The Railways Read online

  None of this required much by way of further discourse. Indeed, the sparseness of conversation in railway compartments was so often remarked upon that the difference from the custom of the road must have been real. ‘Generally speaking, the occupants of a railway carriage perform the whole of the journey in silence; but if one passenger be more loquaciously inclined than the rest, he is soon silenced by abrupt or tart replies, or by a species of grunt expressive of dissent or dissatisfaction’: thus The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book. The Penny Illustrated Paper caught the habitual mood in first class in the same year, 1862:

  Every-body seems to have an idea that he is the only one who is really entitled, by payment and position, to a seat therein, and so is afraid of compromising his dignity by speaking. There is, consequently, no conversation; the heads of the four corner occupants are usually looking out of the windows, and the centre ones looking at each other.

  Samuel Sidney’s Rides on Railways (1851) dared to prefer the ‘vulgar and amusing’ companionship of third class to the ‘dull and genteel’ assortment at the other end of the train; this after a starchy outward journey in the company of an Oxford MA, an army officer, a Somerset House clerk and a man who had been visiting a lord, and a cheerful return spent with a tailor, a sailor, a bird-catcher and an ex-convict in greasy velveteens, for whom Reading gaol was the winter resort of choice (‘plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed’). A similar rigidity was observed by American visitors. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded of first-class carriages in 1852: ‘Nothing is to be seen or learnt there; nobody to be seen but civil and silent gentlemen, sitting on their cushioned dignities.’ Harriet Beecher Stowe – she of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (also 1852) – found the railway compartment an analogy for ‘that privacy and reserve which is the dearest and most sacred part of an Englishman’s nature … a stranger might travel all through England, from one end to the other and not be on conversing terms with a person in it’.

  Observations of these differences worked in both directions. In particular, the contrast with habits on American trains threw the taciturnity of Victorian (and Continental) travel into relief. Here is Dickens, in his American Notes for General Circulation (1842), journeying from Boston to Lowell. He explained to British readers that railroad cars over there had single, undivided interiors, ‘like shabby omnibuses, but larger’. Each held thirty to fifty passengers, seated two by two in benches either side of a central gangway. The entrance or entrances were at the ends. In the middle was usually a coal stove, which Dickens found made the air ‘insufferably close’. Apart from that, the main difference was the freedom of speech: ‘Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy.’ The conductor – whose duties usually included the sale of tickets – was himself at liberty to strike up conversation as he strolled up and down the car: actions at once physically impossible and socially unacceptable for his British equivalent, the railway guard. Nor was conversation confined to polite neutralities: Dickens noted especially discussion of politics, banks and cotton, the hard realities of a young and commercial nation. Travelling in the US twenty years later, Anthony Trollope found the same single-class conventions in place – distasteful to him, as representing ‘confusion between social and political equality’.

  What British visitors apparently failed to discern was the social space from which this habitual jawing and ear-bending derived, a space that predated the railroads, without having been vanquished by them: namely, the riverboat saloon. It was the rivers, not railroads or stagecoaches, that first opened up the interior of North America to settlement and commerce, and anyone travelling long distances sooner or later found themselves afloat on one. The free-and-easy conventions of the riverboat saloon transferred naturally to the railroad, where the capacious interiors likewise allowed the option of moving seats to join in a conversation, or to withdraw with a measure of politeness if the exchanges proved boring or vexatious. Circulation was encouraged further by another American convention recorded by Dickens, even though it cannot always have been respected: if a lady took a fancy to a male passenger’s seat, her male companion would make the preference known and the occupant would move elsewhere.

  Yet it will not do to think of the early railroad cars of the USA as open to everyone equally. A ‘negro car’ was included in Dickens’s train, ‘as a black man never travels with a white one’. The wording is sardonic: at the moral centre of the American Notes is the perception that the Republic’s high ideals had been warped and corroded by slavery. Railroads played their part in the circulation of enslavement; the negro car of Dickens’s train from Fredericksburg to Richmond was carrying a slave woman and her weeping children away from the husband and father, whose master had just sold them off to another. Then there was the writer’s shuddering disgust at the native habits of tobacco-chewing and spitting all over the place: the ‘flashes of saliva’ whizzing past his window between Boston and Worcester made it look ‘as though they were ripping open feather-beds inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers’. Add to this the shamelessness with which people eager for a glimpse of the celebrity author clustered round his carriage – at Washington, they even let down his windows to look in and discuss his appearance ‘with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed figure’ – and it is fair to say that Dickens’s experience of American railroads was not altogether joyful.

  We know a lot about Dickens’s British railway journeys too, and those of certain other notables who kept diaries, wrote letters, or otherwise memorialised their lives. In these writings, conversations with strangers are not hard to find. However, it is often unclear whether these interlocutors knew who they were talking to, or whether the presence of a captive celebrity loosened tongues that would otherwise have remained tied. What, for instance, to make of the old man who addressed Dickens on a journey to Birmingham in February 1844? The man ‘expressed himself most mournfully as to the ruinous effects and rapid spread of railways, and was most pathetic on the virtues of the slow-going old stage coaches’. Dickens concurred politely with this Wellingtonian tirade, joining in the man’s laments at all the jolts, shocks and screeches of their journey. But ‘when the speed of the engine was abated, or there was the slightest prolongation of our stay in any station, the old gentleman was up in arms, and his watch was instantly out of his pocket, denouncing the slowness of our progress’. Dickens had some fun with this exchange in the speech that was the purpose of his journey, in which the novelist’s general impatience with nostalgia and past-mindedness was ventilated. But whether the old bore was sounding off in the hope of influencing the most popular writer of the day is impossible to say.

