Abstract
Abstract This article couples debates about building a Channel Railway between Britain and France in the 1880s with Thomas Hardy’s novel, A Laodicean (1881), to investigate how fiction interrogated the material and imagined limits of British railway infrastructure. By examining ‘reverberation’, that is, the unintended and noisy oscillation of the tracks, it teases out subtle yet significant links between technology, interpretation, and control that underpin Hardy’s novel, and the Channel Railway project more broadly. In doing so, it argues that imaginative writing provided a testing ground for exploring political and practical risks raised by the prospect of a railway connection between Britain and France in the late nineteenth century.
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