Trains, technology and time-travellers

Trains, technology and time-travellers:
how the Victorians re-invented time

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

copyright notice | citation information | plagiarism | notes

LET US BEGIN with some aspects of the daily routine of an English gentleman, resident in Savile Row, London, as recorded for 2 October 1872. He rises at 8:00am; is provided with tea and toast by his valet at 8:23, breakfasts, and has hot water for shaving brought at 9:37; he has his hair dressed at 9:40. He leaves for the Reform Club at 11:30, where he dines, completing his luncheon at 12:47 and making his way to the drawing room where he reads The Times until 3:45pm, followed by the Standardwhich he reads until dinner, which he finishes at 5:40pm. Following dinner he returns to the drawing room where he reads the Morning Chronicle, then plays cards until his departure for home at 11:30pm. On the stroke of midnight he goes he bed.[1] His house is equipped to make this precise and unvarying timetable possible, with electric clocks that show the hour, minute, second, day, date, month and year, are perfectly synchronized and keep perfect time.[2] This particular gentleman is ‘precision personified’, ‘mathematically precise’; as his faithful servant Passepartout puts it approvingly, Mr Phileas Fogg is a ‘genuine piece of machinery’.[3]

Phileas Fogg is of course the hero of Around the World in Eighty Days, written by the French author Jules Verne and first published in the very year in which its action is set, 1872. In his adherence to timetabled precision in every aspect of his life Fogg may seem eccentric, representative of no-one but himself; but I would like us to take this fictional character as the embodiment of the nineteenth century’s new and distinctive concern with the quantification, regulation and dissemination of time, and with the establishment of time as the fundamental structuring principle of society. Through its technologies – most importantly perhaps those of transport and communication, but also the new techniques of mass-production and precision engineering – the nineteenth century re-invented time, and made not only Phileas Fogg and his extraordinary journey possible, but countless more ordinary journeys as well.

In the course of his east-west journey around the world, Fogg uses a variety of modes of transport: steamships and sailing ships, lots of trains, a sloop-rigged sledge, an elephant. These ways of travelling are bound together, however, by a timetabled and systematic itinerary – an itinerary which, it is true, becomes somewhat disrupted in the course of the journey, but which nevertheless binds the various sections of Fogg’s journey into a coherent and planned whole. It does so because, despite all the ups and downs he experiences in the course of his journey, travel in the late-nineteenth-century world around which he moves is characterized to an unprecedented degree by three things: reliability, regularity and predictability. Reliability: ships and trains depart and arrive at certain specified times. Regularity: their movements follow the same pattern at the same times. Predictability: they take the same time to complete the same movements. And these transport systems do all these things day after day; as a result other processes and events can be planned around them. A range of human activities consequently take on a structure and pace determined by the phenomenon that underlies these reliable, regular and predictable motions: the timetable.

When Fogg leaves on his journey he carries under his arm ‘Bradshaw’s Continental Steam Railway, Steam Transit and General Guide, which would provide him with all the information he needed for his travels.’[4] The timetable which inspires his journey is suggested by the Morning Chronicle and is made possible by the fact that ‘now they’ve opened the section of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway from Rothal to Allahabad’:[5]

London-Suez via Mt Cenis Tunnel & Brindisi (railway & steamship)	7 days
Suez-Bombay (steamship)	13 days
Bombay-Calcutta (railway)	3 days
Calcutta-Hong Kong (steamship)	13 days
Hong Kong-Yokohama (steamship)	6 days
Yokohama-San Francisco (steamship)	22 days
San Francisco-New York (railroad)	7 days
New York-London (steamship & railway)	9 days
Total	80 days

Despite Fogg’s assurance that this timetable allows for ‘unfavourable weather, headwinds, shipwrecks, derailments’ and includes delays caused if ‘Red Indians tear up the rails . . . stop the trains, plunder the carriages and scalp the passengers’ this is a finely-balanced schedule, which brings us to a second important point about the nineteenth century’s increasing dependence on precise time and the timetable: its fragility. The more delicately balanced a machine becomes, the greater its degree of precision and delicacy of operation, the more likely a breakdown becomes and the more potentially serious are the consequences of that breakdown. As we shall see, contemporaries worried that as society became more time-conscious and time-dependent it became simultaneously a less healthy and more dangerous society in which to live. From the missed connection and the hurried breakfast to the railway collision and the wrecked steamship, Victorian society not only gained the benefits of a timetabled mechanized world but took the risks and paid the price it demanded. A new consciousness of time worked in other ways to undermine certainties and provoke alarm and concern.

