‘A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods’

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century novel, trains are typically represented as a destructive force. In texts from Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the early 1860s, brief yet vivid instances of ‘these approaching monsters’ tearing through the landscape with a ‘fierce impetuous rush’,1 encapsulate how, to the Victorians, the railways decisively announced the coming of modernity. These visions of the ‘fiery devil, thundering along’2 overtly express the fear and anxiety that surrounded the approaching modern age of industrial capitalism.3 The railway’s disruptive impact is further demonstrated in depictions of places and landscapes becoming transformed by railway development. In Dombey and Son, Staggs’s Gardens is ‘rent to its centre’, with houses ‘knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up’.4 The ‘core of all this dire disorder’ is ‘the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad’.5