The Railways Read online

  These bookstalls varied greatly in size, but stalls they remained, even at their largest extent: open-fronted timber affairs, at which much of the business depended on requests for items kept behind or under the counter, in racks high up, or securely displayed behind glass. They should not be confused with the walk-in, self-service shops of the later twentieth century. The working routines of these stalls, dependent as they were on cheap boylabour for fetching, carrying and selling papers, would also be impossible in the modern labour market. That these unsophisticated structures could handle such a variety of daily, weekly and monthly publications, books for sale and for loan, stationery and postcards, travellers’ rugs and straps and caps, is a tribute to the phenomenal powers of memory and organisation then expected from even quite junior employees. Another difference was the lack of heating; one Smiths clerk who wrote his memoirs recalled a gift of home-knitted mittens from an invalid lady subscriber to his library, who pitied his standing about in the cold all day long.

  The working week suddenly became a warmer affair for many of Smiths’ employees in 1905. Wrangles over licence levels and rates of return finally reached an impasse in that year, losing the company its pitches on the two biggest railways, Great Western and London & North Western. The 250 vacancies thus created went instead to Messrs Wyman, the Great Western’s printing company. Undaunted, Smiths quickly opened new shops and lending libraries as close as possible to the vacated stations: 144 of them in eleven weeks, with more to follow. Suddenly, England had its first high-street bookshop chain.

  In a small way, Smiths’ exodus helped to loosen the grip railways had established over national life. Yet the enduring strength of the railway market for books should not be underestimated. It was the unimpressive offerings at the bookstall at Exeter station, scanned on the return to London from a weekend as the guest of Agatha Christie and her husband some time before 1934, that inspired the publisher Allen Lane to set up Penguin Books, the greatest British imprint of its time. The instantly recognisable orange-and-white covers of the early Penguins soon had blue-and-white companions in the non-fiction Pelican series, a name selected after Lane overheard a woman at King’s Cross station bookstall asking vaguely for ‘one of those Pelican books’. The first real Pelicans arrived in 1937, by which time the display at King’s Cross would also have included the yellow jackets of Victor Gollancz’s books, lettered in various typefaces and font sizes in black and magenta: a house style developed in the 1930s by the gifted typographer Stanley Morison (1889–1967). Gollancz, who detested pictorial book-jackets, wanted his own productions to use the most eye-catching colour possible. The final hue – as if in vindication of the old yellowback bindings – was selected after a reconnaissance tour of the bookstalls of London’s railway stations.

  Arnold and Gissing assumed that reading was an intrinsically passive activity, and that its proper field was broadly cultural and educational. In this they were quite wrong. Other kinds of railway reading were necessary, often for reasons that had nothing to do with literature or learning. Newspapers remained the primary medium for information of every kind, commercial, legal and political, and in matters local, national and international. This information circulated via sales from railway station stalls, and through reading the contents on the trains themselves. Brokers, agents and farmers on their way to the exchange or the market could arrive better informed as to the going rates and prices achieved, and plan accordingly. Commercial travellers could keep an eye out for new customers, or for evidence of initiatives by rival concerns. Political agents and speakers on their way to meetings could discover what had most recently been said, and by whom, in the civic circles of their destination. Legal and business papers of every kind could be read through too, and noted and prepared for handover. Alaric Tudor, one of Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1858), is put in his place on a shared railway journey by his superior Mr Neverbend, who turns up at Paddington with an ostentatiously full despatch box. The contents include ‘twenty-six pages of close folio writing’ for the attention of Alaric, who had been looking forward to doing nothing very much during the long journey westward. But Trollope himself knew all about making the most of time on trains, as a prolific writer who worked for most of his adult life in the service of the General Post Office. As his Autobiography explained, he commissioned ‘a little tablet’ or portable writing desk:

  The ‘Wryteezy’, 1890

  and found after a few days’ exercise that I could write as quickly in a railway-carriage as I could at my desk. […] In this way was composed the greater part of Barchester Towers and of the novel which succeeded it.*** My only objection to the practice came from the appearance of literary ostentation, to which I felt myself to be subject when going to work before four or five fellow-passengers. But I got used to it …

  Another industrious Victorian, the architect George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), wrote most of his autobiography on railway journeys, in five leather-bound notebooks filled with spidery pencillings. This was on top of other written work; as Scott put it, ‘pretty well all that I write is the product of my travelling hours’. These hours may be counted in the thousands: the most prolific architect of the age, his working day often included a dash from Westminster office to London terminus before many of the junior staff had even arrived. (A story that may be apocryphal tells of a telegraph message from Scott, sent from some provincial station to his own office: ‘Why am I here?’)

