Ex officio, headmasters do not care for any kind of Saturnalia, and headmasters of Eton tend not to be enthusiasts for a ‘mixed crowd’. Under Hawtrey’s predecessor, the enthusiastic flogger John Keate, Eton had objected to the proposal for the Great Western, even though the line was a full mile and a half away. Keate was worried not only about the arrival of a mixed crowd, but about the possibility of his own boys taking the train for the purpose of ‘degrading dissipation’.
At Rugby, the higher-minded Dr Thomas Arnold welcomed the first train through the town on the London & Birmingham with the words: ‘I rejoice to see it and think that feudality is gone forever’. But the school had certainly not rejoiced when the planned route was first published, showing the tracks right by the school. The governing body acted quickly to get them shifted across town.
The coming of the railways confused the upper classes. The initial response was one of horror but then, as the reality hit home, the more pragmatic landed proprietors realized there was money to be made from discreet blackmail if a company wanted to cross your land and from improved commerce if it arrived nearby. And the fact was, that once people used the railway, they were won over. Even first-class was less than luxurious in those early days. When the young Gladstone went home to North Wales to get married in 1839 he wrote in his diary: ‘200 miles to Hawarden. Dust from engine annoying to the eyes and filthy in the carriage. I had dreaded the motion backward.’ But it was infinitely better than the stagecoach.
Prince Albert (‘Not quite so fast next time, Mr Conductor, if you please,’) made his railway debut that same year, and that embodiment of sturdy Victorian virtues encouraged the Queen to have a go three years later between Slough and Paddington. She wrote to her Uncle Leopold that she was quite charmed.
Victoria, though now presumed to have been born at the age of eighty, was in her twenties at the time. Her generation was to be the railway generation. Their parents and, particularly, grandparents remained wary, fearful of the speed (Albert was always a little elderly) and of the change the railway was bringing. The Devon squire Cecil Torr, looking back in 1918, recalled his father’s relish as the journey from London to their house near Lustleigh became less arduous. It took twenty-one hours in the Defiance coach in 1841. By 1845 the express from Paddington got him to Exeter in four and a half hours, with another three hours to get home. But Grandfather Torr was never quite reconciled. ‘However glad I should be to receive my call,’ he said, as he looked forward to death, ‘I would prefer home to a railway carriage.’
His contemporaries felt the same. Lord Melbourne, prime minister from 1835 to 1841 and Queen Victoria’s mentor, told her years later that he had never liked railways because ‘they brought such a shocking set of people who commit every horror’. (His view may have been coloured because at the moment he took office, he had just made a very rash investment in the Nottingham Railway.) The Duke of Wellington understandably left it thirteen years after the unfortunate Huskisson business before using a train again. He complained that railways would only ‘encourage the lower classes to travel about’.
The fears of the 1820s had been apocalyptic; in the 1830s they were more specific and real, but still verging on the hysterical. ‘Your scheme is preposterous in the extreme!’ the royal surgeon Sir Astley Cooper told Robert Stephenson and his colleagues as he explained just what he was planning to plonk by his estate at Berkhamsted. ‘Do you think for one moment of the destruction of property involved in it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse!’ By the 1840s as the upper-classes began to see the advantages and seize them when they presented themselves, opposition evaporated into, at worst, a grudging acceptance.
There were a handful of hold-outs. The most splendidly vindictive must have been John Younghusband of Cumberland who left his property to a relative ‘on condition that he should never travel on the Carlisle & Silloth Bay Railway or receive into his house any of the promoters of that undertaking’. Apparently, it had used its compulsory powers to acquire some of his land.
There was also old Lady Suffield who continued to ride up to London in her own carriage to avoid other people. But most of the nobility tried to get the best of both worlds: they didn’t want the railway in their back yards necessarily, but out of sight and sound just a short distance away was very handy. Even Wellington, who had been given a special deal that no station would be placed within five miles of his home, Stratfield Saye in Hampshire, gave way to his neighbours and permitted one at Mortimer, three miles away.
They tried to get the best of both worlds while travelling too. The ever-snotty Great Western Railway was particularly anxious to help in this regard, maintaining, at Bath, separate pens on the platform for first- and second-class. The third-class passengers are presumed to have been in the goods shed.
