Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

III. High-speed Connection: The Railway Network

Part Three High-­Speed Connection The Railway Network Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely“being sent” to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. —­ John Ruskin, Modern Painters III, 1846 He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals. . . . WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. —­William Gibson, Neuromancer, chap. 5, 1984 It was a new technology that seemed to herald a new age. A network that was initially designed for use by a limited number of professionals quickly grew into an indispensable infrastructure that changed a whole society’s sense of distance, scale, and community. Though its eventual impact was impossible to predict, its capacity to bring together people and ideas from widely dispersed locations promised the dawn of a new era. At the same time, it seemed to speed up all aspects of life, creating new pressures in an increasingly harried modern world. Many feared that the patterns of social interaction it created would erode local communities and strain intimate relationships. The railway was in many ways the Internet of its era.1 The rapid development of the railway in the nineteenth century has long been seen as a critical harbinger of modernity. Not only did rail travel have an enormous economic and social impact, it also created a radical reconfiguration 144 Are We There Yet? of our perceptual experience. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s seminal work, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977), explored the ramifications of this new, mechanized form of travel for nineteenth-­ century European and American culture, showing how it altered “the traditional space-­ time consciousness” (37) in a way that would define the modern sensibility. Schivelbusch suggested that “the diminution of transport distances seemed to create a new, reduced geography” (35), creating a kind of “temporal shrinkage” (34). Schivelbusch’s analysis emphasizes the industrial aspect of railway transportation, in contrast to earlier forms, famously describing the“machine ensemble” created by the engine’s dependence on the external apparatus of railway tracks and tunnels. This created, according to Schivelbusch, an artificial mode of perception in which“the traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble” (24).2 In the final section of this study, I suggest that railways created the same disorienting feeling of suspension between two places that we saw in the experience of panoramas, and in the leisurely Thames journeys of Part Two. In comparing a third form of virtual travel to the two already discussed, I will show that this new technology achieved perceptual effects that were not in fact completely new. Where panorama viewers stood still and succumbed to an illusion of movement, and river travellers drifted through a timeless, generalized landscape, railway travellers arrived at distant destinations without feeling the sensation of having gone there.All three modes of experience involve a continuous slippage between the subject and the surrounding environment. As we will see, virtual travel is valued for precisely this destabilization and disorientation of the self. Through close examination of the representation of railways and railway travel, Part Three explores Victorian conceptions of the relationship of the self to the modern world. I begin with some historical and cultural background on the development of the railway, not with the goal of providing a comprehensive overview but in order to identify some key themes and aspects of rail travel that would become important to its textual manifestations. Among the texts I then offer in illustration of these themes are a range of little-­ known railway guides, periodical accounts of rail journeys, and pieces of popular short fiction. These accounts, many studied here for the first time, share an emphasis on the ambiguity of railway space, and the complexity of the social relations that developed in this new,less class-­stratified,domain.As in previous sections,I examine some specific rhetorical moves in these short pieces that will reappear in fictional representations of the railway in novels by Stoker, Dickens, Braddon, and Eliot. Finally, I will draw on film and media theory in...