Mugby Junction
"Mugby Junction" is a set of short stories written in 1866 by Charles Dickens and collaborators Charles Collins, Amelia B. Edwards, Andrew Halliday, and Hesba Stretton. It was first published in a Christmas edition of the magazine All the Year Round. Dickens penned a majority of the issue, including the frame narrative in which "the Gentleman for Nowhere," who has spent his life cloistered in the firm Barbox Brothers & Co., makes use of his new-found freedom in retirement to explore the rail lines that connect with Mugby Junction. Dickens's collaborators each contributed an individual story to the collection.
Overview
Mugby Junction includes the famous ghost story "The Signal-Man" concerning a spectre seen beside a tunnel entrance. The signal-man of the title tells the narrator of a ghost that has been haunting him. Each spectral appearance precedes, and is a harbinger of, a tragic event on the railway on which the signalman works. The signalman's work is at a signalbox in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance on a lonely stretch of the line, and he controls the movements of passing trains. When there is danger, his fellow signalmen alert him via telegraph and alarms. Three times, he receives phantom warnings of danger when his bell rings in a fashion that only he can hear. Each warning is followed by the appearance of the spectre, and then by a terrible accident.
The first accident involves a terrible collision between two trains in the tunnel. Dickens may have based this incident on the Clayton Tunnel rail crash that occurred in 1861, five years before he wrote the story.[1] Readers in 1866 would have been familiar with this major disaster. The second warning involves the mysterious death of a young woman on a passing train. The final warning is a premonition of the signalman's own death.
Another story features, in a thinly disguised form, the town of Rugby in Warwickshire and the town's railway station. This was inspired by an incident in April 1866, when Charles Dickens was travelling from London to Liverpool. Dickens's train made an unscheduled stop at Rugby due to one of the carriages catching fire. While waiting for his journey to resume, he went into the refreshment room for a cup of coffee, and the proprietess, clearly not recognising the celebrity author, treated him rudely. Inspired by this, in chapter three of 'Mugby Junction' he made a scathing attack on railway refreshment rooms and their staff.[2]
List of stories
Title | Author |
---|---|
Barbox Brothers | Charles Dickens |
Barbox Brothers & Co | Charles Dickens |
Main Line: The Boy at Mugby | Charles Dickens |
No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman | Charles Dickens |
No. 2 Branch Line: The Engine Driver | Andrew Halliday |
No. 3 Branch Line: The Compensation House | Charles Collins |
No. 4 Branch Line: The Travelling Post-Office | Hesba Stretton |
No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer | Amelia B. Edwards |
References
External links
- Online editions
- Mugby Junction at Project Gutenburg
- Mugby Junction - Easy to read HTML version (Does note include complete text).
- Mugby Junction public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- v
- t
- e
- The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–1837)
- Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress (1837–1839)
- Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
- The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841)
- Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (1841)
- The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844)
- Dombey and Son (1846–1848)
- David Copperfield (1849–1850)
- Bleak House (1852–1853)
- Hard Times: For These Times (1854)
- Little Dorrit (1855–1857)
- A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
- Great Expectations (1860–1861)
- Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
- A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843)
- The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (1844)
- The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845)
- The Battle of Life: A Love Story (1846)
- The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time (1848)
- To Be Read at Dusk (1852)
- "The Long Voyage" (1853)
- "The Signal-Man" (1866)
- "The Trial for Murder" (1865)
collections
- Sketches by "Boz," Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (1833–1836)
- The Mudfog Papers (1837–1838)
- Master Humphrey's Clock (1840–1841)
- American Notes for General Circulation (1842)
- Pictures from Italy (1846)
- The Life of Our Lord (1846–1849)
- A Child's History of England (1851–1853)
- The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1861)
- Letters (1821–1870)
- The Frozen Deep (1856)
- No Thoroughfare (1867)
- Bentley's Miscellany (1836–1838)
- Master Humphrey's Clock (1840–1841)
- The Daily News (1846–1870)
- Household Words (1850–1859)
- All the Year Round (1859–1870)
- "A House to Let" (1858)
- "The Haunted House" (1859)
- "A Message from the Sea" (1860)
- "Mugby Junction" (1866)
- No Thoroughfare (1867)
Parents | |
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Brothers | |
Partners | |
Children |
- Epitaph of Charles Irving Thornton
- Bleak House
- Tavistock House
- Gads Hill Place
- Grip (raven)
- Dickens fair
- Dickens and Little Nell (statue)
- Charles Dickens in His Study (1859 painting)
- Dickens of London (1976 miniseries)
- Dickens in America (2005 documentary)
- The Invisible Woman (2013 film)
- Dickensian (2015 TV series)
- The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017 film)
- Category