Transport in British Fiction

Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940

A. Gavin, A. Humphries, A. Gavin, A. Humphries

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137499042
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Transport in British Fiction is the first essay collection devoted to transport and its various types horse, train, tram, cab, omnibus, bicycle, ship, car, air and space as represented in British fiction across a century of unprecedented technological change that was as destabilizing as it was progressive.

Part I

Transport in Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction, 1840–1880

1

Distance is Abolished

The Democratization and Erasure of Travel in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon

Elizabeth Bleicher

Two years before the serial publication of William Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon in Fraser’s Magazine (January to December 1844), Victorian commentator the Reverend Sydney Smith exulted that with recent improvements in England’s skeletal and disjointed railways, ‘Time, distance and delay are abolished’.¹ By the time Barry Lyndon appeared such delight was tempered with fear, for 1844 marked both the onset of the mid-nineteenth-century Railway Mania (1844–7) and the passage of William Gladstone’s Regulation Act that mandated low-cost access to the railways. By democratizing travel, the Regulation Act paradoxically affected a form of social deregulation that contributed to the fears of a nation in flux. The discussion that follows asserts that the coincidence of Thackeray’s publication and Gladstone’s legislation makes Barry Lyndon an unwitting symbol of the worst social problems increased travel and the death of distance could generate for the middle and upper classes: class transgression, and the social and legal crimes that anonymity fosters. Thackeray himself mused over to ‘what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised?’ trains would lead.² This necessarily troubles Thackeray scholarship, which has historically defined Barry’s near-epic transience as a function of the picaresque tradition. Read through the lens of the Regulation Act, however, the novel becomes a fascinating cultural artefact of the social impact generated by the period’s revolution in transportation.

Barry Lyndon recounts the adventures of a pretentious eighteenth-century fortune hunter who flees Ireland to escape a crime. While serving in the Seven Years War (1756–63) he is assigned to spy on an elegant rogue he recognizes as his uncle, who tutors him to become a fashionable, globe-trotting card sharper. Barry bullies a rich, foolish widow into marrying him, whereupon he spends and gambles away her fortune. When she finally escapes his abuse, Barry is exiled to live abroad on a pension. Upon returning to England he is arrested, and narrates his past travels from the prison where he spends his final years in confinement, poverty, and illness. Barry’s famous feats of imposture, social climbing, and gambling both require and are conducted via an extraordinary level of physical mobility that defies the novel’s setting in the mid-1700s when land travel was slow, dirty, dangerous, and limited to foot, horse, carriage, or coach. It may seem anachronistic to link trains, the central icon of Victorian urban modernity, to an account of a peripatetic gentleman scoundrel originally published under a title framing it as historical fiction: The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century. Even more incongruous, however, is Thackeray’s creation of a traveller’s memoir that negates travel: there is almost no mention of the time and effort required to get from one place to another, so the very few scenes in which transport details surface bear investigation. Thackeray’s decision to omit details and abbreviate descriptions of eighteenth-century travel undermine the narrator’s penchant for glorifying his heroic sufferings, and although it could be predicated on the assumption that tedious travel for the narrator translates into tedious text for the reader, the resulting effect of this erasure has subtle but serious social and historic implications.

When read this way Barry Lyndon replicates in its denial of the materiality of travel the previously unimaginable compression of time and distance its original readers were experiencing, but with an important distinction. ‘Everything is near’, crowed Reverend Smith, but he might as well have said ‘everyone’.³ Just as railway travel offered Thackeray’s original readers new freedoms, his novel suggests that distance, so long a physical obstacle to be overcome, might actually be a positive emotional and physical buffer from dangerously unknowable persons like Barry himself.

Given the sudden spike in travel and all it entailed, readers in 1844 may have been alarmed by Barry’s revelation at the outset of the novel that he comes from a hereditary line of travellers and that it was ‘in [his] fate to be a wanderer’.⁴ He is born to a mother who eloped to London to marry his father, and their return to Ireland is followed by a series of domestic moves; four residences in two countries within only two chapters tipped off readers to the kind of character that Thackeray had planned for them. Barry’s exploits upon reaching adulthood are more disconcerting: once grown and entered into the profession of gambling he treats the Continent like a single giant gaming table at which he suddenly appears in new locations as if by magic, performs dazzling stunts of imposture, wife-hunting, and crooked gaming, then just as magically pops up in the next European capital or resort town. Over the course of the novel, Barry claims to have gambled and tricked his way through: Minden, Warburg, Berlin, Dresden, Toeplitz, Mannheim, Cologne, Warsaw, Treves, Vienna, Paris, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Brussels, St. Petersburg, Rome, Spa, Versailles, and Ostend. These are over and above his British exploits in London, Dover, Bath, and Bristol, and Irish adventures in Waterford and Dublin. While it is tempting to dismiss this itinerary as evidence of Barry’s braggadoccio, a career in gambling and imposture requires constant motion to locate new prey and evade discovery. He also has to travel after each unsuccessful attempt to win the hand of a wealthy woman since most towns lack a surfeit of rich widows and heiresses and the same tricks will not work twice on the very public gaming table of the marriage market. Barry never discusses the travel required to suit his preference for playing minor venues which have charms apparent enough. ‘I had visited many of the best courts of Europe, especially the smaller ones, where play was patronized, and professors of that science are always welcome’.⁵ The advantage of small towns is that that they offer easier marks in the form of less worldly or sophisticated players and significantly reduced chances of running into rivals or former acquaintances who can attest to his character, identity, class, or true profession.

