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Most biographers of Charles Dickens recognise that the rail crash at Staplehurst, Kent, on 9 June 1865 influenced the final five years of his life for the worse. He certainly felt nervous about any form of transport after the accident, especially by train, and expressed his feelings in both private letters to friends and public letters to the newspapers. It also seems to have reduced the volume of his literary output, although some of his best short stories and an intriguing murder novel (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) followed the events of June 1865. Sadly, the novel remained unfinished. The Christmas supplement of All the Year Round for 1866 (known as Mugby Junction) is a collection of short stories about the railways, and includes The Signalman, a well known short story about the premonition of accidents and disasters. No doubt the story reflected Dickens's own experience of the Staplehurst tragedy.
The accident itself is well described in contemporary accounts1, by the official Railway Inspectorate report2 and by Dickens himself in a famous letter to his friend Mitton3. This journal itself published an account which tried to interpret Dickens's recollection, but which misinterpreted what he said4. I have approached the accident after recent analyses of other Victorian disasters, including the Tay bridge disaster of 28 December 1879s, the Dee bridge accident of 27 May 18476 and the Shipton disaster of 24 December 1874, the subject of a joint study by Alistair Nisbet and myself. Both the Tay and Dee accidents involved the collapse of railway bridges while a train was passing over at the time, and both occurred on cast-iron structures. I was drawn to the Staplehurst crash because it too involved the failure of a cast-iron viaduct during the final stages of the derailment of the train, a fact often forgotten in much later accounts of the incident.
Circumstances
Dickens was travelling back from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother via the boat train from Folkestone on the afternoon of 9 June 1865 when the accident occurred. He was in a first-class carriage towards the front of the train when the locomotive and tender struck the end of a low viaduct crossing a small river (the Beult) between Headcorn and Staplehurst in Kent. The...