The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  Contemporaries knew perfectly well what was happening to them. John Ruskin combined the ideas of speed and dehumanisation. ‘All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity. Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely “being sent” to a place, and very little different from being a parcel.’ Two German authors10 found that man ‘demotes himself to a parcel of goods and relinquishes his senses, his independence … one ceases to be a person and becomes an object, a piece of freight’.

  Even the noblest traveller lost control of his environment to the employees of the railway company, an unnerving experience. As early as 1838 an anonymous witness complained that ‘a railway conveyance is a locomotive prison. At a certain period you are compelled to place your person and property in the custody of a set of men exceedingly independent and who have little regard for your accommodation. Till your journey is accomplished, you are completely subservient to their demands.’ Marching to someone else’s drum naturally agitated such querulous travellers as Thomas Carlyle. He reached Liverpool ‘after a flight (for it can be called nothing else) of thirty-four miles within an hour and a quarter. I was dreadfully frightened before the train started; in the nervous state I was in, it seemed to me certain that I should faint, from the impossibility of getting the horrid thing stopt.’

  However, the railways’ biggest disturbance to the nervous system was not in the loss of independence, or the physical shocks it involved, the hurtling, the change in the perception of place, but in the way they telescoped distance and time. Henry Booth, treasurer of the Liverpool & Manchester perceived how the railway had effected a ‘sudden and marvellous change … in our ideas of time and space. Notions which we have received from our ancestors, and verified by our own experience, are overthrown in a day and a new standard erected, by which to form our own ideas for the future. Speed – despatch – distance – are still relative terms, but their meaning has been totally changed within a few months.’11 When Dickens travelled from London to Paris he called the report A Flight. (Via Folkestone it took only eleven hours as early as 1851.) ‘Enchanted’ by the magical experience, he blessed the South-Eastern Railway Company ‘for realising the Arabian Nights in these prose days’.

  The journey could be an end in itself. In Gryll Grange Thomas Love Peacock claims that:

  ‘Men are become as birds and skim like swallows the surface of the world.’

  ‘To what good purpose?’

  ‘The end is in itself – the end of skimming the surface of the world.’

  In the words of the modern English writer Michael Frayn ‘The Journey is the Goal’.

  The shrinking of space, the upsetting of all previous notions of the relationship between time and distance, inevitably excited fears that, as the Quarterly Review remarked, ‘the metropolis would engulf the whole country’, while the French naturally envisaged their whole country fitting into Paris and its immediate vicinity. ‘Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to oscillate,’ wrote Heine in Lutetzia. ‘Space is killed by the railways and we are left with time alone … I feel as if the mountains and forests of all the countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.’

  For nearly a century after the 1830s any journey of more than a few miles through a civilised country was by rail, and it still remains the best, most intimate way to see a country, its internal essences as well as its outward physical appearance. ‘A train isn’t a vehicle. A train is part of a country. It’s a place,’ wrote Paul Theroux as he travelled round China.12 ‘It allowed one to make visual connections in a place that was otherwise full of bafflements. Every other mode of travel made the country seem incomprehensible.’

  Yet it could be presented entirely otherwise, as a deliberate blank in people’s lives. To Mallarmé,13 the Parisians who flocked south in the winter were ‘calm, self-absorbed people, paying no attention to the invisible landscapes of the journey. To leave Paris and to get to where the sky is clear, that is their desire.’

  In reality these apparently ‘self-absorbed’ people were probably simply terrified, blotting out their fears through a feigned indifference to the landscape hurtling past. If so, they were in distinguished company. Gustave Flaubert used to stay up all night before a journey in order to sleep through it and obliterate the whole experience from his consciousness. Like many air travellers today he covered real terror with an unconvincing veil of indifference. In 1864 he claimed that he got ‘so bored on the train that I am about to howl with tedium after five minutes of it. One might think that it’s a dog someone has forgotten in the compartment; not at all, it is M. Flaubert groaning.’

  Freud was more honest. ‘At the age of three,’ he once admitted, ‘I passed through the station when we moved from Freiburg to Leipzig, and the gas jets, which were the first I had seen, reminded me of souls burning in hell. I know something of the context here, the anxiety about travel which I have had to overcome is also bound up with it.’

