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.”
Introduction
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.”1
Abridged from ‘Mugby Junction’, by Charles Dickens.
1The 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.
Questions for Critics
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
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. (60 / 60 words)
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.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: besides, just, not, or, ought, since, until, whether.
Archive
Word Games
1Sevens Based on this passage
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Variations: 1.expand your answer to exactly fourteen words. 2.expand your answer further, to exactly twenty-one words. 3.include one of the following words in your answer: if, but, despite, because, (al)though, unless.
2Jigsaws Based on this passage
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
3Spinners Find in Think and Speak
For each group of words, compose a sentence that uses all three. You can use any form of the word: for example, cat → cats, go → went, or quick → quickly, though neigh → neighbour is stretching it a bit.
This exercise uses words found in the accompanying passage.
1 Child. Up. Upon.
2 His. Man. Youth.
3 Beloved. Question. Whatsoever.
Variations: 1. include direct and indirect speech 2. include one or more of these words: although, because, despite, either/or, if, unless, until, when, whether, which, who 3. use negatives (not, isn’t, neither/nor, never, nobody etc.)
4High Tiles Find in Think and Speak
Make words (three letters or more) from the seven letters showing below, using any letter once only. Each letter carries a score. What is the highest-scoring word you can make?
n1l1a1a1p3r1m3
x
0
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