Category Archives: Charles Dickens

August 22, 2025 · 3:23 pm

George W. M. Reynolds’ French Hero Alfred

As I work my way through the works of George W. M. Reynolds, I repeatedly am amazed by his ability to create engaging plots full of exciting twists and turns while also offering social criticism. Alfred, The Adventures of a French Gentleman (1838) is no disappointment in this regard, even though it is well into the novel before we meet the titular character. One of Reynolds’ earliest novels, it has all the signs of a precursor to his masterpiece The Mysteries of London (1844-1846). There is even a minor villain named Markham in it—the surname of the two brothers, one good, one evil, Reynolds would use in The Mysteries of London.

Although not a true Gothic novel, Alfred is full of interest, and because it is a little-known work, I’ll summarize the plot before mentioning a few of its interesting elements.

The novel begins when a French family escapes from The Reign of Terror to England in 1793. The father is the Marquis de Denneville, but he hides his identity in England to protect his family. Soon after arriving, his wife dies. His daughter, Eloise, is left under the guardianship of the Clayton family, which includes two brothers, William and Harry, who treat the marquis’ daughter like a sister. When he believes it safe, the marquis returns to France to try to regain his property, but he never returns. In time, his daughter grows up to marry Harry, never knowing the truth about her parents’ identity, though she believes her father was a French nobleman.

Harry and Eloise have a daughter named after her. (To eliminate confusion, I’ll refer to the daughter as Eloise below while Harry’s wife will be Mrs. Clayton.) Harry soon after dies, leaving Mrs. Clayton and Eloise under the care of Mrs. Clayton’s brother-in-law, William. When Eloise is a teenager, they travel to France to try to learn more about Mrs. Clayton’s parentage. There they encounter Alfred de Rosann, a young businessman, who immediately falls in love with Eloise. Alfred has inherited his father’s business, but he does not give it the attention it deserves, causing him eventually to get advice from LaMotte, a man who helps turn around the business, resulting in Alfred agreeing to make him his partner. But LaMotte only wishes to take advantage of Alfred. He dupes Alfred into signing certain papers for a fake loan, then flees to the Netherlands with Alfred’s money, leaving Alfred to be arrested when his business fails and he can’t pay the fake loan. Eloise pledges her love for Alfred and agrees to wait for him when he is sentenced to prison.

LaMotte tricks Alfred into signing the bills of exchange.

In prison, Alfred meets Belle-Rose, a hardened criminal, and Champignon, a restaurant owner who went to prison for crimes committed in an effort to destroy his competition. Eventually, Alfred and Belle-Rose escape from the prison with the help of LeBlond, an old acquaintance of Belle-Rose. LeBlond gives them two passports for when they escape. In exchange, he expects them to carry out services for a secret society when called upon. Later, we learn this society seeks to bring about a new government in France and possibly the world.

Before they escape from prison, Alfred and Belle-Rose learn the story of a prisoner who murdered a wealthy man and hid his papers in a farmhouse. Alfred and Belle-Rose, in their flight, happen to arrive at that very farmhouse, and in the night, Alfred discovers the papers and hides them on his person. He does this just before the farmhouse catches on fire. In the melee that follows, he helps rescue the farmer’s other guests, discovering them to be Eloise, Mrs. Clayton, and William. Eloise and Alfred again pledge their love for one another, and William Clayton supports their engagement, but Mrs. Clayton does not want her daughter to marry a penniless ex-convict. She vows she will never relent unless Alfred learns who her father was. Of course, the papers Alfred found belonged to the marquis, who had been murdered, and the reader guesses this when they are found, but the novel has to play itself out before Alfred can read the papers and make sufficient inquiries to realize Mrs. Clayton is the marquis’ daughter and restore the marquis’ property to her.

Alfred and Eloise meeting during the farmhouse fire

Alfred travels to England with the papers, thinking from what little he has read of them that he will be able to learn about the murdered marquis’ family there. Belle-Rose also travels there separately from him. Belle-Rose was awake when Alfred found the papers and saw him hide them. He is now determined to have them to use to receive some type of reward. He presents himself at the marquis’ banker in England before Alfred does, but the banker, Robson, trusts Alfred and not Belle-Rose. Robson is especially grateful to Alfred after he invites Alfred to dinner along with his future business partner, who turns out to be LaMotte, the very man who had cheated Alfred out of his business and framed him to go to prison. Robson is grateful to Alfred when he denounces LaMotte because it saves him from having LaMotte ruin him also. Belle-Rose fails to gain the papers, and in time, Alfred realizes Mrs. Clayton is the marquis’ daughter.

More twists and turns happen as Alfred tries to return to France, including a highway robbery scene, and Robson’s daughter, Selena, falling in love with Alfred, but Alfred remains true to Eloise. Alfred also secretly carries a small fortune back to Paris for LeBlond.

Alfred returns in time to be caught up in the July 1830 revolution, in which Belle-Rose dies. These scenes reminded me of Les Misérables (1862), a similarity also noted by Reynolds’ biographer, Stephen Basdeo (p. 30, Victorian England’s Bestselling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds). I think it a stretch to argue Hugo could have been influenced by the novel, plus he treats the 1832 Revolution instead. Still, I think Reynolds captures the feel of the period. He was himself a Francophile and lived in France from about 1832-1836, so he understood the French character and political situation of the time. That he chooses a Frenchman for his hero shows how sympathetic he was to the French people.

Belle-Rose wounded during the 1830 Revolution. The image depicts him dying in Alfred’s arms, but Alfred actually takes him to a nearby house where he dies later.

To make a long story short, in the end, Alfred reveals Mrs. Clayton is the marquis’ daughter, and he and Eloise are wed. LaMotte also asks Alfred’s forgiveness before he dies. He leaves Alfred his fortune as well as proof Alfred was innocent, which clears Alfred of all criminal charges.

This plot summary cannot convey the interest with which I read the novel. The main plot of how Mrs. Clayton will learn her true identity and regain her inheritance is largely predictable, but much of the novel is both sensational and surprising. Plenty of humor is also included in the novel, especially in the depiction of Champignon, who is obsessed with food.