The aristocracy maintained their own superior version of first-class by travelling in their own private carriages, lashed to a flatbed truck, as though they were still on the road. This had one huge advantage – it offered the speed of the railway rather than the road, while maintaining privacy. But there were a number of disadvantages: for a start, it must have been fearfully bumpy. Also the horses had to travel separately, and frequently ended up somewhere totally different, especially if the journey involved the change of gauge at Gloucester.
The biggest problem of all became clear to the Countess of Zetland when a spark from the engine ignited an umbrella, and then her whole carriage, near Rugby in 1847. She and her maid took refuge outside on the truck but, with the train still travelling at 40mph, the maid hurled herself off and was badly injured. ‘How long,’ asked The Times wearily, ‘will railway companies delay establishing a means of communication between passengers and the guard? A surprisingly long time, actually.
Through want of imagination, mixed with inertia and snobbery, British trains had been modelled on the stagecoach from the start. The long survival of this system, according to Philip Bagwell, was explained by ‘the Englishman’s fixed determination to remain as isolated as possible from those who have the effrontery to travel on the same train as himself’. Visiting Americans, used to the conviviality and convenience of their trains, looked on aghast. The practice of conveying private road carriages disappeared in the 1850s and, gradually, the upper classes made their own accommodation with the new reality though, for some, it took longer than others. The writer Augustus Hare told how his mother would refuse to take the train all the way into London, but would get horses to meet her at a convenient station so she would not actually be seen in town alighting from a train. Sitting opposite strangers, she said, was ‘so excessively improper’.
Even first-class strangers.
Every Fool in Buxton
Eventually, new forms of etiquette emerged to cope with the disagreeable situation of sharing carriages with people to whom one has not been introduced. Britain’s love-hate relationship with the railways was starting to take shape. But one highly influential group did its best to remain aloof, and moulded that relationship into the tortured shape that it would assume forever.
The British intellectual response to the advent of the railways is usually summed up in two much-quoted literary references. Just two. One was Dickens’ representation – in 1848 – of an engine as the inexorable agent of doom in Dombey and Son, first in the tormented mind of Dombey, mourning his son (‘Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle . . . the remorseless monster, Death!’), and then as the instrument of retribution against the villainous Carker.
The other reference was Ruskin’s withering denunciation of what became the Midland main line from St Pancras to Manchester.
There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening – Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light – walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags . . . You Enterprised a Railroad
through the valley – you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale upon its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.
Neither of these passages is characteristic of what you might call a consistent intellectual position. Nostalgia was always strong in Dickens. Like Thackeray – and unlike most of their readers – he harked back to coaching days. There is a far more effective piece of Dickensian writing, it seems to me, in The Uncommercial Traveller, the now little-read collection of sketches he wrote in the last decade of his life, the 1860s. Here he returns to his boyhood home in Kent.
As I left Dullborough [presumably Chatham] in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage-coach . . . With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted back into Dullborough the other day, by train . . . and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field. It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads. The coach that had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; the locomotive that had brought me back was called severely No. 97 and belonged to S.E.R., and was spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.
In reality, no traveller was more commercial than Dickens, and he travelled frequently by train, as did Ruskin, usually cited as the ultimate railway-hater. Ruskin’s works, being even more voluminous than Dickens’, contain, like the Bible, pretty much any quotation that might suit one’s purpose. At various times he expressed support for nationalization, a bizarre hatred of ornamentation on railway stations and a tender affection for the steam engine: ‘I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath.’
Matthew Arnold, obliged to make a living as a schools inspector and spend his life enduring missed connections, cold platforms and draughty waiting rooms, saw the railways as part of the embodiment of middle-class philistinism, a word he popularized. There was also Wordsworth who, in 1833, extended a grudging welcome to this strange new creature called the locomotive:
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art.
That lasted until someone tried to stick a line through to Windermere:
Is there no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault?
Yet in Britain, in what became the home of railway enthusiasm, it was difficult, in those early days, to find writers willing to admit that they welcomed the trains. The intellectual classes always have a problem with change. They reacted with almost unanimous distaste to the crudities of Thatcherism, without rejecting the financial benefits it brought most of them. They even shuddered at the first sight of a word processor, and said that they could not possibly give up their typewriter, until they realized the machine’s liberating power.
