Biological metaphor and railway systems

Biological metaphor and railway systems:
nineteenth-century perceptions of the railway

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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THE USE OF BIOLOGICAL METAPHOR is a long-established characteristic of accounts of communications and transport networks. As a cultural phenomenon it parallels, and is frequently found in association with, a more generalized application of biological imagery to machinery, and a tendency to describe the community, the city or the nation, in organic terms, as living bodies. The railway, like roads and canals before it, lent itself easily to the biological imagery of blood vessels, nerves, and circulatory systems; and in the railway network, the locomotive and the train those discourses which used a biological language to describe the attributes of machinery and mechanical systems found a very potent application. In both cases, this imagery was lent new significance from the middle of the century by developing theorizations of evolution. This essay investigates some of the ways in which this system of biological metaphor was applied in nineteenth-century Europe and North America to railways. In particular, it seeks to trace the connections between ideas of the railway as a highly-evolved circulatory and communication system, metaphorically related in contemporary discourse to similar biological systems, and the notion of crisis within such systems.

The development of complex systems of control and communication, and the phenomenon of increasing trust on the part of societies and individuals in those systems, constitute central developments in the evolution of that complex of social and cultural factors called ‘modernity’. In the work of the American business historian Alfred Chandler and his followers[1] the development of such systems has been seen as contributing crucially to the growth of the complex organisations which play a key role in the phase of modernity known to Chandler as ‘managerial capitalism’. The great railway companies of the nineteenth century were, in many ways, the first large-scale managerial capitalist organisations; not only were they vast and complex human, administrative and technological systems in themselves, they required reliable methods of controlling complicated and powerful machinery, and networks of information and communication played an essential part in their operation. These networks and systems constituted the hidden mechanism of the railway, invisible, or only imperfectly and partially seen, by the railway passenger during his or her journey. The journalist and writer on railways Edward Foxwell turned to biological metaphor when he observed, in his study English Express Trains in 1884, that the railway passenger ‘does not think of all the complex organisation required to run the railway; signalling, track maintenance, the other business of the railway ... The traveller never thinks of these and a thousand other items; but our leading railways have a task to manage as involved as that of human circulation’.[2]

This image of the railway as a highly-evolved circulatory system, on a parallel with the systems of the human body, is a frequent one in nineteenth-century writing on railways. Not only does it convey the physical complexity of the vast networks of intertwined lines, it also embodies the idea of the railway as a system that nourished and sustained the national body; and suggests powerfully that the presence of such a system was evidence of the advanced evolutionary progress exhibited by that body. The railway could thus be seen as a clear symbol of the nation’s evolutionary progress, facilitating communication between the different parts of the organism and enabling it to work more efficiently as a unified whole. This conception of the role of the railway system led to a conflation of the imagery of blood supply and networks of nerves in accounts of the railway such as that articulated in 1852 by the leading railway manager Henry Booth, when he asked:

How shall we fitly estimate the rapid and everlasting diffusion of information effected by the transportation of news, with practical disquisitions on the prominent topics of the day, radiating every morning from the metropolis, the great centre of intelligence, the living heart whose pulsations animate and invigorate our provincial districts, through the length and breadth of the land![3]

The fact that the railway was clearly at a higher level of integration than the older transport systems of road and water, and the vital role of the electric telegraph in railway operation, served to encourage such applications of organic models to the railway. The telegraph, its rapid, invisible currents of electricity pulsing through the railway system to animate and control the movement of locomotives, trains, people and goods across the network, fascinated contemporary observers, many of whom found the analogy with the nervous system of the body irresistible.[4] The German writer Max Maria von Weber, for example, commented in the 1870s that:

as the muscle of a human body without a nerve flashing through it would be a mere lifeless hunk of flesh, so would the flying muscles that Watt’s and Stephenson’s inventions have lent to humanity be only half as capable of winging their way, if they were not animated by the guiding thought imperiously flashing through the nerves of the telegraph wires.[5]