Fogg takes several trains in the course of his journey, and it is the railway that will be the central focus of this paper. If any single technological innovation drove the nineteenth century’s new consciousness of time – its reinvention of time – it was the railway. Precision and regularity in time rapidly became fundamental to the operation of the railway in a way that had not been true of any other mode of transport or technology, and in turn the railway itself became a symbol of timekeeping and timed operation. ‘Railways are said to “annihilate both time and space”; this they can only do safely and satisfactorily by keeping time’[6] observed a writer in the Mechanics’ Magazine in 1840. The railways, it was perceived, had speeded life up and made it more time-conscious. The influence of railway time and speed spread far beyond the railways, to affect the whole of society. For the secretary of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, Henry Booth, the railways had brought a revolution ‘in our value of time! Our amended estimate of the occupation of an hour, or a day, when generalized, affecting the duration of life itself’.[7] The author and apostle of ‘self-help’ Samuel Smiles commented in 1862 that ‘In no country in the world is time worth more money than in England; and by saving time ... the railway proved a great benefactor to men of industry in all classes.’[8] Others questioned whether the saving of time permitted by rail travel was worthwhile. An anonymous pamphleteer in 1844 declared that railway promoters were mistaken in suggesting:

that the public valued their time rather than their money, and should prefer the velocity of the railway, even at higher charges, than the slower speed of the stage-coach, at lower charges . . . the novelty of the system, which alone created an artificial traffic for a few years, soon wore off; and the fact is now irrefragable, that the travelling community, as a whole, prefer money to time.[9]

Few would have agreed with that final assertion, in 1844 or subsequently. The general impression was that the saving of time which railway speed brought were desirable above all other considerations. The whole of society was speeding up and its motions were governed ever more rigidly by the motions of the clock-face. Not everyone was necessarily happy about this. In 1846 the author of a set of satirical Railway Eclogues lamented that ‘our world’s a world of hurly-burly; / We’re late to bed, and we arise right early. / Time’s precious – up! – would you a fortune make, / Your journey by express train take. / Sounds a loud whistle – but, with all this pother, / Time saved one way is wasted in another.’[10]

The new pressures of time imposed by the railway were a sign of the power it had to transform society into an image of itself – timetabled, regulated, precise. The establishment of uniform ‘Railway Time’, the imposition of railway timetables on all manner of social activities, the constant pressure on travellers to hurry, to fit more into the time available, were some of the outward expressions of a process of evolutionary change, as the railways brought the national organism to a greater pitch of uniformity and efficiency – making the nation, if you like, more into the image of Phileas Fogg.

The period from around 1820 to around 1850 was perhaps most clearly marked by far-reaching challenges to established notions of time and time-keeping.[11] The first public steam-hauled passenger trains (1825); the first Atlantic crossing under steam (1827); the development of the electric telegraph (1836); mail sent by rail (1838); Bradshaw’s railway timetable (1839); the first practical electric clock (1841). Throughout the nineteenth century other factors also contributed to this process: effective mass-production of precision engineered components became cheaper, easier ever more widespread, making mass-produced cheap and accurate clocks and watches a reality for the first time, and modern methods of selling and distribution brought them to everyone’s doorstep. By the end of the century the cheap pocket-watch and the delicate and specialized chronometer lay at either extremity of a new continuum of easy access to precise timekeeping that extended throughout Victorian society.

The clearest illustration of this process was perhaps the adoption of ‘Railway Time’. The railways brought uniform time to Britain and other countries for the first time; and in doing so they transformed communal and individual conceptions of space, time, and motion. The adoption of railway time derived ultimately from a very simple geographical fact. Although Britain is a relatively small country, it nevertheless takes a certain amount of time for the rotation of the earth to move it from east to west in relation to the sun; thus the precise time of sunrise, sunset and all points in between varies from place to place. Depending on the time of year, the sun rises in Plymouth around 20 minutes later than it rises in London; even within London, the sun illuminates Greenwich a good 23 seconds before it gilds the dome of St Paul’s. This clearly has consequences for anybody who moves around – for transport, in other words. The timescale by which you lived your life in London is disrupted if you find yourself in Penzance. However, because Britain is a relatively small country, this phenomenon the disruption would be relatively minor; you could easily adjust by five, ten or fifteen minutes in the course of a journey or upon arrival because the difference being small and travelling slow. The guard of a mail coach from London to Plymouth in 1790 would adjust his watch according to a specified schedule as the journey progressed so that it lost time on the ‘down’ journey west and gained it on the ‘up’ journey east.

