What Dickens (and his readers) knew: an experiment in knowledge criticism

Dickens’s awareness of the traps hidden on our apparently safe ways and railways was indeed spectacular: this knowledge, and the ways it is communicated to the reader, is addressed by this paper in an essay where eclectic criticism provides a way to decode Dickens’s emotional and intellectual experiences as detailed in “The Signalman”. The paper suggests that thorough investigation of the author’s biography, culture, and anecdotal evidence may take advantage from deconstructionist methods as well as from other critical perspectives, including thing theory, ecocriticism, postcolonial or gender studies. We should consider knowledge criticism as a useful tool to decode Dickens’s signs, insofar as the novel-ist rooted most of his work in actual experiences and tried to share most of his experiences with his readers, sharing with them, across narration, an epistemic horizon which yields its knowledge even today.