Mugby Junction

A man who has spent his whole life in one office gets off a train at a railway junction with no plans, and stays — and the lines running out of the station become the lives he might have had. Dickens wrote the frame of the Christmas number of 1866, the year after he survived the Staplehurst rail crash; this edition gathers his own contributions, the Barbox Brothers chapters and The Boy at Mugby, a refreshment-room boy's gleeful account of how the travelling public is fed. Fifty-seven paintings from 1720 to 1914, among them scenes by William Powell Frith and Edvard Munch, share the volume with the story of a man who steps off a train and lets the railway decide the rest.