Representing the Victorian railway

Representing the Victorian railway:
the aesthetics of ambivalence

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

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ELIZABETH GASKELL’S LAST NOVEL, Wives and Daughters, published in the 1860s, is set in the late 1820s and early 1830s.[1] To many later nineteenth-century readers, this period appeared paradoxical, partaking of both the archaic and the modern. In some ways, the early part of the century seemed to have more in common with the 1760s than with the 1860s: a time of unreformed politics, unsophisticated Tory squires, turnpike roads, rotten boroughs, narrow and conservative rural and small-town societies. Yet it was also an age of economic, social and political upheaval and transformation; not least, it was the era which gave birth to the railway. As in the case of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), the society depicted in Wives and Daughtersis witnessing the beginning of the railway age. Molly, the central character of the story, listens to her father, Doctor Gibson, commenting upon the advent of the revolutionary form of transport:

‘... if these new-fangled railways spread, as they say they will, we shall all be spinning about the world; “sitting on tea-kettles,” as Phoebe Bromley calls it. Miss Bromley wrote such a capital letter of advice to Miss Hornblower. I heard of it at the Millers’. Miss Hornblower was going to travel by railroad for the first time; and Dorothy was very anxious, and sent her directions for her conduct; one piece of advice was not to sit on the boiler.’ Molly laughed a little, as she was expected to do.[2]

Richard Altick, in his encyclopaedic study of Victorian fiction, The Presence of the Present (1991), uses this passage to argue for the successful cultural assimilation of the railway by the 1860s. Doctor Gibson’s remark, he claims, is, for Gaskell’s mid-Victorian readership, a joke made at the expense of the unsophisticated 1830s, ‘in the spirit of amused condescension with which people in the sixties recalled the fear of the thirties’.[3] It is true that by the 1860s a process of adjustment to the railway had been going on in Britain for three decades, railways had become widespread and better understood, and people increasingly accepted them and took them for granted as part of everyday life, no more remarkable or frightening than savings banks or the penny post. But this process of assimilation was ongoing, not complete, and was more superficial than Altick allows.

If Miss Hornblower had been catching her first train in 1866 no-one would have thought it necessary to advise her not to sit on the boiler, but might very well have recommended the middle of the train as safer than the front or the back, suggested that a stopping train was safer than an express, and urged her to get out of her carriage and stand well clear if her train came to a stop between stations. By the 1860s people were surrounded by discussion of railway accidents and references to them in the press, literature and popular culture, and no particular effort would have been required to draw Miss Hornblower’s attention to the risks of rail travel. It is a suggestive coincidence that it was in 1866, the year in which Wives and Daughters was published in book form, that another work appeared which was to become a key text in the articulation of new forms of railway anxiety in the nineteenth century: John Erichsen’s On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System,[4] a work which seemed to suggest that the railway posed an insidious danger to the human constitution through the obscure nervous and other disorders it could provoke.

The anxiety associated with the railway was submerged, not conquered, by the 1860s. It receded to a deeper level of the collective unconscious, ready to re-emerge among railway passengers whenever danger seemed to threaten, and among the general public whenever a railway accident made the headlines. However widely accepted railway travel became, and however easily people apparently accustomed themselves to it, the awareness of danger and the subliminal anxiety remained.

This essay considers two nineteenth-century representations of the railway, one visual, from the 1840s, the other textual, from the 1880s, and argues that this subliminal anxiety is reflected in both through their expression of a pervasive and enduring attitude of ambivalence among the Victorians towards the railway as an agent of the potentially destructive energies of technological modernity.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued,[5] it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age.[6] As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The railway also brought more people than ever before into direct engagement with the machine. Before the coming of the railway, industry, except for those directly engaged in the activities which it required, had been a world set apart, a world which artists and writers could to some extent ignore, disguise or downplay, if they chose; as Herbert Sussman notes, ‘The standard picture of the industrial world in Victorian literature consists of smoke and flame seen from a distance’.[7] The railway, however, brought many more people than ever before into direct engagement with the machine; it carried the smoke, flame and danger of industry into the public spaces of everyday life, into towns, villages, the countryside, and compelled a response from those confronted with its dramatic, pervasive presence. Such responses could vary from the matter-of-fact to the lyrical and apocalyptic, but the dominant attitude across a range of cultural and artistic production is deep ambivalence. Victorian attitudes to the railway were governed by a conflict of desire and repulsion: desire for the benefits the railway brought, repulsion at the price it seemed to demand.

