Published in the People’s Journal for Glasgow and Edinburgh, 6 January 1883, p. 3.

“The Pointsman” expresses Bernstein’s sympathy for the switch operator who labors “eighteen hours” a day and her contempt for the “heartless system” that cares little for the working person or for the public safety. As the subtitle suggests, the poem is based not on a specific incident but upon a “story” that might occur everyday. The poem was published in the People’s Journal for Glasgow and Edinburgh, a weekly newspaper with “thoughtful leaders on social topics.” Two weeks earlier, in the issue for 16 December 1882, the paper had reported on a meeting in Glasgow of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for Scotland. Tensions had arisen between the men, who had “frequently to work 70 and 90 hours in the week” but had demanded “a day of ten hours,” and the directors of the several railway companies, who had declined to confer with them. A representative for the petitioners insisted that “the concessions asked are not only reasonable, but absolutely necessary to the interests and the safety of the traveling public.” Just one week later, in a grim coincidence, the same newspaper reported three serious railway collisions—near Glasgow, at Kilbirnie, and at Essendene—in which three miners were killed and scores of passengers were injured. All three accidents occurred at junctions. In nineteenth-century Scotland, one scholar observes, “women poets were often reluctant radicals, attempting to reconcile piety and a desire for respectability with an acute awareness of injustices” (Bold 257). But not Marion Bernstein. For poetical purposes, she conflates the incidents into one and imagines that an “overwearied” operator has failed at the switch.