  In physical terms railways were the first industrial intrusion on most of the world’s landscape. In Britain the landscape had been changing since the middle of the 18th century – the fields had been enclosed and enlarged, the landscape pierced by canals and turnpikes – yet these were relatively gentle interruptions compared with the territorial imperatives asserted by the railway. Previously the Industrial Revolution had been confined to a handful of towns and cities. Railways were inescapable, omnipresent evidence of a new, brutally mechanical world. In 1844 an anonymous author lamented how ‘in travelling on most of the railways the face of nature, the beautiful prospects of hill and dale, the healthful breeze, and all those exhilarating associations connected with “the Road”, are lost or changed to doleful cuttings, dismal tunnels, and the obnoxious effluvia of the screaming engine.’

  Not surprisingly John Ruskin went the furthest in associating what he called an ‘infernal means of mischievous locomotion’ with the horrors of the industrial revolution: ‘when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea, when their great net is … contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufactures’. A famous passage in Praeterita denounces a railroad enterprise. ‘You enterprised a railway through the valley,’ he thundered, ‘you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange, you Fools everywhere.’

  For later generations, when no one remembered the shape of the landscape before the railways were embedded in them, they became a deeply cherished part of the national heritage, and roads took their place as the despoilers of the landscape. But at the time intellectuals outside Britain echoed Ruskin’s attitude. Nathaniel Hawthorne emphasised that ‘the locomotive brings the noisy world into the midst of … slumbrous peace.’ ‘People of today sacrifice, if they must, all their own particular literature and culture in favour of “night through-trains” ’ wrote the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in disgust, while France spawned a whole school of romantic anti-railwayites. Alfred de Musset, among many others, took the railway as the preeminent symbol of a modern barbarism which had swept away all the beauties of the world.

  In France the battle was more formal than in Britain. The modernising Saint-Simonians were as ideologically motivated as their romantic opponents, the Parnassiens, who rallied most of the country’s major literary figures in rejecting modern life as exemplified by the railways. In the words of Marc Baroli ‘literary history offers few examples of failures more complete than that of Maxime du Camp’s Chants Modernes’, which hymned their delights.14

  The damage the railways caused was obvious even to those perpetrating them. Railways were ‘unholy devastators of the soil’ in the words of the great e
ngineer Joseph Locke (‘Shareholders do not want works of art,’ added his biographer, J. Devey, ‘they want half-yearly dividends’). As always the greatest engineers – like Locke – managed to combine the functional and the beautiful. Nevertheless the sheer scale and insensitivity of the intrusion inevitably bred the Nimby*, most illustriously William Wordsworth.

  Not everybody welcomed the railways.

  Wordsworth was not alone. The garden of the country retreat owned by Dr Flaubert, Gustave’s father, was bisected by the railway line from Paris to Le Havre, while the Goncourt brothers’ notorious insomnia was exacerbated by the trains which thundered past their house at Auteuil. Later, poachers turned gamekeepers. The railway from Leatherhead to Dorking was opposed by Thomas Grissell, a celebrated contractor retired to enjoy some country peace nearby.

  Nevertheless the ever-changing vista offered by the sheer speed of the train enchanted and finally converted even the most sensitive travellers. In the process they were succumbing to the lure of the travel ‘product’ they were ‘consuming.’† Late in life, looking out from a carriage on the line from Amiens to Beauvais, Ruskin obviously did not see the intrusions caused by the railway on which he was travelling but ‘every instant a nearly divine landscape of wood, harvest-field and côteau’ and at Aix recounted that ‘yesterday an entirely divine railway coupé drive from Aix by the river gorges – one enchantment of golden trees and ruby hills.’

  Victor Hugo, no railway lover, perceived that ‘The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grainfields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon.’

  By the time of Hugo’s conversion to their virtues, railways had entered the very fabric of the language. The Americans had hoped to domesticate this strange new fire-eating beast through using horsey words. The locomotive was named the ‘iron horse’. When an engine ran away: ‘so much for leaving a horse in the street without being made fast’. As for the railway lines, why, they were like trees, there were trunk routes, branch lines, feeders ‘like tributaries feeding rivers’. The escape route for runaway slaves was known as the ‘underground railroad’ because it was so reliable. In Moby Dick, Melville elevates the comparisons to poetry when Ahab ruminates ‘swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run … through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way.’

  Every novelist of the first generation absorbed the railway into his skin, and thence into his writings. But for Dickens, the railway had a universal significance. It destroyed towns and created new ones, it was life, it was death. It was the supreme sign of Dickens’s awareness of living in a world of change, symbolised above all by the ubiquitous railway lines.

  Railways play a particularly significant role in Dombey and Son, written at the height of the railway mania of the mid-1840s. Although they are mentioned in only a dozen of its near nine hundred pages, every word of each passage provides a clue to the inner meaning of the work as a whole. Railways are ‘the power that forced itself upon its iron way – its own – defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it.’

