'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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We need little nous to appreciate that late Chesterton differs from early Bennett in tone. One applauds progress, the other retrogression. One celebrates the stern, the other the whimsical. Writing about railways evidently can sustain both these styles, but in different voices. What underlies this tension, these differences? To begin to answer that question we need a brief detour into notions of the pastoral. Investigating literary arcadianism towards the end of the long nineteenth century (when Bennett and Chesterton wrote their best work), John Lucas makes Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' a `vision of a lost England', of `the deep heart of England in the shires'.31 He then moves to a close reading of E. M. Forster's Howards End. Lucas works with simple dyads: country/city; feudalism/modernity. Showing how literary evaluations of country and city shift over time as material interests bloom and fade, Raymond Williams is a good deal more subtle. His notion of neo-pastoralism,32 with pre-capitalist literary conventions put to work legitimising agrarian capitalist social relations, provides a scale against which to measure Lucas's argument. Edward Thomas's closing lines certainly can be conjured to celebrate English nature-as-a-garden.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

But this ruralist reading can be sustained only if (with Lucas) one ignores the poem's opening quatrain:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

This is a railway poem. Indeed, it is the most famous railway poem in English,33 and much parodied. Its striking power comes from Thomas's quiet cunning in filling old bottles with new wine, inserting his machine in the Edwardians' cultural garden. This train - an express train, direct descendant of Dombey's ravaging `monster, Death' - disturbs nobody. Industrialism's strident emergent element nestles comfortably in a cosy neo-pastoralist structure of feeling. Thomas's train is a trusted friend, as much at home in the landscape as that loved wych elm in the garden at Howards End.

Unnoticed by almost all commentators,34 Howards End could be a candidate for the British railway novel. The house which gives E. M. Forster's book its name lies close to Stevenage ('Hilton'), in Hertfordshire. Characters routinely travel between London and Hilton by train. Forster draws fine distinctions:

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, [Margaret Schlegel] had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down [in railway parlance: the physical gradient rises] the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realise this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner, who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.