As far as Gothic elements go, the most notable is the finding of the marquis’ manuscript in the farmhouse. Manuscripts that reveal family secrets are a staple of the Gothic. Notably, the farmer knows the marquis was murdered in that room, and when he offers the room to Belle-Rose and Alfred to sleep in, he warns them it is believed to be haunted, causing Belle-Rose to make jokes and reference the works of Mrs. Radcliffe.

Reynolds also has fun playing intertextual games. In one scene, a character sings a song Reynolds had previously published in Pickwick Abroad (1837-8), a novel in which he appropriated Dickens’ characters and sent them to France.

Alfred’s fighting in the 1830 Revolution and his helping the invisible secret society seem like precursors to how Richard Markham in The Mysteries of London will aid in bringing about a revolution in an Italian dukedom.

The peasants in the novel continue to revere Napoleon, even though the main action takes place in the late 1820s, but Reynolds says the ignorant peasants always will revere Napoleon, a sign Reynolds was not himself a fan of the man who was largely France’s national hero, but he ends the novel on a note of hope that France will know peace and prosperity now that the 1830 revolution is over.

Overall, the novel is a vital document, along with some of Reynolds’ other works, including The Modern Literature of France (1839), Pickwick Abroad, and Robert Macaire (1839), for our understanding of Reynolds’ favoritism toward French culture and literature. (See my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides for more on how Reynolds was influenced by French literature.) Alfred also shows mastery of complex and multiple plots and the weaving together of all the threads to a satisfying conclusion. Best of all, the reader’s interest never lags. The same year Alfred was being serialized, Dickens was serializing Nicholas Nickleby, a novel that is better known and still read today, yet Nicholas Nickleby largely wanders about without any clear purpose as if Dickens is just making it up as he goes along. From the beginning of Alfred, we know the purpose of the entire book is to find out what happened to the marquis and to have Eloise and her mother restored to their rightful property. Dickens is known to have hated Reynolds, and you can’t blame him after Reynolds’ appropriated his characters for Pickwick Abroad, but at the same time, Dickens could have learned a lot from Reynolds. As much as I admire Dickens, at times, he can easily put a reader to sleep, especially in his early novels. I can’t imagine falling asleep while reading anything by Reynolds.

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Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and The Mysteries of Marquette: A Novel, plus many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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April 1, 2025 · 4:19 pm

Walt Whitman’s Lost “City Mysteries” Novel

I first heard of Walt Whitman’s lost novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, when I was writing my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, which contained a chapter on City Mystery novels. It was then I discovered that Wikipedia had an entry listing City Mysteries novels, including this novel by Walt Whitman. I’ve been trying to read all the City Mystery novels (and even wrote one of my own, The Mysteries of Marquette), so I was curious about Walt Whitman’s novel, especially since I had never heard of him writing any novels. It turns out he wrote several stories and novels besides his famous poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. I am no Whitman scholar, but I am a City Mysteries scholar, so I had to read his lost novel.

The 2017 reprint by Iowa University Press of Whitman’s lost novel

The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle has a curious history. It was published in 1852 in the New York Sunday Dispatch in six installments. A relatively short novel of twenty-two chapters that runs just over a hundred pages in print, its short period of serialization is not surprising. What is surprising is that critics have labeled it a City Mysteries novel since most City Mysteries novels run 400 pages or more and were serialized for about a year or longer. The novel was serialized anonymously, and Whitman’s authorship was kept a secret and then forgotten until a graduate student, Zachary Turpin, saw an old advertisement for the novel and recalled references to Jack Engle in Whitman’s notebooks. Turpin’s introduction to the 2017 University of Iowa Press edition—the first time the novel was reprinted in 165 years—discusses his discovery in more detail.

Here, I will focus solely on the novel’s plot and discuss whether it is a true “City Mysteries” novel, a term Turpin doesn’t use in his introduction, although he notes it’s more a novel about social reform and compares it to works by Dickens—truly it feels like it was mainly inspired by David Copperfield, as I’ll discuss below. I’m not sure who first labeled Jack Engle as a City Mysteries novel, but it may be David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who was quoted in The New York Times (February 20, 2017) when the novel was republished, as stating, “This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the ‘upper 10 thousand’—what we would call the 1 percent —against the lower million.” This remark references a novel by George Lippard, who wrote The Quaker City (1845), America’s first City Mysteries novel. Lippard later wrote New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million, published in 1854, two years after Whitman’s novel was published. I wouldn’t fully agree with Reynolds’ definition of a City Mystery novel, but he is correct that such novels usually did depict the very rich and the very poor and the unfair class distance between them. Whitman’s novel is somewhat lacking in this respect, but it does contain the typical secrets and revelations common in most Victorian fiction and not limited to the City Mysteries’ genre. The novel’s short length, however, does not have multiple plots that allow for the larger overview of society and its classes.

The main character, Jack Engle, is an orphaned boy who doesn’t really remember his past. One day he wanders into the store of a milkman, Ephraim Foster, and ends up being adopted by Foster and his wife. When Jack is grown, Ephraim Foster brings Jack to Covert, a lawyer, to serve as an apprentice. There Jack meets Wigglesworth, the elderly office clerk, who hints to Jack he knows the truth about his origins.

In time, we learn Covert is the guardian to a young girl named Martha whose parents died when she was just one or two. Covert’s wife is a Quaker, which means she is kind, but Covert ironically turns out to be a villain. His name suggests he engages in covert behavior, keeping secrets concealed. By the end of the novel, Jack learns from Wigglesworth that Covert has kept quite a few secrets he has profited from.

