‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens and ‘The Smell’ by Patrick McGrath. Explore the ways in which Two Authors Create Mystery, Suspense and Horror

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GCSE English Coursework

Explore the ways in which Two Authors Create Mystery, Suspense and Horror

Horror is one of the most popular genres for fiction stories and one that many people enjoy for many reasons. The supernatural and psychological aspects of the stories provoke a lot of thought in people and trigger such emotions as terror and fear while enthralling and chilling the reader and making them read on.

Two stories I have read are ‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens and ‘The Smell’ by Patrick McGrath. Charles Dickens, born in the 19th Century is the most famous Victorian novelist and witnessed a fatal train crash just two years prior to writing ‘The Signalman’ which influenced him in the writing of it. Patrick McGrath, however, is a living author, who specialises in ‘Gothic’ style short stories.

The different time eras of these authors can be seen in their style of writing and story. Charles Dickens’ supernatural story is typical of the 19th century, and in particular the latter half when this type of story became very popular. The many religious ideas about life after death and ghosts etc were beginning to be challenged by science and in particular the theory of evolution (Charles Darwin, Early 19th Century). This made the thought of ghosts and supernatural happenings scary because they seems unexplainable and irrational. Nowadays the idea of ghosts has got old and not as many people are interested. The expectations of modern Horror readers are more to do with the psychological. In the early 20th Century Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis and the interest in mental illnesses and such things became greater. Horror stories involving psychological problems became more popular because we realise that the things that happen in them are possible in real life, unlike the ghost stories, and this makes them scarier.

Both the stories I read are similar in that they involve a death, which is a typical trait of a horror story and they both involve a character that foresees his own death. It is the signalman in Dickens’ story that does this. The narrator is not this man but another who pays him visits three days in a row, down in his railway cutting. The first day the narrator meets the signalman for the first time and discovers that something has been troubling him, so he comes back the next day so the signalman will tell him what it is. He finds out that the signalman has been sighting a spectre standing near the warning light of the nearby railway tunnel and waving his arms and calling out warnings. The first time the signalman had seen him, there was a fatal train crash hours later and the second time he saw the spectre, some months after the first, there was a murder on a train passing the signalman’s box. The signalman then tells the narrator that he has been seeing the spectre appear again and he is scared something terrible is going to happen like the first two times. The narrator decides to go home and come back the next day, but when he does he finds the signalman has been killed on the line by a train. It appears the spectre is a premonition of the signalman’s own death.

In ‘The Smell’ it is the narrator himself that foresees his death but in this story he does so in a psychological way instead of supernaturally like in ‘The Signalman’. The story begins with the narrator telling the reader about his special room that he keeps locked to stop all but himself entering. His family then find a stray dog, which they wish to keep but the narrator tells of how he finds this outrageous and then punishes them. After this he starts to smell a terrible smell but the other members of his family appear to not smell it. This makes the narrator think that the other members are playing a trick on him, which makes him angry. However even after his sister in law has cleaned the whole house, apart from his room, the narrator could still smell the odour so he calls his sister in law to his room to punish her, but finds that the smell was apparently coming from his room all the time. This makes the narrator extremely angry and one night he punishes one of his children by what appears to be killing him or her. Before he can punish the next child however, he is drawn back to the origin of the smell, the fireplace and chimney of his room. He goes back and decides to climb up it to find what is making the smell, but he gets stuck and apparently dies there. It appears that the smell is actually the odour of his rotten death and in a way he foreseeing or ‘fore-smelling’ his death. It is possible that the man has clairvoyance and is able to perceive the future but this is not clear, as he also seems to be mentally ill as I point out later.

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The settings used in both are similar in ways and both are used to add to the atmosphere of mystery and horror in the stories. The chimney in ‘The Smell’ is described as a “sooty blackness” with a “sweet and viscous liquid dripping into the fireplace” and in ‘The Signalman’ the narrator describes a “gloomier entrance to a black tunnel” and the cutting has on either side “a dripping wet wall” which is cut through “ clammy stone that became oozier and wetter.” Both are dark, un-natural, dripping, confined spaces where the mysterious things in the stories (the smell ...

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