Dickens, “The Signalman,” and the Posthuman Subject

This article gives renewed attention to Dickens’s final “ghost story,” “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman.” It first historicizes the story in terms of Victorian fears about an expanding and poorly regulated rail network and how that might affect the lives of passengers and rail workers. It then examines Dickens’s interests in mesmerism and integrating science and humanism as a possible response to industrial trauma. Next, it turns to more contemporary critical approaches that address the signalman’s malady in terms of trauma studies, Marx’s theory of alienation, and psychoanalysis. Finally, it postulates that the story prefigures what Rosi Braidotti has characterized as the “posthuman predicament,” in which the assimilation of individuals into technological systems produces hybrid, cybernetic entities. The article concludes that Dickens not only incorporated Victorian science and medicine into the story but also anticipated the possibility that increasingly elaborate systems technologies, such as the railway system, could produce a posthuman subject, or “cyborg,” a human-machine hybrid that shares consciousness itself.