It was the railway’s speeding-up of travel that made time differences a problem. There was considerable potential for inconvenience in the fact that clocks in Bristol did not show the same time as clocks in London, or as the watches in the pockets of travellers arriving in trains from the capital. Missed appointments, missed trains and missed connections were the likely consequence. More than this, howerver, it was also downright dangerous. The railway was run as an integrated whole, with trains interacting with each other over the same stretches of track in complex ways that necessitated a uniform method of keeping time. Even a few minutes’ discrepancy in the departure times of two trains could very easily result in an accident. The result was that the railway needed standard time even if no-one else felt that they did. Hence in 1841 the Great Western Railway’s announcement in its timetables that the company would observe London time throughout its network. The danger of arriving in London from Bridgewater with a watch showing 14 minutes behind London time and consequently missing your return train was to some extent obviated by the availability of special watches with an extra minute hand, enabling them to keep both times simultaneously without the need for adjustment; others were sold with the time differences between various places engraved inside the lid, enabling quick calculations to be made; but these were clearly short term expedients that did not overcome the essential problem.

In 1847 Henry Booth, the secretary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, published a pamphlet entitled Uniformity of Time, Considered Especially in Reference to Railway Transit and the Operation of the Electric Telegraph, in which he argued for the establishment of a standard time across Britain. Differences between one local time and another, and between railway time and local time, Booth argued, were leading to unendurable inefficiencies and anomalies in a country increasingly bound together by the rapid agencies of steam and electricity. A railway journey from east to west, he pointed out, was shown to be quicker in Bradshaw than exactly the same journey from west to east. A baby could be born in London early on Saturday morning, and news of the birth could arrive in Dublin by telegraph late on the preceding Friday night. Clocks showed different times, and man might seem to age twenty minutes just by walking in through the door of a railway station. This untidy state of affairs could not be allowed to continue:

The parish clocks in some half a dozen hamlets or fishing towns in the extreme east in quick succession, commence the long and dissonant peal; Norwich and Yarmouth, Harwich and Ramsgate, with a few hundred clock and chimes ring vigorously; Canterbury, Colchester and Cambridge ... with a thousand intermediate towns, each with its parish clock or market bell proclaiming its own time ... Westward the noise moves on . . . while every city, town, or township, or ‘extra-parochial place’ ... [marks] its particular Time ...[12]

Booth saw uniformity of time as the key to a united and coherent national effort in the direction of progress:

The great bell of St Paul’s strikes ONE, and, simultaneously, every City clock and village chime, from John of Groat’s to the Land’s End, strikes ONE, also. The finger of every watch or timepiece ... points to the same hour! ... The man of business keeps his appointment; and the traveller regulates his movements with the confidence of one who has no longer the fear of ‘the longitude’ before his eyes. There is sublimity in the idea of a whole nation stirred by one impulse; in every arrangement, one common signal regulating the movements of a mighty people![13]

Booth saw the conjunction of the railway and the electric telegraph as key to a new uniform and standard conception of time. It was, he wrote, by ‘London Time’ that ‘the great scheme of inter-communication [is] adjusted, from one end of the Kingdom to the other’, and it was through these modern means of communication that the anarchic chaos of every community preferring its own definition of the time would be replaced by a uniform and imposed acceptance of one standard: ‘the ever-varying longitude of a thousand port-towns is made subservient to the metropolitan chime of St Martin’s-le-Grand’.[14] Not for nothing did the clock become such a prominent element in railway station architecture from the 1840s onwards.

