate gestures toward the ineffable, in which characters have become abstracted personifications identified only by their social functions. By the end of the story, the Signalman has become a broken archetype, a reified figure that marks a barely legible shift from the gestural vocabulary of melodrama to that of an Expressionism waiting to be born.
Music, in its simplest form, may be called a sensuous art acting upon the nervous system; it appears to be, to a great extent, a physical faculty of appreciating the quality and consonance of certain fine vibrations of the air. It excites passions and emotions, especially an excitement which might be called “hysterica musica,” but it cannot describe or bring form or action to the mind.
BOUCICAULT, “Opera” (1887) (343)
Unlike Dickens, Boucicault had no use for opera. As a genre, it was “a misconception produced by the improper association of two Muses” (340): a bastard form. The complaint, oddly enough, echoes Wagner’s own from The Artwork of the Future, when he argued that Grand Opera had mixed the arts into a hodgepodge. And indeed Boucicault mentions Wagner in his essay—mentions him only to dismiss him. After noting Wagner’s own opposition to the pastiche form of Italian opera, Boucicault changes the target of his attack from opera’s hybridity to opera’s reliance on music itself. Music, in Boucicault’s account, is simply unsuitable for drama. While drama’s business is representation (specifically, the “imitation of a human suffering” [341]), music’s is sensation (“a sensuous art acting upon the nervous system” [343]). If the two are brought together not only does confusion result, but, worse still, drama’s noble artistic purpose becomes degraded by music’s “vibrations.” “Art is not a delirium; but music seems to unsettle by intoxication the brains of its lovers” (343).
Coming from the master melodramatist and pioneer of sensation drama, the critique is surprising, to say the least. But it is also revealing. For by 1887, the year of Boucicault’s essay on “Opera,” Wagner had become associated with neurophysiological thrills in a way that threatened to overshadow even those of Drury Lane. As reviewers and audiences were growing weary of plays like After Dark, Boucicault himself began to adopt the stance of a cultural guardian of drama against a cult of mere sensation.
It is worth recalling that Wagner worked on the libretto and score of Götterdämmerung, the conclusion of his Ring cycle, from 1869 to 1874. In other words, the great fall of Valhalla, with its all-consuming funeral pyre and oceanic flood, was written at the height of Anglo-American sensation fever, a craze with analogues in Germany and France. By the 1860s and 1870s, theaters of sensation were taking form not only internationally but across class and cultural lines as well, ranging from mass-cultural working-class entertainments to avant-garde performances for cultural sophisticates. At his Festival Theater at Bayreuth—a remote location reachable, for most audience members, only by rail—Wagner was to bring together his “hysterica musica” with theatrical devices partly pioneered by Boucicault himself.
1 For a survey of such satirical “railway monster” images in the period, see Taylor. A study of Dombey and Son in light of the Railway Panic may be found in Steig.
2 The most incisive account of the relationship between the tied-to-the-tracks sensation scene and Victorian railways is N. Daly, Literature 10–33. Daly pays illuminating attention to Boucicault’s After Dark, but argues that “in [Augustin] Daly’s Under the Gaslight the railway rescue seems to have little to do with the main concerns of the play” (Literature 26). Given the strength of Nicholas Daly’s reading of Boucicault, I have refrained from dealing with that play in depth here. But as my own brief reading of Under the Gaslight may indicate, I disagree with Daly’s point about the lack of connection between the themes of that play and Victorian-era anxieties about the railway.
3 A good overview of Victorian sensation drama may be found in M. Diamond 218–247. Lynn Voskuil’s penetrating analysis of sensation drama connects the genre to commodity fetishism and the formation of mass subjectivity (Voskuil). The fluid trans-Atlantic circulation of sensation culture has been surveyed in Phegley et al.
4 Nicholas Daly concludes that “[i]n retrospect, Daly’s claims to originality may seem suspect,” noting instances of the scenario dating back to 1863 (Literature 11).
5 While in 1980 “The Signal-Man” could still be described as a “little-noticed story” of Dickens’s (Stahl 98), scholars have since corrected that oversight. Beginning in the 1990s, the tale has been considered in relation to the Victorian ghost story and Victorian spiritualism as well as to the cultural impact of telegraphic communications and the railroad. For relations to the ghost story, see, e.g., Day; Greenman; for relation to spiritualism, see Henson, “Natural” and “Investigations”; for relations to telegraphic communications and the railroad, see especially Pope; Matus; Menke (esp. 166–172).