Abstract
In the mid-nineteenth century novel, trains are typically represented as a destructive force. In texts from Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the early 1860s, brief yet vivid instances of ‘these approaching monsters’ tearing through the landscape with a ‘fierce impetuous rush’,1 encapsulate how, to the Victorians, the railways decisively announced the coming of modernity. These visions of the ‘fiery devil, thundering along’2 overtly express the fear and anxiety that surrounded the approaching modern age of industrial capitalism.3 The railway’s disruptive impact is further demonstrated in depictions of places and landscapes becoming transformed by railway development. In Dombey and Son, Staggs’s Gardens is ‘rent to its centre’, with houses ‘knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up’.4 The ‘core of all this dire disorder’ is ‘the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad’.5
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848, ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), 840, 839.
For illuminating discussion on the relationship between railways and modernity, see Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001);
Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and
Ralph Harrington, ‘The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity’, in Pathologies of Travel, ed. Richard Wrigley and George Revill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 229–59.
Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, 1984, 3rd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 7.
See Smith, Uneven Development, and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry Dunbar, 1864 (London: Maxwell, c.1890), 211.
Daly, Literature, Technology, 42. See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, 1977, fwd. Alan Trachtenberg (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 129–70 and
Ralph Harrington, ‘The Neuroses of the Railway’, History Today 44.7 (1994): 15–21 for contextual discussion on the fear of railway accidents.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Lovels of Arden, 1864 (London: Maxwell, c.1890), 12.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 1861–2, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor, intro. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Russell Crofts (London: Penguin, 1998), 145–6.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Marchmont’s Legacy, 1862–3, ed. Toru Sasaki and Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 225.
Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 84.
Augustus Egg, The Travelling Companions, 1862, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
Abraham Solomon, First Class: The Meeting … and at First Meeting Loved, 2nd version, 1855, oil on canvas, National Railway Museum, York.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, 1862–3, ed. P. D. Edwards, 1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 344.
See Peter Bailey, ‘Adventures in Space: Victorian Railway Erotics, or Taking Alienation for a Ride’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9.1 (2004): 1–21, and Harrington’s ‘The Railway Journey’ on the social relations of the railway compartment.
John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol VIII (London: George Allen, 1903), 159.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 1–17.
See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and
Neil Smith, ‘Homeless/global: Scaling Places’, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 87–119.
As Andrew Thacker details in Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Charlotte Mathieson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mathieson, C. (2015). ‘A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods’. In: Gavin, A.E., Humphries, A.F. (eds) Transport in British Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499042_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499042_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69838-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49904-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)