  The book’s most dramatic moment occurs when a train runs over the evil Mr Carker at the moment he felt that ‘Death was on him’. Of course Dickens was not alone in finding railways a convenient, and conveniently dramatic, means of disposing of unwanted characters. But comparing Mr Carker’s death with, say, that of Anna Karenina or the adventurer Ferdinand Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister is a matter for students of the novelists concerned.15 The deaths are not comparable, only the means are the same (although both Carker and Lopez plucked up courage to throw themselves under trains only when they realised they were being pursued).

  But no novelist could ever have conjured up the ‘Death Road’ described to Paul Theroux during his travels in China.16 ‘During the Cultural Revolution people used to kill themselves on this section of track. One person a day, and sometimes more, jumped in front of the train. In those days the buildings in Pekin weren’t very tall – you couldn’t kill yourself by jumping out of the window of a bungalow. So they chose the train, because they were too poor to buy poison. Also if you were killed by a train China Railways was obliged to bury you free of charge.’

  For Dickens in Dombey and Son the railway embraces both life and death. This universality is most obvious in the famous account of Mr Dombey’s journey to Leamington. ‘It has generally been interpreted either as Dickens’s great paean to the advent of a revolutionary new transport system, or as an expression of doubt as to its benefits,’ wrote Andrew Sanders.17 Although the journey, dominated by memories of the recent death of Mr Dombey’s son, Paul, may strike readers as the ‘Victorian equivalent of the chariot of Death in some medieval pageant … only to the particular traveller Dickens is describing, one who carries the blight of death with him like a carrier of an infection.’ To present the journey Dickens used a sort of prosodic doggerel, the clackety-clackety rhythm associated with railway travel until the coming of longer welded rails in recent years:

  Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle … Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze smooths or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away with a shriek and a roar and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!

  Robert Louis Stevenson tamed the same rhythm, transformed it in an innocent nursery rhyme, ‘From a Railway Carriage’:

  Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

  Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

  And charging along like troops in a battle,

  All through the meadows the horses and cattle;

  All of the sights of the hill and the plain

  Fly as thick as driving rain;

  And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

  Painted stations whistle by.

  The rhythm proved durable. In the late 1930s W. H. Auden used it for the film Night Mail:

  This is the Night Mail crossing the border,

  Bringing the cheque and the postal order …

  But behind the apparent innocence of the rhythm Peter Gay insists that ‘the erotic desires and fears stimulated by the rhythmic experience of the train ride were never far beneath the surface’. Freud attributed boys’ desire to be an engine driver (or a coachman for that matter) to the fascination provided when the body (and the libido) were thoroughly shaken by travel by coach or train. He went on to insist on the ‘exquisite sexual symbolism’ in railway travel and a ‘compulsive link’ between the two, springing clearly ‘from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement’.

  It was two lady poets who best seized the erotic nature of train travel. In her poem ‘To the Railway’, written in 1844, the German Luise von Plonnies tells of her experiences:*

  Fast flash which carries me

  As fast as an arrow powered by fire

  Rushing through the glory of the day,

  Roaring through the darkling night,

  Thundering over the foam of the current,

  Going like lightning around the edge of the abyss

  (Rascher Blitz, der hin mich tragt,

  Pfeilschnell von der Gluth bewegt,

  Sausend durch des Tages Pracht,

  Brausend durch die dunkle Nacht,

  Donnernd uber Stromesschaumen
,

  Blitzend an de Abgrunds Saumen)

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s imagery was even more blatantly sexual in her poem ‘Through the Tunnels’ from Aurora Leigh:18

  So we passed

  The liberal open country and the close,

  And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge

  By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,

  Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits

  And lets it in at once: the train swept in

  Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve

  The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on

  And dying oft-smothered in the shuddering dark

  While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed

  As other Titans underneath the pile

  And nightmare of the mountains, out, at last,

  To catch the dawn afloat upon the land.

  The sexual side of rail travel was not always mere fantasy. Love overcame Gustave Flaubert’s fears of rail travel. He regularly used the line from Rouen to meet his mistress, Louise Colet, half way between his home and hers. Other French novelists seized on railways as a natural locale for sexual encounters.19 But it was a writer of a much later generation, Emile Zola, who managed to combine all his obsessions, with sex, crime and the railways, in his famous novel La Bête Humaine. The railway landscape provided a suspense-saturated atmosphere for the novel’s melodramatic plot: the trains and locomotives are important characters in it.*