Railway Mania and national consciousness

At the same time as Fraser’s Magazine was publishing the monthly instalments of Barry Lyndon, newspapers and magazines where becoming saturated with campaigns promoting railway speculation and travel. These campaigns spawned ‘Railway Mania’, the term for the pace and scope of the physical rails’ expansion throughout the countryside, as well as the investment ‘madness’ that gripped individuals from all classes and constituted the largest growth of an economic sector in the history of the nation. In an attempt to convey the degree of public awareness and the intensity of the financial frenzy, British railway historian John Francis estimated that, at the height of the railway investment mania in 1845, the leading London papers derived ‘£12–14,000 per week from railway advertisements’.⁶ As the Mania began to wane in 1847, ‘12 per cent of all national income went into railway capital … a favourite form of investment for the middle classes. By the 1840s, railways were attracting more capital than any other industry in Britain’.⁷

Until the mid-1840s, the English rail ‘system’ was a disparate group of small local railways that did not intersect. What made the Mania of the 1840s unique was the breadth of its impact and the intensity of its rise. In 1844 alone, £20 million was invested in railway stocks and approved for use to build and extend rail lines. Before the Mania ended, over £500 million in investments had been raised and a total of 9000 miles had been approved, although less than a third of these were ultimately built.⁸ The rails spread, the economy boomed, fares fell, and speed increased. In the process, the railways’ redefinition of the concept and experience of distance resulted in social, psychological, economic, and demographic effects that permeated and reconfigured Victorian culture. While rail speculation was a socially sanctioned form of gambling that brought lifetime economic freedom and class mobility to some, it was also the utter ruination of those who had been gulled by unrealistic or fraudulent schemes launched during the frenzy. Such was the culture into which Thackeray introduced his satirical account of a professional gambler who answers to over forty names and never stays in one place for long.

The pervasive spread of Railway Mania affected every class, from those financing the railroads to those working to build them and to service their passengers. The Mania’s ramifications came into sharpest focus with the passage of Gladstone’s Regulation Act in October 1844. The Act had originally been constructed to force state purchase of the private lines to create a national rail system that could be regulated for safety, price gouging, and consumer protection, but managed only to achieve one goal: the mandate that all railway companies provide low-cost universal access by establishing a third-class passenger service. Every company had to provide penny-a-mile passage on a majority of their trains and on all of their routes. A penny could buy a half pound of bread in 1844, so the new law should not be construed as offering free transport, but with careful allocation of financial resources, the poor could travel in the same vehicles as the rich, the only difference being comfort and location of seating.⁹ Railways complied immediately, actively promoting the new service since some had already discovered the benefits of high-volume, low-profit ticket sales to fill trains that would run whether empty or full. Now all but the very poorest could afford to travel.

The Regulation Act advanced many of the concomitant social changes that have been attributed to the nineteenth-century railway. Individuals hobbled by the economic depression and high unemployment of the early 1840s were freed to travel to find work in new locations; middle-class urbanites could move their families to suburbs and commute to city jobs, and by the end of 1844, women who had been forced to travel at the convenience of male chaperones were empowered to travel in ‘ladies only’ cars (on most lines). However, with these new freedoms came some unexpected side effects. Letters to newspapers recorded dismay that thrifty members of the middle and upper classes were deliberately travelling in third-class cars although they could easily afford full-fare tickets, and the practice of sneaking onto a first class car with a third class ticket was well recorded in the popular press.¹⁰ Those most invested in keeping intact class distinctions and, perhaps, rai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• The Transports of Fiction 1840–1940: An Introduction
• Part I: Transport in Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction, 1840–1880
• Part II: Transport in fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Fiction, 1880–1910
• Part III: Transport in Modern Fiction, 1910–1940
• Bibliography
• Index