Why Dickens could never take a train without fear

Charles Dickens’ account of his post-traumatic stress disorder after surviving a train crash has come to light in a previously unseen letter.

Dickens was 53 and travelling back from France in June 1865 with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother when the train derailed on a viaduct at Staplehurst in Kent.

Seven carriages plunged into the river below, leaving 10 people dead and 50 injured.

Although the accident is familiar to scholars, its longer lasting consequences are not so well known, as the incident left Dickens so shaken that he was unable to write about it.

His first-class carriage was left dangling from the bridge and he had to climb out of the window to escape. He spent three hours tending to the injured while waiting for help to arrive.

Although he was uninjured, the accident appeared to have triggered PTSD, a condition that was not recognised by medical science until 1980.

He lived for five more years but developed an acute fear of travelling by train.

The letter, which is due to be sold at Sotheby’s in London this week with an estimate of £5000, was written to Pauline Viardot, the French opera singer, two months after the accident.

He wrote: "The scene was so affecting when I helped in getting out the wounded and dead, that for a little while afterwards I felt shaken by the remembrance of it.

"But I had no personal injury whatsoever. My watch (which is curious) was more sensitive, physically, than I; for it was some few minutes ’slow’ for some few weeks afterwards.

"Except that I cannot yet travel on a railway, at great speed, without having a disagreeable impression - against all reason - that the carriage is turning on one side, I have not the least inconvenience left."

Despite making light of the impact the accident had on him, his son Henry later said that he "never altogether recovered". He described his father in a "state of panic" gripping the seat with both hands when he "felt the slightest jolt while travelling by train".

The psychiatrist Ben Green, editor-in-chief of the Priory medical journals, diagnosed Dickens’ PTSD.

He wrote: "This letter begins to demonstrate the features of PTSD - some evidence of anxiety on being reminded of the accident and the start of some avoidance behaviour."

Gabriel Heaton, of Sotheby’s, said the letter brought out the narrator in Dickens. "The detail about his watch running slow ever since is just the sort of thing he would draw on. It is the mark of a great storyteller," he said.