Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001) 413-436

Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection

Jill L. Matus

In 1865 Charles Dickens narrowly escaped death when the train on which he was traveling from Folkestone to London jumped a gap in the line occasioned by some repair work on a viaduct near Staplehurst, Kent. The foreman on the job miscalculated the time of the train's arrival; the flagman was only 550 yards from the works and unable to give adequate warning of the train's approach. The central and rear carriages fell off the bridge, plunging onto the river-bed below. Only one of the first class carriages escaped that plunge, coupled fast to the second class carriage in front. "It had come off the rail and was [. . .] hanging over the bridge at an angle, so that all three of them were tilted down into a corner" (Ackroyd 1013). Dickens managed to get Ellen Ternan and her mother, with whom he was traveling, out of the carriage and then behaved with remarkable self-possession, climbing down into the ravine and ministering to the many who lay injured and dying. With further aplomb, he climbed back into the dangerously unstable carriage and retrieved his manuscript, an account of which is offered in the memorable postscript to Our Mutual Friend (1865).

Once back in London, however, Dickens began to develop the symptomatology that today we would recognize as typical of trauma. ¹ He was greatly shaken and lost his voice for nearly two weeks: "I most unaccountably brought someone else's out of that terrible scene," he said. He suffered repeatedly from what he called "the shake," and, when he later traveled by train, he was in the grip of a persistent illusion that the carriage was down on the left side. Even a year later, he noted that he had sudden vague rushes of terror, which were "perfectly unreasonable but unsurmountable." At such times, his son and daughter reported, he was unaware of the presence of others and seemed to be in a kind of trance. His son Henry recalled that he got into a state of panic at the slightest jolt; Mamie attested that her father's nerves were [End Page 413] never really the same again: he "would fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over and clutch the arms of the railway carriage." An uncanny repetition also characterizes his death, falling as it did on the anniversary of the accident five years later. ²

It is well known that Dickens was engaged throughout his literary career in representations of the railroad and used it to various effects, often combining the "humorous and the horrific" (Atthill 134). ³ It would be unwise to claim, therefore, that the accident must have provoked his short story about railway disaster, "The Signalman" (1866), which appeared a year later as part of "Mugby Junction," the special Christmas issue of All the Year Round. Yet there is, I want to argue, an integral connection between Dickens's experience of accident trauma and this ghost story. While the fact of Dickens's own experience of the train crash has sometimes been acknowledged in discussions of "The Signalman," it is usually by way of a closing gesture to the grim and eerie irony that he died on the same day as the accident. To read "The Signalman" through the lens of current trauma theory, however, is to see that Dickens's story uncannily apprehends the heart of traumatic experience in its focus on the uncoupling of event and cognition, on belatedness, repetitive and intrusive return, and on a sense of powerlessness at impending disaster. The question that this reading of the story then raises is whether there was a discourse of trauma in the 1860s which could have provided Dickens with a hermeneutic through which to respond to his experience. That question draws us to consider both the pre-Freudian history of trauma and the relation between literature and the psychological and medical discourse of its day.

Trauma has in recent years commanded great interest...