LONDON TO BRIGHTON RAILWAY
1840
1841
Isambard Kingdom Brunel completed his London to Bristol line - the Great Western Railway. This was such a stunning achievement that people used the rail line's initials (GWR) to call it "God's Wonderful Railway". For the thirty years between 1841 and 1871, Brighton was the fastest growing town in England. This was due to the railway connecting the town with London. (History Learning Site, 2014)
London to Brighton Train Journey
1953 - 2013
Sixty years ago, the BBC filmed a train journey from London to Brighton, squeezed into just four minutes. Thirty years ago, we did it again. Now we are bringing it up to date, to see how much has changed - and how much is still the same. Here are all three journeys side by side:
(BBC, 2013)
1844
PARLIMENTARY TRAIN ACT
In the early years, train travel was not a comfortable way to get from Point A to Point B. Seats were often just wooden boards, and springs and buffers were an unknown commodity. The best way to describe the ride is to compare it to riding in a stagecoach.
Eventually, Victorian railways began to offer comfort. Upholstered seats, armrests, and an enclosed carriage were soon the norm, at least for first class passengers. Oil lamps placed along the carriages offered light.
Second class travellers had to contend with being exposed to the elements, and with sitting on wooden benches. With the enclosure of some of these carriages, second-class became an easier way to travel, while third class had to make do with being exposed to weather.
By 1844, courtesy of the Railway Act, third class carriages had to be enclosed. Lighting was also provided, albeit only one oil lamp per carriage as opposed to the many placed in first class. (AboutBritain, 1999)
1845
During the Victorian Era, the rail system reached more and more rural districts, by 1876 the expansion into the countryside was well underway and by 1914 the growth had reached its peak (see diagram).
A glance at the maps conveys the immediate impression of continuing growth that reached farther and farther into the country as the years wore on. Closer inspection reveals the outlines a relationship between railways and industrialization. This is visible in the pattern where the industrial areas of Manchester and Leeds, in addition to London, were hubs of the rail network. Evident also are the growing concentrations in the northeast near Newcastle and, to the southwest, in the southern edge of Wales showing a correlation with population growth.
(Schwartz, 1999)
The Spiritual Railway
The line to Heaven by Christ was made,
With heavenly truth the Rails are laid,
From Earth to Heaven the Line extends,
To Life Eternal where it ends.
Repentance is the Station then,
Where Passengers are taken in;
No Fee for them is there to pay,
For Jesus is himself the way.
God's Word is the first Engineer,
It points the way to Heaven so clear,
Through tunnels dark and dreary here.
It does the way to Glory steer.
God's Love the fire, his Truth the Steam,
Which drives the Engine and the Train;
All you who would to Glory ride,
Must come to Christ, in him abide.
In First, and Second, and Third Class,
Repentance, Faith, and Holiness,
You must the way to Glory gain,
Or you with Christ will not remain.
Come then poor Sinners, now's the time,
At any Station on the Line,
If you'll repent, and turn from sin,
The Train will stop and take you in.
EXTENSION OF THE RAIL SYSTEM INTO THE RURAL DISTRICTS
Nikolaus Pevsner transcribed the following lines from a memorial in the cloister of Ely Cathedral to two victims of an accident on the Norwich to Ely railway line in 1845. Pevsner finds it "eminently characteristic of the earnestness with which this new triumph of human ingenuity was still regarded". (Pevenser, 1970)
Rail travel turned the landscape into a mere panorama.
Some travelers regarded the experience as unpleasant. The Victorian essayist John Ruskin commented,
“To any person who has all his senses about him, a quiet walk along [a] road is the most amusing of all traveling; and all traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.”
(Schivelbusch, p. 58)
The novelist Gustave Flaubert stayed up all night before rail trips because, as he put it to a friend in 1864,
“I get so bored on the train that I am about to howl with tedium after five minutes of it.”
(Schivelbusch, p. 58)
Others enjoyed the experience. An American visitor to Great Britain wrote home:
“The beauties of England, being those of a dream, should be as fleeting. They never appear so charming as when dashing on after a locomotive at forty miles an hours. Everything is so quiet, so fresh, so full of home, and destitute of prominent objects to detain the eye, or distract the attention from the charming whole, that I love to dream through these placid beauties whilst sailing in the air, quick, as if astride a tornado.”
(Schivelbusch, p. 60)
RAILWAY MANIA
FIRST UNDERGROUND RAILWAY
1863
The first train pulled into the Brighton station in September 1841. Originally filled with only first-class passengers, this Victorian railway quickly realized that lowering the ticket price would enable more people to journey to Brighton.
With the numbers of visitors swelling the seashore area, entrepreneurs soon made Brighton their home. Hotels, restaurants, and other tourist attractions soon filled the town to overflowing. Brighton, as a seaside holiday spot, was born. (AboutBritain, 2012)
Fig. 20: The Hunstanton portion of the 10.39 service from Liverpool Street at Ely in 1958
The London Underground, which opened in 1863, was the world’s first underground railway system. More than 30,000 passengers tried out the Tube on the opening day and it was hailed by the Times as “the great engineering triumph of the day”. Pictured - William Gladstone on an inspection of the first underground line. (Lin, 2014)
Fig. 23: 24 May 1862 - Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, and directors and engineers of the Metropolitan Railway Company, embark on an inspection tour of the world's first underground line. Built between Paddington and the City of London, it opened in January of the following year. Gladstone is seen in the front row, near right.