Like all good Gothic and City Mysteries novels, a manuscript surfaces that tells the whole story, written in the hand of Martha’s late father. It turns out that Martha’s father (we are never told his name) was friends in his youth with Jack’s father. But Martha’s father prospered while Jack’s father remained a workman. As Martha’s father began to put on airs, Jack’s father started to make sarcastic and mocking remarks about him. This behavior continued when Martha’s father built a new house and hired a contractor. The contractor employed Jack’s father as one of the workers. One day, Martha’s father heard Jack’s father mocking him in front of the other workers. In anger, he hit Jack’s father over the head, killing him instantly. Martha’s father then went to prison where he wrote his confession—the manuscript Wigglesworth gives to Jack Engle to read. Martha’s father’s grief is so great that he dies the day of his trial. He has in the meantime altered his will to leave two-thirds of his estate to Martha and one-third to Jack to compensate Jack for the loss of his father.

Once Jack learns these secrets, he manages to get papers away from Covert that show how Covert has been withholding their inheritances from him and Martha. He and Martha flee New York to escape pursuit by Covert. After Covert realizes he’s in trouble since the papers are lost, he seeks refuge in Canada and is never heard from again. (A rather anticlimactic resolution to the plot in which no real justice is done.) Meanwhile, Jack and Martha have fallen in love, and at the end of the novel, they are married.

A series of other characters are involved in the plot, though they are of little real consequence. They include Inez, a dancing girl, who gives Martha shelter when she flees; Tom Peterson, who helps Martha and Jack escape; Calvin Peterson, a religious fanatic and Tom’s father; and two Jewish characters, Madame Seligny and her daughter Rebecca. Madame Seligny claims to be an émigré of the French Revolution, but she is actually Jewish and runs a gambling parlor. There’s a touch of anti-Semitism here, as is typical in Gothic novels of the time; gambling was deeply frowned upon by the Victorians as a transgression against God, so it’s not surprising a Jewess is the one involved in it rather than a Christian. (For more on gambling as a Gothic transgression, see my book The Gothic Wanderer.)

Does The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle qualify as a City Mysteries novel? I would have to say it is a wannabe City Mysteries novel that doesn’t quite make the cut. Nor am I convinced Whitman set out to write a City Mysteries novel. As I stated above, the novel feels more akin to Dickens’ David Copperfield than Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, George W. M. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London, or even the American George Lippard’s The Quaker City. Yes, we have a secret to be revealed, but that is the case in most Gothic novels. And while the novel is set in New York, it hardly gives us a representation of a large overview of society with characters from all the classes. Nor is there much sense of a criminal element or criminal underground other than Covert and a firm that seems to help him in his crimes. It is not a novel concerned with the poor, other than the brief time Jack is a poor child at the beginning. Nor does it have any sense of Gothic atmosphere. The city is not depicted as a scary place full of mystery. In City Mysteries novels, usually strange events occur that other characters don’t understand and they may even attribute to supernatural causes. Jack Engle fails to have this sense of mystery and suspense, which is akin to the more modern film noir.

What we do have is a first-person narrator, unusual in City Mysteries novels because of the multiple plots, who is our title character and narrates the story of his life. In fact, the novel’s subtitle is “An Autobiography: in which the reader will find some familiar characters.” Why the characters are thought to be familiar isn’t clear unless Whitman believes he’s depicting typical character types. The plot is similar to that of David Copperfield in that the main character ends up revealing crimes committed at the office where he works, only in David Copperfield, David works for Mr. Wickfield, and Wickfield’s employee, Uriah Heep, is the villain robbing the company and its customers; in Jack Engle, the employer, Covert is the villain. In David Copperfield, the villain Heep is romantically interested in Agnes, the daughter of his employer. In Jack Engle, Covert is not romantically interested in anyone—he’s married—but he’s willing to rob his ward like Heep robs Agnes’ father. In both novels, the title character/narrator helps reveal the crimes. In both novels, that same character also marries the young lady being wronged. Both novels are also “autobiographies” and tell the entire history of the narrator up to his marriage. The similarities are not exact parallels, and David Copperfield, being about eight times as long, has a much more complicated plot, but there are enough similarities for me to believe David Copperfield, published in 1850, just two years before Jack Engle, was a major influence on Whitman’s novel.

As is typical of Gothic novels, in Jack Engle, a crime has been committed that has been kept secret. As is also typical of the Gothic, the plot concerns family, revealing secrets about both Jack and Martha’s parentage. That Jack marries the daughter of the man who killed his father is a sort of generational healing and redemption for their parents, and while it doesn’t really resemble the plot of Wuthering Heights (1847), it has that sense of healing the past and restoring the status quo that occurs when the Linton and Earnshaw heirs, Hareton and Cathy, marry at the end of Wuthering Heights, while no one of the villainous Heathcliff’s lineage remains alive.

Overall, The Adventures of Jack Engle is a second-rate novel that fails to have a complicated enough plot to keep the reader in suspense. The secrets are presented in a way that does not invite the reader to be curious about the mysteries because they are laid bare too easily. Only after Wigglesworth tells Jack everything does he present the manuscript to Jack that reveals the secrets, but the manuscript is a dull read for the reader since we already know the secret. Whitman’s construction is consequently rather clumsy. A philosophical chapter of Jack wandering in a graveyard is also pointless and doesn’t advance the plot or develop the characters. Perhaps clumsiest of all, Whitman names the dog Jack, the same name he gives to his main character.

Nothing of genius or originality exists in Jack Engle. It is highly derivative of David Copperfield and other Victorian fiction while failing to be genre-specific enough to be considered a true City Mysteries novel or even an early detective novel. In short, it reveals that Whitman’s talents did not lie in fiction but rather in poetry. Still, it highlights what an influence Victorian Gothic fiction had on writers of the day since Whitman would try his pen at writing such a book—though probably more for money than a desire to write a great piece of literary fiction. The novel also adds to our understanding of Whitman as a man of various literary interests beyond just the poetry that has made him famous. Despite Jack Engle’s faults, it makes me curious to read Whitman’s earlier fiction works, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), which is a temperance novel, and The Half-Breed; A Tale of the Western Frontier (1846), a novel published more than half-a-century before Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), considered the first true Western novel.

