Short Fiction Various Authors: Mugby Junction. v1, 4 Aug 2015

[AlexBell]

Charles Dickens' journals Household Words and All the Year Roundhad Extra Christmas Numbers each year, and several of these contained stories co-authored by Dickens and staff writers who shared his social activism. Some of the chapters were later published separately in other versions, but this ebook contains the original text from the journal.

Mugby Junction was the All the Year Round Extra Christmas Number for 1866, and was co-authored by Charles Dickens and Andrew Halliday, a Scottish journalist and dramatist; Charles (Alston) Collins, younger brother of Wilkie Collins and son-in-law of Dickens; Hesba Stretton, (pen name of Sarah Smith), an evangelical writer and one of the founders of the National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; and Amelia B. Edwards, a novelist, traveller, and Egyptologist.

The first two chapters are narrated by 'a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life,' and who was 'at last set free' after he had impulsively got off the train at Mugby Junction. The other tales are told to him by people he meets while exploring the area; the first of these is a diatribe about 'Refreshmenting' at the station, and most of the others are spooky tales involving death and apparitions.

The source text for the first six chapters was taken from the Dickens Journals Online site, and checked against the images of the original journals. The source text for the last two was taken from another source, and checked against a pdf version on the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos and inconsistencies, simplified punctuation, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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