At the time of Booth’s appeal various railway companies were keeping uniform time within their own systems and the railway industry as a whole was identifying itself with the move towards uniform time across the nation itself. In 1847 the Railway Clearing House, a body set up in 1842 to co-ordinate the activities of the railway companies, recommended that each railway adopt Greenwich time at all their stations ‘as soon as the Post Office permits them to do so’.[15] This reveals the role played by the General Post Office, which had been conveying mails by rail since 1838 and clearly had an interest in establishing standard time. With the GPO’s support the largest railways and many of the smaller companies adopted Greenwich time on 1 December 1847.

Given the growth of the railway network and its growing importance in the economic and social life of the nation it is hardly surprising that railway time exerted a considerable influence, extending far beyond the rails and station themselves. The railways took the precision of their timekeeping extremely seriously; in November 1850 the London, Brighton & South Coast Board issued the following instruction to the contractor employed to wind and regulate the company’s clocks:

The Clocks must be wound regularly every week and regulated, and the Contractor must undertake to keep them exact to London time, failing which the Company reserves itself the power at once to terminate this Contract.[16]

By 1852 the use of Greenwich time was widespread, but no statute or proclamation had enforced this change: it was the railway which had brought it about through the force of its example. But the change was not universal, and was not uncontested. The railway station in every town would be displaying ‘London’ (by which the railways generally meant Greenwich) time, but that did not mean the clocks of the town itself would be doing so. Some towns and cities took the lead from the railways and changed their clocks to fit in with what the railway companies had laid down as the new national time, Manchester being a prominent example[17], but a significant part of the country, particularly in the further west and east of the island of Great Britain, still adhered to local time.

In Exeter the railway arrived in 1844; from the end of 1847 the Bristol and Exeter Railway ran to London time, but the city held to local time, 14 minutes behind London. Watches could be bought in the city showing both local and London time, and clocks in the city showed both versions of the time, as a local paper explained in 1845:

As a matter of great public convenience, a new dial affixed at St Johns Church, fore Street Hill, in this city, exhibits as well as the correct time at Exeter, the railway time, which is several minutes in advance, and non attendance to this has sometimes placed parties in unpleasant situations.[18]

A campaign to bring Exeter into line with London time began, with a petition and debates in the city council chamber. Among the evidence in favour of a change cited was ‘a dispute which arose as to a young lady being of age, owing to the church clock saying she was of age and the Cathedral clock saying she was not’.[19] The principal clock in Exeter was the cathedral clock, and in 1850 the mayor and corporation requested the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral to alter their clock to London (Greenwich) time. The Dean, however, refused. When the telegraph was brought to Exeter station in August 1852 the pressure for change increased the degree to which, as an Exeter paper put it, ‘every individual is made to feel the personal inconvenience arising from the fluctuation in the computation of time in various towns’.[20] It was not until November 1852, however, at the end of another season of determined campaigning by ‘The Committee for the Adoption of Greenwich Time in the West of England’ and others that the Dean of Exeter finally gave way. Other west country laggards such as Bath, Bristol, Devonport and Plymouth had already conceded the adjustment in September and October, in the latter case after a lively debate in the town council:

MR W. MOORE disapproved of the movement [to adopt Greenwich time], for workmen would thereby be enabled to leave work 16 minutes earlier every day, but he was sure employers would not be able to get them to come 16 minutes earlier in the morning. (A laugh.)
MR W. F. COLLIER remarked it would be well if the Mayor could cause Railway trains to arrive at the hours at which they were due.[21]

By 1855 it was estimated that 98% of the public clocks in Great Britain and Ireland were set to Greenwich Mean Time;[22] a testament to the success of teh railways in bringing about new conceptions of the importance of time.

What might be called the ‘regularisation’ of time was only part of the change which the nineteenth century brought to time consciousness. Another element was the distribution of accurate, uniform time. One part of this has already been mentioned; the availability of cheap and accurate clocks and watches. The United States and Switzerland were particularly successful in acquiring markets for mass-produced timepieces, the former for clocks, the latter for watches. American clocks were in evidence at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and by the end of the century clocks were commonplace in even the humbler working-class homes,[23] and watches were prized possessions which lay ‘through mass production within the buying power of millions’.[24] When clocks and watches were luxury items, ordinary people had to rely on the sun and public clocks to judge the passing of the hours; knowledge any more precise of time itself was restricted to the privileged. The nineteenth century democratized that knowledge, bringing accurate timekeeping to almost every mantelpiece and pocket.

