Critical commentary has tended to focus on the domestic setting as the location of haunting. The haunted house is a stock figure in nineteenth century literature. As Steven Conner notes, ‘ghost stories which multiplied from the 1850s onward most frequently take place in the bounded space of the home.’[1] But surprisingly, the representation of haunting in the railway network has gone relatively unremarked. Even though, as the illustrated periodical Once a Week remarked in 1862, ‘Ruined castles have given place to railway stations … and ghosts in armour are as much out of fashion as mail-coaches.’[2] The association between ghosts and trains has a rich history. Many thought that there was something supernatural about the performance of a steam engine. The Victorian invention of the fairground Ghost Train is a suggestive legacy of this. It can be read as a symbolic reminder of how Victorian society reacted to the rapid expansion of the railway. Mugby Junction can be read in a similar sort of way. The text was published in December 1866 as a special Christmas collection of short stories by the magazine All the Year Round. The first story in the collection sold 250,000 copies in its first week.[3] In the same month that the collection was published a parody named ‘Jugby Junction’ was concocted by Fun magazine.[4] The railway stories about Mugby Junction, then, seem to have struck a nerve in the 1860s. This kind of popularity authenticates the text as an exemplary marker through which to ask specific questions about ghostliness in the representation of the railway network in the Victorian period.
As Michael Freeman acknowledges, commentary on how the expansion of the railway network affected individuals that experienced it is varied and ambivalent.[5] However, as suggested by the legacy of the Ghost Train, there was an urge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to use ghostly or spectral images to represent the railway. From the 1840s onwards, the representation of the railway network has been coloured and coded with metaphors of the supernatural. The stories in Mugby Junction deal with hauntings, apparitions, spectres, spirits, forces, and liminal and demonic spaces in and around the railway network. The railway network in the collection is inscribed with what Julian Wolfreys might call ‘the spectral nature of all modern technologies’ (57). By analysing Mugby Junction alongside nineteenth-century discourse on railways and ghostliness this essay will trace the genealogy of the associations between ghosts and trains, and explore the wider questions that modernity asks about the proximity of the mechanical and the supernatural.
Mugby Junction is a fictional railway station that serves as a platform from which the central character – the gentleman from Nowhere – explores the tracks that radiate outward. We can read the collection of stories as a fictional representation of the ‘machine ensemble’. Wolfgang Schivelbusch invented this term to describe the institutionalisation of the railway network as one great machine that sculpted and reconfigured the physical environment of Victorian Britain. [6] The components of this machine ensemble include the tracks, the stations, the tunnels, the engines, the carriages, the signalling and communication systems, the army of employees, the freight, the trade, and the passengers. In Mugby Junction, this ensemble is loaded with ghostly metaphors. The representation of the machine ensemble in Mugby Junction is marked by the experience of a complex shift of agency that occurred as the Victorian period became a technoculture. This shift is characterised as supernatural. The physical environment of Mugby Junction, its connecting apparatus, and the characters we encounter are figured as spectral. In the techno-mystical domain of Mugby Junction, the experience of the supernatural, rather than being quashed by the development of technology, science and industry, is generated by it.
The first story in the series is called ‘Barbox Brothers’, written by Charles Dickens. A gentleman from Nowhere alights at Mugby Junction. The description of the environment of the station is deliberately distorted and phantasmagorical; it is a ‘place replete with shadowy shapes’,[7] a demonic space of exchange in which trains flit past with ‘ironed-barred cages full of cattle’, their eyes ‘frozen with terror’. It is left unclear whether the terrified cattle refer to live stock or human passengers, which is suggestive of the shifting agencies involved in the railway network. Passengers become cattle in the machine ensemble. A train has a predetermined track and timetable, giving a sense of the passivity of the traveller. The passengers, being enclosed in compartments like cattle, are disassociated from the energies that convey them, giving the impression that the machines convey themselves and that the passengers are merely freight; as much the agents of their conveyance as cattle are theirs. Just the year before Mugby Junction was published John Ruskin hit upon the same connection between this shift of agency and the sense of supernatural automation when he saw a locomotive ‘take its breathe at a railway station … [with] more than fleshly power’.[8] Trains were represented as conscious and beastly things with life-force and influence of their own. The station at Mugby is invested with the same life-force: it ‘started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes’[9] as a parliamentary train flies past.[10]A parliamentary train, commonly known as a ghost train, originally ran as a statutorily imposed low-cost service intended to allow cheap travel. However, it quickly became used as a contrivance that ran only to keep stations and tracks open; a ghost train that acted as a force that motivated the ‘dead’ station to wake up.
