The Signalman

After reading Charles Dickens’s Signalman I can make a comparison between the Victorian age and the Greek old times; meanwhile during the Victorian age people lived industrialization as a new way of life, the ancient Greece people’s life were ruled by their gods will. Both ideas, Industrialization and gods will has several thinks in common:

First of all, both were unstoppable forces that cannot be challenged by anyone. In the signal man we can see who the train is the representation of modernity, a giant titan of the old Greece or more closely connected with the idea of the Sanskrit idea of a Juggernaut. Secondly, the signalman had a vision of a ghost, figure that contrast with the ideas of modernity implied in the Victorian age, but are very connected with a world of fantasy and magic, as the Greek divinities.

To cut a long story short, The Signalman, is just a spectator of the dynamic world that surrounded him, a lonely man that is visited by a magic entity. Even in modern times when the science and logic are the trend, we can find signals, maybe the same ones that the old Greek thinkers saw in those times.