The distribution of time was not solely a matter of the wider availability and greater accuracy of time pieces. The technology of precise timekeeping combined with the technology of communication in the form of the telegraph to make accurate time widely available in the nineteenth century. In 1852 the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airey, presided over the installation of a modern, very accurate chronometer at the Greenwich Royal Observatory. His idea was to connect this clock to other timekeeping devices throughout the country by means of the electric telegraph. In 1854 the chronometer was connected to the telegraph lines of the South Eastern Railway near Greenwich so that a regular electrical time signal would be carried on the railway telegraph system to London Bridge Station, from where it could be distributed through the telegraph lines to wherever it was required. By 1855 four Post Office clocks in London were regulated by this signal, and in 1856 and 1857 time balls controlled by the Greenwich signal were installed at the English & International Telegraph Company Offices in Liverpool and London, in Cornhill and the Strand, and at Deal in Kent. The balls would drop at 1pm each afternoon, enabling those passing to set their chronometers. In 1860 a ‘Time Superintendent’ was appointed at Greenwich and provided with a desk from which all the time signals being distributed by telegraph across Britain and beyond were controlled, and in 1861 you could have set your watch by the Greenwich time signal in, among other places, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Calcutta, Sydney, Quebec, Djakarta and Valparaiso.

By the time the telegraph companies were nationalized and brought under the control of the Post Office in 1870 railways, telegraphs and technological timekeeping precision had come together to establish a standard time that was becoming truly global and laid the foundations (along with the imposition of a universal time scheme for the United States, also by the railways, in 1883) for the establishment in 1884 of the Greenwich meridian as the Prime Meridian of the world and of the modern system of time zones around the globe. But these electrical time signals were not limited to the highways of empire, they were also available to the person in the street. From the 1870s it was possible for institutions and private individuals to rent a telegraphic connection that would give them access to the Greenwich signal. It became quite common for jewellers’ shops to have a clock in their window regulated by the Greenwich signal and proudly displaying ‘Greenwich Time’, and many of the railways used their telegraph systems to regulate the thousands of clocks in their stations, offices and signal boxes.

By the time of Phileas Fogg’s fictional journey in the 1870s, then, the world was effectively being bound ever more tightly into a unified regime in which time was regulated and made available as a universal organizing principle of an increasingly globalized economy. This could be seen as an instance of progress, of evolutionary development. An enthusiastic Scottish clergyman called John Blakely described it thus in 1855:

The railway and the telegraph are not only marvels of science to astonish the learned, but also ministers of physical and mental elevation to the human race. The earth itself is becoming a vast machine . . . encircled with a mechanical framework, it is bearing to and fro, upon iron rings, its living millions, while its electric net work of wire arteries is incessantly throbbing with the quick pulsations of human thoughts.[25]

There were those, however, who were concerned about the way in which society was going; and the pressures of time associated with modern society were one highly significant focus of that concern. The railway can stand as a symbol of that anxiety.

The railway, as I have argued, was in many ways the key technology of this new global system. The modern railway historian Jack Simmons has observed that the railways ‘enforced a new observance of punctuality. Through them the clock came to guide – even to rule – lives as it never had before’.[26] No more potent symbol could be found for the enforcing, regulating aspect of the railway than the dominance of the clock at the railway station. Just as the factory clock regulated the lives of industrial workers, so the station clock regulated the travels of the crowds who came and went through the portals of railway stations great and small. The railway brought the tyranny of the clock and the timetable into people’s lives, governing their every action: ‘I went to bed at night conscious that I must rise at a given and somewhat early hour, or miss my train. I am sure that this does not render sleep more sound and refreshing’, complained the eminent surgeon Dr Forbes Winslow in The Lancet in 1862; ‘In the same way breakfast is eaten with this necessity of being on time still in one’s mind.’[27] This sense of being constantly under the pressure of time has been one of the abiding anxieties of railway travel. The experience of the central character in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Henry Dunbar (1864), tormented by the fear that he will miss his connection, must have been all too familiar to many of her Victorian readers, and remains familiar to us today:

The delay attendant upon every fresh stoppage worried him, as if each pause had been the weary interval of an hour. He sat with his watch in his hand; for every now and then he was seized with a sudden terror that the train had fallen out of its regular pace, and was crawling slowly along the rails.[28]

