Copy Book Archive

The Train of a Life In Charles Dickens’s tale set around Mugby Junction, a man sees his life flash by like a ghostly train.
1866
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Music: Ignaz Moscheles

© Nick MacNeill, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

Loughborough Central station, on the now preserved Great Central Railway line in the midlands. ‘Mugby’ is a faint alias for Rugby to the west, a station which Dickens did not remember fondly as the lady in the cafeteria there had once refused sugar until he had paid in advance for his tea. In ‘Mugby Junction’, Dickens indulges in a little revenge. “Speaking as a man,” the lamps man at Mugby Junction says, “I wouldn’t recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he’d be treated at the Refreshment Room.”

The Train of a Life
At the start of his railway-themed story ‘Mugby Junction’, Charles Dickens wants to tell us about the lead character, whom we know thus far only as a man with two black cases labelled ‘Barbox Brothers’. He is standing with the station’s sole member of staff on the otherwise deserted, rain-soaked platform at three o’clock in the morning.

AS the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.

“—Yours, sir?”

The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question.

“Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are mine.”*

The story goes on to relate how Mr ‘Barbox Brothers’ goes on to use seven lines branching out from Mugby Junction to search for meaning in his life. The chapters that follow include Dickens’s famous ghost story ‘The Signalman’, and four tales by Dickens’s co-authors Charles Collins, Amelia Edwards, Andrew Halliday and Hesba Stretton.

Précis

A so far unnamed traveller steps off a train at Mugby Junction in the small hours, and falls to musing on his past in the form of an imaginary train of disappointments. His reverie is interrupted by a station employee asking him ‘Yours, sir?’, as if he could see the train, though he was asking about a pair of suitcases. (61 / 60 words)

Source

Abridged from ‘Mugby Junction’, by Charles Dickens.

Suggested Music

Sonata Mélancholique Op. 49

Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870)

Performed by Noël Lee.

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How To Use This Passage

You can use this passage to help improve your command of English.

IRead it aloud, twice or more. IISummarise it in one sentence of up to 30 words. IIISummarise it in one paragraph of 40-80 words. IVMake notes on the passage, and reconstruct the original from them later on. VJot down any unfamiliar words, and make your own sentences with them later. VIMake a note of any words that surprise or impress you, and ask yourself what meaning they add to the words you would have expected to see. VIITurn any old-fashioned English into modern English. VIIITurn prose into verse, and verse into prose. IXAsk yourself what the author is trying to get you to feel or think. XHow would an artist or a photographer capture the scene? XIHow would a movie director shoot it, or a composer write incidental music for it?

For these and more ideas, see How to Use The Copy Book.

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