Locomotive Breath: The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse

Abstract

Locomotive Breath:The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse Ethan Taylor Stephenson (bio) By the turn of the twentieth century, the British railway system had left its mark on both the landscape and the literary imagination.1 The proliferation of rail lines and new railway technologies, what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as the "machine ensemble," combined with a substantial increase in passenger numbers and travel frequency to redefine conceptions of time and space—and thus, by extension, to influence both the content and form of poetic expression.2 The Scottish working-class poet Alexander Anderson was acutely aware of these changes as "surfaceman" and self-appointed chronicler of the railway.3 A contest winner in and frequent contributor to that "new wave of penny papers" like the People's Journal and People's Friend of Dundee, which, following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, "catered first and foremost [to] the working class," Anderson was keen to inspire "a higher reverence for the 'nobility of labour, [and] the long pedigree of toil.' "4 His railway verse too attempts to transcend, even while it responds to, its cultural moment, and, in doing so, it both informs our understanding of late-Victorian attitudes toward technology and comments on the machine's broader viability as a poetic vehicle thereafter. Anderson's 1878 Songs of the Rail, a collection of thirty-four poems (most republished from his own earlier volumes), best expresses his complex attitudes toward the railway as an institution and toward railway technologies like the locomotive. Beyond this, though, it demonstrates the depth and sophistication of his drive to portray railroad workers and their gargantuan steam engines as ontological equals, co-denizens of a new technological age.5 This is not to say that Anderson was unaware of the dangers posed by the railway to both worker and passenger. Accidents were frequent and well documented both in the periodical press and in verse by contemporaries like William Aitken, [End Page 277] whose 1883 collection Lays of the Line, and Other Poems tells the "little histories" of those who were employed in that "most hazardous" line of work, and William McGonagall, who immortalized the 1879 Tay Bridge Disaster.6 Neither does Anderson ignore certain existential fears of the machine age. Besides portraying locomotives' raw, sometimes brutal power, his poems often respond to contemporary warnings about the human costs of technological advancement. Nevertheless, Anderson's work remains striking for its fervent embrace of "progress" wrought jointly by human and machine. Thus, even as Anderson often features what Kirstie Blair has described as rhythmic juxtapositions of "the pulse of the rails with the fragile and easily damaged rhythms of the human body," he more insistently imagines the future of human resiliency and enlightenment as inhering in a new hybrid poetics and, with this, a newly collective consciousness of human and machine.7 Alongside Blair's account of the mimetic properties of railway verse, then, we also need to figure in John Goodridge's assessment that Anderson himself saw the railway's "poetic potential as both a metaphor and a site of reverie, a place where the poet can dream of metaphysics, political progress, and social change."8 In this essay, I apply these two approaches toward a more detailed and specific characterization of Anderson's technophilic vision than has yet been offered—and one that is especially timely as Victorian scholarship is currently reassessing similarly overlooked histories of post- and nonhuman subjectivity.9 It is first important to appreciate how Anderson presented himself as a working-class literary professional. He parlayed his early and ongoing magazine-contest success into several poetry collections in the 1870s, and the reviews and sales of these volumes were favorable enough to win him appointments as a librarian at Edinburgh University and as secretary of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution.10 Even though the image of the laboring literary autodidact had seemingly become clichéd by the time of Anderson's career, his credentials were such that George Gilfillan, in his introduction to Anderson's 1875 volume, could at least plausibly locate him at the top of the Scots working-class poetic tradition as inaugurated...