He had been returning from a holiday in Paris with his new lover, Ellen Ternan, and her mother when the accident occurred (Cody 1). Though he survived, the incident scarred Dickens psychologically for the rest of his life. It was later learned that the manuscript for Our Mutual Friend also survived the incident. The crash influenced Dickens to write a short ghost story about a fictional crash similar to that of Staplehurst; however, it is possible that the story was based on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel Accident (qtd. in Lewis, Dickens and the Staplehurst Rail Crash, 104) rather than Staplehurst. There is also evidence that the crash took so much of a toll on Dickens that it was one of the reasons why his life was suddenly cut short. After working a full day on his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens collapsed and died on June 9, 1870, five years to the day of the Staplehurst crash. His epitaph reads as
He had been returning from a holiday in Paris with his new lover, Ellen Ternan, and her mother when the accident occurred (Cody 1). Though he survived, the incident scarred Dickens psychologically for the rest of his life. It was later learned that the manuscript for Our Mutual Friend also survived the incident. The crash influenced Dickens to write a short ghost story about a fictional crash similar to that of Staplehurst; however, it is possible that the story was based on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel Accident (qtd. in Lewis, Dickens and the Staplehurst Rail Crash, 104) rather than Staplehurst. There is also evidence that the crash took so much of a toll on Dickens that it was one of the reasons why his life was suddenly cut short. After working a full day on his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens collapsed and died on June 9, 1870, five years to the day of the Staplehurst crash. His epitaph reads as