Fig. 24: 1863 - A contemporary lithograph of a steam locomotive on the Metropolitan line near Paddington Station
1843
During the British Railway Mania, which occurred between 1843 and the autumn of 1845, the prices of railway shares doubled, and thousands of new railway lines were projected. However, share prices then fell dramatically, and the railway industry endured a sustained downturn.
The central cause of the Mania was the myopic expectations of investors, who hoped that recent improvements in the profitability of the railway industry would continue long-term. However an economic downturn and overexpansion by the railways led to a substantial deterioration in financial performance.
FIRST MOTION PICTURE
1895
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Train Pulling into Station
No film in history has had such an astonishing effect on audiences as this apparently unremarkable 50-second short by Auguste and Louis Lumière. One of the first films ever screened for the public, it simply shows a train approaching La Ciotat, a coastal village near Marseille. The Lumières placed their camera close to the platform edge, and when viewers saw the footage they reportedly rushed from their seats, convinced that the train would burst from the screen and crush them.
The film is commemorated in the restoration of the world’s oldest existing cinema, the Eden in La Ciotat, which is due to be reopened next year by Steven Spielberg. (Telegraph, 2012)
Victorians experienced the coming of the railway age as a watershed in the history of Great Britain. Some greeted and others mourned the changes that came with the new technology. As one might expect, references to railways and the phenomena surrounding them become an important part of Victorian fiction. The railway not only changed both the landscapes and cityscapes of great British, often for the worse many writers claimed, but it also changed conceptions of time and distance. Since the construction and running of railways had major impact on the financial world, particularly after railway mania of the late 1840s — the Victorian equivalent to the dot.com bust of the 1990s — it provided obvious material for both plot devices and social commentary for writers. (Landow, 2009)
‘The very core of all this dire disorder’, the unfinished railroad ‘trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement’. (Dombey, 1846, ch. 6)
‘There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and time-tables; railway hackney-coach and stands; railway omnibuses, railway streets and buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites, and flatterers out of all calculation. There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in’. (Dombey, 1986, ch. 15)
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son 1846
The railway is irresistible, first destroying, and then bringing ‘throbbing currents’ of new vitality to the city. On a train journey, the grim, life-denying Mr Dombey experiences the momentum of the train as a hellish intimation of doom. On the other hand, the affectionate Mr Toodle, husband of Paul Dombey’s devoted nurse, is a stoker who eventually becomes a train driver, and entertains his many children with observations playfully built out of train and railway metaphors. The railway brings nothing but good to him and his family. (Mullan, 2012)
Dickens witnessed the building of the London and Birmingham Railway through Camden Town to Euston in the later 1830s. He gives a description of the ‘great earthquake’ produced by this project in Dombey and Son (ch. 6). This novel began appearing in monthly installments in October 1846, at the height of the railway boom, and measures the impact of the train in many ways.
1846
The railways formed Victorian ideas of modernity and progress. Hardy’s novel was published in 1897, but was set between the 1850s and early 1870s, in a Wessex already utterly reshaped by the train. The first rail line connecting British cities, running between Liverpool and Manchester, came before Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), opening in 1830. Yet many of Britain’s major rail lines were built during the first decade of her reign: London-Birmingham opened in 1838; London-Bristol in 1841; and London-Glasgow in 1848. Britain’s first railway boom took place in the 1840s: by 1850, over 6000 miles of track were laid. The 1860s saw a second boom, and by 1880 there were about 18,000 miles of track and a web of connections between the nation’s towns as well as cities. (Mullan, 2012)
Jude is courting Sue Bridehead in Melchester (based on Salisbury) and suggests that they go to sit in the Cathedral together:
1850
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (set 1850)
“I think I'd rather sit in the railway station,” she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice.
“That’s the centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!” “How modern you are!”’ exclaims her admirer (Hardy, 1987, Part Third, ch. 1).
VICTORIAN ERA
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death, on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain.
The reign of Queen Victoria Britain emerged as the most powerful trading nation in the world, provoking a social and economic revolution whose effects are still being felt today. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century the process of industrialisation had built a firm foundation for nineteenth century growth and expansion. At the heart of this was the successful development and application of steam technology. (Atterbury, 2011)
[Pattinson, British Railways (1893). — George P. Landow.]
Fig. 16: Railways in the South East of England in 1840
Fig. 18: The railway mania as depicted in a Punch cartoon (Freeman and Aldcroft, 1985)
Romantic?
The Victorian period saw the extension of the railway lines into the rural areas and consequently the increase in passenger trains. This allowed more and more people to experience travelling by rail and trains became a feature in the majority of Victorian literature.
This time also saw the invention of moving image and with the industrial revolution still influencing the country; trains and cinema were irrevocably linked.
Those who could not travel by train saw could picture it through novels and films and the fascination with this captivating machine grew.
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