While The Adventures of Jack Engle holds no significant place in the history of Gothic fiction or the City Mysteries genre, it does provide insight into the publishing world of Whitman’s time and how he worked at his craft before he became, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, America’s “lonely old courage teacher.”

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and The Mysteries of Marquette: A Novel, plus many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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January 5, 2025 · 3:06 pm

Long Overdue Biography of George W. M. Reynolds a Must-Read

Thank you, Stephen Basdeo and Mya Driver, for writing Victorian England’s Bestselling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds. This book, published in 2022, provides the first full-length biography of the man who may have been more popular than any other Victorian author, including Charles Dickens and William Harrison Ainsworth. While critics have long been dismissive of Reynolds and many literary scholars do not even know his name, a growing body of Reynolds scholars has been reviving his reputation. I have myself written numerous blog posts about his novels (links to some of them are included below), and I also wrote extensively about many of them in my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Literature, 1789-1897 (2023). Unfortunately, this new biography came out too late for me to use it as a resource in writing my own book, but I have read it with great pleasure, and it only makes me want to read more of Reynolds. Unfortunately, few of Reynolds’ novels have been printed in readable editions, so I have only so far read a dozen of his fifty-eight novels.

This biography fills in a lot of blanks about Reynolds’ life and even clarifies some misconceptions and fanciful stories about him, such as that he employed Thackeray while living in France or that he became a church alderman at the end of his life. More importantly, it shows how Reynolds developed and refined his views on the social problems of his day and how he was a true champion of the people in ways not even Charles Dickens could claim.

One aspect of the biography that particularly interested me was the discussion of Reynolds’ early life, his short stint in the military, and his life in France. The authors seem to have read almost everything Reynolds wrote, and they quote him frequently. In fact, Basdeo is a collector of first editions of Reynolds’ novels. Passages of Reynolds’ first book, The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed, are quoted. His time spent in France is discussed, which led to his interest in French literature, his writing The Modern Literature of France, his translating several French novels, and his being inspired by French literature in writing his own fiction, such as his novel Robert Macaire.

While Reynolds’ fiction has always been my chief interest, I was also impressed by how Basdeo discusses why Reynolds was willing to change his views on important topics. Initially, Reynolds was pro-British imperialism, but in time, he became a champion for those oppressed by the British Empire. He was also against being a teetotaler, but after engaging in a public debate on the matter, he changed his mind and even went on to publish a magazine called the Teetotaler.

Reynolds’ role in the Chartist movement will especially be of interest to readers. We learn about his public speeches, his contemporaries’ opinions of him, including Charles Dickens and Karl Marx, and how he used his nonfiction publications to further the causes he believed in, such as bettering the situation of the working class and giving the vote to all men regardless of how much property they owned.

Basdeo discusses the significance of many of Reynolds’ novels, including The Mysteries of London, The Seamstress, and The Soldier’s Wife. I would have liked more discussion on some of the novels, especially my favorites like Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals, and The Parricide, but they are all mentioned. I should mention here that another wonderful book on Reynolds appeared recently—G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined (2023) edited by Jenifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon. It includes essays discussing many of the novels, as well as Reynolds’ popularity in India, and his role as an employer with his workers. Those wanting more literary criticism beyond what Basdeo includes would do well to consult it because I feel every essay in it is excellent and it is one of the best books I have read in the last year. That said, Basdeo could not possibly discuss in detail every Reynolds’ novel and his discussions made me want to read all of those I have not read.

As an employer, Reynolds was also ahead of his time. Basdeo includes some information also mentioned in an essay in G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined about how Reynolds annually hosted a mini-vacation for his employees including taking them on a picnic, a sort of employee appreciation day. As Basdeo notes, Reynolds used these events as a way to promote his own generosity in his magazines, but they still show he was ahead of his time in how he treated his employees.

Details of Reynolds’ family life are also discussed, including his marriage with his wife Susannah who was an author herself, and the growth of his large family, both children and grandchildren and what became of some of them.

A few special treats in the book worth mentioning include the large number of photographs in the center insert that show many of the illustrations and covers of Reynolds’ novels. The complete texts of all of Reynolds’ editorials for the Political Instructor (1849-50), transcribed by Mya Driver, are included in the back; they provide Reynolds’ opinions on politics, the Chartist movement, and European politics, especially in France. Dr. Rebecca Nesvet, a scholar of penny dreadfuls, provides the foreword, advocating for why Reynolds deserves serious attention from scholars. I could not agree more and join with Basdeo in wishing a publisher would come out with a scholarly series of Reynolds’ novels. So far, only Valancourt Books has republished a few of them, and most are difficult to find. Finally, a useful timeline of Reynolds’ life is provided.

No book is perfect, and I admit this biography has a few flaws, but they are insignificant beside the fact that it is the first biography about an author who deserves to be a household name along with Dickens. Among the shortcomings is no mention of French author Paul Féval, who wrote his own The Mysteries of London before Reynolds and may have inspired Reynolds to do the same. After all, Féval was the first to capitalize upon the popularity of Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, which would go on to have many imitations (including The Mysteries of Lisbon, which Basdeo is currently translating into English). The book also has numerous typos and some awkward sentences, but hopefully as more information about Reynolds becomes available, the authors will come out with a second edition and correct these errors, which did not distract from my keen interest and pleasure in reading the book. Such faults are small compared to the significant undertaking and achievement it is to have written the first full-length biography of George W. M. Reynolds, who literally wrote circles around Dickens. I believe everyone, scholar or reader, interested in Reynolds will embrace this biography.

You can learn more about Stephen Basdeo and his work at his website: Reynolds’s News and Miscellany.

Victorian England’s Bestselling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds is available from Pen and Sword Books and most online bookstores.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and The Mysteries of Marquette: A Novel, plus many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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March 7, 2023 · 2:17 pm

The Quaker City: America’s First City Mysteries Novel

On this blog and in my new book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897, I have written extensively about the City Mysteries novel genre, which began with French author Eugène Sue’s blockbuster The Mysteries of Paris (1842-1843). Sue’s novel inspired a chain of novels ranging from two novels of the same title, The Mysteries of London, one by French author Paul Féval, one by George W. M. Reynolds, and then numerous more imitations from authors around the world.

