Examine the setting in three victorian stories

The reader gets the impression that the young man feels at odds in their company since they appear to belong to different worlds. The narrator feels "uncomfortable" with their "gaunt silences, their bent carriage and their evident unfriendliness towards each other". This creates a sense of unease right from the start and the tension increases by the narrators" insistence to be shown to the "Red Room" despite their warnings. The ending of this story has a twist to it and does not necessarily provide a solution to the mystery of the Red Room.
             The authors of these stories all lived through a period of change that affected people's lives on all levels. The Victorian era was a time of new inventions in industry and scientific discovery meant progress. .
             At the time when Charles Dickens wrote "The Signalman" (1865) the railway was a new and dramatic invention so the setting for this story was original and exciting for his readers. Dickens had managed to combine the old with the new, the supernatural past with the modern railway in this narrative.
             Sir Arthur Conan Doyles" story, "The man with the twisted lip" is one of a series that deal with the social life of that time. It has the streets of East London as its setting, where Jack the Ripper committed a series of brutal murders and was not caught for a long time. The streets were already considered to be dark and dangerous, the Thames was heavily polluted and so was the air that was thick with smog. This social environment provided the backdrop for the detective story.
             The "Red Room" by H G Wells does not provide the reader with much information about the world beyond the castle where events take place. It does, however, indicate that there were changing attitudes towards things that belong to the past and those of the "modern" Victorian world. .
             This story belongs to the tradition of Gothic literature that is concerned with mind-blowing terror and always involves aspects of the supernatural world such as the living dead, cemeteries, spooky castles, hidden rooms and secret passages, curses and witchcraft.