The evolutionary analogy in such uses of biological imagery tends to become more explicit as the century passes. For Foxwell, writing in the 1880s, the railway — and especially the express train — is an unmixed blessing, the clearest sign that progress is at work in the world. The railway is the highest development of communication and transportation, its defining characteristics — speed, directness, energy, intensity — brought to their finest pitch of development in the express train. The invention, expansion and elaboration of the railway system in Great Britain was exemplified for Foxwell in the ‘400 expresses [which] run across England every day ... mile after mile by day or night for a hundred miles on end, in summer and winter alike, through fog or storm, at a speed barely less than that at which nerve-tremors throb in our own bodies’.[6] Reaching naturally for organic metaphors, Foxwell described how the diffuse and separate intelligences and abilities of the population, the different and formerly distinct areas of the country and centres of activity, were brought into unity by the railway and subjected to a higher, national, organically unified purpose.

It is the invigoration put into men’s energy by the quick conversion of intention into deed, which is the most valuable effect of expresses ... an express takes Purpose white-hot at its origin, whisks it off into warm contact with other living centres, and lights up Action across an area of opportunities. Such swift speed makes one organic whole of the practical ideas scattered here and there, so that the local vigour of the country pervades the whole mass in through currents, which return to revivify the centres of their birth; industrial life becomes intensified as bodily functions are by the establishment of cerebro-spinal nerve tracks among the local ‘sympathetic’ ganglia; there is more and more an orchestral effect in life.[7]

Doctors writing on the health consequences of railway travel also placed their consideration of the medical aspects of railways into the wider context of the significance of railways in civilization, and the relationship of the railway to questions of progress and social evolution. James Ogden Fletcher, in his Railways in their Medical Aspects, published in 1867, recognised that the perceived medical dangers of railway travel had to be considered in the context of the railway’s place in society as a whole. He therefore began his study by asking, ‘Is this mode of conveyance a necessity or a luxury?’ and ‘Did it contribute to or arise from increased civilisation?’[8] For Fletcher (who, as a railway surgeon employed by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire and the Great Northern railway companies owed part of his living to the railways), it was both a necessity for modern civilization and a sign that civilization was progressing. The development of the railway had been a necessity, for ‘it is sufficient to say that when commerce is checked and civilisation retarded for want of anything, that thing at once becomes a necessity, and there can be no doubt that the state of transit during the last two centuries was a serious impediment to the progress of civilisation and knowledge’. It was inevitable that Great Britain, the most advanced nation in the world, would play the role of pioneer of railway development, driven by its ‘increased commercial prosperity and the development of its abundant natural riches’.[9] Thus, for Fletcher, as for Foxwell, there was nothing unnatural or threatening in the railway; it was an inevitable and necessary product of economic and commercial progress. The increasing complexity and elaboration of the railway system, like that of the human body, constituted evidence that adaptation, improvement and advancement were taking their course.

Yet this interpretation of the railway’s development as the embodiment of progress carried the implication of a darker side to the railway. Could the rapid growth and elaboration of complex technological systems of communication which the railway represented lead to a loss of human liberty, a steady reduction in man’s control over his own destiny? Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon, published in 1872, implied that this was indeed the case. The very forces which Foxwell and Fletcher see as the signs of a flourishing, progressive, expanding market economy — invention, innovation, improvement — are, Butler suggests in his account of the Erewhonian ‘Book of the Machines’, signs that humanity is no more than the tool of irrational forces beyond all human control, forces which find their expression in the rise to dominance of the machine:

... this is the art of the machines — they serve that they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided he creates a better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their development ... They have preyed upon man’s grovelling preference for his material over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying that element of struggle and warfare without which no race can advance. The lower animals progress because they struggle with one another; the weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their strength. The machines being of themselves unable to struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them ...[10]

In this analysis, Butler adopts the corporeal imagery we have noted above, but interprets the significance of the new technological circulatory systems of the nineteenth century in a provocative and disturbing way:

Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? ... When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby circulation is carried directly into the heart, — which receive the venous lines, and disgorge the arterial, with an eternal pulse of people.[11]

