CHARLES DICKENS AND THE STAPLEHURST RAIL CRASH: FOUND IN THE FOOTNOTES
Make Sure to catch Dickens GREAT short story 'The Wreck of The Golden Mary' NOW at 1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales!
FOUND IN THE FOOTNOTES CHARLES DICKENS AND THE STAPLEHURST RAIL CRASH
Podcast Script – Charles Dickens and the Staplehurst Rail Crash
As many of you know,I’m a huge fan of classic literature and four of our 1001 podcasts are packed with
My renderings of short stories and novels from the greats like Robert Louis Stevenson, O. Henry, and
Charles Dickens- just search 1001 Classic Short Stories and you’ll see what I mean. Charles Dickens gave
usGreat Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol,
And many more …
This is a mostly unknown story about Charles Dickens which I had never known-- until I found it in the footnotes.
Picture this.
It’s a warm June evening in 1865. The countryside of Kent is slipping
past the windows of a train bound for London. Inside one of the first-
class carriages sits one of the most famous writers in the English-
speaking world — Charles Dickens. He’s tired, he’s thinking about
deadlines, and beside him is something priceless: the handwritten
manuscript for a new novel, Our Mutual Friend, not yet finished, not yet
safely delivered to the public.
Then — without warning — the world breaks apart.
The bridge ahead has collapsed. The train plunges into open space.
Carriages snap loose and tumble into the river below. Iron screams,
wood splinters, steam hisses into chaos. In moments, what was a quiet
journey becomes one of the worst railway disasters of the Victorian age.
And somehow — impossibly — Charles Dickens survives.
He climbs out of a shattered carriage suspended over the river. He tends
to the wounded. He witnesses death at arm’s length. And before he
leaves the wreckage, before he allows himself to process the shock, he
does something extraordinary:
He climbs back into the ruins to retrieve his manuscript.
Tonight’s episode is about that moment — the Staplehurst rail crash,
the night Charles Dickens cheated death, and how a single train accident
quietly reshaped the final years of one of literature’s greatest voices.