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) – a much less approachable man – found himself on the rails later in 1843, ‘in a somewhat sulphurous condition, not handy to quarrel with’. A fellow passenger in second class

  took it into his head to smile visibly when I laid off my white broad-brim, and suddenly produced out of my pocket my grey glengarry [Scotch bonnet]. He seemed of the mercantile head-clerk species, and had been tempted to his impropriety by a foolish-looking pampered young lady in tiger-skin mantle whom he seemed to have charge of.

  Carlyle stared him down: ‘the smile instantly died into another expression of emotion’. Was the clerkish man one of his readers, offering misguided tribute? Dickens would have been flattered, but Carlyle only wanted to be left alone.

  Then there is Gladstone. Railways run through this statesman’s life like a steel thread, shining brightly at the legislation and regulation of the 1840s and the electioneering and speech-making tours of his late years. Sometimes Gladstone’s diary records journeys in the unexpected company of other notables – a reminder that the first-class waiting room at a great station was the nearest Victorian equivalent to the airport vip lounge. Thus 21 June 1855: ‘The first three hours in close conversation with Montalembert [the French Liberal Catholic historian], whom I was so happy as to have for a fellow traveller.’ By that decade Gladstone was on the wa
y to becoming as recognisable a figure as Dickens, or Wellington in his time. So the entry for 9 July 1857 – ‘In the train I got from a Newcastle man a good lecture on the Iron Trade’ – looks like a case of someone seizing the chance to bend an influential ear.

  Putting fame aside, we may take Francis Kilvert, travelling in company with his mother, sister and a maidservant, on a fierce June day four years later:

  The Wiltshire downs and Salisbury Plain were white and glaring with drought and chalk and dust in the scorching blinding sun … At Heytesbury a young handsome intelligent gentlemanly farmer got into the carriage, a man with a ruddy face, light brown hair, merry blue eyes and a white puggery [a thin scarf wrapped round so as to shade the neck] on his hat. We fell into talk about the strike and lock-out in the Eastern Counties and the much vexed labour and wages question …*

  These episodes – tersely noted down by the greatest British statesman of the age, or vividly captured by an obscure junior clergyman with no thought of a wider readership – can stand for what must have been countless instances when reserve was laid aside and enjoyable or enriching discussions begun. For in the end, however much the old stagecoach talkativeness dwindled away, it is impossible to credit that a presumption of silence prevailed without exception inside the higher classes of railway compartment; that the chatterbox, the monomaniac, the political agitator, the evangelist awaiting his moment, never found a willing ear or a spirited response; that soldier did not speak to soldier, tradesman to tradesman, or undergraduate to undergraduate; that the angler or the hunting man could not detect a fellow sportsman from details of dress or luggage and launch gladly into conversational common ground.

  What if you really, truly, did not want a conversation? Surtees in 1851 was ready with the answer: have a newspaper or book to hand, ‘in case tiresome people will talk – a purpose for which railway travel was never intended’. The Handy Book concurred: ‘an excellent weapon against bores … who can only be silenced by levelling a volume or a journal at their heads’. The author reckoned that at least one passenger in two might be observed taking up a book or a paper (a caveat here, for this author usually ignores third class). Reading at once allowed an escape into a private mental space and signalled to those sharing the compartment that one did not wish to be disturbed. All those books and magazines were so many personal screens, held up in front of the body as if to complement the territory-defining armrests and headrests in the better classes of carriage. In the words of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, whose The Railway Journey (1979) remains the most penetrating international study of nineteenth-century railway travel, ‘reading becomes a surrogate for the communication that no longer takes place’.

  Marking personal space: readers and smokers in a second-class compartment, 1895

  To keep up a measure of civility without a commitment to conversation, printed matter could be exchanged between strangers. This is what Major Grantly and Johnny Eames do in Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset (1867): first The Times for the Daily News, then Saturday for The Spectator. Finally, the silence breaks properly, in a discussion of the Pall Mall Gazette, of which both men have a copy.

  The generosity of this diet of print identifies Trollope’s characters as members of the wealthier classes. The same can be said of Gladstone in 1859, filling spare time on a journey in getting by heart the 692 blank-verse lines of Tennyson’s newly published Guinevere. Likewise, of the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell, who reportedly hurled his copy of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) out of the carriage window in dismay at the death of Little Nell (‘He should not have killed her!’). Any railway worker happening on the book in that year would doubtless have found a good home for it: a single instalment of a serially published Dickens novel then required the outlay of a shilling. Even The Times cost five-pence, at a time when a station porter might earn not much more than three shillings per day. Surtees’s suggestion to his travellers of 1851 that a newspaper could be bartered for another at stations along the way, so that the thrifty traveller might read several for the price of one, underscores the relative costliness of printed matter into the early railway age.