Turner’s Great Western: the destabilizing railway

For all its dramatic impact, the railway evoked surprisingly little response from artists during the first two decades of its existence. From the early nineteenth century railways were well represented in what might be called ‘lower’ and ‘popular’ art-forms, in engravings, topographical views and cartoons, but among more ‘academic’ artists there was very little interest in the railway as a subject until the 1860s. In this respect, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, painted in 1843-4, stands alone among the art of the period, as it does within Turner’s own oeuvre. Turner painted no other railway scenes, but in this one picture he expressed the full significance of the railway in the nineteenth-century imagination, and encapsulated contemporary attitudes towards the railway as a presence in the landscape and in society. Rain Steam and Speed is more than a picture of a train in the landscape. It is also an attempt to capture the new speeded-up vision associated with rail travel itself. There are differing stories about the inspiration for the picture,[8] but it is clear that Turner’s experience of travelling on a Great Western train through a rainstorm in the summer of 1843 played a vital role. The painting thus reflects Turner’s experience, not only as an observer of the railway from the outside, but as a traveller inside the train, looking out at the blurred and swirling world beyond the window.

Turner as an artist was sensitive not only to light and atmosphere, but to social, political and commercial systems.[9] He was preoccupied by travel and traffic, not only as a habitual and dedicated traveller himself, but as one fascinated by the phenomenon of commerce and the ways it is embedded in the social and physical environment. As a result, his Rain Steam and Speed is alive to the significance of the railway at more levels than the purely visual. The train is an image of speed and power, an expression of the elemental forces of fire and water, but it is also the dictatorial re-orderer of the landscape, an agent of metropolitan expansion and influence, a component part within a network with national ramifications, the creator of a new age of commerce and communication.

The setting Turner chose for his picture reflects his concern with these themes. Approaching Maidenhead, 25 miles from London, the Great Western Railway main line crosses the River Thames on a brick-built bridge, slightly downstream from the eighteenth-century stone bridge which carries the London to Bath road. At this spot (in an area of beautiful scenery which Turner had painted several times in the century and which he knew well), road and river, the old conduits of traffic and arteries of the state’s commercial and political power, intersected the new metal highway, the railway. It is an intersection rich in symbolism and expressive power, and Turner exploited it to the full.

The picture shows an early morning train from London heading westwards across the Thames on the new bridge, as a rainstorm sweeps through the valley. The railway cuts diagonally across the canvas, from the dead centre to the bottom right-hand corner. To the left of the line is the old Maidenhead road bridge, with the forested escarpments of Cliveden rising above it in the distance. Between the two bridges curves the bank of the river, upon which some people are to be seen, seemingly waving or cheering the train. In front of them, a boat containing two figures drifts across the river. To the right of the railway bridge a ploughman and his team make their way steadily across a field. In the foreground on the bridge, between the broad-gauge rails, a hare races ahead of the speeding train. The picture presents a study in all-comprehending light, its surface a swirling haze of white, gold and blue, out of which the dark shape of the train erupts, prodigious and inexorable.

The painting can be seen as a hymn to the power of the railway, and an assertion of the beauty of this new technological marvel. By extension, it can be said to be a celebration of the technological future which the railway heralds. Yet the composition of the painting suggests that the railway is also a destabilizing, disruptive force, bursting through existing structures and shattering established distinctions and dispositions. The bold diagonal of the railway thrusts across the canvas, cutting directly across the other main structural member of the composition: a horizontal line, formed by the upper edge of the trees and foliage on either side of the railway bridge and, significantly, the line of the old road bridge on the left of the picture. This horizontal line represents stasis, stability, passivity; the diagonal slash of the railway embodies energy, purpose, power. Turner has further stressed this distinction by modifying the geography of the site, exaggerating the curve of the river and the divergence of the two bridges (which in reality are almost parallel) to strengthen the contrast between the old and the new means of transport, and between the old system of commerce which exists within the established order of things and the new system which cuts through it.

