Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

6. The Matrix: Railway Junctions as Non-Spaces

High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 187 ful relatives never allude to these events, but her husband, she says,“sometimes teases me by saying he thinks the man was right and the whole thing a delusion” (423). The story is thus recast as the possible fantasy of a hysteric, with the kidnapped bride becoming an Adela Quested whose accidental confinement with a man in close quarters triggers a kind of sexual hysteria. Or is she the heroine of“The Yellow Wallpaper,” with a husband who is blandly indifferent to her own subjective reality? In any case, the railway carriage provides the setting for a cautionary tale in which women travellers are taught that the corollary of this more mixed, interactive form of travel is the possibility that one’s worst nightmares will be realized. The generalized fear of encountering strangers, and in particular, strangers of the opposite sex, is embodied in a tale that positions itself somewhere along the spectrum between fantasy, nightmare, and reality. The socially ambiguous space of the railway train seems to generate equally ambiguous psychological states and experiences. The railway traveller, poised uncertainly somewhere between here and there, turned his or her attention inward to fill the undefined space of the railway car with his or her own imagination. 6. The Matrix: Railway Junctions as Non-­Spaces Railway stations, particularly at major junctions, were a favorite subject of both verbal and pictorial representation, for they seemed to emblematize the connective power of the railway network. While it was understood that a major benefit of railway expansion was the opportunity it provided for wider circulation of goods, it was the circulation of people that caught the public imagination. Michael Freeman has pointed out that prints and paintings such as L. J. Cran­ stone’s Waiting at the Station (1850), F. B. Barwell’s Parting Words (1859), George Earl’s Going North, King’s Cross Station (1893), and, most famously, W. P. Frith’s depiction of Paddington, The Railway Station (1863) conveyed “the measure of railway stations as hives of human activity” (237). Such scenes combined a wide range of social types with an emphasis on the personal dramas inherent in the partings and greetings that took place. In written accounts, too, the image of the junction emphasizes the capacity of the railway to bring together an assortment 188 Are We There Yet? of people from a wide variety of places. The station forms a kind of nexus that seems to draw energy from the constant activity of drawing people in and spinning them out again. Railway stations quickly developed their own identities as meeting places, often attracting people“for other purposes than travelling,” according to one account . In addition to serving as“a lovers’ trysting-­ place,” they also performed an important function in providing a convenient, centrally located meeting place for people to “conduct business on the cheap” (“Railway Stations,” 306). This author’s claim that“every class of people make appointments at railway-­stations” (306) is borne out by the suggestion of Marion Yule, in New Grub Street, that an editor who has missed her father at home might arrange to meet him before his departure:“He might just call, or even see you at the railway station?” (Gissing, 75). The Oliphant story mentioned above,“The Railway Junction,”describes the junction as kind of “limbo,” and many other writers echo this sense of it as a transitional space that merely holds people in suspension. Jerome K. Jerome famously satirized the confusion and bustle of a major railway terminus in his description of Waterloo, where he and his friends try unsuccessfully to find their train. Asking is no help:“Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it” (40). When they find an engine-­ driver who seems unsure of his assigned destination, they offer him half a crown to become the 11.05 for Kingston: “‘Nobody will ever know, on this line,’ we said,‘what you are, or where you’re going. You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston’” (41). Jerome’s facetious description reinforces the image of a system beyond individual control by imagining the impossible: a human response to a human appeal. Destination is almost irrelevant; all one can say is that trains come and go, forming a pattern Jerome finds indecipherable. By contrast, Trollope’s...