The Railways Page 20
How Dickens arranged his journeys to spend time with Nelly was reconstructed by the actor Felix Aylmer in Dickens Incognito (1959), from cryptic references in a pocket engagement diary for 1867. Outward travel was usually by evening train on the Great Western, direct to Slough. For the return, Windsor station and the South Western were favoured, as if to create the impression that the novelist’s business had been somewhere in that town. The route brought Dickens in to London at Waterloo, which was also much closer to his office and apartment off the Strand.
These movements were enmeshed with the other great preoccupation of Dickens’s last years: the reading tours. Starting in 1866, he went from city to city across the British Isles (and, once, to the United States), declaiming comic or dramatic episodes from his fiction, always to packed houses. The tours were extremely lucrative, and Dickens relished the connection with his public. That much is clear from the memoirs of George Dolby, the manager of the tours, published in 1885. But the memoirs also show how badly Dickens had been affected by the ordeal at Staplehurst. He was grinding himself down, and it was the railways as much as anything that were responsible.
The two men’s first journey together, heading north from Euston, made the situation clear. At first the atmosphere in the compartment was stilted: Dickens, Dolby and a male companion read the newspapers, and not much was said. Things improved after the stop at Bletchley, where Dickens explained that his anxious and nervous state was due to the Staplehurst accident.
He never, he explained, had travelled since that memorable day […] without experiencing a nervous dread, to counteract which in some degree he carried in his travelling bag a brandy flask, from which it was his invariable habit, one hour after leaving his starting-point, when travelling by express train, to take a draught …
Other railway episodes remembered by Dolby were not so bad. They often travelled in style; their private saloon on a trip to Scotland in May 1866 featured baskets of food and tableware, salmon mayonnaise, pressed beef and cherry tart, iced gin punch and coffee made on a spirit lamp. Mishaps that might have tested a less resourceful man were taken by Dickens in his stride. A pipe burst on the locomotive as the train passed through Northumberland; they took a pleasant walk in the woods alongside the line until the relief engine turned up. Once, their carriage caught fire (an overheated axle-box seems indicated) and had to be substituted at Rugby. On the way to Holyhead for the Irish crossing, their train stuck in a snowdrift at Bangor for four freezing hours while the locomotive was dug out. Delays such as these seem not to have put Dickens on edge; rather, it was the routine exposure to express travel, hour after hour, that made him uneasy. On 26 January 1867 he wrote to The Times to protest at ‘the reckless fury of the driving and the violent rocking of the carriages’ on that morning’s express from Leicester, which had so disturbed him that he got off at Bedford rather than continue through to St Pancras (letters followed from fellow passengers, three of them in support; another claimed to have been reading one of Dickens’s own books all the way ‘in greatest comfort’). After going north in the same year, Dickens complained to Dolby of the effects once again, ‘constantly referring to the Staplehurst accident, which was ever in his mind’. His nervousness improved after they began to take slower trains instead, but the practice had to be dropped, ‘as the delay and the monotony of these journeys were almost worse than the shaking of the expresses’. Touring again in 1868, Staplehurst ‘seemed to recur to him with increased horror’.
Dolby also tells of another serious accident, sometimes overlooked by biographers. Leaving Belfast on the midday mail train on 16 January 1869,
we received a severe jolt which threw us all forward in the carriage. Looking out we observed an enormous piece of iron flying along a side line, tearing up the ground and carrying some telegraph poles with it. The breaks [sic] were suddenly applied, a lumbering sound was heard on the roof of the carriage, and the plate-glass windows were bespattered with stones, gravel, and mud … Possibly having the recollection of the dreadful Staplehurst accident in his mind, Mr Dickens threw himself to the bottom of the carriage, and we all followed his example.
