The Engineer's Garden

Abstract

This essay studies two nineteenth-century travel guides to Norway and looks at the way their descriptions and illustrations construe the national landscape. Written at the beginning of the railway era, these guides cater to a new kind of traveler – the railway tourist. This was a traveler who moved dast and effortlessly through the landscape and for whom the en route experience attained a new importance. The guides reflect this new perspective. They describe with meticulous care the attractions passing outside the compartment window and choreograph the travelers’ body and eye so that he (or occasionally she) would not miss a single vista. In his classic study of 19th-century landscape perception, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that this particular view of the landscape was new to the nineteenth century, intrinsically linked to the new mode and speed of travel. This essay, however, suggests that the aesthetics of the mobile eye has a longer historical lineage, stretching back to the English garden of the eighteenth century. Using the notion of the fabrique – scenic elements placed as points of view in eighteenth-century landscape gardens – the essay identifies the particular fabriques of the nineteenth century railway landscape. It suggests, borrowing a term from the French historian Antoine Picon, that the nineteenth century railway landscape is a kind of “engineer’s garden”, conceived, composed, and experiences en route.