Compare the texts of two stories "The Signalman" and "The Darkness Out There".

Danielle Trubridge

Comparison of texts, Coursework assignment

The Signalman And The Darkness Out There

For this piece of English coursework I have been asked to compare the texts of two stories “The Signalman” and “The Darkness Out There”.

The main storyline for The Darkness Out There is about two people who are in a club to help elderly people around the house. There is a girl named Sandra and a boy named Kerry Stevens. They do not get along with one another and the two are chosen to be partners to visit Mrs Rutter and to help clean her cottage. Both of the children think that Mrs Rutter is a nice and pleasant person until they meet her and she tells them the story about the German Pilots, they are very surprised at Mrs Rutter. Sandra learns an important lesson, that she should not judge a book by its cover. She knows this because when she meets Kerry Stevens she expects him to be ignorant and immature but she soon learns that he is the opposite, mature and understanding. Mrs Rutter is the opposite of Kerry in a way. Mrs Hammond calls her a “dear old thing” she looks like the typical sweet old lady, calling Sandra “dear” and asks if she is courting. She seems very entertained in marriage and people having children, this may be because she did not have children herself and blames the Germans for this and is therefore very bitter. The settings in this story are very weird and disturbing. The author (Penelope Lively) describes packers end as being dangerous and says gypsies could attack people. Although the author describes packers end as being a nasty, creepy place where voices come out of the trees and people said that they could hear German people chattering on the radio. The author described Mrs Rutters cottage as old, with old calendars cluttering up the walls. The cottage had a smell of cabbage. The alcove by the fireplace was filled with china ornaments.

Mrs Rutters garden was described as having matted beds and a square of shaggy grass. Beyond the spinney reached up to the fence a no mans land of willow herb and thistle and small trees growing thicker and higher. The garden seemed lonely and had been abandoned by Mrs Rutter years ago or so it seemed.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Charles Dickens described the cutting as extremely deep and unusually precipitous. It was made through clammy stone that becomes oozier and wetter as it went down. The author is pushing the effectiveness of the tunnel to its limits describing it as not a nice place, scary and dark, not somewhere you would want to go voluntarily. The tunnel is described by the author as a “dripping wet wall of jagged stone” and calls it a great dungeon. This is a good comparison of packers end as it is not a place to be entered either by yourself or with someone else.

The situation of the signal box was at the beginning of the tunnel and it was horrid because when you entered the tunnel it felt as though you had left the real world.

It was easy to make an assumption that Dickens felt strongly about what he was writing and describing, as he was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that in 1865 he had been involved in a railway accident, which killed ten people and injured many more. He wrote “The Signalman” a year later.

In The Darkness out There Penelope Lively is trying to tell the readers that everything is not as it seems. Sandra thought that Mrs Rutter would be a nice old lady but she soon realised that he judgement was wrong after she found out what Mrs Rutter had done to the German pilots. As I have also mentioned before her judgement of Kerry was wrong as well. The setting fits in with Sandra’s personality at first when she is walking through the field and she thinks that everything in the world is fine, then she comes to Packers End and she feels frightened as she does when Mrs Rutter explains what she had done to the German pilots.

In The Signalman Charles Dickens is trying to create a setting, which will frighten the reader and send shivers up their spine. This can be seen when he describes the tunnel as being a great dungeon. It creates a setting of a gloomy, dark, dark place which may disturb the reader because it is suggesting that the tunnel is somewhere supernatural, but yet the reader still wants to keep reading because of the frightening setting which makes the story.

I enjoyed the signalman because of the words used to describe the tunnel and the cutting and the signal box. I also enjoyed this story because you could almost feel Dickens’ terror for railways after his accident previously mentioned in this essay. I preferred “the Darkness Out There” because it seemed like a true story and the message it sent across to me was very true; you can never judge a book by its cover. I thoroughly enjoyed looking more deeply into both stories.