A tyre on the locomotive’s driving wheel had fractured, turning instantly to giant pieces of shrapnel. The noise on the carriage roof was caused by the impact of one of these fragments. It happened that the compartment was of the coupé type sometimes provided in the earlier Victorian decades, essentially a half-compartment with a single row of seats facing a generously glazed end wall. Dolby could only wonder how they would have fared if the steel fragment had shot through the glass and into their midst. A few months later, Dickens was taken ill at Preston while on yet another tour, and his doctors ordered a long rest, blaming his condition on the reading circuits and the ‘long and frequent railway journeys’ that made them possible.
Dolby’s fortunes depended on keeping the show on the road. His memoirs stress the novelist’s powers of recuperation and his exhilaration in performance, never admitting that the demands of touring were slowly killing him. It is true that Dickens’s energy was prodigious; his walking speed was once calculated at 4½ mph. The author Cuthbert Bede recalled talking to him at a railway station: ‘During the whole of the time we were pacing up and down the long platform – for he seemed to be one who could not stand still, but must keep moving.’ This impatience no doubt helps to explain the reversion to the use of expresses, after the experiment with slower trains. Nor had Dolby known Dickens before the Staplehurst accident. It is in accounts by others, including the man himself, that the depths of his psychic disturbance become clear.
After the burst of activity at the accident scene, Dickens had succumbed to a period of shock, ‘weak as if I were recovering from a long illness’. Also, as he put it in a letter later that month, ‘I cannot bear railway travelling yet. A perfect conviction, against the senses, that the carriage is down on one side … comes upon me with anything like speed, and is inexplicably distressing.’ Mary (‘Mamie’) Dickens, who sometimes accompanied her father back to Gad’s Hill from London, would witness him
suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror. We never spoke to him, but would touch his hand gently now and then. He had, however, apparently no idea of our presence; he saw nothing for a time but that most awful scene.
Yet he pressed on with his divided existence, train after train, between Gad’s Hill, London, Slough and the punishing itineraries of touring. Physical symptoms accompanied the nervous complaints: Dickens began to drag one foot while walking. For all his busy-ness this way and that, he never finished another full-scale novel after 1865, and it seems more than coincidence that his death should have come on 9 June 1870, five years to the day after the Staplehurst accident.
Dickens’s ordeal would now be recognised as a textbook instance of trauma, a state of temporary and involuntary possession by memories of the original ordeal. This condition, now familiar under the name of post-traumatic stress disorder, was then not yet understood. Instead, medical science focused on the immediate responses of shock and stress, from which the path to recovery was surer and faster.
That did not prevent Dickens from arriving at a deeper comprehension of his own plight, if his short story of 1866, ‘The Signal-Man’, is anything to go by. This is usually classified as a ghost story, and so it is – perhaps the finest in the English language. But for all its supernatural elements, the tale also extends his repertoire of haunted and possessed figures, such as Miss Havisham, whose distress is essentially psychological, especially in response to some disappointment or wound. Behind which lies the damage induced by Dickens’s own childhood, with its dislocations of place and fortune, culminating in a period as a twelve-year-old worker in a Thamesside blacking factory: a famous episode now, but secret and unmentionable in the author’s lifetime. The tale of the signalman is therefore also an acute psychological study, in which
the author’s possession by a memory of disaster on the railway is displaced on to his own creation – multiplied here to two disasters, for the signalman has been a helpless witness to successive fatal incidents on his stretch of the line, as if to underscore the recurrent nature of traumatic experience.
Those who have yet to discover the story will not find any spoilers here. But there are two further details of ‘The Signal-Man’ that deserve mention. First, the similarity between its setting – the signal box is buried in a damp and gloomy cutting, hard by the mouth of a railway tunnel – and the situation of Dickens’s local station at Higham, deep enough in its cutting to be clothed in shadow when the fields around are sunlit, and with the dark mouth of a long tunnel in close view of the waiting passenger. So ‘The Signal-Man’ seems to have been written, as it were, out of somewhere close to home; and it seems fitting that the up platform at Higham should have despatched Dickens’s own funeral train on its progress to Charing Cross station on 14 June 1870, for the short journey onward to burial in Westminster Abbey. The second point – disguised by the tendency to anthologise it with other ghost stories – is that the tale was one of a set of four narratives with carefully researched and vividly described railway settings, published among the Christmas Stories for 1866 in Dickens’s own weekly All the Year Round. It is as if the novelist were seeking a deeper understanding of the transport system that had so damaged him, and on which he had yet become so dependent.
