Mugby Junction
1866
The signalman stands at the railway cutting, warning of specters that haunt the rails. A businessman flees his counting-house and finds himself at a junction where seven lines diverge into seven fates. This is Dickens at his most haunting: a collection that uses the Victorian railway network as a labyrinth of the soul. Mugby Junction frames the journey of Barbox Brothers, a man who has spent his life imprisoned in the firm of Barbox Brothers & Co., now released into retirement but not into peace. He arrives at the junction on a stormy night, searching for something he cannot name, and encounters the quirky porter Lamps and his invalid daughter, each carrying their own quiet burdens. The stories weave between the ghostly and the humane, between industrial urgency and individual longing. Dickens contributes the frame narrative and the celebrated ghost story "The Signalman," while four collaborators add their own tales of lives intersecting at this liminal space. For readers who loved The Turn of the Screw or want to understand why railways became the great metaphor for Victorian anxiety about progress, fate, and the tracks we leave behind.
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“...Be what you like''Some people, sir,' remarked Lamps, 'are sometimes what they don't like.''Nobody knows that better than I do,' sighed the other. 'I have been what I don't like, all my life.””
— Charles Dickens
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Dickens, Charles. Mugby Junction. Lex, lex-books.com/book/mugby-junction-636b9d99-69a1-4457-8fe0-abfbfdd225a5.Dickens, C. (1866). Mugby Junction. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mugby-junction-636b9d99-69a1-4457-8fe0-abfbfdd225a5Dickens, Charles. Mugby Junction. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mugby-junction-636b9d99-69a1-4457-8fe0-abfbfdd225a5.