We are told that another ‘Mysterious goods train’ drifts past the station ‘covered with palls and gliding on like a vast funeral’.[11] This image of a funeral train stacked with coffins has an historical basis. In 1854 a private organisation called the London Necropolis Company was created to remove dead bodies from central London to a mass graveyard in the suburbs. The cholera epidemic of 1848-9, combined with a lack of space to bury a growing population in the 1850s, led to the construction of the first funeral line.[12] Chamber’s Journal published an article documenting a trip on the funeral train in 1855.[13] According to the article, the family of the dead would buy a ‘coffin ticket’ and the train would carry its ‘solemn burden’ out of Waterloo station to a mass city of the dead in Woking.[14] The associations between ghosts and trains must have been potent here. Like the cattle-passengers, the funeral train has the potential to act as a visual symbol of the agency of the machine ensemble and as a vivid figuration of the passive status of the passenger. The funeral train shows that the machine ensemble handles the dead and impotent in exactly the same manner as it handles the living and mobile. The image of Mugby with the funeral train passing through it carries the Ruskinian idea that passengers become parcelised or dead objects in the industrial process, carried as freight by the phantom or otherworldly energy of the machine ensemble.
The world that the junction inhabits has a disorientating mechanical topography. It is a leaky, liminal space full of perplexity and miscommunication. ‘Mugby Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible and visible.’[15] Its ‘threads of railway’[16] dart around the station as if woven by iron-spinning spiders. [17] Cognition of the pattern of the structure of the railway system is lost to the eye.[18] The disorientation was such that ‘there was no beginning, middle or end to bewilderment’. [19] The stories take place in a technological landscape full of combinations between bodies and machines. The idea of the android became a poignant point of discussion in the Victorian period. Thomas Carlyle famously grumbled that ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand’.[20] The idea that humans were becoming prosthetic to machines in a mesmeric relationship circulated in the nineteenth century. Harriet Martineau saw technological development as an intensification of the invisible energies that combine people and machines.[21] The mechanical components of the machine ensemble take on characteristics of life, and the humans that inhabit the machine ensemble are described as mechanical. As Tamara Ketabgian notes in her 2011 study, The Lives of Machines, ‘humans and machines are compulsively coupled and uncoupled, dissected, and rejoined, to form diverse narratives of a “border war” between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and mechanical’.[22]
Throughout Mugby Junction this fastening of bodies and machines marks the description of the characters. The gentleman from Nowhere encounters a lighting technician at the station called Lamps, named and defined by his relation to the machine ensemble. ‘He had a peculiarly shining transparent complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application’, he is so oily that he could mistake himself ‘for one of his charges’.[23] Lamps is given a mechanical appearance. As the gentleman from Nowhere studies the railway lines at the junction his forehead wrinkles ‘as if the railway lines were getting themselves photographed on that sensitive plate’.[24] The image impresses the structure of the tracks onto his face. This combination or synchronisation of people and machines appears again in ‘The Signalman’, another contribution from Dickens. The mechanical routine of the signalman’s life ‘shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it’.[25] The text focuses on the interplay between bodies, discipline, and machines. It represents the machine ensemble as assuming some kind mystical control over the bodies and routines of the characters. Rather than machines being obedient to the rational society that uses them, the characters are at the whim of their techno-mystical domain. As Ralph Harrington notes in an article for The Pathologies of Travel, ‘no other technological system required large numbers of ordinary people to surrender themselves to fast-moving machines driven by incomprehensibly powerful and barely controllable energies’.[26] The mechanical aesthetic in Mugby Junction is a metaphor for the complex shifts of agencies involved in mass engagement with the railway network.