Just as the factory clock converted the industrial worker from a human being into a regulated piece of mechanism (and it is worth remembering that this is the very period which saw the birth of the automatic time clock for checking employees in and out of work) so the station clock represented the process whereby the individual people using the railway were subsumed into a flow, turned on and off according to the timetable. The tide of commuters hurrying through the station in John Davidson’s poem ‘London Bridge’ (1909) ‘Sweeps unobservant save of time – for thrift / Or dread disposes clockward every glance’.[29]

The timetable in its modern sense arrived with the railway – the word ‘timetable’ itself is a railway coinage, first used by the London & Birmingham Railway in 1838[30] – the direct expression of the railway’s demand for precision, regulation, exact time. The complexity of railway timetables produced much incomprehension and confusion (even without the additional difficulties arising from the time outside the station being different from the time inside) as this comment on the most famous and successful of the national timetables, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, indicates:

When you get into the maze of this huge monthly magazine that scorns fiction and is congested with facts, armed with intricate tables of place-names, dots, figures, warning hands, dark lines, notes, references, indications of trains ‘up’ and trains ‘down’, trains that run on ‘week days’, trains that run on ‘Saturdays only’ and when after striving in vain for half an hour to ascertain really what time you will arrive at your destination, you alight; with your head in a fog and your eyes aching, on the encouraging words in italic ‘see above’ or ‘vice versa’ you feel inclined to fling ‘Bradshaw’ out of the window.[31]

A valuable publication entitled The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book from 1862 conveys even more vividly the extent of the timetabled regulation of the railway system and the powerful influence it had on railway passengers in this piece of advice to the traveller who wishes to avoid unnecessary stress and confusion:

About five minutes before a train starts a bell is rung as a signal to passengers to prepare for starting. Persons unaccustomed to travel by railway connect the ringing of the bell with the instant departure of the train, and it is most amusing to watch the novices running helter-skelter along the platform, tumbling over everything and everybody in their eagerness to catch the train which they believe is about to go without them. At the same time the seasoned traveller, who understands the intention of the bell, stands by the carriage door coolly surveying the panic-stricken multitude ...[32]

More seriously, a contributor to the Association Medical Journal in 1854 suggested that the pressure passengers felt from the railways’ regulated, timetabled operations could actually be fatal. The chief evils of railway travel, he writes, result from ‘the excitement, anxiety, and nervous shock consequent on the frequent efforts to catch the last express; to be in time for the fearfully punctual train ... Cases of sudden death, produced by the hurry and eagerness often required to reach the train on time, are on record’.[33] Two years later another physician writing in the same journal recounted the tragic case of how a friend who was a regular commuter on one of the lines into London ‘fell down dead on the platform of a railway station; his life being the forfeit paid for the exertion which he had made to reach the starting train’.[34] In 1868 the surgeon Alfred Haviland went so far as to publish a medical monograph dealing with just this danger of excessive punctuality entitled Hurried to Death: Especially Addressed to Railway Travellers.[35]

There were other dangers too, dangers that revealed the precarious balance between order and chaos represented by the ticking of the station clock and the close-printed figures of the railway timetable. In June 1865 there was an accident on the South Eastern Railway at Staplehurst in Kent. This was caused by the unpredictable movements of a boat train known as the ‘Tidal’ because its timetabling depended on the arrival and departure of the boat it was intended to serve at Folkestone. A group of men working on the track had not been notified of the time at which it was due to pass through on a particular day; when the train arrived the rails had not been replaced and the train jumped the track and crashed off a low bridge into a gully. Ten passengers were killed; Charles Dickens happened to be on this train, and wrote an interesting account of his experiences. But the timetable had failed and caused this accident, and in the complex, finely-balanced operation of the Victorian railway the failure of the timetable was every bit as capable of causing death and disaster as the failure of a locomotive wheel or a bridge support.