An illustration of George Lippard as a young man

In the United States, the city mysteries genre was first taken up by George Lippard (1822-1854), although he shied away from copying Sue’s title, naming his novel The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall. It was issued in monthly parts from August 1844 to May 1845. Its circulation began after Féval began serializing his novel, and so it is possible it was somewhat inspired by it, but it was completed before Reynolds began his novel. The Quaker City would be extremely popular and lead to many more city mystery novels in the United States, including Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), written under the pseudonym Edward Zane Carroll Judson.

While similarities exist between Lippard’s novel and those of Sue and Féval, the reader, especially an American reader knowledgeable of American literature and particularly antebellum literature, is bound to be struck by what a very American novel it is in its themes. All the Gothic trappings of Sue, Féval, and Reynolds are here, but the novel’s setting in the United States makes the concerns over the criminal world and immorality all the more relevant because they threaten not only society and domestic happiness but the very ideals upon which the American Republic was based. Throughout the book, Lippard decries how Philadelphia, the Quaker City (Lippard appears to have coined the name), and setting of the novel, no longer reflects the ideals of the American Revolution. Lippard plays on scenes like Washington crossing the Delaware to have a criminal pursued on the river to have revenge taken upon him. In a terrible vision, another character foresees the destruction of Philadelphia, with Independence Hall standing in ruins and in the sky written in flaming letters the words: “WO UNTO SODOM.” The novel then serves as a warning to the American people of where the Republic is headed, mourning the lost ideals of the Founding Fathers and even having the President replaced with a king in the vision of the future. As a result, its exposure of crime and vice and its calls for reform make it the first muckraking novel in the United States.

A summary of The Quaker City’s plot would be difficult to follow, but like his city mystery predecessors, Lippard provides multiple storylines, each of which surrounds some crime or attempted crime ranging from abducting innocent women or bamboozling them into fake marriages to adultery to characters disguising themselves to con others and religious deceivers.

Throughout, Lippard pays homage to other great Gothic authors. He makes reference to Ainsworth as a master of plot and references both Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton. That much of the novel’s action takes place in the fictional Monk Hall may be a nod to Matthew “Monk” Lewis. It is surprising Lippard makes no references to Sue or Féval since at least the former, and probably both, inspired his work. He dedicates the book to Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first Gothic novelist who was from Philadelphia and set his novel Arthur Mervyn there. He also references James Fenimore Cooper, but notes that critics complain that more people in the United States read Ainsworth than Cooper, and he defends Ainsworth in the process. Surprisingly, he avoids mentioning his own American Gothic contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lippard was himself a good friend of Poe’s, and while the novel was published before Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and his other novels, Lippard must have known Hawthorne’s short stories since Poe reviewed them. Based on The Quaker City, it surprises me that Lippard is not a household name along with Poe and Hawthorne, for his novel is more thoroughly plotted and complicated than anything either of them wrote, and if he is not the equal in style and depth to Hawthorne, I feel he exceeds Poe in his greater vision of society and he keeps the reader in suspense without the boredom Poe too often creates.

Literary critic and historian Stephen Knight, in his chapter on the novel in The Mysteries of the Cities, notes that many critics have dismissed Lippard, but such critics have not really read him. The novel is actually wonderfully plotted and Lippard is a master of pacing, something in keeping with the writing of Ainsworth, as well as Sue, Féval, and Reynolds, and far exceeding the plotting and pacing of anything Dickens had achieved at this point in his career. That the novel was written by Lippard when he was only twenty-two to twenty-three years of age is remarkable, and really gives him genius designation with other brilliant young authors like Mary Shelley. By comparison, Dickens did not write The Pickwick Papers until he was twenty-five and it is a nearly plotless book. Furthermore, because Lippard wrote quickly, his work has been seen as inferior, but in my opinion, it just adds to his genius that he was able to keep so many plot strands straight and weave them together so effortlessly. Anthony Trollope also wrote quickly but only because he dedicated himself to daily writing. Nor should a novelist be decried for writing a novel in a year when it takes another author three years to do so since we cannot know how many hours of writing and contemplative thinking about the novel took place within either time frame.

A few plot points and characters from The Quaker City deserve mention. The novel begins a few days before Christmas when two men go to see a fortune-teller and are told that one of them will die by the other’s hand at the hour of sunset on Christmas Eve. The novel unfolds from there as these two seeming friends discover that neither is who the other thought and one greatly wrongs the other, leading to the dramatic murder scene on the Delaware River, said to be based on a true murder case in Philadelphia.

Another notable character is Devil-Bug. This depraved criminal is illiterate, unintelligent, and mostly the slave to superior criminals, yet he is perhaps the closest thing the novel has to a main character. As Stephen Knight notes, he is almost the reverse of Eugene Sue’s hero Rodolphe, who is a prince in disguise. Devil-Bug is not moral, but he is haunted by his past, continually seeing the ghosts of those he has killed. He also once was in love and had a daughter who was lost to him. By the end of the novel, we will learn not only what became of his daughter, but he will manage to save her and see her happy and prosperous, a marked contrast to how Rodolphe is unable to save his daughter, who ultimately dies of shame because of her past. Devil-Bug is also the character granted the vision of the future in the novel.