The rehearsal of trauma in ‘The Signal-Man’ ran ahead of medical understanding. Contemporary models of the nervous system presumed an intricate mechanism or apparatus that could be detuned or degraded by loud noises and other shocks; what one influential psychology textbook of the period, Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855), called ‘a great cost of tear and wear of nerve’. This wear and tear was conceived of as a physical process, akin to other bodily injuries, although much harder to detect. The theory provided a sufficient explanation of any disorders – insomnia, trembling, stammering, numbness, incontinence – which might overtake an apparently unhurt passenger following an accident, often after some delay. But if such symptoms were difficult to diagnose accurately, they were also easy to simulate or exaggerate. Compensation claims of this kind became steadily more common through the 1850s and into the 1860s, alongside straightforward instances of redress for physical injury. Typical were two cases of 1862 arising from the Clayton Tunnel disaster at Brighton the year before: a piano-maker and tuner called Williamson, left unable to work and subject to pains in the head, back and kidneys after ‘entire prostration of the nervous system’ in the collision, and the taxidermist George Swaysland (c. 1814–88) – an authority cited in Darwin’s Origin of Species – whose palpitations, headaches and general excitability following the crash meant that he could no longer stuff a bird or go out to shoot fresh ones.
Both men won compensation. By that date, indeed, the railways were losing almost every such case that came to court, even as they sought to weed out spurious suits by requiring claimants to submit to examination by doctors of the companies’ choosing. In the case of Williamson, medical evidence in support could detect no signs of improvement since the accident, but the ‘very eminent surgeon’ retained by the London, Brighton & South Coast company reckoned that the patient would probably recover in a few months.
Embarrassed by these public disagreements between its members, and by the still worse implication that medical expertise pro and con could be had in exchange for a fee, the profession set out to define the condition more precisely, urged on by papers in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal. The consensus that emerged in the 1860s, set out by J. E. Erichsen of University College Hospital in his On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (1866), was that any otherwise unexplained ailments that followed a railway accident must be due to inflammation of the spine. Erichsen was careful to acknowledge that other kinds of physical shock could have a comparable effect, but the railway question was so dominant that it was the shorthand term ‘railway spine’ which identified his theory in medical and legal circles. It was generally agreed, too, that railway accidents inflicted shocks to the human frame of a previously unknown level of violence. The only problem was that physiological evidence to fit the theory was simply not there: in railway case after railway case, inflammation of the spine could not be demonstrated. That left the field open to further challenge.
Erichsen returned with a second edition of his book in 1875, arguing now that the spinal cord was impaired after accidental shock not by inflammation but by as yet unidentified changes at molecular level. This version of the hypothesis was by definition harder to disprove, but it was also easy to contest. In the 1880s a railway company surgeon, Herbert Page, set out a different theory. Page took the lack of physical change to the spine as a sign that the primary cause of hurt was the ‘great fear and alarm’ induced in the victim, without entirely letting go of the idea that the pathological symptoms might arise from physical changes to the nervous system this fear had induced. His position thus came close to convergence with developing theories of hysteria, a long-established way of understanding mental disorders induced by shock, especially in women and in men categorised as excitable or over-imaginative. That line of enquiry had been altogether too much for Erichsen, who refused to countenance the idea that a gentleman of mature years, ‘active in mind, accustomed to self-control, addicted to business, and healthy in body’, might find himself reduced by mere shock to a condition like that of ‘a love-sick girl’. It is a sudden reminder of the assumptions of the age: the primacy of male authority, of age over youth, of the propertied classes over the lower orders. If the disintegration of personality that might occur after a railway accident could be blamed on undetected physical injuries, the victim would escape, as it were, with his masculine dignity intact. Much more perturbing was the suggestion that the psyche of the Victorian patriarch might prove no more robust in a calamity than that of a young woman – that physical disorders could be induced in men without physical harm.