What the literati say and do is not always the same. Ruskin’s attacks on capitalism were funded by his inheritance and his investments. The mania’s improbable victims included the Brontë sisters who, at Emily’s urging, invested their aunt’s legacy in Hudson’s Yorkshire & North Midland. Darwin, more prudently, sat out the mania and then built up a portfolio of railway investments that gave him the financial security to write On the Origin of Species.6
When the railway age began, the few writers to enthuse about it were at the solid-good-sense end of the spectrum like that fount of wit, wisdom and humanity, the Rev. Sydney Smith:
Railroad travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly longer and quicker than the Solan goose. The mamma rushes sixty miles in two hours to the aching finger of her conjugating and declining grammar boy. The early Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly before the setting sun . . .
That was his softening-up exercise for a furious campaign against the Great Western Railway for locking their passengers inside the trains leaving them open to possible incineration, as had happened at Versailles in 1842. As he wrote to the publisher, John Murray:
Every fresh accident on the railroads is an advantage, and leads to an improvement. What we want is an overturn which would kill a bishop, or at least a dean. The mood of conveyance would then become perfect.
Smith never did get his bishop. But otherwise that is a pretty accurate prediction of how safety would progress on the railways, which any health and safety inspector could endorse. Among British novelists of the era, the only out-and-out enthusiast for the railways seems to have been the fox-hunting bard R. S. Surtees, as in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (1864):
People can now pick and choose wives all the world over, instead of having to pursue the old Pelion on Ossa or Pig upon Bacon system of always marrying a neighbour’s child. So we now have an amalgamation of countries and counties, and a consequent improvement in society – improvement in wit, improvement in wine, improvement in ‘wittles’, improvement in everything.
The high priests of Victorian culture and conscience looked on with disdain. Yet this pattern was peculiarly British. France, with far less reason to look back to an idealized past, was divided between Saint-Simonians and Parnassians, modernizers and sceptics. In railway terms, there were loathers (like Flaubert) and lovers (like Balzac). Flaubert would compile lists of his pet hates, which varied from time to time. ‘Railways, factories, chemists and mathematicians’ was one version. ‘Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine’ was a more resonant one. But the railways remained a constant.
Later, Zola, in La Bête Humaine, used trains not merely as a setting but as characters in a fearful story of love and vengeance. Jacques the engine driver no longer had his much-loved locomotive, Lison. This new one was grimly called No. 608. Just like the change from Timpson’s Blue-eyed Maid to No. 97 – except that the railway itself is not seen as the source of unwanted change. We are catching our first glimpse of railway nostalgia.
In British literary fiction, a locomotive’s main purpose was as a device to bump off unwanted characters (like Carker, or Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister) more effectively than any stagecoach. You wouldn’t catch a Victorian British novelist becoming lyrical about one, any more than you would be likely to see Martin Amis or Will Self standing on a platform writing down engine numbers. But one great nineteenth-century European artist did exactly that: the composer Antonin Dvorák, even in his distinguished old age when he was probably the most famous man in Prague. Dvorák habitually made a daily journey to the station to find out which engine was pulling his favourite train; unable to get there one day, he sent his favourite student, Josef Suk, instead. ‘Himself no railway enthusiast, Suk dutifully noted the number: but took it from the tender, not the locomotive,’ according to Ian Carter. ‘This solecism almost cost him the chance to marry Dvorák’s daughter.’
In the US technological progress has always been received with far more gratitude than in Britain. ‘Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844. ‘The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.’ And there even the Arcadians were comparatively relaxed. In the midst of his masterpiece Walden, Henry David Thoreau burst into song:
What’s the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
This was fair enough.
But the moment passed quickly.
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway.
A British Thoreau would have been apoplectic. I did wonder if I was reading too much into the literary responses, and over-elaborating British attitudes compared to everyone else’s simply because I was writing a book and needed a theory. Then I went to Liverpool.
The exhibition ‘The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam’ was shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in 2008 and early 2009, bringing together more than one hundred works from across the world. And it was possible to see the same national distinctions at work on canvas as on the page.
Here was American triumphalism in full cry. Westward the Star of Empire Takes its Way proclaimed Andrew Melrose as the title of an 1867 painting of an engine at dawn scattering the deer in Iowa. Here was the French fascination with the interplay of the machine and the landscape. Indeed, perhaps the most charming of all paintings of British railways came from both Camille Pissarro, and his son Lucien, in the improbable settings of Dulwich, Bedford Park and Acton. And here – most delightfully – was the magnificent twentieth-century Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux, who was obsessed with painting naked women and railway stations and sometimes (The Iron Age, 1951) both together. (What more could a boy ask for?)
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