When the narrator of Charles Dickens’ masterful ghost story ‘The Signalman’ climbs down into a lonely railway siding on a whim, he finds himself in ‘as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw … it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’ His misgivings turn out to be justified, for the signalman who lives there has a secret, a ghostly visitor who has twice warned him of impending disaster, and now appears again, foretelling a coming catastrophe that neither man can predict or understand. This volume also contains Dickens’ comic gem ‘The Boy at Mugby’, a rollicking satire on customer service which rings as true today as it did in the author’s own time.