At one level, Butler is here describing the process whereby in an industrial society human beings are forced to behave with a machine-like regularity and predictability, thus sacrificing a certain degree of liberty for the benefits which mechanization brings. But his argument goes further, and is more subtle, than this. He sees an insidious process at work whereby the human builders and controllers of technology are, through their own desire to improve and make more powerful their machines, gradually subjected to them, ultimately becoming their servants. In effect, human beings become themselves mere components in a vast mechanism. This theorization has direct relevance to contemporary perceptions of the railway, particularly when inscribed in biological metaphor. Butler’s choice of the railway to illustrate his argument is not a random one; the locomotive and the railway offer the clearest illustration of the process he describes, as is made clear when he goes on to consider the implications of the rise and elaboration of machines for questions of human free will and agency:

At first sight it would indeed appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going when set upon a line of rails with the steam up and the machinery in full play; whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so that the first has no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free will, while the second has and is.
This is true up to a certain point; the driver can stop the engine at any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of influences around him, which makes it impossible for him to act in any other way than one.[12]

Human beings are trapped, the fable of Erewhon warns, in a system constructed around the needs of the machines; a system which, while ultimately of human devising and under human control, no longer recognises any human priorities and compels humans to become its servants and comply with its demands, in order to sustain its own existence. The machine imperative has become dominant.

These sentiments are strikingly echoed in the claims of railway labour during this period that the conditions of their employment made them little more than machines. ‘Fairly worked, there are few operatives as intelligent and trustworthy as railway officials’ stated the medical periodical The Lancet in 1862, at a time when a number of serious accidents had brought the hours worked by railway employees to the forefront of public concern, ‘But they are men, not machines’.[13] In 1874, ‘A Signalman’, writing anonymously in a pamphlet published under the title A Voice from the Signal-box, claimed that the railway signalman ‘is treated like a “machine,” and, so long as his “machinery” does not fail, he may stop in this responsible and trying position until his hair turns grey’.[14] The signalman in Charles Dickens’s ghost story of 1866, The Signalman, posted for long hours on his lonely stretch of line, ‘at all times liable to be called by his electric bell’,[15] offers a similar picture, while across the English Channel the mechanical tedium of the railwayman Misard’s work in Émile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine (1890) contributes to his mental and physical degeneration:

Each time the electric bell rang signalling the arrival of a train, sound the hooter; then, once the train was past and the section blocked, press one button to alert the next section-post and press another to give the line clear to the preceding section-post: these were simple, automatic movements [des mouvements simplement mécaniques] which had become like bodily functions in his vegetable existence.[16]

The clearest instances of human beings becoming incorporated into the vast organism of the railway are indeed to be found among the railway employees of the nineteenth century; but the passengers, too, who abandoned their individuality to become part of the ‘eternal pulse of people’ along the arteries of railway, were required to govern their comings and goings according to the dictates of the railway timetable, to conform with numerous rules and regulations, to lose autonomous control over speed and motion, and to surrender their safety to other hands. Railway passengers became part of a regulated flow through a vast circulatory system: the railway.

The poet John Davidson’s account of the commuter crowds at London Bridge station, from 1904, draws on a combination of images, and relates the circulatory processes of the world — rivers, deltas, seas — to the circulation of blood in the body in his description of the station’s

wide delta of platforms, whence
Discharges into London’s sea, immense
And turbulent, a brimming human flood,
A river inexhaustible of blood.[17]

Railway crowds could easily be seen as constituting a regulated ‘flow’ through the system of tracks, trains and stations; the imagery of arteries and veins, of wires and nerves, of flows, pulses, circulation, was naturally applied to the railway from an early stage. Butler’s reference to railway passengers as ‘corpuscles of blood’ drew on a specifically urban and industrial interpretation of the crowd, the mass. Individuals were mere molecules, atoms, particles in the dehumanized mass; the behaviour of that mass was manageable — through a controlled circulatory system such as the railway, or the grands boulevards of post-Haussmann Paris — yet unpredictable.

Thomas Carlyle’s comments on the railway from the middle of the century reflect this concept, and reveal his preoccupation with the condition of flux, change, and hurry associated with it. Carlyle saw that the condition of modern life was one of constant circulation; people, money, words, ideas, even entire towns, are in constant ebb and flow like molecules, acted upon — attracted, repelled, made to spin, coagulate, fly apart — by forces (economic, thermodynamic, technological, biological) vaster by far than they. ‘Railways have set all the towns of Britain a-dancing’, he wrote in 1858:

Reading is coming up to London, Basingstoke is going down to Gosport or Southampton, Dumfries to Liverpool and Glasgow ... Their business has gone elsewhither; and they — cannot stay behind their business! They are set a-dancing, as I said; confusedly waltzing, in a state of progressive dissolution, towards the four winds; and know not where the end of the death-dance will be for them, in which point of space they will be allowed to rebuild themselves.[18]

Whereas the optimistic Foxwell saw the railway system controlling, focusing and directing concentrated beams of energy made up of the collective purpose of its passengers — ‘when the driving wheels begin to turn, and the white steam pours out, it is the departure of a human ray of light and heat to energise some distant spot’[19] — Carlyle saw the energies associated with the railway as dissipative, bringing about the dissolution of the constitutive parts of civilization in a frantic, unmanageable whirl of uncontrolled motion. There is a suggestion here of an overheated system, a constitution exhausting itself by excessive stimulation and exertion. John Ruskin had implied a similar threat when he had written in The Seven Lamps of Architecture of the association of the railway with ‘the ceaseless fever’ of modern life: ‘along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour’.[20]

Thus, in a milieu influenced by ideas of the dark side of evolutionary progress, of degeneration and decline not only through the process of organic simplification and regression but over-development and excessive refinement, the railway system could be read in disturbing ways. We have seen that notions of the railways as both a circulatory system for the nation’s lifeblood and a nervous system through which it controlled its functions existed in parallel in positive conceptions of the railway in organic terms; similarly, both concepts are intermingled in negative responses to the railway.

In his novel The Octopus, published in 1901, the American writer Frank Norris dramatized a late-nineteenth century confrontation between Californian farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, renamed in his book the Pacific and South Western. The ‘octopus’ of the title is the railroad itself. Here it is worth mentioning that when organic metaphors are applied to the railway they do not necessarily draw on the human body. Spider’s webs were an obvious image for railway systems, and in a cartoon of 1847 George Hudson, the ‘Railway King’, is shown as a singularly corpulent and unappealing spider crouching at the centre of his network of lines. The spider imagery is almost invariably negative at some level, and so is the image of the octopus, which is also found in references to railways from the 1840s. Octopuses were perceived as a life form low down the evolutionary scale; they were also visually unappealing and were assumed to have an unpleasant life style which drew from the circulatory systems of healthy organisms rather than contributing to it. That was certainly the view which many took of Hudson. Such imagery could be used in a relatively neutral way; in a 1913 book for children, The Wonders of the Modern Railway, there is a reference to the railway ‘spread[ing] its giant tentacles across the face of a country’,[21] but generally speaking tentacles strangled rather than sustained. To draw a parallel between the railway and a primitive life form such as the octopus was to do the former no favours. Such was certainly Norris’s intention.

This imagery is articulated powerfully and at length in a passage in which Norris describes the appearance of the railroad commissioners’ official map of California, showing all the railroad systems of the state. Sprawling across the map, more extensive than the lines of any other road, the red lines of the ‘vast, complicated network of red lines marked P. and S. W. R. R.’ ramify across the state. Centred on San Francisco and spreading out across the map runs ‘the plexus of red, a veritable system of blood circulation’:

complicated, dividing, and reuniting, branching, splitting, extending, throwing out feelers, off-shoots, tap roots, feeders — diminutive little blood suckers that shot out from the main jugular and went twisting up into some remote county laying hold upon some forgotten village or town, involving it in one of a myriad branching coils, one of a hundred tentacles, drawing it, as it were, toward that centre from which all this system sprang.[22]

Systems of blood circulation are a healthy thing, but the Pacific & South Western does not represent the natural, vigorous, healthy circulatory system of the state of California itself but an autonomous, parasitic monster which has imposed itself upon the body of the state and instead of serving the needs of its constitution is sucking the life from it:

The map was white, and it seemed as if all the colour which should have gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities marked upon it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism, with its ruddy arteries converging to a central point. It was as though the State had been sucked white and colourless, and against this pallid background the red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to bursting; an excrescence, a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-blood of an entire commonwealth.[23]

The example of Norris suggests the ambivalence of the biological network metaphor. There is no necessary connection between thriving circulatory systems and a healthy body; not all networks of circulation, extraction, nourishment and exchange benefit the bodies with which they are associated.

Norris was strongly influenced by Émile Zola, and one of the fullest and most powerful images of this dark side of the application of biological metaphor to the railway network is to be found in La Bête humaine. In Zola’s work generally people tend to become more and more like machines while inanimate objects — railways, mines, factories, cities — become more and more willed and seemingly alive. The treatment of the railway in La Bête humaine reflects this phenomenon. The railway is practically a character in the book; in many ways it does seem more autonomous and willed than the human characters, who are represented as the tools of great societal and biological (hereditarian) forces. The locomotive Lison is given the characteristics of a living creature throughout the book, and its destruction in an accident is described as if it is the death of a human being. The whole railway system shares in this vitalism: thus, Zola describes the railway system of the Compagnie de l’Ouest upon which the action of the book takes place:

It was like some huge body, a giant creature laid out on the ground with its head in Paris, its vertebrae the length of the track, its limbs stretching out with every branch-line, and its hands and feet in Le Havre and other destinations.[24]

The mention of ‘vertebrae’ suggests the ancient forms of life that were the subject of such contemporary fascination as their fossilized remains were uncovered by, among other things, the excavations associated with railway building. The railway-dinosaur connection is often implied in descriptions of the railway; the resemblance of the long, many-jointed, clanking train with the bodies of great reptilian life forms was irresistible to many. John Davidson’s poem ‘Rail and Road’ (1909) describes a train thus:

Its resonant flanges, and its vertebral
Loose-jointed carcase of a centipede
Gigantic, hugged and ground the parallel
Adjusted metals of its destined way
With apathetic fatalism, the mark Of all machinery ...[25]

Zola’s vast railway-body parallels Davidson’s train-monster in its air of inevitability, but whereas Davidson’s apathetic fatalism is that of dinosaur heaving its way unstoppably towards its own extinction (and that was Davidson’s view of the railways) Zola’s monster is altogether more purposeful. Zola’s view of the railway echoes Butler’s anxiety about the complex systems of modern communication effectively becoming autonomous agents, and carries additional overtones of a world in which human beings have surrendered all autonomy and freedom of action to vast impersonal (but, seemingly and compellingly, sentient) forces: economic, technological, biological, hereditarian. In Zola’s image of the railway, all these elements come together, in the ‘mechanical, triumphant' trains, ‘hurtling towards the future with mathematical rigour',[26] as they do for his disciple Norris in The Octopus:

Railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply . . . There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them – supply and demand ... Nature was, then, a gigantic engine, a vast cyclopean power, huge, terrible, a leviathan with a heart of steel ...[27]

The image of the railroad as a parasitical agent, drawing the life blood from the community, here becomes yet more disturbing. The image of the railway system as a vast organism and the image of the locomotive as a willed, destructive beast, are revealed as themselves tools of still greater forces, agents of a still vaster organism, a machine-monster constantly in motion, remorselessly following its own imperative of improvement and evolutionary development. This is the dark inverse of James Ogden Fletcher’s view of the railway as a necessity produced by social and economic circumstances (‘when commerce is checked and civilisation retarded for want of anything, that thing at once becomes a necessity’).

On one level, the growth and elaboration of the railway system during the nineteenth century was an indicator of progress, of an increase in the complexity of the social and economic organism in accordance with the doctrines of evolution; but at the same time it also represented a restriction of human freedom by subjecting human behaviour to a high degree of regulation and control, and a great increase in the risk to which people were exposed — for the more complex and highly evolved an organism becomes the more fragile its organisation is, and the more dangerous are the consequences of a breakdown in that organisation. The Victorians were much exercised by the phenomenon of railway accidents, which represented a failure of precisely the systems of circulation, organisation and control for which the railway system was celebrated (this is the theme underlying Charles Dickens’s short story The Signalman, mentioned above). As Herbert Page, one of the surgeons involved in the investigation of the ‘Railway Spine’ complaint suffered by railway accident victims, wrote in 1895:

Elaboration of structure and complexity of function are indeed acquired at the risk of instability ... not only is the organism brought into relation with changes going on around and outside it, with the environment ... but inside it also the various bodily parts are kept in due relation and harmony with each other, so that if one member suffer all the members suffer with it.[28]

The highly-developed circulatory systems of the railway showed themselves throughout the nineteenth century to be delicately balanced and vulnerable to the crisis of the railway accident, just as the nervous disorders suffered by railway accident victims suggested that the complex and highly-evolved human cerebral and nervous system, the summit of evolutionary development and the guarantee of the intellectual and moral elevation of humanity over the animal nature of the body, was fragile and easily unbalanced. Ultimately, imbedded in the language of biological metaphor applied to the railway system was a deeply-rooted anxiety at the traumas of rapid industrialization, and human independence surrendered to the vast powers of the machine.

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Notes

1. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. & Richard S. Tedlow, The Coming of Managerial Capitalism: A Casebook in the History of American Economic Institutions (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1985); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 79-187 passim; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 26, 54-6, 252-3, 607-8.

2. E. Foxwell, English Express Trains: Two Papers (London: Edward Stanford, 1884), p. 3.

3. Henry Booth, The Case of the Railways Considered (London & Liverpool: Baines, 1852), p. 7.

4. See Ralph Harrington, The Neuroses of the Railway: Trains, Travel and Trauma in Britain, c.1850-c.1900 (unpub. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1999), pp. 60-3.

5. Max Maria von Weber, Vom rollenden Flügelrade (1882); quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey(Oxford: Blackwell, 1979; pbk edn, Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 30.

6. Foxwell, English Express Trains, p. 3.

7. Foxwell, English Express Trains, p. 5

8. James Ogden Fletcher, Railways in their Medical Aspects (London: J. E. Cornish, 1867), p. 1.

9. Fletcher, Railways in their Medical Aspects, pp. 2, 5.

10. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 207.

11. Butler, Erewhon, pp. 205-6.

12. Butler, Erewhon, p. 218.

13. ‘The influence of railway travelling on public health’, The Lancet, 4 January 1862, p. 17.

14. ‘A Signalman’, A Voice from the Signal-box; or, Railway Accidents and their Causes (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874), p. 22.

15. Charles Dickens, No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman, in The Nine Christmas Numbers of All The Year Round (London: Chapman & Hall, 1870), p. 21.

16. Émile Zola, La Bête humaine, trans. Roger Pearson (1890; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 312.

17. John Davidson, ‘Railway Stations. I: London Bridge’, in Poems of John Davidson, ed. Andrew Turnbull (2 vols., Edinburgh & London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 434-5.

18. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Hudson’s statue’, (1850), in Collected Works, vol. 13, p. 266.

19. Foxwell, English Express Trains, p. 8.

20. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. VIII, p. 246.

21. Archibald Williams, The Wonders of the Modern Railway (London: Seeley, Service & Co, 1913), p. 15.

22. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), bk. II, ch. I, pp. 288-9.

23. Norris, Octopus, bk. II, ch. I, p. 289.

24. Zola, La Bête humaine, ch. II, p. 44.

25. Davidson poem ref

26. Zola, La Bête humaine, ch. II, p. 44.

27. Norris, The Octopus, p. 577.

28. Herbert Page, Clinical Papers on Surgical Subjects (London: Cassell, 1897), p. 15.