The Signalman

by

Charles Dickens

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The Signalman Character Analysis

The signalman, a “dark sallow” man who reluctantly befriends the narrator, monitors trains passing through a tunnel: he’s responsible for guiding them safely and preventing major accidents. While speaking to the narrator, he often breaks off conversation to attend to his duties, suggesting that he understands the life-and-death importance of his job. His position means that he’s working class, but he wasn’t always—he’s well educated and once studied natural philosophy, but he squandered his professional opportunities. The signalman seems to willingly accept his bleak situation, which requires spending most of his time underground, believing that he’s helpless to change his fate. As he later explains to the narrator, this unhappy fate includes the supernatural: the signalman thinks he’s being haunted by a ghost, who stands by a nearby red light and warns of impending accidents on the rail line. Without more details about where or when these accidents will occur, the signalman is powerless to prevent them, but he still feels responsible for the casualties. As a result, he believes there must be a deeper meaning to the hauntings and wants to figure out why they’re happening. Before he can, a passing train hits him while he’s standing near the tunnel, which implies that he may have gone looking for the ghost, or may have believed he was supposed to die and allowed the train to hit him. This confirms his helplessness to avoid a dismal fate, and it disproves his belief that he could understand the supernatural—in fact, this belief may have inadvertently caused his death.

The Signalman Quotes in The Signalman

The The Signalman quotes below are all either spoken by The Signalman or refer to The Signalman. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Responsibility and Guilt Theme Icon
).
The Signalman Quotes

Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Train
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:

His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

Was it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above those lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose.

He took me into his box, where there was a fire, 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.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Box
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut—he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

‘[…] Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry, “Halloa! Below there!” tonight?’

‘Heaven knows,’ said I, ‘I cried something to that effect—’

‘Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well.'

‘Admit those were the very words. I said them, no doubt, because I saw you below.’

‘For no other reason?’

‘What other reason could I possibly have?’

‘You have no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?’

‘No.’

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman (speaker), The Ghost
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

“‘One moonlight night,’ said the man, ‘I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry, “Halloa! Below there!” I started up, looked from that door, and saw this someone else standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, “Look out! Look out!” And then again, “Halloa! Below there! Look out!” I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, “What’s wrong? What has happened? Where?”

[…]

‘I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped, and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways. “An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?” The answer came back, both ways: “All well.”’

Related Characters: The Signalman (speaker), The Narrator, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time: ‘That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us.’

Related Characters: The Signalman (speaker), The Narrator, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Train, The Box
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

‘When it first stood under the Danger-light,’ he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, ‘why not tell me where that accident was to happen—if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted—if it could have been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, “She is going to die. Let them keep her at home?” If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?’

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman (speaker), The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost
Page Number: 23-24
Explanation and Analysis:

But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to execute it with precision?

Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in my communicating what he had told me to his superiors in the Company, without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.

The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft a little low hut entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost, Tom
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

‘Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir,’ he said, ‘I saw him at the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was no time to check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn’t seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call.'

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!”’

I started.

‘Ah! It was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use.’

Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the coincidence that the warning of the engine- driver included, not only the words which the unfortunate signalman had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Tom (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Train
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Signalman Quotes in The Signalman

The The Signalman quotes below are all either spoken by The Signalman or refer to The Signalman. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Responsibility and Guilt Theme Icon
).
The Signalman Quotes

Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Train
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:

His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

Was it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above those lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose.

He took me into his box, where there was a fire, 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.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Related Symbols: The Box
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut—he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

‘[…] Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry, “Halloa! Below there!” tonight?’

‘Heaven knows,’ said I, ‘I cried something to that effect—’

‘Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well.'

‘Admit those were the very words. I said them, no doubt, because I saw you below.’

‘For no other reason?’

‘What other reason could I possibly have?’

‘You have no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?’

‘No.’

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman (speaker), The Ghost
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

“‘One moonlight night,’ said the man, ‘I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry, “Halloa! Below there!” I started up, looked from that door, and saw this someone else standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, “Look out! Look out!” And then again, “Halloa! Below there! Look out!” I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, “What’s wrong? What has happened? Where?”

[…]

‘I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped, and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways. “An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?” The answer came back, both ways: “All well.”’

Related Characters: The Signalman (speaker), The Narrator, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time: ‘That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us.’

Related Characters: The Signalman (speaker), The Narrator, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Train, The Box
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

‘When it first stood under the Danger-light,’ he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, ‘why not tell me where that accident was to happen—if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted—if it could have been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, “She is going to die. Let them keep her at home?” If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?’

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman (speaker), The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost
Page Number: 23-24
Explanation and Analysis:

But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to execute it with precision?

Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in my communicating what he had told me to his superiors in the Company, without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.

The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft a little low hut entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost, Tom
Related Symbols: The Red Light
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

‘Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir,’ he said, ‘I saw him at the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was no time to check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn’t seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call.'

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!”’

I started.

‘Ah! It was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use.’

Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the coincidence that the warning of the engine- driver included, not only the words which the unfortunate signalman had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Tom (speaker), The Signalman, The Ghost
Related Symbols: The Train
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis: