The sage of the train: Ruskin and the railways

The sage of the train: Ruskin and the railways
John Ruskin and the Victorian railway

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

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Work on this paper is ongoing – incomplete draft only, please do not quote.

IN 1874 the Royal Institute of British Architects offered their highest honour, the Gold Medal, to John Ruskin. He refused it, the only person ever to do so, saying that he did not ‘wish to be decorated by a bunch of Demolishing Experts’ and citing four public atrocities committed in his lifetime against irreplaceable architectural treasures. One of those atrocities, and the only one located in Britain, was the construction of a railway line through the ruins of Furness Abbey.[1]

This episode, cited by the railway historian Jack Simmons and others,[2] provides a dramatic and characteristic illustration of John Ruskin’s lifelong and profound dislike of the railways and their influence. Ruskin, to quote one of his modern biographers, ‘always hated railways’.[3] He was averse to what he saw as their physical ugliness, their intrusion into the landscape, and their encouragement of speed and superficiality in travel. Yet he could not ignore the railways or try to live as if they did not exist. He used rail travel frequently and was very aware of the distinctive railway-shaped world of stations, junctions, bridges, timetables, carriages and locomotives. The characteristic conditions and accompaniments of railway travel, and the physical embodiments of the railway age, came to occupy a prominent place in Ruskin’s discourses on the moral, aesthetic and social issues of his day.

For those Victorians who celebrated progress, industry and the machine, the railway was the foremost expression of their age: an age of unparalleled industrial, economic and technological achievement. Speeding express trains; vast, teeming stations; the great network of shining, intertwining lines; the intricacy and precision of timetables; the statistical proof of ever-growing traffic; the scale and complexity of the railway companies themselves: all could be seen as sustaining the acknowledged position of the railway as among the most powerful demonstrations of human mastery over the forces of nature, and in particular as an expression of British mechanical genius.

The significance of the steam railway locomotive, built of metal, powered by coal, in embodying nineteenth-century Britain’s industrial know-how and energy in a single, highly dramatic, universally successful and thoroughly practical form can be found reflected in the works of Ruskin:

I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground and forge it into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as the serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile – a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh![4]

For Ruskin the locomotive represents a new cycle of the processes of creation and reshaping – geological, natural, artisanal – that constitute the earth’s fundamental nature. The forming of the substances of the earth, created themselves by the vast machinery of rock and fire, into precise and complex machines that obey human command represents a form of integration into the cycles of nature and a triumph over them. The locomotive represents an exceeding of the feeble material conditions of the human body itself through the application of knowledge and – above all – physical skill.

The locomotive builders are characterised by Ruskin in almost heroic terms, as ‘the men who thought out this – who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will’.[5] He compares the precise application of technical knowledge and skill apparent in their mechanical creation to the imprecise, tentative, feeble nature of the artist’s enterprise: ‘this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-colour, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else – mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment’.[6] He sees the locomotive as a uniquely powerful expression of the genius of the time, of the ability of the men of the nineteenth century – ‘these Iron-dominant Genii’[7] – to extract the raw materials of the earth, master them, and transform them into a device shaped to serve their purposes and do their will.

Many of Ruskin’s abiding concerns are reflected in his response to the railway locomotive: the nature and value of work, the importance of skilled craftsmanship, the relationship between raw material and finished product, and the transforming power of human agency in making the one into the other. But for Ruskin all human creations, whether architectural, artistic or mechanical, are expressions not only of expertise and physical skill but of the morality of the society which produces them; and the railway locomotive reveals the shortcomings of the society that gives it birth as well as symbolizing its skills and achievements:

But, as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me shuddering in real physical pain for some half a minute following; and assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers’ finger; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.[8]

The real nature of the railway locomotive, the real end of all the skill, precision and strength embodied in its construction, is betrayed by the strident sound of its whistle: dehumanized, profoundly unnatural, productive of actual physical pain in the sensitive hearer.[9] The image of the steam-whistle relates the locomotive to a complex of other ideas about the character of nineteenth-century industrial civilization with which Ruskin was preoccupied, for in engine-houses, at railway stations, in factories, mines and mills, the whistle symbolized the mastery of the machine and the regulated, in human toil which sustained the modern industrial economy.[10]

This densely woven interwoven string of associations reinforces Ruskin’s depiction of the locomotive as symbol of the nineteenth century's particular genius, and as index of the age’s degenerate spirit. Ruskin's evocation of ‘oaten stop, or pastoral song’, a reference to the poem ‘Ode to Evening’ by the eighteenth-century poet William Collins, stresses the break with the past that the locomotive represents. Collins’s verse was aligned with the pastoral poetic tradition which had its origins in ancient Greece; Ruskin sees in such work a harmony and continuity linking present with past and unifying poetry, human society and nature. In the modern age, by contrast, these lines of continuity and harmony have been shattered: the shrieking of the locomotive whistle is the music of the modern age, expressing the cultural disharmony and degeneracy of an era dominated by ‘the Tenth Muse’, the muse of mechanism.[11]

The assault upon the settled order of civilization represented by the locomotive whistle was emblematic of the social degeneration and cultural vulgarization that Ruskin believed the railway encouraged. He criticized railway development as a new barbarian invasion, destroying in a few short years a culture that was the legacy of centuries: ‘the railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and the characters of Venice, Florence and Rouen are yielding day by day to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham’,[12] he lamented in 1849; while in 1876 he warned of ‘the certainty ... of the deterioration of moral character in the inhabitants of every district penetrated by the railway’.[13]

Work on this paper is ongoing – incomplete draft only, please do not quote.

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Notes

1.John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 34, pp. 513-16.

2. Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), pp. 162-3; Christopher Miele, ‘“A small knot of cultivated people”: William Morris and ideologies of protection’, Art Journal, vol. 54, no. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 75.

3. John Dixon Hunt, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (London: Dent, 1982), p. 356.

4. John Ruskin, Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 19, pp. 60-1.

5. John Ruskin, Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 19, p. 61.

6. John Ruskin, Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 19, p. 61.

7. John Ruskin, Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 19, p. 61.

8. John Ruskin, Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 19, pp. 61-2.

9. The locomotive whistle, loudly and persistently sounded wherever railways were found, was a widely detested aspect of the railways’ presence in the Victorian environment. For an account of such nineteenth- and early twentieth-century noise pollution, and opposition to it, see L. Baron, ‘Theodor Lessing’s crusade for quiet’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 17, no. 1 (1982), pp. 165-78.

10. Ruskin accorded the whistle emblematic significance as a symbol of modern industrial society and the ideas that sustained it: as in his reference to Charles Dickens as ‘a pure modernist - a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence'; letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 June 1870, in John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 37, p. 7.

11. The nineteenth-century literary conceit of a peaceful pastoral scene disrupted by the sound of a railway locomotive whistle is discussed, in an American context, by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 11-33. For the passage from Thoreau’s Walden which is the focus of Marx’s study, and which makes an interesting comparison with Ruskin's comments in The Cestus of Aglaia, see Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ‘Sounds’, pp. 105ff.

12. John Ruskin, ‘Samuel Prout’ (1849); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 12, pp. 314-5.

13. John Ruskin, Railways in the Lake District (1876); in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 34, p. 141.