By fostering new conceptions of injury on the one hand and new categories of insurance and litigation on the other, the railway network had unwittingly pointed the way towards this fuller perception of the relationship between mind and body. The consequences were for the twentieth century to work out. In terms of medical history, the true heirs of the traumatised survivors of Victorian railway disasters were the legions of shell-shocked patients produced by the First World War, men physically uninjured but lost to their former selves.
Railway accidents were so disturbing because they brought home the powerlessness of the human condition in the face of what had become an indispensable technology. As the Saturday Review had it in 1868, ‘we are all railway travellers; these trains and collisions, these stations and engines, and all the rest of it, are not only household words, but part of our daily life’. To these fears were now added an insidious new suggestion, that the human frame was unsuited to the hours of jolting and vibration that a railway journey entailed – that something like the effect of a violent smash might be induced cumulatively.
Whiling away train time in 1868, Dickens calculated that the journey from Edinburgh to London subjected each passenger to 30,000 individual shocks to the nerves. (The total presumably allowed for every jolt made when the carriage wheels passed over a joint in the rails; assuming a separate shock from each axle, it is almost certainly a gross underestimate.) Dickens by that time was hypersensitive; on 9 June 1865 he had crossed the line that divided those who had experienced a railway accident from those merely nervous at the possibility. But he would not have forgotten that his own wife had miscarried on the train between Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1847, losing what would have been their eighth child. The loss was a half-echo of the belief expressed by the drunken midwife Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), that fright caused by screeching steam engines could induce premature birth; she claimed to know of a railway guard who was godfather to twent
y-six children (‘and all on ’um named after the Ingeines as was the cause’). The Gamp theory was hardly medical orthodoxy, but has something of the power of folk belief. A ‘true’ instance concerned the wife of the illustrator John Leech (1817–64) – the very man who excoriated the railways in many a cartoon for Punch and a close member of the Dickens circle in his own right. In 1847 Mrs Leech went into labour on a train from Liverpool, giving birth at the station hotel at Euston soon after arrival there.
Sober medical opinion also found room for the theory that the stress of keeping up with the railway’s timetable, as much as the noise and vibration of train travel in itself, was an enemy of health: in the words of the Journal of Public Health and Sanitary Review (1855), ‘the excitement, anxiety, and nervous shock consequent on the frequent efforts to catch the last express; to be in time for the fearfully punctual train’. A publication of 1868 by Dr Alfred Haviland, ‘Hurried to Death’, or, a few words of advice on the Danger of Hurry and Excitement, especially addressed to Railway Travellers, had it both ways: not only did railway travel degrade the constitution, so that season-ticket holders on the Brighton line aged much more quickly than non-travellers, it also brought the risk of sudden extinction from rushing to catch the train in the first place. Potential victims included all those last-minute entrants to the compartment, who ‘sink exhausted and breathless into their seat with a ghastly smile of self-congratulation, muttering something about their luck in sentences that are broken at every word by their laboured respiration’. Such behaviour risked exposing hidden bodily flaws, illustrated by Haviland with the case of William Searles, fruiterer and fishmonger, thirty-five years old, who travelled regularly from Chelmsford to London on market business; after a successful dash to Shoreditch for his train home, he looked out of the carriage window, ‘making a ruckling noise in his throat and nose’, then slid down dead. Haviland emphasised that such risks rose sharply when the stomach was full of solid food: his case studies included a jeweller who dropped dead running for a train in 1864, lobster dinner still inside him, cigar burning on the pavement where it fell.