  Many other livelihoods that entailed travelling were at once liberated and disciplined by the possibility of using railway time as an addition to work time. Basic correspondence could be dealt with from a railway seat and posted in letter boxes at stations along the way. These were provided in response to an order by the Post Office in 1849, a few years before the first pillar boxes were set up. The makers of the ‘Wryteezy’ railway writing desk, advertised in 1890, aimed at this market; strapped on to the forearm, the apparatus was steadied – supposedly – by a cord and hook attached to the luggage rack. A few Edwardian saloons even had little postboxes inside, the emptying and posting onward being looked after by railway staff. Sensing a valuable novelty, the London & North Western briefly introduced a typewriting service for businessmen on its City to City Express between Birmingham and London Broad Street. It serves as a reminder that the appropriation of travel time by work, and specifically by those categories of work that involve reading, writing and preparing text, is many generations old, for all that the new facilities offered by smartphones and wireless internet have extended its scope. Also, that this change was made first, and most fully, by the railways.

  Footnotes

  * The reference is to an agricultural workers’ strike, and not to the former Eastern Counties Railway.

  ** Perhaps Wilde, the Irishman, remembered a still more explosive incident at the Brighton line cloakroom: in 1884 the structure was demolished by a Fenian bomb, deposited in an innocent-looking Gladstone bag.

  *** The Three Clerks, as it happens, and much also of others subsequent to them.

  – 5 –

  RISKS AND ANXIETIES

  Railways provoked resentment or hostility in many ways, from their violations of natural beauty to their imposition of London time on unwilling towns and cities, from the physical challenges of travelling in their unheated and underlit carriages to their aiding and abetting the advance of trashy printed matter. Those who raised these objections did not necessarily put the railways under a general sign of condemnation: as with the internet in our own century, most people understood that the new technology came with its own risks and drawbacks, even as they enjoyed its benefits. But a deeper note sometimes sounded among the chorus of responses, suggestive of wider disquiet about what was happening to the world and the railways’ share in this process.

  We have met something of this kind in Thackeray’s bittersweet lament for the ‘praerailroad world’ of his youth, whose apparent solidity had melted under the breath of steam. For a more searching indictment of the rai
lways, the man to go to is John Ruskin (1819–1900). The greatest art critic of the age, as brilliant in the visual analysis of architecture as he was acute in describing the wonders of nature, Ruskin was driven by an implacable sense of moral purpose, rooted equally in profound religious commitment and in enormous and ultimately crushing personal unhappiness. In later life these impulses led him beyond his mission to expound art, history and culture, and into political economy and some highly individual attempts at social reform. By turns prophet, patron, artist, curmudgeon and crank, Ruskin today would seem a remote figure but for the continuing force of his charges against industrial capitalism for its false values, human costs and environmental destructiveness. In this respect, if no other, his closest cousin is that other scourge of his times, Karl Marx.

  Ruskin found so much to loathe about railways, and so many ways of saying so, that it is difficult to know where to start. Not that his every reference was hostile – the thirty-nine volumes of his collected works include a level-headed paper on the merits of national ownership of the network, as well as a rhapsodic meditation on the locomotive’s ‘infinitely complex anatomy of active steel’. But he was ever alert to the penetration of the world by railways, and to any accusation of harm or degradation that could be laid at their door; old enough to have known how things used to be, he felt the change overwhelmingly in terms of loss.

  A specimen charge-sheet can be had from Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera. These ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ were issued mostly as monthly pamphlets in the years 1871–8, tackling social and economic questions along with much else, often with conscious hyperbole, paradox and provocation. In these pages the railways do not come off well. There is an exhaustive calendar of accidents and fatalities across the network during one month in 1873, lifted from the Pall Mall Gazette; a lament that the railways were severing age-old connections between producer and consumer, exemplified by changing traffic patterns for farmhouse butter; reminders of the vandalistic levelling of the keep of Berwick Castle to make way for the main line to Scotland, and of the infilling of the North Loch beneath the castle rock at Edinburgh to build Waverley station; and an angry description of the harsh toil of a Worcestershire mother and daughter as they forged iron spikes for fixing rails to sleepers, working from seven till seven, the mother making a mere sixteen pence a day, ‘or, for four days’ work, the price of a lawyer’s letter’.

  Injury and death, alienation, destruction, exploitation; the examples could be multiplied and the connections traced outwards from the railways to Ruskin’s critique of the social and economic order in which they were embedded. But his condemnation went further still, challenging the assumption that railway travel must be superior to the slower ways it replaced. Ruskin refused to bow to the idol of acceleration: for him, railway speed could only coarsen responses to the beauties of creation and the particularities of place, reducing life to a frenetic and meaningless dashing about. Each halting-place had become merely ‘a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder’; a true lover of travelling should no more take the train than a devotee of the pleasures of the table should ‘concentrate his dinner into a pill’.