Fears about railway safety were widespread in the period surrounding the publication of Mugby Junction. An 1868 article in All the Year Round entitled ‘Railway Thoughts’ echoed deep-seated anxieties about the vulnerability of railway users: ‘Very few know what degree of safety is ensured by the principle of running upon rails. There may be none at all. We take the railway upon blind trust’.[27] In Andrew Halliday’s contribution to Mugby Junction – ‘The Engine-Driver’ – we are given a testimony by an engine-driver about the dangers involved in his job. He seems to confirm the veracity of this blind trust. The gentleman from Nowhere assumes a protean position in relation to each tale. He is himself a spectral figure that morphs from character to narrator to hauntingly absent force driving the text in his ‘careful study of the junction’.[28] As narrator/reporter in ‘The Engine-Driver’ he asks his interviewee how many deaths he has caused: ‘Altogether? Well. Altogether, since 1841 I’ve killed seven men and boys … and I don’t count passengers’.[29] The nonchalance of this statement would have toyed with the sense of vulnerability in the railway going audience. It is evident from Mugby Junction that train travel became a pathological question in the nineteenth century. The engine-driver talks in detail about the dangers and fatalities that surround him. Playing on the industrial neuroses of a mid-Victorian readership he proclaims that ‘many accidents take place that never get into the papers’.[30] The engine-driver represents the machine ensemble’s death-drive (a term that tellingly uses mechanical language to articulate the condition of the psyche).
Death on the railway was a very real fear in the period. The 1864 murder of Thomas Briggs would have been fresh in the mind of the audience. According to the Saturday Review, the murder caused ‘a frenzy of the public mind about the dangers of railway travel’.[31] In addition to this, an accident on the Metropolitan Railway occurred in the same month of the publication of Mugby Junction. A man and a woman were killed as the train they were on passed under a bridge. According to a newspaper report ‘his body was cut across and his bowels were protruding’ and ‘her head was all but severed from her body’.[32] The lurid detail of the article, like the incitement of fear in the short story and the murder of Thomas Briggs, would have exacerbated anxiety around rail travel by acting as a reminder to the passengers that they were subject to danger outside of their control. The engine-driver’s assertion that he does not count passenger fatalities in his death toll as his responsibility implies that either the passengers are disposable, or that even he, as the person supposed to have control over the machine, does not have agency over what happens. This is echoed in ‘Railway Thoughts’. The article implies that fear is caused by a sense that no one person is in control: ‘I wonder if there is anyone who has full knowledge of all the ways and habits of a train’.[33] Industrialism is marked by a dispersal of agency that created various cognitive blind spots for the parcelised passenger. This is what is meant by taking the railway upon blind trust. Even in its supposedly rational form, engagement with industrial technology entails a relationship with the unknown. It is this unknown combined with the mortal fear involved in the operation of the railway network that generated associations between ghosts and machines.
In Halliday’s contribution to Mugby Junction, fear is intensified by the implication that the engine-driver, the voice of the story, is a spectre. His testimony wavers between images of life and death. His visage is ‘scarred and seamed, as if he had been operated on’ which hints at his being in an accident that embossed the pattern of a railway track onto his face. We hear that he has been an engine driver for twenty five years[34] and that ‘engine-drivers, as a body, are the healthiest fellows alive; but they don’t live long.’[35] ‘He reveals that an engine-driver’s wife cannot stop worrying, ‘for we never know, when we go out, if we’ll ever come home again’.[36] He reveals that he never thinks of his own life because ‘you go in for staking that’ when you begin.[37] And it is no good, he admits, for ‘engine drivers to know too much, or to feel too much’.[38] If we are convinced that the engine-driver is actually the ghost of the engine-driver, then the idea of who has control over the machine becomes vague and hard to pin down. We are back to the idea of trains ‘conveying themselves’.[39] A sense of human powerlessness in the machine ensemble is represented by the ghost in, or in this case on, the machine. He gives the impression that he is a ghost operating a machine that he does not fully understand. The pathological worries that surrounded railway travel combined with the experience of mechanical agency appear to generate a sense of the supernatural. Something in the nature of machines conjures up images of spectrality. This kind of representation of the machine ensemble complicates the empirical idea that we have absolute control over machinery and that the machines are obedient to our rational will. As the engine driver comments on the cognition of his passengers, ‘I dare say they think the train goes along of itself’.[40]
The sense of the supernatural is immediately apparent in the fourth story of the collection. In ‘The Signalman’, the gentleman from Nowhere, now assuming the role of the narrator, comes across a deep cutting in the land at the bottom of which is the opening of a railway tunnel: ‘So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot that it had a deadly smell … as if I had left the natural world’.[41] In this otherworldly spot, the narrator finds a ‘troubled’ signalman.[42] The signalman explains that he is being haunted by apparitions that show themselves at the mouth of the tunnel and mysterious signals emanating from his telegraph machine. The conversation between the signalman and the gentleman from Nowhere turns out to be a dialogue between rational empiricism and supernaturalism. The gentleman struggles to believe the veracity of the signalman’s story. He suspects that he is mad. He tries to explain the supernatural incidents rationally:
I showed him that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the function of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients.[43]
This medico-rational retort to the supernatural was certainly circulating in the nineteenth century. In 1824, Samuel Hibbert argued that apparitions are nothing more than ‘recollected images in the mind, which have been rendered more vivid than actual impressions as a result of some physiological change in the body’.[44] The gentleman from Nowhere, like Hibbert, looks for what we would now call a scientific explanation for apparitional phenomena. He tries to trace the signalman’s illusions in ‘the natural course of physical things’.[45] However, the ghosts that haunt the signalman are not so easily exorcised by empirico-rationalism.