Original cover for The Quaker City

Perhaps the most interesting character for me, however, is Signor Ravoni. Did I not know that this novel was published before Alexandre Dumas’ Joseph Balsamo (1846-1848), I might have thought Ravoni was inspired by Dumas’ sorcerer character because Ravoni is also a sorcerer and has the same mesmeric abilities as Balsamo. However, as Stephen Knight notes, more likely Ravoni’s name is a play on Zanoni, the Rosicrucian hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). Like Zanoni, Ravoni claims to have lived a long life—two centuries. He is a voice of atheism in the novel, wishing to rid the world of the old religions and replace it with a religion of man for man, which may sound like a sort of religion of reason akin to the Goddess of Reason during the French Revolution. However, he intends to use his new religion to gain power over other men, and to do so, he uses supernatural powers, attempting to resurrect the dead to win over followers who claim they will worship him if he can do so. He manages to bring about a faked resurrection, and he also mesmerizes a young woman, holding her in thrall similarly to how Svengali will hold power over Trilby half a century later in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby. The scenes where Ravoni is worshiped by his followers in a mass meeting also eerily reminds me of scenes in the Swedish version of Dracula, Powers of Darkness, where Draculitz tries to create a new world order. In the end, Ravoni is stabbed and dies, but not before he gets his followers to promise to carry on his new religion and he appoints a successor. (I discuss these novels by Dumas and Bulwer-Lytton and Powers of Darkness in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides.)

The Ravoni plot does not get introduced into the novel until the fifth of the six books, and it is not as closely tied to the main plots as it might be, but it is interesting for its religious message that seems anti-Christian, anti-religion, and pro-man if not pro-reason, wishing to raise man from the groveling servitude that religion often places him in, and yet Ravoni is a type of hypocrite in wishing to be worshiped like a god. It is also telling that American culture has always been highly religious due to its Puritan roots, ironic given the novel is set in a city founded by Quakers. The role of religion in the novel needs far more attention by future critics.

While my interest in The Quaker City is primarily in its Gothic elements, it is worth noting that like Sue, Lippard was a voice of reform and one who spoke out for the poor and downtrodden. He mocks those ready to send off missionaries to Hindoostan when there are outcasts at home who know nothing of the Bible. He also shows the sad state of racism in the country, some of the characters finding it a lark to burn down negro churches or abolitionist headquarters and create race riots. He is not afraid to speak out against the many wrongs that afflicted American society in the 1840s, even if those wrongs also gave him fodder for creating his novels.

The Quaker City was a phenomenal success in its day. It was the best-selling novel in America until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. It sold 60,000 copies in the first year and at least another 10,000 in the following decade per Wikipedia. According to Stephen Knight, in London, Lloyd, the leading low-level publisher, republished it, much reduced and sensationalized, as Dora Livingstone (1845) (Dora is the adulteress character in the novel), and the German popular writer Franz Gerstacker translated it as Die Geheimnisse [“The Mysteries”] von Philadelphia (1845), taking credit as the author. In America, it spawned numerous more city mysteries novels.

As for George Lippard, he had published five previous books and would go on to publish at least twenty more before his untimely death in 1854 of tuberculosis. A list of his works is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lippard. Not listed, however, is The Mysteries of Florence, which is available at Amazon and was published under his name. I intend to explore that novel and other works by Lippard in the future, along with several other city mysteries novels.

Lippard, in my opinion, deserves a prominent place in early American literature alongside fellow novelists Charles Brockden Brown, Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne. Few scholars pay much attention to him today, but for more information on The Quaker City, I recommend Stephen Knight’s The Mysteries of the Cities which discusses not only Lippard’s novel but several other city mystery novels. Two books about Lippard’s life and writings I have not read but hope to explore are Roger Davidson’s George Lippard and R. Swinburne Clymer’s George Lippard: His Life and Works. References to Lippard can also be found in biographies of his friend Edgar Allan Poe.

While I have mostly focused on British and French Gothic works at this blog, American Gothic literature was alive and well in the nineteenth-century, though mostly overlooked today. Certainly, it deserves far more attention beyond the works of Poe and Hawthorne. I will try to remedy that in some of my future posts.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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Filed under Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, City Mystery Novels, Classic Gothic Novels, Dracula, George W.M. Reynolds

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February 1, 2023 · 10:21 am

New Book Reveals Dracula’s French and British Gothic Ancestors

Dr. Tyler. R. Tichelaar’s new literary history, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, reveals how nineteenth-century French and British Gothic novelists were continually inspired by each other to create some of the most memorable characters in literature, from Quasimodo to Dracula.

Marquette, MI, January 2, 2023—Gothic literature studies usually focus on one nation’s tradition. Dr. Tyler R. Tichelaar, however, argues that the Gothic crossed the English Channel regularly, providing blood transfusions of new life into the Gothic corpus as revealed in detail in his new book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897.

When Gothic novels are mentioned, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) quickly comes to mind, but Dracula was only one in a long tradition of vampire stories that stretches back to John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). Dracula scholars today focus on the handful of British vampire stories by John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, and J. S. Le Fanu, as sources for Dracula, but in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, Tichelaar looks to the plethora of vampire texts from France by Charles Nodier, Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, Alexandre Dumas, Paul Féval, and several other authors as influential in the creation of Stoker’s masterpiece. In fact, the female vampires in Dracula make far more sense within the context of the French vampire tradition.

Beyond Dracula, French literature inspired numerous British Gothic works and was inspired by them. Tichelaar explores how early British Gothic novelists like Radcliffe, Lewis, and Scott influenced French Gothic works by Hugo, Dumas, and Sue, and those works inspired British works by William Harrison Ainsworth, George W. M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, and many others. Besides vampires, Tichelaar examines such literary archetypes as immortals, werewolves, cursed transgressors, and redeemed Gothic wanderers. Separate chapters include thorough discussions of the city mysteries genre and depictions of secret societies and the French Revolution in Gothic novels.

Tichelaar argues that by exploring how the French and British Gothic traditions influenced each other, a new understanding arises of many literary classics from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Count of Monte Cristo to A Tale of Two Cities and Dracula. “To explore the French and British Gothic traditions together,” says Tichelaar, “is like performing an archeological dig that exposes the missing links in Gothic development. Reading Dracula and Carmilla in the context of early French Gothic literature allows us to understand better the continuity of the Gothic tradition. Today, Paul Féval is almost unknown and largely overlooked by scholars of British literature, yet his vampire and Irish novels probably influenced Bram Stoker. Even British novelists like Ainsworth and Reynolds, who have been ignored by literary critics, provide fascinating understandings of the Gothic’s cross-cultural influence. Dickens and Stoker regularly visited France, and French authors regularly read British works, so the two literatures deserve to be read together as one Gothic literary tradition.”