At a more humble level, errors in timekeeping could have serious consequences: business and job opportunities lost, romantic encounters ruined, articles mislaid, plans overset. Even the imperturbable Phileas Fogg nearly finds precise timekeeping too much for him. He arrives in London, he believes, too late to win his bet, having been held up on the railway journey from Liverpool to London by ‘unavoidable delays’ so that ‘Having completed his journey around the world, Phileas Fogg had arrived five minutes late’.[36] But he is mistaken: he has lost neither the time nor his bet, as his faithful servant Passepartout discovers. Without realizing it, Fogg had gained a day by going around the world eastwards:

This means that while Phileas Fogg, heading eastwards, saw the sun cross the meridian 80 times, his colleagues remaining in London saw it cross only 79 times. And this was why, on that very same day, Saturday, and not Sunday as Mr Fogg believed, they were waiting for him in the drawing-room of the Reform Club. And this is what Passepartout’s famous watch – permanently kept on London time – would have read if, as well as the minutes and the hours, it had shown the days![37]

Such a journey, and such an error, had only become possible in the Victorian age – the age of time travellers, the age of the reinvention of time.

This paper was originally given as an Open Lecture at the University of York on 23 January 2003.

© Ralph Harrington 2003. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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1. Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (1872; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 9, 14-16.

2. Verne, Around the World, p. 14.

3. Verne, Around the World, pp. 12, 15.

4. Verne, Around the World, p. 23.

5. Verne, Around the World, p. 19.

6. Mechanics’ Magazine, vol. 33 (1840), p. 518; quoted in Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 72.

7. ‘A Shareholder’ [pseudonym for Henry Booth], The Case of the Railways Considered, Especially with Reference to Railway Accidents, and the Operation of Lord Campbell’s Act (London: W. H. Smith & Son / Liverpool: Baines & Herbert, 1852), p. 7.

8. Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, with an Account of their Principal Works, comprising also a History of Inland Communication in Britain (3 vols., London: John Murray, 1862), vol. 3, p. 351.

9. Anon., Horse-power Applied to Railways at Higher Rates of Speed than by Ordinary Draught (London: John Ollivier, 1844), p. 3.

10. Anon. [attrib. Basil Montagu], Railroad Eclogues (London: William Pickering, 1846), pp. 29-30.

11. Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (London: National Maritime Museum, 1997), p. 89.

12. Quoted in Nigel Thrift, ‘The making of a capitalist time consciousness’, in John Hassard (ed.) The Sociology of Time (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 122.

13. Quoted in Thrift, ‘capitalist time consciousness’, p. 123.

14. Booth, Case of the Railways Considered, p. 4.

15. Quoted in Thrift, ‘capitalist time consciousness’, p. 123.

16. Quoted in D. R. Parr, ‘The clocks of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway’, Antiquarian Horology (Spring 1989), p. 41.

17. Freeman, Railways in the Victorian Imagination, p. 124; J. R. Kellett, Railways in Victorian Cities (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 173-4.

18. Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 16 October 1845.

19. Quoted in Thrift, ‘capitalist time consciousness’, p. 126.

20. Quoted in Thrift, ‘capitalist time consciousness’, p. 127.

21. Quoted in Howse, Greenwich Time, p. 111.

22. Thrift, ‘capitalist time consciousness’, p. 127.

23. For example, see Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914; London: Flamingo, 1993), pp. 62-3.

24. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 36.

25. John Blakely, The Theology of Inventions: or, Manifestations of Deity in the Works of Art (Glasgow: William Collins, 1855), p. 76.

26. Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 347.

27. ‘The influence of railway travelling on public health’, The Lancet, 11 January 1862, pp. 50-1.

28. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry Dunbar: the Story of an Outcast (3 vols., London: John Maxwell, 1864), vol. 2, p. 233.

29. John Davidson, The Poems of John Davidson, ed. Andrew Turnbull (2 vols., Edinburgh & London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), vol. 2, p. 435.

30. Simmons, Victorian Railway, p. 183. See also OED, ‘timetable’.

31. John Pendleton, Our Railways: their Origin, Development, Incident and Romance (2 vols., London: Cassell, 1896), vol. 2, pp. 153-4.

32. The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book (London: Lockwood, 1862), pp. 70-1.

33. ‘Railway travelling and its effects on health’, Association Medical Journal, vol. 4 (New Series), 1 December 1854, p. 1079.

34. ‘Railway travelling and its effects on health’, Association Medical Journal, vol. 4, no. clx (New Series), 26 January 1856, p. 72.

35. Alfred Haviland, Hurried to Death: Especially Addressed to Railway Travellers (London: Renshaw & Mitchell, 1868).

36. Verne, Around the World, p. 191.

37. Verne, Around the World, p. 201.