The focal point of the picture is the front of the locomotive. The dark masses of the smokebox and chimney are sharply outlined, constituting the most distinct shapes in the painting. Their clarity against the blurred background of rain and mist draws the viewer’s eye towards the front of the train and serves to catapult it forward from the canvas, adding energy to its headlong onward rush. When W. M. Thackeray saw the picture in 1844 he was struck by the energy of the train which, he suggested, was barely contained by the confines of the canvas: ‘there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, which the reader had better make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite’.[10] The glow at the front of the locomotive is ambiguous. Although fiery in appearance it is in the wrong place to be the glow of the firebox, whether actual or reflected; unless – as has been suggested by Stephen Daniels[11] – Turner’s art here becomes metaphysical, allowing us to see right through the structure of the locomotive to the blazing fire behind the boiler which is the heart of its strength. Such a conception has no parallel elsewhere in Turner’s art, and while it is possible that (as Daniels suggests) he was influenced by cutaway diagrams of locomotives there is no evidence that this was the case. It is perhaps more likely that the glow represents the light of the train’s headlamps, scattered and magnified by the mist and the rain. The French engraver and painter Félix Bracquemond interpreted it as a headlamp in his unfinished etching La Locomotive. D’Après Turner (1874);[12] and when Théophile Gautier saw the picture in the 1870s he also read the fiery glow as a headlamp, writing of the engine ‘opening its red glass eye in the shadows, and dragging after it, in a huge tail, its vertebrae of carriages’.[13] Whatever Turner’s intentions, the effect is that the locomotive appears as a monster breathing fire as it advances towards us, an effect strengthened, as Gautier observed, by the lizard- or dragon-like tail formed by the train behind, a dark articulated mass tapering away into the mist.

The railway bridge itself was a celebrated, but uncertain, monument of the new railway age, and in Turner’s picture it constitutes an ambiguous presence. Built in 1839 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the bridge immediately became one of the notable sites of the Great Western Railway. So shallow were the two arches Brunel constructed across the two hundred yard width of the river that it was widely believed that the bridge could collapse at any time; but it stood, justifying the faith of its builder and securing its reputation as a marvel of modern engineering.[14] Turner has shown the red-brick parapets as bold and striking, framing the railway as it surges across the canvas (he concentrates the energy of the train further by showing only one line of railway; in reality there were two), but the lower part of the arches and the central support are lost in the mist, seeming to fluctuate and shimmer insubstantially in the golden haze. This ephemeral vision prompts a question in the viewer’s mind: is the train of progress secure upon its rails? ‘Let the world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’,[15] Tennyson had written only a few years before Turner painted Rain Steam and Speed, the poet’s subliminal desire for reassuring stability perhaps finding expression in his (mistaken) impression that the train was held firm in its path by grooves in the rails. In fact the rails were smooth, and Tennyson’s train, like Turner’s, could be seen as poised rather uncertainly above a yawning abyss. If Turner is expressing a faith in technological progress with this image of his powerful, prodigious train, he also seems to be questioning that faith with his depiction of this daring, debatable bridge.

Rain Steam and Speed, then, is a picture fraught with ambiguities and anxieties. It is too simplistic to see Turner’s train as ‘a beautiful, extraordinary apparition’ celebrating the artist’s belief in a future he found ‘beautiful’ and ‘exhilarating’.[16] Turner’s vision is more complex than that. It is a truly sublime vision, a perception of beauty, certainly, but a terrible, awesome beauty redolent of vast imponderable energies and dark forebodings. Furthermore, it is a beauty which questions progress. It is not the value of progress that is questioned; Turner was unafraid of change, believing that the world had to undergo a process of constant destruction, re-creation and renewal. Rather, through his visualization of the Great Western Railway, Turner is questioning the security of the foundations upon which progress is erected, and the structures through which its energies are channelled and controlled.