Despite the rational resistance from the gentleman, the signalman maintains that he sees portentous apparitions at the mouth of the tunnel. He maintains that his telegraphic machine seems to have a paranormal life of its own, that the bell rings without human influence. The apparition and the strange behaviour of the telegraphic machine turn out to have some foundation. On the gentleman’s final visit to the spot he discovers that the signalman is dead, mowed down by an engine driven by a driver making the same gestures as the apparition that haunted him. The signalman, as it turns out, was warned about his impending death. Only he could not interpret the signals. As the signalman explains,
‘If I telegraph “danger”, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it … I should get into trouble and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the way it would work – Message: “Danger! Take care!” Answer: “What danger? Where?” Message: “Don’t know. But for God’s sake take care!”[46]
The telegraphic operation functions on the basis of reason, but the apparitions that visit the signalman lie outside the bounds of rationality. The signals they omit are distorted and unclear. Rationality cannot account for what the signals mean. The rational view of the machine ensemble cannot account for or react to supernatural activity, even though it seems to be generated by it.
It was an error in the function of the signalling system that caused a train Dickens was travelling on in 1865 to derail on a viaduct.[47] The accident became known as the Staplehurst Disaster. [48] Jill Matus reads this event as the origin of ‘The Signalman’, arguing that the story is a re-enactment of Dickens’ trauma and that the narrative ‘is shaped by and expressive of the logic of trauma’.[49] Without getting too biographical, parallels can certainly be drawn between the accident and the story. The potential for the signalling system to throw up miscommunications beyond the control of those on duty is central to both. The ‘Unknown languages in the air’[50] relate to the seemingly autonomous system of codes that circulates around railway technology. In ‘The Signalman’ these unknown languages and their propensity to fail are coded as ghostly. As Louise Henson notes, the apparitions that appear to the signalman ‘represent a strange mockery of his own industrial function’.[51] Again, human components of the machine ensemble become the prostheses of their machines as the machine assumes what appears to be a cogent life of its own. The machine ensemble has the potential to give the impression of irrational ghostly control, despite being thought of as practical, rational, and empirical. As unlikely as it sounds, technology and magic have an intimate relationship. As John Potts argues ‘enchantment – in the form of belief in the supernatural – flourished even in highly technologised cultures’.[52] In fact, if we take Mugby Junction as evidence, supernaturalism not only flourishes but is generated by technologised cultures.
Mugby Junction is a text about Victorian engagement with modernity and develops themes that gather intensity and pervasiveness towards the fin de siècle and into the twentieth century. By historicising Mugby Junction we can trace the nature of the reaction to the proliferation of the railway network in mid-Victorian Britain. The collection of stories crystallise a will to represent the operation of the machine ensemble as ghostly. By presenting images and tropes that illustrate the experience of a complex shift of agency felt by those who engaged with industrial transport, the text reveals the associations between ghosts and trains in the nineteenth century. The idea of the ghost performs complex work in the representation of all cultures, but in a technoculture it can be read as a symptom of the impact industrialism has on the power/knowledge relationships that circulate as people and machines become intimately involved. The regimentation of movement and the potential for malfunction and miscommunication inherent in the machine ensemble was experienced as a shift of agency in the mid-Victorian imagination. This shift generated the idea of the ghost in the machine ensemble.