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature includes in-depth discussions of a wide range of British and French Gothic novelists from 1789-1897, including Mrs. Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, John Polidori, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, William Harrison Ainsworth, George Croly, Edgar Quinet, Eugène Sue, Paul Féval, George W. M. Reynolds, Alexandre Dumas, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Marie Nizet, J. S. Le Fanu, Jules Verne, and Bram Stoker. The book’s cover art by Ukrainian artist Inna Vjuzhanina perfectly complements the title, suggesting not only the marriage of these two literary traditions but how the first literary vampires, including Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, continually tried to dupe unsuspecting women into marrying them so they could avoid eternal damnation. A comprehensive index, endnotes, and an extensive bibliography complete the study.

About the Author

Tyler Tichelaar with a statue of Bram Stoker in Romania.

Tyler R. Tichelaar has a PhD in Literature from Western Michigan University and Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in English from Northern Michigan University. He owns his own publishing company, Marquette Fiction, and Superior Book Productions, a professional editing, proofreading, and book layout company. The former president of the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, Tichelaar has been a book reviewer for Reader Views, Marquette Monthly, and the UP Book Review, and regularly blogs about Gothic, Arthurian, and Michigan literature and history. Tichelaar is the award-winning author of thirteen novels and nine nonfiction books, including The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, When Teddy Came to Town: A Novel, and Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man.

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897 (ISBN: 978-0-9962400-9-3 hardcover; 978-0-9962400-8-6 paperback; 979-8-9872692-0-6) is available through local and online bookstores.

For more information, visit www.GothicWanderer.com. Publicity contact: tyler@marquettefiction.com. Review copies available upon request.

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Filed under Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Classic Gothic Novels, Dracula, George W.M. Reynolds, Literary Criticism, Sir Walter Scott, The Wandering Jew

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January 18, 2023 · 1:53 pm

Guest Post: Why I Love the Gothic Story “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens – by Rayne Hall

Today, we have a guest post by author and Gothic lover Rayne Hall. First, I’ll introduce her, then she’ll talk about Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” and then she has a special offer regarding her new book you won’t want to miss!

Rayne Hall MA is the author of over 100 books, mostly Dark Fantasy and Gothic Horror, e.g. The Bride’s Curse: Bulgarian Gothic Ghost and Horror Stories. She is also the acclaimed editor of Gothic, Fantasy and Horror anthologies (e.g. Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard, and author of the bestselling Writer’s Craft series for advanced-level writers, including the bestselling Writer’s Craft series e.g. Writing Gothic Fiction.

Born and raised in Germany, Rayne Hall has lived in China, Mongolia, Nepal and Britain. Now she resides in a village in Bulgaria, where men perform the annual demon dance, ghosts and sirens beckon, and abandoned decaying houses hold memories of a glorious past.

Her lucky black rescue cat Sulu often accompanies her when she explores spooky derelict buildings. He delights in walking across shattered roof tiles, scratching charred timbers and sniffing at long-abandoned hearths. He even senses the presence of ghosts… but that’s another story.

Rayne has worked as an investigative journalist, development aid worker, museum guide, apple picker, tarot reader, adult education teacher, belly dancer, magazine editor, publishing manager and more, and now writes full time.

Why I Love the Gothic Story “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens

By Rayne Hall

(copyright Rayne Hall 2023)

Charles Dickens (1812 –1870) was a fiction writer, editor and social critic. Today, he is best known for his novels, including Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, depicting life in Victorian England. Few people realise that Dickens also wrote fine ghost and horror stories.

‘The Signal-Man’ is one of the stories which drew me to the horror genre – the kind of story I like best, Gothic, psychological, atmospheric, scary by implication rather than by gore. Each time I read it, it has the same disturbing effect, leaving me to wonder: what if the narrator had not interfered, had not tried to help the signal-man by calming him? Would the signal-man have paid attention to the call, heeded the warning, and averted the accident? How guilty is the narrator of the signal-man’s death? Does he feel the guilt? Should he?

Throughout the story, the narrator felt and acted compassionate and caring on the one hand, patronising and detached on the other. We don’t learn how he feels at the end, if his ‘superior’ attitude gives way to feeling foolish. As readers, we know only how we would feel in his place.

This is not the only question the author leaves for the readers to decide. Dickens doesn’t even reveal what the signal-man had really seen – or thought he had seen – and where the visions and premonitions had come from.

Although the ending is strong and leaves a powerful impact, it doesn’t answer all questions, and instead encourages the readers to think and draw their own conclusions.

Charles Dickens wrote this story a few months after he survived a horrific railway disaster, the 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash. The train crossed a viaduct where a section of the rails had been removed for engineering works and derailed, with parts of the train tumbling into the dry riverbed below.

When his carriage hung at a steep angle off the viaduct into the river, Dickens escaped with his life. For hours, he aided injured fellow passengers, some of whom died in his arms. The directors of the railway company presented him with a piece of plate as a token of their appreciation for his assistance.

Dickens never got over this trauma. For two weeks after the accident, he lost his ability to speak, and for the rest of his life, he was terrified of trains and used alternative modes of transport where possible. According to his son, he never fully recovered from the terror of that day.

I know from experience how scary it can be to revisit personal traumas to weave them into fiction. Dickens wrote this story just a few months after the event, with the horrifying events fresh on his mind. This must have required great courage.

A second railway disaster, which happened a few years earlier and was still in the public mind at the time, also fed Dickens’ creative imagination for this tale: the Clayton Tunnel Crash of 1861. A series of human and technical errors, combined with misunderstandings and unfortunate coincidences, caused two trains to crash into each other in a tunnel, killing 23 and injuring 176 passengers.

