How do Dickens and Gaskell use language to create setting and atmosphere?

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2nd English Coursework first draft

How do Dickens and Gaskell use language to create setting and atmosphere?

Ms.F.Pow

Rebecca Lau

In the two short ghost stories, The Signalman, written by Charles Dickens and The Old Nurse’s Story written by Elizabeth Gaskell, a lot of techniques were used to create setting and atmosphere. These techniques may include pathetic fallacy, detailed imagery, using traditional ghost story settings, and first person point of view.

In The Signalman, Dickens chose not to tell readers the names of characters to give the characters a mysterious atmosphere. The signalman never introduced himself thoroughly, so he is always referred to as “he” or “him”, “he stirred” “he answered” “he returned”. This makes him veiled, as a name is the most common way of knowing a person. This makes the character of the signalman harder to understand, and builds up a mysterious atmosphere.

Dickens and Gaskell both use pathetic fallacy to reflect the character’s feelings and the atmosphere. The “angry sunset” and the “barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air” in The Signalman all reflect the narrator’s feelings. The “sunset” may be a bad omen as to it may imply that night and danger is approaching.  And the personification of the air, making it sounds like it has feelings may be referring to a desperate and unfriendly person, which may be death. Dickens put three three-syllabic words together to emphasize the unpleasant feeling the narrator has and influences the atmosphere to make the reader feel the same. And in The Old Nurse’s Story, “the sky hung heavy and black over the white earth, as if the night had never fully gone away, and the air, though still was very biting and keen” and “whenever it was a more stormy night than usual, between the gusts, and through the wind we heard the old lord playing on the great organ” describes the bad premonition of the narrator and builds up a tension in the atmosphere of the whole story. Both writers use pathetic fallacy to echo the thoughts of narrators, and using the feelings of the narrators to influence the atmosphere.

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Both writers chose to use traditional ghost stories settings, which is basing the whole story in an isolated, remote and ancient place. The Old Nurse’s Story is set in the “black moors of Northumberland” or “the foot of the Cumberland Fells” which “left all signs of a town, or even a village”; while The Signalman is set in a place of “dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky” and near to a “black tunnel” with a “gloomy red light”. The isolation of these settings implies that it needs journeys over dangerous lands, further suggesting ...

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