Michael Reynolds and the railway poetic/pastoral/apocalyptic

When Michael Reynolds, a distinguished and experienced railway engineer, wrote an account of the excitement and danger of engine-driving in 1889, he began with a description of the train in the landscape which was poised between the poetic and the apocalyptic. For Reynolds, the railway locomotive was:

... the most beautiful mechanical construction of this or any other time. We watch it under steam from a distance, from meadows where in sun the cattle graze, and it seems to fly as the swallows fly – skimming above the horizon, and presently we see its colossal form crossing the mighty arches which span the valley of the river. Then we on the platform shrink from it aghast as it rushes past in the full thunder of its power, and, straining on its course like some mighty monster broken loose, it is an object of intense and almost passionate interest.[17]

Reynolds begins his account with what appears to be an artful assimilation of a new technology into the pastoral discourse of the pre-industrial age. The presence of the train in the landscape is described in the time-hallowed terms of the bucolic rural idyll: sun, meadow, river, grazing animals. The train is located in the countryside and, viewed ‘from a distance’, blends into the arcadian scene to the extent that its motion is not seen as mechanical at all but as an echo of the low, rapid, swooping flight of the swallow. The train’s motion, it is implied, is, like the bird’s flight, an organic part of the rural scene; it is a phenomenon which is naturally present among the meadows, trees and hedges which make up the landscape, rather than artificially cutting through them. When Reynolds comments on the size and power of the locomotive for the first time he acknowledges the scale of the railway’s impact on the landscape in his reference to the ‘mighty arches’ of the viaduct, but the train itself remains distant, one element in an overall scene rather than the dominating focus of the image.

This distant focus changes abruptly in the final sentence of the passage, with its dramatic shift in point of view. The pastoral idyll is suddenly replaced with an altogether more ambiguous and threatening image. The landscape setting shrinks, the locomotive grows and fills the scene. The sudden change in viewpoint, from some undefined position overlooking a formulaically evoked rural scene to the very specific location of the railway station platform brings us, the readers/viewers, very close to the speeding locomotive. It locates us concretely in the scene as railway passengers, and compels us to recognize that we must entrust our safety to this vast and terrifying machine. The locomotive’s great size and power are forced upon our consciousness, and the danger inherent in its speed and energy is apparent: it is now a ‘mighty monster broken loose’, and as it thunders past we ‘shrink from it aghast’. The immense energies which drive it onward are, it is suggested, only barely contained, for it is ‘straining on its course’, threatening to break away and spread death and destruction all around it. The train as a benign presence in the landscape, its placid course signalled by distant puffs of white steam, has metamorphosed into a colossal metal monster threatening to overwhelm us with its speed, power and danger.

The careful construction and abrupt destruction of the arcadian idyll in which Reynolds places his locomotive reflect the efforts of many such nineteenth-century commentators to neutralize the anxiety which the railway provoked by assimilating it to the known, the safe, the traditional – and the fragility of that process when confronted with its vast and threatening reality. The placing of the railway at a distance in the rural landscape – a mode of representation which might be called the railway pastoral – constituted an important type of contemporary response to its challenging, alarming presence. Engravings and pictures from the 1830s and 40s often show the railway as an unobtrusive part of the rural scene, harmonized with, and tamed by, picturesque compositions of hill, vale, river and park.[18] The railway pastoral can also be found in written form, in guidebooks such as T. R. Potter’s The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town of Leicester (1842). The nearby town of Loughborough, Potter observes, ‘when viewed from the summit of Long Cliff has a noble, city-like appearance. From this point too, the trains of the Midland Counties Line, may be observed, almost uninterruptedly, from Silesby to Derby and form a pleasing object darting across the grand panorama’.[19] Here town, countryside and railway form a single harmonious composition in which the railway line with its trains is viewed from a distance and assimilated into the prospect. Even in cases where overt hostility to the railway is being expressed, the terms in which objection to its presence is couched can reveal an underlying adherence to the railway pastoral; as in the following lines, which were recited at a public meeting held to oppose the construction of new railways in Bournemouth in 1882:

’Tis well from far to hear the railway scream
And watch the curling lingering clouds of steam,
But let not Bournemouth – health’s approved abode,
Court the near presence of the iron road.[20]

As in Reynold’s conception, the train at a distance can be safely accommodated in the pastoral frame, but its ‘near presence’ is quite another matter. The railway pastoral represents an attempt to constrain the energy and potential danger of the railway. The difficulty with it is that the essence of the pastoral lies in its passivity, its maintenance of a harmony of stasis. The essence of the railway is movement, noise, fire, smoke, a disharmony of managed violence. As the Bournemouth verse implies, and Reynolds’s words make explicit, the railway cannot be neutralized; the brute force of its reality inevitably breaks down the constraining constructions of pastoral representation.[21] The attempt at assimilation is, in the end, unsuccessful. Like Turner, Reynolds may appear at first to be neutralizing the train by placing it in a landscape and subjecting it to the conventions of pre-industrial landscape representation, but the train bursts those conventions apart and forces us to confront it, the new age it brings, and the anxieties it provokes within us.

J. M. W. Turner’s Rain Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1843-4) is in the collection of the National Gallery, London, and is not reproduced here for copyright reasons. The painting can be viewed on the National Gallery website.

© Ralph Harrington 2006. 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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Notes

1. Angus Easson, in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Wives and Daughters, dates the events of the novel to 1827-30, and has some interesting observations on Gaskell’s depiction of the era, its significance for Victorian readers, and the nature of Gaskell’s ‘anachronisms’. See Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. xiv-xviii (introduction).

2. Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866), in The Works of Mrs Gaskell (8 vols., London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1906), vol. 8, chap. 52, p. 654. The story was published in Cornhill between 1864 and 1866, and appeared as a book in the latter year, after Gaskell’s death.

3. Richard D. Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991), p. 195.

4. John E. Erichsen, On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (London: Walton & Maberly, 1866).

5. See, for example, H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport: An Economic Survey from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), p. 188; P. J. Cain, ‘Railways 1870-1914: the maturity of the private system’, in Michael J. Freeman and D. H. Aldcroft (eds.), Transport in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 92.

6. Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 16.

7. H. L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 10.

8. See Simmons, Victorian Railway, pp. 127-8. Simmons is mistaken when he states that Turner himself said that he painted this picture in order to show what he could do with an ugly subject; it was John Ruskin who made this suggestion, when he was asked why he thought Turner, who was an artist he greatly admired, had chosen to paint a railway scene. Significantly, given Ruskin’s antipathy to railways, this appears to have been his only comment on Rain Steam and Speed. See The Works of John Ruskin, ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. 35, p. 601 (note).

9. Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

10. W. M. Thackeray, ‘May gambols, or, Titmarsh in the picture-gallery’, Fraser’s Magazine, June 1844; in The Oxford Thackeray (17 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1908), vol. 2, p. 630.

11. Stephen Daniels, ‘Images of the railway in nineteenth century paintings and prints’, in Train Spotting: Images of the Railway in Art (Nottingham: Nottingham Castle Museum, 1985), p. 8; see also Daniels, Fields of Vision, p. 128.

12. John Gage, Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 9-10, where Bracquemond’s etching is reproduced.

13. John Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed (London: Allen Lane, 1972), p. 33.

14. See L. T. C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A Biography (1957; pbk. edn., London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 171-2. Adrian Vaughan, in his more recent biography, gives a slightly different version but (typically) provides no references in support of his account: Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant (London: John Murray, 1991), pp. 76-8, 96-7.

15. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (3 vols., London: Longman, 1969, 2nd edn. 1987), vol. 2, p. 118.

16. Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 162.

17. Michael Reynolds, Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Son, 1889), p. 4.

18. Daniels, ‘Images of the railway’, in Train Spotting, pp. 7-8.

19. T. R. Potter, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town of Leicester (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1842), p. 187.

20. Jack Simmons (ed.), Railways: An Anthology (London: Collins, 1991), p. 69.

21. See Leo Marx’s suggestive discussion of this point in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 11-33.