The Train of a Life

In Charles Dickens’s tale set around Mugby Junction, a man sees his life flash by like a ghostly train.

1866

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

Introduction

At the start of his railway-themed story ‘Mugby Junction’, Charles Dickens wants to tell us about the lead character, whom we know thus far only as a man with two black cases labelled ‘Barbox Brothers’. He is standing with the station’s sole member of staff on the otherwise deserted, rain-soaked platform at three o’clock in the morning.

by Charles Dickens 1812-1870

AS the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.

“—Yours, sir?”

The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question.

“Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are mine.”*

by Charles Dickens 1812-1870

Abridged from ‘Mugby Junction’, by Charles Dickens.

The story goes on to relate how Mr ‘Barbox Brothers’ goes on to use seven lines branching out from Mugby Junction to search for meaning in his life. The chapters that follow include Dickens’s famous ghost story ‘The Signalman’, and four tales by Dickens’s co-authors Charles Collins, Amelia Edwards, Andrew Halliday and Hesba Stretton.

Précis

A so far unnamed traveller steps off a train at Mugby Junction in the small hours, and falls to musing on his past in the form of an imaginary train of disappointments. His reverie is interrupted by a station employee asking him ‘Yours, sir?’, as if he could see the train, though he was asking about a pair of suitcases.

Questions for Critics

1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

What did the traveller see as he stood on the platform of Mugby Junction?

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

A man got off a train at Mugby Junction. It was three in the morning. It was raining.