How does Dickens create suspense in ‘The Signalman’?
The Signalman written by Charles Dickens in 1866 is a short story that falls into the gothic fiction genre. This particular style of writing combines elements such as the supernatural, castles, darkness, madness and the unknown. At the time the story was being written, the industrial revolution was in full force. This had a huge impact on society at the time. It improved the standard of living drastically. The death rate had dropped due to better health care and sanitation. Numerous amounts of great and unbelievable machines were being invented. Nothing like this had ever been seen before. There were suddenly vast amounts of new jobs being created because of all the new factories and machines having to be built and operated. People became sceptical as to the existence of god because their thoughts were being widely challenged by science and its overwhelming significance. Charles Darwin’s, “The Origin of Species” suggested that man had evolved from the ape. This caused chaos in the Church. Ordinary People began to form their own opinion about the existence of mankind in relation to god. Dickens incorporates these ideas into The Signalman. The idea of these prosperous new machines scared people because they were totally unknown shows through in the short story and is one of its main themes.
Dickens uses the setting to form suspense by using a combination of powerful and sinister imagery. The narrator is describing the tunnel where the signalman’s hut is situated, ‘in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing and forbidding air’. As well as being negative, the three adjectives that Dickens chose are very sinister. The words ‘forbidding’ and ‘depressing’ are heavily associated with sadness and despair. The word “barbarous” adds an evil and dark element to the description. Images of death, deceit and pain are conjured within the reader. Dickens also uses the list of three in this description. This is an example of repetition to strengthen the feeling of negativity. Although it is not the same word being repeated, they all have an extremely negative effect upon the reader. Furthermore, the tunnel’s architecture is described as being “massive”. This powerful word adds strength to the three adjectives that follow. This word portrays images of something great; something powerful, something enormous and something that makes man feel small and cowardly in comparison. As we read on through the description we realise that this great architecture is not great and powerful in a positive way. There is something very frightening about the words great and powerful when they are associated with something evil. When a setting of a story is portrayed in such dark and negative manner to the reader, it can only make the reader think about whether this sinister description of the setting could be linked to the outcome of the story and the plot.