Staplehurst Rail Crash - Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was with Ellen Ternan and her mother in the first class carriage that did not completely fall into the river bed and survived the derailment. He climbed out of the compartment through the window, rescued the Ternans and tended the victims with his flask of brandy and his hat full of water, some of whom died while he was with them. Before he left with other survivors in an emergency train to London, he retrieved the manuscript of the episode of Our Mutual Friend that he was working on. The experience affected Dickens greatly; he lost his voice for two weeks and he was two and a half pages short for the sixteenth episode, published in August 1865. Dickens acknowledged the incident in the novel's postscript:

On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage—nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn—to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—THE END.

Afterwards Dickens was nervous when travelling by train, using alternative means when available. He wrote a short ghost story, named "The Signal-Man", in which one of the principal incidents is a rail crash; this was first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round. Dickens died five years to the day after the accident; his son said that he had never fully recovered.