Railways and the Victorian Imagination. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2001 by Peter Bailey

Railways and the Victorian Imagination. By Michael Freeman (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. vii plus 264pp.).

For all the bullet trains of Japan and France's TGVs, the railway of today has become a sign of nostalgia, more a souvenir than an agent of modernity. Yet if there was a single phenomenon that symbolised the divide between old and new for the Victorians, it was the railway train. The word 'railway', like the prefix 'atomic' after 1945, became a descriptor for all that was modern and up to date, not least in the new dimension of 'railway time' that imposed its radical imperatives on everyday life--even cows were milked according to railway time to ensure their milk made the early morning train to town. In this impressive book Michael Freeman sets out to reanimate the shock of the new that impacted on Victorian consciousness, reconstructing a complex contemporary response, from the epic to the banal, across a wide range of texts and testimony. Thus he pursues the railway as 'cultural metaphor' within a more extensively realised social context than that acknowledged in conventional railway history. This, claims Freeman, is a long overdue exercise in a field dominated by a doggedly economic and institutional approach. There have been some instructive general treatments of the railway in Britain, there is a good social history of the railway station (across many countries) and of the navvies who cleared the way, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written suggestively on the transformation in perceptions of time and space wrought by rail travel. But most railway historians, it seems, have remained 'trainspotters' to a man--in the pre-Irvine Welsh sense--combining the enthusiasms of the hobbyist and the econometrician in scholarly mimicry of that singular British type.

Freeman marshals his rich miscellany of sources in support of several major propositions. A geographer by discipline, he is alert to the historians' current debate over the relative extent of change and continuity in Britain's industrial economy; perhaps not surprisingly he aligns the railway firmly with the forces of change, though he adds fresh weight and insight to this and other claims. It was, figuratively as well as literally, the prime engine of that 'circulatory ferment' of goods, bodies and cash that implicated a whole society in the values and practise of capitalism. The railway wrought a further profound change in engineering a new manmade landscape which both destroyed nature and revealed to all the geological evidence that undermined Creationism. It accelerated the growth of cities and defined the new culture of the suburbs. Freeman inverts his running emphasis on change and transformation in one major respect: for all that the railway democratised travel and personal mobility, it reinforced rat her than eroded the historic class differentials in British society, segregating its customers by class-specific trains, compartments, tickets, timetables and station facilities.

This is a handsome and engrossing book, lavishly and effectively illustrated, well packed and well written--the reader travels first class. Yet in taking the cultural turn, Freeman doesn't stray far from the mainline, for this remains in many ways a very conventional work of scholarship. There is little take-up on the expanding literature of modernity, no sustained attention to language or discourse, and cultural theory stops short with a few gestures to Raymond Williams. Many readers will be glad to ride free from the excesses of an overblown postmodernism, but may still feel disappointed at significant absences, most notably in the limited treatment of gender and sexuality. For Freud, the train symbolised deep anxieties over sex and death. Here we get one but not the other. Surely the train was a gendered artefact? Up front it flaunts a brazenly masculine image, in its Pullmanised interiors it is domesticated and feminised. Wordsworth used the train as a metaphor of rape, while in Forster's Howard's End Ma rgaret Schlegel luxuriates in the seductive frisson of the Great Western Express as "a forcing house for the idea of sex."

Among the literary sources that Freeman does use, Dickens figures prominently, as might be expected. Sex, death and the railway were conflated themes for Dickens, in real life as in his writing, most sensationally in the train accident that nearly killed him and his mistress, Nelly Ternan. Dickens' relationship with Nelly involved his constant use of trains and timetables, as he accommodated clandestine cross-country visits to her with the commuting of family and business life. In this ceaseless mobility and dislocation Dickens lived out the fraught exhilarations of the new multiple self that, if in less extreme terms, became a common denominator of modern experience. Thus the railway was deeply implicated in the construction of modern subjectivity, perhaps a more fruitful concept than the unexamined invocation of 'imagination' in Freeman's title, if one less likely to appeal to the general reader that the publishers clearly also have in their sights.