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High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 167 ning over a tedious, tame district—­ level and bleak . . . Now a lovely little blue hill far away in Derbyshire! ...Going at a tremendous rate—­no less than thirty-­ six miles an hour! (Jennings 209) The constant repetition of “now” emphasizes the rapidity with which the scene changes, and the writer’s desperate attempt at a real-­ time record of her experience is apparent in the breathless quality of her prose. Robert Louis Stevenson not only wrote about trains in a number of his poems and stories, he wrote on trains as well. One letter is dated “Train between Edinburgh and Chester, 8 August 1874,” and begins, “My father and mother reading. I think I shall talk to you for a moment or two.” The letter combines more general musings with comments on the scenery and on the journey itself.At one point, Stevenson describes the“combination of lowland and highland beauties” in terms that show his appreciation of the distant, structured view a train window can provide: “The outline of the blue hills is broken by the outline of many tumultuous tree-­ clumps; and the broad spaces of moorland are balanced by a network of deep hedgerows that might rival Suffolk, in the foreground.” However, he immediately goes on to complain,“How a railway journey shakes and discomposes one, mind and body! I grow blacker and blacker in humour as the day goes on” (I, 207–­ 9). But however discomposed he may feel, he cannot resist the impulse to capture his experience on paper. These efforts to write bespeak not only the desire to use the time productively but a struggle to create some sort of alignment between one’s mental universe , and the world rushing by outside the window. This challenge is visible in a picture from the Illustrated London News from 1879, showing Queen Victoria crossing the ill-­ fated Tay Bridge (fig. 7).10 The picture is startlingly modern-­ looking both in its foreshortened perspective, which brings the viewer directly into the picture space, and in the casual way in which the Queen hangs outside the window of the railway car, looking at the river below. Like many textual representations of railway travel, the picture has an immersive quality that invites us to go along for the ride. 3. User’s Manuals: The Railway Guide This effort at mental alignment is made explicit in reading material designed 168 Are We There Yet? specifically for the railway traveller: railway guides and handbooks. The railways generated a unique body of texts that sought to fill the perceptual gap created by this disorienting form of travel. Like an“iPad for Dummies”book, these railway guides were indispensable companions to the potentially intimidating experience of new technology. Combining scenic description with timetables and practical advice, railway guides played an important role in making this new, complicated form of travel accessible.Travellers rapidly came to rely on the iconic“Bradshaws”to lead them through the maze of connecting and competing train schedules. The novelty of the railway itself, as a mechanism, also made explanatory information about speeds, inclines, embankment levels, and viaduct construction a useful addition to many guides. But perhaps the primary role of the guidebook was to mediate between the insular experience of train travel and the external world through which the traveller was passing. The idea of reading about scenery, perhaps at the precise moment one was passing through it, seems intended to counter the sense of dislocation and alienation from the landscape that was so prominent a feature of the rail travel experience. The overall format of railway guides generally resembles that of the river guidebooks examined in Part Two—­ they present scenic description and historical background to the places encountered on a specific route. But the tone and pace of the narrative is quite different. Guides to the Thames generally position themselves in relation to a reader who may consult them in advance of a journey, or indeed, instead of a journey. As we saw, their rhetoric encourages the reader to feel a sense of vicarious participation in an experience that may in fact substitute for their own journey. The relatively slow pace of river travel ensured that if the reader was literally following along during the actual trip, there would be plenty of time to absorb both scenery and description. Many of the Thames books were oversized volumes with elaborate, foldout illustrations, clearly not meant to be handled on a...

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