The Victorian Railway Book

The railway was the creation-in some ways the archetypal creation-of the Victorian age. From the very first it symbolized progress, the advance of civilization, and the promise of the future. It also stood for ugliness, slavery to the machine and the destruction of peace and beauty. What no one ever disputed was that it stood for change-change on a scale that had never been experienced before.

Jack Simmon's wide-ranging new study shows how the railway affected Victorian thought and language, figured in the literature of the age, inspired artists and transformed communications through the mail service and dissemination of news. Above all it expanded the horizons of ordinary people. By the end of the century they were traveling by train in enormous numbers to and from their daily work and further abroad in search of pleasure, on excursion trains that covered the country from Cornwall to the Highlands of Scotland.

Professor Simmon's book is the culmination of a lifetime's enthusiasm and dedicated research. Discussion of the technical aspects-track, stations, machines-leads to the engineers who built the railways and the businessmen who financed them, and then to the impact the railways made social and intellectual fabric-on attitudes of mind, on leisure and on the environment. There are chapters on the railways in literature and the visual arts, on railway publicity and the press, on tourism and holidays, and the way the speed of railways altered our perception of time. It is a story that is enthralling in its own right and fundamental to an understanding of British history and the nature of Britain today.