The setting of The Signalman gives the story a certain edge of suspicion and supernaturality. Everything seems to point to danger and oddness from the ground to the air, “a barbarous, depressing and forbidding air”. This is hinting that something is not right, all is not as it’s meant to be. In a way the cutting could be seen metaphorically as a passage way to hell the dark gloomy atmosphere helps this, it seems so deep that nothing could live down there. “I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head…. down in the deep trench” In this quote the narrator is standing above the signalman and it almost seems like he is looking into hell itself. The setting is so important in The Signalman without it the story would loose virtually all sense of horror and spookiness. Well basically the story is based around the setting of a railway cutting, which means men have came along and instead of making a tunnel through the hill they’ve made a big steep ‘v’ shape in the hill and at the bottom of this put the train tracks. The cutting then leads on to a tunnel, beside this tunnel is a red danger light where the signalman sees this spectre of his. The cutting is “as solitary and dismal place as I ever saw” as the narrator puts it. This means barely any one ever goes down there and certainly no one lives there except the single signalman. It could be because the place is so boring to the eye, the smell of dirt and the look of slime just like a dungeon or as the book puts it “this great dungeon” meaning really clammy, dark, dripping with mould and cracked, grey and boring walls of the valley. I imagine it a bit like the Grand Canyon but instead of having red valley walls it has grey, brown and a few old trees still just hanging onto life in poor soggy soil. Then we come to the red danger light and the deadly black entrance to the tunnel, which the story rotates around. The “gloomy red light and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel” the gloomy pair seem to just say aloud ‘use your imagination and see the ghost standing there’.
The Red Room is set in an older age so naturally H.G.Wells picked a spooky old castle in which three ancient people live. Firstly I will examine the old people in there, for they aren’t really part of the story so they must be part of the setting, I do this because this is where the story begins. There are three ancient people living in old Lorraine castle, a man who has a withered arm, by which I believe he was born with the defect, a woman, which the story doesn’t say much about other than that she was continually looking into the fire, and lastly the most gruesome of them all an old man, almost bent fully over forwards, with a lip “half averted,” hanging “pale and pink” he also wore a shade. . The setting in The Red Room is totally revolving around the red room which is an old bed room in which the duke, who is the narrator, proposed to sleep in for the one reason that his predecessor had died in that very room. “Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he had opened the door and fallen down the steps”. The red room is full of “shadowy window bays,” “recesses and alcoves” which the people which had slept in there had been so very afraid of or the object that lurks in them. The other objects in the red room consist of a bed, seeming, as it is a bedroom this makes sense, other furniture including a “chintz-covered armchair”, two big mirrors each with a pair of sconces bearing candles and a big open fire. Candles seem to be a very important part of the story or the fire of which they bare does. The setting is just what you would expect from an old spooky castle, grey stone walls with the odd bit of moss hanging off them, old chairs and old tables, old painting above old stairs etc. When the duke is travelling to the red room he sees a shadow of a bronze statue of an eagle, which he thinks is a man crouching ready to pounce upon him.
The similarities between these two stories are: they both take place in dark places, the railway tunnel and the railway cutting which lets in as much light as a mole hill, and the red room itself which does not seem to like light considering that it keeps on putting out the candles being put in there. Neither of the narrators actually sees a ghost or anything of the supernatural. In both stories the narrator has to go down, like in the signalman the narrator goes down the “zigzag path” and in the red room the twenty eight year old duke goes down some stairs into a “subterranean passage”, this could signify going down into hell. Both stories involve previous deaths in the signalman there was a train accident on the line of which the signalman looked after, the red room at least two other people had died in there or close to the red room like the narrator’s predecessor. Both the stories used cold thermal images like in the signalman there was a cold but strong wind consistently blowing through the cutting and in The Red Room that subterranean passage must have been cold. They both include candles the danger light and the signalman’s lantern, the red room was full of them until the ghost or draft blew them out. In the signalman the sense of smell is used to describe that dirty earthy smell that occurs below normal ground level “it had an earthy, deadly smell” and in The Red Room the sense of hearing is found when the narrator thinks he hears a rustling noise. In both stories the setting is based around man made objects such as the cutting and the castle. The first person in both of these stories is the narrator; we see every thing through their eyes. Feelings are shared such as in The Signalman the narrator at one point thinks the signalman to be a spirit and in the very first line of The Red Room the dukes feelings are shared when he says “it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.
