The Red Room and The Signalman

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The Red Room and The Signalman

The 19th century horror stories, The Red Room by H. G. Wells and The

Signalman by Charles Dickens, are both written in the traditional

gothic horror setting with the almost predictable storylines. The Red

Room by H. G. Wells is not an irregularity in the masses of 19th

century horror tales but is slightly different as it tells of a

visitor to long forgotten castle which is purportedly inhabited by a

ghostly force in this one room. It is different to many others as it

is just a ghostly force not a spectre. The Signalman however, is an

account of one mans encounters with a railway signalman and the

signalman's alleged encounters with auguring phantoms warning of the

perils that lay ahead for the railway worker. The suspense in both is

used to accentuate the series of events leading up to the conclusions

of the stories.

The gothic horror genre was, as aforementioned, widely used in novels

which had predominated in the last two thirds of the 18th century and

continued into the 19th. The authors of these two short stories, The

Signalman published in 1866 and The Red Room in 1896, were probably

inspired to write such themed works by literary greats of the early 19th

century like Mary Shelley and to a lesser extent Edgar Allen Poe. In

turn these stories may have inspired authors later in the century such

as Robert Louis Stevenson who gave us The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde or Bram Stoker and Dracula. A key variance in the two

novels is that The Signalman dates itself through the railway train

theme but The Red Room tells us only of the location not of the time

so maintains an air of mystique ...

... middle of paper ...

...haunt

poor mortal man, and that is in all its nakedness - Fear!"

These two 19th century gothic horror stories both revolve around the

appearance ghosts but the building of suspense is done in two very

different ways. The Signalman uses visions and foreshadowing to lead

the reader into the conclusion before surprising and releasing the

tension in the signalman's death. The Red Room, however, builds up

suspense by directing us to a meeting between the supernatural and the

narrator, but then this never happens creating a definite anti-climax

for the modern reader. The suspense is rebuilt by the slow

extinguishing of the candles until it culminates with the passing out

of the narrator. Both have unique ways of interesting the reader and

fulfilling their purpose as a horror story and this is how they are so

effective.

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