Ultimately, it means that it is very hard to see because of the limited light; it would be a very uncomfortable place to be.
The Red Room is about an old castle which boasts a dark room in it which is theoretically meant to have a ghost in it. A man, who is not named, enters this room to prove that there is nothing in there, no ghosts or spirits. The old people would not show him the room, this builds the tension. Once in the room, his candle goes out and then everything begins... and the only thing really in the room is FEAR! An extract from the story emphasises how good the descriptive language is to create the setting.
‘I caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness in the queer old mirror.’ This gives the effect that just one of the many things is in place. The mirror distorts him so that he looks ill-formed like the three strange characters in the story. Another well written extract is this, ‘One man with a withered arm, the woman swaying from side to side, and the other man with a single bent crutch…’ ‘…he had wrinkled eyes covered by the shade, and he constantly coughed and spluttered.’ This sets the scene that the place is weird and unique as they are grotesque and distorted old people, weird, with the feel of decay and death about them. They make you feel uncomfortable.
Finally, another extract, which I think sets the setting of the story completely, ‘the ornaments and the conveniences of the room were ghostly, the thought of a vanished room compared against today’s modern world.’ It gives the sense of the pale, half-vanished men in white suits standing next to the ornaments.
Similarities between ‘The Signalman’ and ‘The Red Room’ are they are both written in Gothic Literature. An example of this is an extract from The Red Room, ‘Eight-and-Twenty years,’ said I, ‘I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.’
In The Red Room and The Signalman, both use the characters and the setting to create tension and suspense . Both stories use intensive amounts of suspense in the way they are written. They were written in the old Victorian times, hence the style of literature and writing.
A difference in the stories is the fact that they were set in totally different places. The Signalman was set in the middle of nowhere, in an isolated place, just by the actual railway; and featured a very normal man. Whereas, The Red Room was set in an old ruined castle.
Finally, The Signalman and The Red Room were set in different times in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens’ story was set in middle Victorian times, whilst H G Wells’ was set later, when it was a new time of discovery, when literature was more recent possibly.
In conclusion, I find that the stories both have excellent tension in them throughout. An extract from The Red Room, I especially liked was, ‘... However, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and that black shadow sprang back to its place there ...’ The suspense is well built as the language of the story was great. I believe that the stories have 19th century language and the atmosphere created fits the stories perfectly. The vocabulary was fairly aged compared to today’s language.
By Joshua Gill
9 Violet
Set 2