  Letter 69 of Fors Clavigera puts this case in detail. Much of the text recounts a day-long journey into Merionethshire from Ulverston, the main-line station closest to Ruskin’s home on Coniston Water, made in the summer of 1876. Here is one of the most vivid and specific accounts of Victorian railway travel which has come down to us. Any such narrative is necessarily coloured by the writer’s preoccupations and purposes, and no one should mistake Ruskin’s text for pure reportage: there is too much anger in it, and too much pressure behind the words from the private, inadmissible distress which would tip him over into madness within another two years. Even so, it is exceptional in its freedom from the narrative priorities of fictional or satirical writing on the one hand, and the impersonal conventions of travel and guide-book writing on the other.

  Things start tolerably enough: Ruskin ‘took train first at the Ulverston station’, sharing his compartment with a middle-aged man reading a newspaper, and choosing a ‘corner’ on the side which he knew would give the best views of Morecambe Bay. But at Grange-over-Sands, three stations on, fresh company arrived:

  … two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth, – he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly.

  From his corner seat, Ruskin could observe both the world outside and his companions’ indifference to it: ‘Not one of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore’, where ‘the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion’.

  This first train terminated at Carnforth, where the Furness Railway handed over to the London & North Western. Here Ruskin noted a crowd of third-class passengers for whom no waiting room was provided, huddling into the platform shelter away from the rain. ‘Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterised every face.’ When the up train arrived he found a first-class compartment all to himself, but was left wondering ‘how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience’. His solitude ended at Lancaster, where a father and daughter entered the carriage. They too read papers all the way. But as the rain persisted, reducing visibility to ‘a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings’ on the window glass, even Ruskin was compelled to take up reading for a while.

  The next change of train was at Warrington, at the southern edge of Lancashire. Here Ruskin took a cup of tea and slice of bread in the refreshment room of the station, which had been rebuilt eight years before. His gaze was arrested by the painted glass panels in its swing doors: ‘… two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs.’ Here was a naïve and blowsy display of bad art, perhaps derived at several removes from the historical fictions and poems of Sir Walter Scott that were Ruskin’s favourite after-dinner reading, but appearing here at once out of place and out of time. And it was already a dictum of Ruskin’s that a railway station, being ‘the very acme of discomfort’, was the worst place in which to be confronted by art. The same applied to ornamented architecture, good, bad or indifferent: as his treatise Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) had it, ‘Better bury gold in the embankments, than put it in ornaments on the stations.’

  Onward from Warrington, by the Chester train; now with ‘a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect’ for company, equipped with a copy of The Graphic, an illustrated weekly. As the weather lightened, Ruskin found himself transfixed by ‘a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail’: the sandstone hills of Cheshire, with the estuarine sands of the Dee beyond and the greater hills of Wales on the horizon. But when Ruskin’s attention turned back to the compartment, his companion was discovered with legs stretched out to the opposite cushions, boots resting on The Graphic, face ‘clouded with sullen thought’, indifferent to the beauties through which they were passing.

  Another change at Chester, and another train, south to Ruabon in Denbighshire. Again Ruskin found himself sharing a compartment, this time with ‘two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters’. The pair had kept the windows all but shut, ‘and were breathing the richest compound of the products of their own indigestion’ – an unusually explicit reference to the hazards of railway travel in flatulent company. By way of relief, Ruskin pretended anxiety about their progress, first leaning out of the window as the train moved off, then, h
aving cunningly left the window half-open, asking the ladies if they might remove their luggage from the seat ‘that I might sit face to the air’. Outmanoeuvred, his companions huddled into the opposite corner ‘to make me understand how they suffered from the draught’. Their retaliation was to produce a bag of grapes each and to throw the skins and pips out of Ruskin’s open window.

  Ruabon brought relief from the malodorous spinsters, at the cost of milder and more routine annoyances: ‘a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of “Stand back there.”’ Then on, through ‘puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam’, into the celebrated Vale of Llangollen, now with only a businessman and his inevitable newspaper for company. The man got out at Llangollen, discourteously leaving Ruskin to pull the compartment door shut; whereupon a paterfamilias of the lower middle class stayed his hand, and entered the carriage with his four fidgety children, their mother and aunt. The group stayed on as far as Corwen, ‘past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world’, although none of the family troubled to look at it. Finally, Ruskin was left alone for the run through to the coast at Barmouth, musing on ‘the sense of his total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people’.