In ‘The Signalman’ Dickens uses time and place in the setting to create fear and suspense. The main parts of the story happen at a railway cutting with a signal box and a tunnel. All of the events happen at night this is typical for a ghost story as they are understood to come out at night. Through the generalisation of darkness throughout the story, this brings fear into it as darkness is regarded as spooky. There is a very lonesome and desolate atmosphere at the signal box with the signalman being the only one there. Being alone in the dark open to all affects of nature is scary and this is the setting until the Sceptic goes down to meet the signalman. There is always a sense of danger, fear, strangeness, nothing is normal in the story there’s always something strange going on. The setting in The Signalman is in a dark, lonely, damp location, in a steep, forbidding cutting. Dickens refers to the path of the train track as "extremely deep and unusually precipitous… clammy stone… oozier and wetter". The story keeps the reader in suspense with dramatic description, short and long sentences to slow things down and to intensify the fear of the supernatural. Last of all Dickens uses the technique Foreshadowing when he refers to the ‘Angry Sunset’ which is a negative climate, this is right at the beginning story, so we know it will not end well.
The signalman makes out to be a very strange man through his unexplainable behaviour and ‘different’ wording. In the beginning of The Signalman, suspense is built because the signalman is shocked when the narrator calls to him because he thinks the narrator is the ghost that has been haunting him. The narrator uses exactly the same words as the spectre. The first thing the signalman does in the story creates fear and suspense because when the Sceptic calls down to him ‘Halloa, Below there!’ he looks the wrong way. This implies that he is strange as someone is calling to him from above; he just looks down the tunnel into...