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152 Are We There Yet? sup / I come—­I come—­to eat you up!” as it bears down upon a family’s holiday meal.“Oh, the Monster! . . . Oh, my beef! and oh, my babbies!” the parents cry, the implication being that their family finances have been ruined by unlucky railway speculation. A century and a half before the promise of Internet riches fueled the dot-­ com bubble, the“railway bubble” devastated the Victorian financial world, demonstrating that the promise of this new technology had yet to be fully understood. 1. Frankenstein’s Monster: The Cyborg Engine The Victorians were not entirely confident that the power of the railway could be predicted and controlled.E.Foxwell’s image of“Distance ...led captive across the land in triumphal possession at forty miles an hour” (17), and his claim that “men who were once the serfs of distance, are now free” (18), suggests that in overcoming physical constraints, man had freed himself from a kind of enslavement . But the railway“monster”was often compared to Mary Shelley’s monster, who is powerful enough to escape the shackles of the scientist who created him. The analogy to Frankenstein’s monster may seem surprising, given that it occurs in contexts presenting a largely enthusiastic vision of the railway.Alexander Anderson, in his“Song of the Engine,” refers to the engine as“this monster of ours, that for ages lay/ In the depths of the dreaming earth,” till he is brought out by man (46); then, “like the monster of Frankenstein’s, / This great wild being was nigh; / Till at length he rose up in his sinews and strength,” causing both pride and fear (46). The fact that Anderson is announced on the title page of his collection as a “Railway Surfaceman,” and pictured with a pick and shovel, suggests that his working-­ class perspective may take into account the employment opportunities created by this new industry. In another poem,“On the Engine by Night,” Anderson has the engine himself speak, saying,“Let the Frankensteins who made me / Keep the guiding of my feet” (79). This image of barely restrained power in need of careful guidance emphasizes the hybridity of this partly artificial, partly human creation. The specter of Frankenstein’s monster seems to lurk beneath the surface, too, in images that attribute an electrifying, galvanizing power to the railway. Foxwell, for example, uses a complex organic metaphor to describe the ability of railway speed to further the progress of thought: “Such swift speed makes High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 153 one organic whole of the practical ideas scattered here and there, so that the local vigour of the country pervades the whole mass in through currents, which return to revivify the centres of their birth; industrial life becomes intensified as bodily functions are by the establishment of cerebro-­ spinal nerve tracks among the‘sympathetic ganglia’” (5). Here, the railway seems to function as the electric current that gives life to a previously lifeless “mass.” Iwan Morus has described the transformation of electricity from an unstable, dangerous form of experimentation and entertainment in the 1820s and 1830s into an integral part of public and commercial life from the 1840s onward, and the frequent use of electrical images in relation to steam-­ powered locomotives seems intended to place them on the same trajectory of acceptance. The animating, life-­ giving power of the railway is stressed in the London and Birmingham railway guide. The guide muses, as the route passes through a cemetery: Here is the dead creature—­ there the living, moving, all but speaking monster, which had its origins from intelligences like those which once inhabited the mortal remains around us. The powers of Frankenstein’s monster are here exceeded , and these were created by man. (Freeling, 39–­ 40) This striking juxtaposition of the transience of human life emblematized by the rotting corpses,and the immortality of human intelligence embodied in the railway engine, suggests that the engine is an independent creature that will outlast its creators. To see the power of this new technology as exceeding the capacity to animate dead flesh is to credit man with almost godlike powers that stand in ironic contrast to his inescapable mortality. The anxieties about the dehumanizing effects of technology that led Victorian writers to personify the railway as a kind of monster are echoed today in the cyborg figures that populate science fiction novels, films, and television shows. Contemporary theorists have rehabilitated the figure of the cyborg...

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