Peter William Slater
Bibliography:
Books and Chapters:
Carlyle, Thomas, ‘The Sign of the Times’ (1829) first published in Edinburgh Review. Or Critical Journal Vol. 15
Carte, Ian, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001)
Clare, John M., London’s Necropolis: A Guide to Brookwood Cemetery (Gloucestershire: Sutton Press Limited, 2004) p. 1-25
Connor, Steven, ‘Afterword’ from The Victorian Supernatural ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
Crook, J. Mordaunt, ‘Ruskin and the Railway’ from The Impact of the Railway on Society in Britain ed. A.K.B. Evans and J.V. Gough (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003)
Daly, Nicolas, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860-2000 (Cambridge, CUP 2004)
Freeman, Michael, Railway and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)
Freeman, Michael, ‘The Railway Age: An Introduction’ from The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam ed. Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
Gilbert, Geoffrey, ‘The Origins of Modernism in the Haunted Properties of Literature’ from The Victorian Supernatural ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
Harrington, Ralph, ‘The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity´ from Pathologies of Travel ed. Richard Wrigley and George Revill (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Publishing, 2000)
Hay, Simon, the History of the Modern British Ghost Story (New York: Houndsmill Publishing, 2011)
Henson, Louise, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’ from The Victorian Supernatural ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
Hibbert, Samuel, Sketches of the Philosphy of Apparitions; or an attempt to trace such illusions to their physical causes (London: Whittaker, 1824)
Ketabgian, Tamara, The Lives of Machines (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2011)
Lynch, Eve M., ‘Spectral Politics: the Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant’ from The Victorian Supernatural ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
MacFarlane, Robert, “Foreword” to Mugby Junction (London: Herspeus, 2005 originally published 1866) p. viii
Martineau, Harriet, and Atkinson, Henry George, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (London: John Chapman, 1851)
Noakes, Richard, ‘Spiritualism, Science and the Supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain’ from The Victorian Supernatural ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
Potts, John, ‘The Idea of the Ghost’ from Technologies of Magic ed. John Potts and Edward Sheer (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006)
Ruskin, John, “The Cestus of Aglaia” from The Works of John Ruskin Vol. XIX, ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: Library Editions, 1903)
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986 originally published in 1977)
Simmons, Jack, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2009 originally published 1995)
Spurr, David Anton, Architecture and Modern Literature (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2012)
Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Publishing: 2002)
Periodicals:
Field, B.K., ‘Charles Dickens’s Railway Accident’ from Strand Magazine July 1906; Vol. 32, 187: MLA International Bibliography p. 37
‘Jugby Junction: a Christmas Number’ from Fun magazine, December 29 1866: 4, British Periodicals p. 167
‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’ from Once a Week, Vol. 6 Issue 134, January 18 1862, British Periodicals p. 100
‘The London Necropolis’ from Chamber’s Journal, January 1855, 97, British Periodicals p. 297-300
‘Mugby Junction from The Examiner December 8, 1866; 3071; British Periodicals p. 774
‘Mugby Junction’ from The London Review December 8 1866; Vol. 13 Issue 336; British Periodicals p. 639
‘Mugby Junction’ from The Saturday Review December 15 1866; Vol. 22, Issue 581; British Periodicals p. 739
‘Railway Thoughts’, from All the Year Round, January 4 1868; Vol. 19, Issue 454, British Periodicals p. 82
‘Road and Rail’ from The Saturday Review June 22 1872; Vol. 33, Issue 869; MLA International Bibliography p. 794
The Saturday Review, July 16th 1864
Newspaper Articles:
‘Fearful Accident on the Metropolitan Railway’, The Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh, Thursday December 20 1866 Issue 24171
Journal Articles:
Bailey, Peter, ‘Adventures in Space: Victorian Railway Erotics, or Taking Alienation For a Ride’ from Journal of Victorian Culture January 15 2010, Vol. 9, Issue 1; pp. 1-21
Esbester, Mike, ‘Nineteenth-Century Timetables and the History of Reading’ from Book History Penn State University Press, Vol. 12, 2009, pp. 156-185