One of the crucial factors in that train crash was a misunderstanding between two signal-men. An investigation revealed the horrifying conditions under which these men worked: one of them had been working a continuous 24-hour shift! His job required intense, non-stop concentration, and we can imagine how tired his brain was at the time of the accident. Even in his tired state, he did his best to avert the accident, but did not realise that his counterpart at the other end of the tunnel had misunderstood him. When the inquest revealed how these men, on whom the safety of trains and passengers depended, had worked without proper break, a public outcry ensued, and different rules and systems were put in place.

As well as an author and editor, Charles Dickens was a social reformer. Often, he combined these roles, using his fiction to expose intolerable living and working conditions, flagging up social injustices. He saw literature as a springboard to moral and social reform.

No doubt, he was moved by the plight of two signal-men involved in the Clayton Tunnel Crash who had been too tired to avert the disaster. In writing his story, Dickens exposed another aspect of the inhumane working conditions of signal-men.

The story’s titular character lives and works in total isolation, in a remote signal box where he has practically no human contact. As a result, his mental health suffers. Through the narrator’s perspective, Dickens presents it as a life that can descend into madness. Yet this man is in charge of the safety of trains. Dickens used his story to arouse pity for men working under such conditions, and alert the public to the resulting dangers.

In this, he was remarkably successful. Dickens was what we today would call an ‘influencer’. His stories helped shape public opinion influenced the decisions of the authorities, and contributed to several legal reforms.

I admire how Dickens manages to use the plight of fictional characters to expose real social injustices, and to inspire moral, ethical and political action without ever sounding preachy. This, I think, is literature at its noblest: inspiring readers to change their attitudes and bring about improvements, without preaching or dogma.

In tone, this story is decidedly Gothic. I’ve identified the following typical elements of Gothic literature:

The location is isolated, remote, difficult to reach and creepy: ‘The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down.’

The building is dark, dilapidated, battered by the elements: ‘His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’

The means of communication with the outside world are limited. The signal-man can use the telegraph machine to contact his colleagues along the track, and when a train passes, he can exchange a hurried signal with the driver, that’s all – except when a wanderer happens to come to this spot and seek a conversation, like the narrator does, an extremely rare circumstance.

The story begins when an outsider enters the scene, disrupting the status quo. This happens with the first word, the narrator calling “Halloa!”

A growing sense of danger and impending doom pervades the story. We readers know that a disaster will unfold, and are as helpless as the characters to prevent it. ‘There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen.’

Darkness, light and shadows create mood and contribute to the plot – for example, the red warning light.

Part of the story unfolds at sunset, that special time of the day when day gives way to night and the sinking sun dyes the horizon. Dickens’ description of the twilight’s effect is sparse, but powerful. ‘… so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.’

Windy weather contributes to the atmosphere. ‘The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail.’

The tunnel represents the dangerous underground space so common in Gothic fiction. ‘…and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’

In typical Gothic fashion, the line between sanity and madness is blurred: The narrator believes that the inhumane isolation has affected the signal-man’s mental health. ‘When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us…’

A character has a dark past that he prefers not to reveal. The signal-man mentions having wasted education opportunities in his youth, but does not elaborate. We readers are left to surmise what happened. Since he seems to bear his new life like a penalty for past deeds, it seems likely that he committed something worse than mere classroom truancy.

Paranormal elements are present, e.g. the ghost that appears and disappears. ‘I ran right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone.’

There are communications from the supernatural realm, e.g. the warning voice, and the warning bell ringing that only the signal-man can hear: ‘The ghost’s ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don’t wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it.’

A death contributes to the unfolding story: the demise of the young lady in the train.

Guilt, one of the key elements of Gothic fiction, plays a role when we readers wonder if the narrator caused the signal-man’s death – even though the narrator himself doesn’t seem to feel this guilt.

Great Gothic fiction flag ups and deals with social issues. In this story, it’s the working condition of signal-men.

Of course, no single work of Gothic fiction contains all tropes of Gothic literature. ‘The Signal-Man’ features neither a disputed inheritance nor a forbidden love; those would simply not fit into this plot.

However, one crucial trope of Gothic fiction is conspicuous by its absence: passion.

Throughout the tale, the narrator remains strangely detached and analytical, even when he feels strongly about something. The signal-man, although conscientious, is not passionate about his job. Although he teaches himself in his spare time, he’s not passionate about learning either. While he is distressed and worried about the warnings, he is not passionate about finding out what they mean.

This absence of passion is strange in a work of Gothic fiction, and the sense of detached, analytical interest from the narrator’s point of view feels alien – but in my opinion, this makes this story all the more chilling.

To me, ‘The Signal-Man’ is Gothic fiction at its finest: creepy, thrilling, thought-provoking.

When I was editing the anthology The Haunted Train: Creepy Tales from the Railways and selected the stories, I was happy to include this masterpiece of Gothic fiction.

ABOUT THE BOOK THE HAUNTED TRAIN: CREEPY TALES FROM THE RAILWAYS

Come on board for a Gothic journey in a funicular railway in Victorian England, a freight train in the Carpathian mountains, a high tech sky train in Bangkok, an underground railway in Tokyo. Visit stations which lure with the promise of safe shelter but harbour unexpected dangers. Meet the people who work on the tracks – stationmasters, porters, signal-men – and those who travel – commuters, tourists, dead bodies, murderers and ghosts.

In this volume, editor Rayne Hall has collected twenty of the finest– and creepiest – railway tales. The book features the works of established writers, classic authors and fresh voices. Some stories are spooky, some downright scary, while others pose a puzzling mystery.

Are you prepared to come on board this train? Already, the steam engine is huffing in impatience. Listen to the chuff-chuff-chuff from the locomotive and tarattata-tarattata of the giant wheels. Press your face against the dust-streaked window, inhale the smells of coal smoke and old textiles, watch the landscape whoosh past as you leave the familiar behind and journey into the unknown.

But be careful: you can’t know the train’s real destination, nor your fellow travellers’ intentions. Once you’ve closed that door behind you and the wheels start rolling, you may not be able to get out.

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2023. (After that date, the price will go up.) https://mybook.to/Train.

The paperback edition will be available soon.

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