Comment on the use of character, plot and location in each of the stories, which you have read. Demonstrate the similarities, which are apparent in these tales and then consider how the period affects your enjoyment of them.

The secondary characters in ‘The Red Room’ are all old people. There is one woman and three men. The old people are not the most charming towards the young man. They give him glances of “positive dislike” and want to “relieve themselves of entertaining him.” I think that the way the elderly people are described, it gives the reader unpleasant thoughts, “the man with the withered arm”, “her pale eyes wide open”, “bent, more wrinkled, more aged”, and “ his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth.” All of these secondary characters have a physical deformity. The young man refers to the old people as “grotesque custodians.” Putting these elderly men and woman in the same room as the young man, who was full of himself, creates an interesting juxtaposition. In the end the main character is proved wrong, when he says, “it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me,” but in the end it is not even a real ghost that frightens him it is an invisible one. All of the old people are frightened to go into the red room because of the “evil goings on” in there. The phrase they do to sow this is "It's your own choosing." I think that they use this to try and scare him a little and they succeed. “On this night of all nights”, they are not keen on the young man going into the red room. This quote makes the reader read on, it makes you wonder what is so special about the night. You never find out, it is left to your imagination.

I think the characters in ‘The Judge’s House’ are stronger because they are more complex. In the other hand the characters in ‘The Red Room’ create a better atmosphere, they make the story more scary end eerie.

The story of ‘The Signalman’ there is two main protagonists but the spectre could probably be called a third figure. The reader is suddenly alerted by the fact that the signalman may be an apparition, “The monstrous thought came into my mind…that this was a spirit, not a man.” This suggests that the story has a somewhat more supernatural feel and subsequently there is a direct build up of tension. The story surrounds a stranger. The reader’s mind is comforted when the man in the conversation with the signalman utters, “I should have set this man down as one of the safest men to be employed in that capacity…” They try to find out as much as possible about each other so they ask certain questions. For example when the signalman asks the narrator, “Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry ‘Halloa! Below there!’ tonight?” he is trying to find out why the narrator used those words, and was unsure as to whether or not they had a meaning. It is a ghost story, in which, an apparition warning of an impending train accident is haunting a branch-line signalman.

In ‘The Signalman’, the signalman’s experience is the center of the story similarly to ‘The Red Room’ where the old people’s experience is the main part of the story. It is also common in all three of the stories that there is a stranger; in ‘The Judge’s House’ it is Malcolm Malcolmson, as he has jus moved to the village. In ‘The red Room’ it is the narrator as he has never been involved with the old people before, and in ‘The Signalman’ the whole story surrounds a stranger.

‘The Judge’s House’ is set in a small town called Benchurch. It was a market town, there was a market held every three weeks. This makes the town sound lively but then for the rest of the time it was dead, “…for the remainder of the twenty-one days it was as attractive as a desert.” Meaning that the place was deserted. The house that caught Malcomson’s eye was, isolated and was surrounded with a massive stonewall. “It was an old rambling, heavy-built house of the Jacobean style, with heavy gables and windows, unusually small..” The description of the house suggests that it is old. The sense of oldness is created by references to the rooms such as, “great old room,” and “great dining-room”.

‘The Red Room’ is set in a castle that is called Lorraine Castle. The idea of a castle sounds spooky because when we talk about a castle we associate it with battles, deaths and old age. The castle is fitted with a “spiral staircase’ and the doors are covered with ‘baize’, which indicates that the setting is very old. The people the furniture and the tales which are in and about the castle all have one thing in common they are old, “the ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were ghostly,”

In ‘The Signalman’ the setting is dark. It is set deep in a trench, which means there would be little light. In "The Signalman", Charles Dickens uses words such as 'dreary',  'secluded', ‘dark’, 'cold', 'deserted', 'lonesome' and ‘dangerous’. These words are used to describe the whereabouts of the story in order for the reader to think and try to imagine that you are there and are seeing the place first hand. Where the ground vibrates and pulsates when a train comes by, it sets the mood for the supernatural visitation that haunts the man.

All of the stories were written near the end of the nineteenth century. ‘The Red Room’ was written in 1896, ‘The Judge’s House’ was written in 1891 and ‘The Signalman’ was written around 1886. The period in which it is set I don’t know much about it so it makes it that extra bit exiting because I am finding out a little bit about the period from each story. From the three of the stories I have gathered that the people are very supernatural and ghostly. I have also gathered that the young Victorian men started to think that they were far more superior to older people.