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Transportation Industry

'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2000 by Carter, Ian

The British paradox

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'Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the practice of railway history in the east ten years or so,' Michael Robbins wrote in 1957, `has been a genuine attempt to seek out new evidence, to probe new sources, and to bring a more vigorously critical approach to bear on the traditional accounts.'1 Reading forty years' issues of this journal, one wonders at parts of that judgement. Still dominating other forms of transport history,2 railway history certainly has explored new sources, but vigorous criticism is trammelled in a narrow range. The founding editors regretted failing to bridge divisions between historians in academic and other worlds,3 but their sense of who constitutes a 'proper' transport historian has been policed strictly. Professional academics' guarded and suspicious attitude to swarming amateur railway historians4 contrasts sharply with the trajectory in certain other sub-disciplines. Industrial archaeology was invented by amateurs but then enriched by professional expertise. Much the same tale can be told of that creatively strident organ History Workshop Journal. The membrane between family reconstruction and genealogy grows ever more permeable. Beyond these domains, for several centuries professional astronomy rested firmly on evidence provided by amateur labourers. This broad lesson should be learnt. Maintaining a cordon sanitaire between the professionally academic Journal of Transport History and swarming publications catering to amateur interests (from the Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society down to Rail) may assuage fears about pollution,5 but at excessive cost. Bringing to term 'a truly comprehensive science and art of the history of transport'6 must see new lines built out from economic history's well developed territory into less charted spaces in social and cultural history. While not abandoning proper canons of evidence, transport historians should worry less about patrolling respectability's boundaries. A newer and wider discipline, railway studies, can now be built on railway history's firm base.

Let me justify this broad claim by probing what railway historians take to be a curious absence: the lack of a major British railway novel. In his magisterial survey of the Victorian railway Jack Simmons judges that `The success of the first steam railways evoked little interest from English imaginative writers.'7

He ascribes this lack of interest to contemporary literary market signals, with technical matters deemed no fit subject for serious fiction.8 These judgements are too hasty. By limiting attention to 'serious' authors included in today's literary canon he fails to notice an important register shift in railways' fictional representation: a shift which influences (in ways which largely lie beyond our compass here) British railways' current public reputation. In the first section of this article we shall see that the likeliest candidate for Britain's canonical railway novel, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, cannot bear the weight that commentators seek to load on it. We then move, through a brief comparison of Arnold Bennett and G. K. Chesterton and a discussion of E. M. Forster's Howards End, to a very different kind of fiction. Entwined with contested notions of 'Englishness' and with British railways' twentieth-century economic history, we see that comic novels and short stories comprise an unstudied province of `railway fiction'. Taking comic fiction seriously, we end up proposing a surprising candidate for Britain's railway novel.

The problem

`Type of the modern', in Walt Whitman's famous phrase, for our greatgrandparents railways exemplified `the Enlightenment project': distance and time annihilated through practical science disciplined to pursue profit. So much that we take for granted today was invented or perfected in the nineteenth century to facilitate railways' development, or to limit their potential for political, fiscal or physical mayhem: standardised time, a disciplined and uniform labour force, large-scale bureaucratic organisation, joint-stock industrial corporations, close State regulation of private capitalists' activities.

In the first of his three books tracing the birth of modern consciousness, the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch insists that the modern railway's significance lay not in one element (usually taken to be the steam locomotive, or an iron wheel's low frictional resistance on an iron rail). It was the way in which many elements interlocked - the machine ensemble - which made railways so potent and so revolutionary.9 Different regional and national histories qualified compatibility in this machine ensemble. Varied track gauges, loading gauges, driving positions, coupling arrangements (and, later, automatic braking systems): all these factors - and aesthetic differences - modestly roughened Tennyson's `ringing grooves of change' as their chiselled progress crossed Europe, and beyond. But rails (not grooves: poets habitually suffer from short sight) did spread. Uniformities in the machine ensemble outweighed differences.

Transportation Industry

'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2000 by Carter, Ian

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