The Railway Guide’s Experiments in Cartography: Narrative, Information, Advertising

More than compendia of departure times and fare information, popular railway guides sought to make sense of an unfamiliar journey for travelers, to lend coherence to and realign representation with what was otherwise a dislocating experience of time and space. Early versions suggested that narrative might provide legible coordinates for cartographic reorientation, while also inviting readers to transform themselves into authors and to script their own journeys and destinations in the form of narrative. By the 1850s and ’60s, the visual rhetoric of advertising reshaped both tables and maps; indexical and incremental representation became less important than an emphasis on consumer choice and the promise of immediate fulfillment.