Railroads in Victorian novels
Author: John Mullen
Theme: Technology and Science, novels from 1832 to 1880
Britain's first railway was built in 1830 and caused a major revolution in travel, communication and reading. Professor John Mullen stopped by thomas hardy, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot to explore the railroad to Victorian fiction.
Thomas Hardy's book, The Nameless Jude, has a scene in which Jude, in the small town of Melchester in Salisbury, is pursuing the talented Shu Blyhead, and he proposes that the two of them go to the Cathedral of God and sit together: "It would be better to go to the train station and sit down," Replied Shu, with a hint of chagrin and reluctance. "Nowadays it is the center of town life. Cathedrals are a thing of the past! "Honey, hello avant-garde!" Jude, as an admirer, praised. Victorian modernization and social progress were written by railroads. Hardy's novels, published in 1897, are classified as part of the Wessex Collection of Novels from the early 1850s and 1870s, which was reborn by a train. The first railway linking The British city was built between Liverpool and Manchester, before Queen Victoria ascended the Dabao (1837-1901) and opened in 1830. Many of Britain's major railway lines were later built during the first decade of the Queen's reign: the London-Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, the London-Bristol Railway opened in 1841, and the London-Glasgow Railway opened in 1848. In the 1840s, Britain's first rail boom hit: by 1850, more than 6,000 kilometres of railways had been built. The 1860s saw a second boom in railways, and by 1880, British rails stretched to eighteen thousand kilometers, weaving a town Internet across the country.
Some of the strong accounts of the origin of the railway in English fiction are traceable, and the railway, in turn, shapes the development of the novel on a material level. Henry Walton Smith, the founder of WHS, and his descendants built a series of railroad stations (in 1848, the first façade opened in Euston, London) to sell novels at low prices. The company sponsors two shilling reprints of popular novels, a different kind of "railway remake" that is then sold by other publishers for passengers to read on the train. It is worth mentioning that George Routledge's "Railway Library" can be republished in a shilling. Reading novels and railroad travel thus formed an indissoluble relationship. As the rail network expands, the WHS bookstore industry booms: across the UK, the company already has more than 1,000 bookstore sites.
Dickens and the Railroad
Victorian novelists mostly liked to postpone their work decades after their completion, which means that very few of the great writers of the mid-19th century could understand the impact of the railway in time. Dickens was an exception, having witnessed the completion of the London-Birmingham Railway, which passed through the towns of Camden and Euston in the late 1820s, and used the term "Great Earthquake" to describe the change in his book The Father and Son of Dong Bei (Chapter VI) set against the backdrop of the railway. Released in October 1846, the novel became the pinnacle of railway fever, serialized in installments and witnessing the impact of trains in all its aspects.
Dickens satirizes the lines, such as 'the root of all extreme chaos' lies in the endless expansion of railways , "in the strong advance of civilization and progress, smooth progression." (Chapter 6) Years later, after reading a few more chapters, revisited by the protagonist of the novel, Walter Guy, and you will find that the "railroad world" has become a widely accepted fact. 'There are hotels, office houses, hostels and apartments by the railway; there are railway plans, maps, railway landscapes, even wrapping papers, bottles, sandwich boxes, and even schedules inscribed with railway signs; there are rental carriages and platforms on the railway; there are hotel carriages, railway streets, railway buildings; and there are all kinds of people who are flattering and courteous. There is even railway time on the clock, as if even the sun has been defeated and bowed down. (Chapter 15)
The arrival of the railway was like a bamboo, at first a mess, and then it injected new life into the whole city, like a heartbeat. During the train trip, mr. Dong Bei, who was gloomy and bored, felt the momentum of the train traveling, and felt like he had turned around in hell. On the other hand, the affectionate Mr. Tudel is the husband of Paul Dongbei's loyal nurse, starting as a furnace (specifically referring to the fireman on the train) and later becoming a train driver. He often joked with small talk outside the train, and used some railway anecdotes to tease his children. The railroad brought a boon to himself and his family.
George Elliott and the Railroad
It was inevitable that people in the community would argue about railroad expansion. In Middlemarty, George Eliot looks ahead to the next 40 years of the 1830s and gives a joke. Of the hundreds of themes in Middlematch, railroads have been a hot topic, as exciting as the Bill of Rights, as terrifying as the cholera plague.' News of the construction of the railway spread rapidly, and staff from London "carried pencil blueprints" and outlined possible routes for the railway. The character in the book, Geleb Gass, is well known for his honesty and loyalty, and he feels that new developments are necessary and should be well accepted. In the face of the peasants who wrestled with the railway workers, he exhorted: 'It's all this time, good fellow, you can't stop it: whether you like it or not, railway construction is imperative.' ’
Fate symbolizes righteousness
Just as there is an element of majeure in resistance, railroads often symbolize fate for Victorians. In the case of a railway accident, this is a common bridge in the novel. The villain character Kaker in "DongBei Father and Son" breaks the rails, just as he thinks he represents the power of progress, but he is destroyed because of it. In Mrs. Henry Wood's best-selling romance novel The History of East Forest Hate (1861), Isabella Carlisle, who was a mischievous man, was punished in a railway accident and ended up disfigured. In two other novels, Mary Elizabeth Breton's The Secret of Mrs. Audley (1862) and Will Collins' Nameless (1862), the protagonist's parents were killed by railroad tracks.
Story threads and railways
The train journey is an important plot in Victorian mystery novels, for example, the more typical ones are will Collins's strange love novels and Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novels. Train travel plays an integral role in many Sherlock Holmes stories, in which detectives always visit seemingly beautiful local attractions and unveil evil (Baskerville's Hound (1902) is probably the best example). In The Copper Beech (1892), Holmes suspected that the Hampshire suburbs were suspected of crime, and asked his partner Watson to ask Bradshaw, the Bradshaw Railway Guide, to examine the movements of trains throughout Britain during the month. This is the possible framework for the Sherlock Holmes case.
Narratively, London is now interconnected with remote areas. For example, Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-1873) is mostly set in the remote cornwall of southwest England, while the plot relies on easy access to London. The railroad brings the heroine Elfrid into love, causing her to fall in love with two men, architect Stephen Smith and the great writer Henry Knight, and composing perhaps the most shocking and heart-wrenching interludes in the entire novel. First, Elfrid and Stephen elope to London, but before they reach the end, the heroine's state of mind changes (the railway causes her to evacuate on an adventure). Finally, at the end of the novel, the heroine's two suitors ride together on the westbound train, they guess each other's precautions, but they do not expect that the goddess Elfrid in his heart has long since disappeared, and the body is parked in the luggage room of the same train.
As the last Novelist of the Victorian era, Hardy is best known for the potential for storytelling on the train journey. Reading his covered book" The Nameless Jude, readers will be surprised by the many local train journeys of the heroes and heroines Jude and Shu that appear frequently in the novel. For many of the Victorian middle class, railroads brought a new freedom. In Hardy's dreary novels, all the scenes of the train speeding only emphasize the heavy breathing of his characters under the shackles.
Professor John Mullen, Dean of the Department of English at the University of London, specializes in 18th-century literature and is currently writing the Oxford History of English Literature, spanning from 1709 to 1784. Professor Mullen was also interested in the study of 19th-century literature, publishing in 2012 what did Jane Austen value most? a book.
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