  Changes were afoot. Taxes on press advertising were done away with in 1853, taxes on newspapers themselves in 1855, duties on paper in 1861. The Post Office did its bit, enforcing cheaper rates of carriage for books on the reluctant railways in 1853. The market was already there: as early as 1800, three-quarters of the adult male population was accounted literate. A steam-powered press was patented in 1810; the four-cylinder press (as used for The Times) arrived in 1828; the rotary press by 1857. Cheap wood-pulp paper, new paper-making machines and letter-founding machines also played a part in bringing costs down. Such was the demand for type in the boom after 1855 that some printers briefly rummaged out their old Georgian ‘f’s to supplement stocks of the familiar modern ‘s’. The Times of 1800 was a luxury item with a daily sale of some 2,500–3,000, each copy hand-stamped to show that duty had been paid; by 1860 it was selling upwards of 55,000. The Daily Telegraph in 1856 dropped its price to a penny, which became the expected rate for the mass daily press. By 1880 this paper alone had a circulation of around 300,000. Newspapers were joined by the professional press (The Lancet, The Builder, etc.), pictorial journals (the Illustrated London News started in 1842), women’s magazines (four titles in 1846, fifty by 1900), sporting papers and magazines (the forerunner of the Sporting Life began in 1859, the first non-horsey periodical, Athletic News, in 1875), and by mass-market general journals such as Answers, Titbits and Lloyds Weekly, of which the last claimed a million sales per issue in 1896.

  Railways had relatively little to do with making possible this torrent of printed matter – cheap steam presses came about without their direct help, for instance – but everything to do with its distribution and consumption. Newspapers were first carried by the Liverpool & Manchester in 1831. By 1839 they were also on sale at stations. Journals that had been delivered by road swiftly went over to railway distribution whenever a new line opened. At first they were mixed with general parcels traffic, but later in the century they were increasingly likely to be sent by the ton in dedicated newspaper trains, at least in the case of national titles originating in London. Their despatch was tightly choreographed: in order not to miss the late news, Fleet Street would delay printing to the last minute compatible with getting the papers to the station in time for departure in the small hours, so that rival consignments tended to arrive in one rush. Sorting all these papers for onward distribution in advance was out of the question, and much of the job had to be done on trestle tables within the railway vans as the train went on its way. By 1900 Manchester likewise had its own newspaper trains, one of which ran across the Pennines to take the Manchester Guardian into the heart of Yorkshire – a significant cultural victory for the red rose over the white.

  Local journals flourished too, including a growing list of regional daily papers, little known before 1855. In this case it was the electric telegraph more than the railways that fostered the change. Telegraphy broke the subordinate relationship by which the provincial press served up a belated digest of news that came out physically from the capital in printed form. From the 1860s the railways also made possible a shift of book production away from congested and costly London, in favour of printing firms as far off as Clay’s at Bungay in Suffolk, or Butler and Tanner’s at Frome in Somerset. Manuscripts and proof pages shuttled back and forth between these works and the publishers’ London offices, breaking the ancient link between the intellectual composition and the physical production of books. Some older publishers benefited too: Cambridge University Press in the eighteenth century paid five shillings a ton for the transport of its paper by means of a roundabout water route, as against the two shillings it cost to take the same quantity up the Thames to Oxford. Once the railways had equalised these rates, Cambridge’s printing house could compete effectively for business from outside its parent university, on which the best profits were
to be made.

  By fostering both national and specialist markets for publications, the railways also opened the floodgates to press advertising of every kind, keeping cover prices down. Railway companies themselves added considerably to this acreage of newsprint. Established lines placed regular notices concerning services and traffic, especially small ‘non-display’ advertisements in local papers. New ventures burnt through piles of money in self-advertisement, and for the associated legal notices. This kind of outlay peaked early with the Railway Mania of the mid 1840s. For a time during 1845, the Morning Post came with a supplement devoted entirely to railway matters. In three months of the same year, the Direct London, Holyhead & Porth Dinllaen Railway, a representative Mania project, spent £1,255 18s 8d on self-promotion in the press and still came to nothing.

  As to consumption, there was nothing to match the thronged railway station for a captive market. Likewise, for the traveller a newspaper or magazine had advantages over a book: it was generally cheaper, it was not made for consecutive reading from start to finish and it could be discarded without a pang when the journey was done. Writings from the nineteenth century’s cultural heights were mistrustful of these trends, as of the rise of a mass readership generally. Those who fear that the electronic media of today are shortening attention spans, blunting the capacity for sustained thought and generally frying the neural pathways might take note of the plan by the egregious Mr Whelpdale in George Gissing’s bracingly pessimistic New Grub Street (1891) to transform a shallow-minded weekly, Chat, into an even more superficial offering, Chit-Chat. Aimed at the ‘quarter-educated’ traveller by train or bus, Chit-Chat naturally proves to be a triumph: ‘the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches.’