An Historical Geography of Railways in Great Britain and Ireland, and: Railways and the Victorian Imagination (review)

An Historical Geography of Railways in Great Britain and Ireland, by David Turnock; pp. xiv + 379. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998, £68.50, $119.95.

Railways and the Victorian Imagination, by Michael Freeman; pp. vii + 264. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, $39.95, £25.00.

Recent scholarship on the industrial "revolution" has tended toward the view that Britain's industrial development was more evolutionary than revolutionary. David Turnock's recent work is certainly in keeping with this trend. Throughout his study, Turnock pursues the moderate line that the railways, although certainly important, did not exercise a determining influence on the shape of nineteenth-century British society. Michael Freeman rejects this "gradualist perspective," noting that, if British society was not actually in danger of collapse in the first half of the nineteenth century, it nonetheless "seemed so" to many members of the privileged classes (9). This basic difference shapes the respective goals and focuses of these two studies. Turnock builds upon the previous work of many specialist historians and geographers to document the ways in which local technological, geographical, and economic conditions shaped Great Britain's railway networks. Freeman undertakes an "imaginative history" of the railway, eschewing a brand of scholarship that he considers "largely institutional in mould" for a more expansive study of the railways' "cultural connections" (19).

The first part of Turnock's book examines the evolution of railway networks in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In England and Wales, he argues, technical considerations and struggles among myriad competing companies led to the emergence of an interlocking system of regional monopolies which only softened in the later decades of the century. Development in Scotland was largely coal-driven, as lines were built following an older system of wagon-ways allowing access to valuable coal fields. The "Irish railway scene" (139) was shaped by "a territorial division of interest" (136) that limited competition among companies. Ireland was unusual too for its extensive narrow-gauge lines and the substantial government support its railways received. The second part of the book considers the broader impact of railways on canals and ports, cities and towns, and the countryside, addressing such topics as the railways' role in bringing about the demise of older modes of transportation, the ways in which they shaped urban geography, and their complex relationship to agriculture and rural industry.

Freeman divides his study into eight topical chapters, each addressing a different manifestation of "the railway as cultural metaphor" (19). The first discusses the role of the railway in the decline of eighteenth-century patterns of life. The second situates the railway in the context of the Victorians' general fascination with science and technology, arguing that it not only accelerated the pace of life but also encouraged characteristically Victorian obsessions with punctuality, time-keeping, and statistics. The third chapter examines railways and capital, the fourth the railways' impact on urban spaces, and the fifth their broader effects on "territory." Railways, Freeman maintains, simultaneously "annihilated space and compartmentalized it" (149). Taken together, they created a "produced" nature, in which the "old absolutes of location" were supplanted by "relational" systems of space and time (166-68) and individual companies acted almost like "quasi-states" (23), controlling territories and dictating the flow of commodities. The sixth chapter explores the railways' dependence upon two very different sorts of human workers: the "armies" of navvies who constructed the railway lines and the highly differentiated corps of engineers, stokers, porters, and so on, who were so essential to their daily operation. While the earliest navvies carried the social evils of industrialism into rural areas, the workers in "railway service" heralded the emergence of a new kind of capable and pliant labor force demanded by the modern corporation. The "kaleidoscopic division of railway labour" to which they were subjected in turn, fostered an elaborate "tribalism," with different occupational specialities evolving...