The Four-fifteen Express | A Ghost Story by Amelia B. Edwards | A Bitesized Audio Production

On a grey and foggy December afternoon, a traveller finds himself sharing his private compartment on the four-fifteen express train out of London...

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831–1892) was a prolific journalist, traveller and Egyptologist, as well as a hugely popular English novelist of the Victorian era. Born in London she was well educated at home by her Irish mother, and showed early promise as a writer as well as demonstrating skill in several other areas, including painting and musical composition. She devoted herself to writing professionally from the early 1850s, producing novels including 'My Brother's Wife' (1855) and 'Barbara's History' (1864). She also travelled widely and published several travelogues, including 'A Thousand Miles up the Nile' (1877), which is still widely read and admired today. Aside from her travel writing she is best remembered today for her many short stories with ghostly, supernatural and mysterious themes, many of which were contributed anonymously to literary magazines. Charles Dickens regularly invited her to compose seasonal tales for his annual Christmas numbers of 'All the Year Round' between 1860 and 1866.

'The Four-fifteen Express' was first published in December 1866, and may have been written for the celebrated 'Mugby Junction' 1866 Christmas issue of 'All the Year Round' which featured a number of ghost stories by various authors set in and around the railway, the most famous of which is Dickens's own 'The Signal-man'. However, for some reason (perhaps due to space, as it is relatively long for a short story) it did not appear in that issue, and went instead to a rival periodical, 'Routledge's Christmas Annual', in December 1866.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2020.