Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination

A central crisis of representation in the Victorian period was this: how might one represent an ill that is not villainous but systemic? This article traces the ways in which several Victorians struggled to address that quandary during a brief period of paradigm shift: the middle years of the 1860s. The article’s first half explores ways in which the railway accident interrupted central conventions of melodrama. This section surveys editorial cartoonists, writers for Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round, volume one of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867), and Augustin Daly’s sensation drama Under the Gaslight (1867). The second half focuses on Dickens’s ghost story “No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-Man.” Written a year after the Staplehurst disaster, the story gropes toward a new language for a traumatic condition, a language haunted by melodrama even as it moves beyond it.