Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the son of a clerk in the Navy Pay Office who could never live within his income. In 1824 his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison in London, and twelve-year-old Charles was sent to work pasting labels on pots in a blacking warehouse near the Thames. The episode lasted only months, but he kept it secret almost all his life and wrote about it, in disguise, in David Copperfield.

He became a court reporter, then a parliamentary reporter, then a writer of comic sketches. The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), published in monthly parts, made him famous at twenty-four, and for the rest of his life he was the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world, from Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol (1843) to Bleak House, Great Expectations and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He was also a full-time magazine editor, first of Household Words (from 1850) and then of All the Year Round (from 1859), and in his last years he gave hugely popular public readings of his own work.

Dickens loved ghost stories, and his magazines made them part of an English Christmas. Each year he put together a special Christmas number, usually a set of linked stories by several writers within a framing narrative, and he often contributed a supernatural story himself. Both stories on this site come from those Christmas numbers. The Trial for Murder (1865), from Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, is about a juryman who recognises the man in the dock, and finds that someone else in the courtroom does too.

The Signal-Man (1866), from Mugby Junction, is one of the most famous ghost stories in English. A traveller climbs down into a deep railway cutting to talk to a lonely signalman, who has been seeing a figure by the mouth of the tunnel. A year before writing it, on 9 June 1865, Dickens had survived the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent, where a train fell from a viaduct under repair and ten passengers were killed. He helped tend the injured and was badly shaken for years afterward. He died at his house, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, on 9 June 1870, five years to the day after the crash.

Read “The Signal-Man” first. Its Reader’s Companion has more on the Staplehurst connection.