Talk:The Signal-Man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the General Project Discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
	This article has been automatically rated as Stub-Class because it uses a stub template. If you agree with the assessment, please remove |auto=yes from this template. If you disagree with the assessment, please change it by editing the |class= parameter in this template and removing the stub template from the article.|-
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Short story task force, which deals with short story articles
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
Tasks you can do: Novels WikiProject • (Novels, Novellas, Novelettes & Short stories) Announcements and open tasks (watch • edit • discuss) → Please help with tagging articles! Critique (Featured Article): no candidates currently - "10 achieved" Wikipedia wide peer reviews: Original Stories from Real Life Novels WikiProject Peer reviews : Master and Commander Improve: The Body in the Library • Furies of Calderon • Wolf Brother • The Monk • The English Patient • Bones of the Moon • More... Create: Black Cocktail • Blackthorn Winter • London, 1850 • More... Novel without Infobox (auto list): many novel articles do not have an infobox - and need one (auto generated list) - may need expansion of article too Our Collaboration Department is continuing with one more title The_History_of_Tom_Jones,_a_Foundling for the current month. Get collaborating on the article and also look at nominating other titles to be considered. The new article Fictional locations now exists - as a companion article to Fictional characters - but it is still a stub and could do with plenty more imput to improve it. Another new article A Taste for Death (P.D. James novel)‎ now exists - but it is also still a stub and could do with plenty more imput to improve it. A new Infobox exists to support the growing number of "Short Story" articles that are tagged as part of the project - take a look at it and comment on it's talk page. I would suggest we use it for "Short Stories and "Novelettes" and leave the main "Book infobox" for "Novels" and "Novellas". New hitlists added to the main worklist. List of literary works with eponymous heroes List of literary works with eponymous heroines Pages that only exist as redirects: Men at Arms changes

I did a search: Google returned 12,500 hits for "The Signal-Man" Dickens I then tried: "The Signalman" Dickens and got 21,000 hits. So, by popular opinion, the title should have "Signalman" as one word, not two. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 193.82.16.50 (talk • contribs) 18:40, 18 April 2006.

Whatever one may think of a Google search as the mirror of "popular opinion", I think it would be fair to say that the story was first published with the (all caps) title of "THE SIGNAL-MAN" -- which I have reason to believe would probably have been "The Signal-man" in mixed case (see here) (cf. such Victorian usages as "Fleet-street") -- but it is undoubtedly also true that it has since been republished many times as "The Signalman", reflecting the more modern spelling of the common noun "signalman". -- Picapica 14:04, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Surely, in the interest of accuracy, the page's title should follow the title of the story as Dickens published it. Those who follow the contemporary spelling will find a link at the beginning of the Wikipedia entry "signalman" that will lead them here. It may be the case that "The Signal-man" reflects more appropriate capitalization. I doubt it, but let it be changed if anyone feels strongly enough to do so. -- Talented Mr Miller 14 August 2006

That's fine by me, TMM. -- Picapica 22:04, 1 September 2006 (UTC)