Matus, Jill L., ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection’ in Victorian Studies Vol. 43, No. 3 (Spring, 2001) pp. 413-436
Pope, Norris, ‘Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ and Information Problems in the Railway Age’ in Technology and Culture, Vol. 42 No. 3, July 2001, pp. 436-461
Smith, Matthew Wilson, ‘Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination’ from Modern Drama University of Toronto PressVol. 55, Number 4, Winter 2012, pp. 497-522
Stahl, Damel, ‘The Source and Significance of the Revenant in Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” from Dickens Studies Newsletter December 1 1980; Vol. 11, Issue 4; ProQuest pp. 98-101
Wagner, Tamara S. ‘Dickens’s “gentleman from Nowhere”: Reversing Technological Gothic in the Linkages of Mugby Junction’ from Dickens Quarterly Louisville: March 2011; Vol. 28, Issue 1; pp. 52-66
[1] Steven Connor, ‘Afterword’ from The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) p. 259
[2] ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’ from Once a Week Jan 1862, p. 100
[3] Robert MacFarlane, “Foreword” to Mugby Junction (London: Herspeus, 2005 originally published 1866) p. viii
[4] ‘Jugby Junction: a Christmas Number’ from Fun magazine Dec 29 1866, p. 167
[5] Michale Freeman, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008) p. 8
[6] Wolfgang Schivelbisch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) pp. 16-32
[7] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction (London: Hesperus Classics, 2005) p. 4
[8] John Ruskin, “The Cestus of Aglaia” from The Works of John Ruskin (London: Library Editions, 1903) p.60-61
[9] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction p. 8
[10] Ibid., p. 6
[11] Ibid., p. 4
[12] John M. Clare, London’s Necropolis: A Guide to Brookwood Cemetery (Gloustershire: Sutton Press Limited, 2004) p. 1-25
[13] ‘The London Necropolis’ from Chamber’s Journal, Jan 1855, 97, p. 297-300
[14] Ibid., p. 299
[15] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers and Co.’ from Mugby Junction p. 29
[16] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction p. 18
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., p. 11
[20] Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Sign of the Times’ (1829) first published in Edinburgh Review p. 444
[21] Harriet Martineau and Henry George Atkinson, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (London: John Chapman, 1851) p. 66
[22] Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011) p. 17
[23] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction p. 7
[24] Ibid., p. 11
[25] Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’ from Mugby Junction p. 56
[26] Ralph Harrington, ‘The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity’ from Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) p. 253
[27] ‘Railway Thoughts’, All the Year Round January 4 1868, p. 82
[28] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers and Co.’ from Mugby Junction p. 43
[29] Andrew Halliday, ‘The Engine-Driver’ from Mugby Junction p. 67
[30] Ibid., p. 71
[31] Saturday Review July 16th 1864
[32] ‘Fearful Accident on the Metropolitan Railway’, The Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh Thursday Decemeber 20 1866 Issue 24171, p. 100
[33] ‘Railway Thoughts’, from All the Year Round January 4 1868, p. 82 emphasis in orginal
[34] Andrew Halliday, ‘The Engine-Driver’ from Mugby Junction p. 67
[35] Ibid., p. 72 emphasis added
[36] Ibid., emphasis added
[37] Ibid., p. 73
[38] Ibid., p. 74 emphasis added
[39] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction p. 4
[40] Andrew Halliday, ‘The Engine-Driver’ from Mugby Junction p. 70
[41] Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’ from Mugby Junction p. 57
[42] Ibid., p. 58
[43] Ibid., p. 60
[44] Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosphy of Apparitions (London: Whittaker, 1824) p. iii
[45] Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’ from Mugby Junction p. 57
[46] Ibid., p. 63 emphasis added
[47] Norris Pope, ‘Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ and Information Problems in the Railway Age’ in Technology and Culture July 2001, p. 437
[48] B.K. Field ‘Charles Dickens’s Railway Accident’ in Strand Magazine July 1906, p. 37
[49] Jill L. Matus, ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection’ in Victorian Studies, p. 431
[50] Charles Dickens, ‘Barbox Brothers’ from Mugby Junction p. 4
[51] Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’ from The Victorian Supernatural p. 58
[52] John Potts, ‘The Idea of the Ghost’ from Technologies of Magic (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006) p. 54
Playgrounds in Prison 