Fiction · 1866
Mugby Junction
A melancholy traveller nicknamed "Barbox Brothers," after the firm he has just quit, gets off a train at the bewildering Mugby Junction at three in the morning and, with nowhere else to be, stays — befriending a lamplighter and his invalid daughter, and setting himself the task of following each of the junction's lines to see where it leads. Six stories come out of that project: the Refreshment Room boy's own gleeful account of never yet having served a decent meal; a lonely signalman haunted by a spectre that seems to warn of death, and is always right; an engine-driver's reckoning of the men and boys his trains have killed over twenty-five years; a reclusive tenant's house with not one looking-glass in it; a post-office clerk pulled into a government minister's own private secret; and an engineer's tale of murder, vengeance, and a dead friend's warning.
Charles Dickens wrote the framing story and two of the six tales inside it, including "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man" — published the year after his own survival of the Staplehurst rail crash, and the piece for which this Christmas Number is now best remembered. The other four are the work of his regular contributors to All the Year Round — Andrew Halliday, Charles Allston Collins, Hesba Stretton, and Amelia B. Edwards — each signing a different branch line in the magazine's own table of contents. Mugby Junction was published as the magazine's Extra Christmas Number for 1866.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete Christmas Number: the frame story in full and all six of the tales it holds.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1812–1870 · Victorian
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Portsmouth and worked as a child in a blacking factory while his father was imprisoned for debt — an experience he drew on for the rest of his life. A parliamentary reporter by twenty, he became the most popular novelist in English with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and never lost that place: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861) followed. He died at Gad’s Hill, Kent.
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