A World History of Railway Cultures, 1830-1930

Volume I

Matthew Esposito, Matthew D. Esposito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780815377511
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351211789
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This 4-volume collection is the first compilation of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Gathered together are over 200 rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. Organized by historical geography, this first volume covers the United Kingdom.

Volume I
THE UNITED KINGDOM

ENGLAND AS EPICENTER OF RAILWAY CULTURES AND THE PAX BRITANNICA

As to the neighborhood which had hesitated to acknowledge the railroad in its struggling days, that had grown wise and penitent as any Christian might in such a case, and now boasted of its powerful and prosperous relation. There were railway patterns in its drapers’ shops, and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen. There were railway hotels, coffee-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway-plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and time-tables; railway hackney-coach and cab-stands; railway omnibuses, railway streets and buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites, and flatterers out of all calculation. There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in. Among the vanquished was the master chimney sweeper, whilom incredulous at Staggs’s Gardens, who now lived in a stuccoed house three stories high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the cleansing of the railway chimneys by machinery.

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848), 241.

Every new generation of railway researcher profitably reconsiders Dickens’ passage in light of their own eras. Staggs’ Gardens of the 1840s still has relevance as a locus of timeless reinvention: of neighborhoods, religion, relations of power and wealth, journals, hotels, cafes, the list of material representations of railway culture goes on. Dickens’ memorable imagery of the railway’s omnipresence in England and the sun’s surrender to the clock is analyzed below. For now, it is the final sentence that embodied nineteenth-century world railway cultures. Ever the brilliant wordsmith, Dickens played with a keyword conspicuous in its archaism even in 1847. Hiding in plain sight is “whilom,” meaning “up until now” or “in the past.” In shorthand, Dickens referred to the cultural aptitude of Britons in Staggs’ Gardens to set aside their collective uncertainty and disbelief with the rapidity of change and adapt. This mutability toward progress explains the chimney sweeper’s agility within the shifting milieu. The sun gave in, but he “gave himself out.” Modernity vanquished unbelievers, but the resilient chimney sweep persevered “with golden flourishes upon a varnished board.” He mastered a machine to clean the chimneys of trains and reinvented himself into a three-story home. Dynamic societies with fluid relations of production adjusted nimbly to change and left many others behind.

In some of his characters, Dickens narrates the English parable of John Bull, the fictional Englishman who symbolizes the inventiveness of the factory engineer and whose historico-spatial analogues were indeed the two great cities of the industrial north in Lancashire, Manchester and Liverpool, and also London. Victorian culture worshiped the anti-intellectual of Carlyle, Froude, Kingsley, and Hughes, the Man of Practice admired for his industrial achievements and exalted for his imperial conquests. Stolid, earnest, hard-working, willfully ignorant, and tenacious, he prized and practiced rule of thumb, machines, and empiricism over scientific theory. The builder of railways, fleets, and empires had access to capital to invest in action and the use of force.¹ From 1800–1821, Lancashire’s population grew 56 percent. Manchester rose to prominence as the cotton manufacturing center of the world. Liverpool imported raw cotton, exported cotton goods, and demanded 1,200 tons of coal per day by 1825.² London was the financial capital of the world. On December 4, 1830, after conveying over 50,000 passengers on nearly 1,000 round-trips, L&M crews loaded eighteen railway wagons with 135 bales and bags of cotton, 200 barrels of flour, sixty-three sacks of oatmeal, and thirty-four sacks of malt. The locomotive engine that hauled the fifty-one-ton load from Liverpool to Manchester was Stephenson’s significantly named Number One engine Planet.³

Great Britain never needed railways to achieve a global empire, nor even a capitalist world. London and Liverpool had been ports of call for international shipping traffic for two centuries prior to steam-locomotive railways. By 1830, a world market already existed, and Great Britain controlled ten ports that regulated trade within the main oceanic systems. London on the Thames and Liverpool on the Mersey exercised hegemony over trade in the Atlantic, and with it the North Sea and Mediterranean. British control of Calcutta (1760s) and the Straits Settlements of Penang (1786), Singapore (1819), and Malacca (1824), as well as Cape Colony (1814), granted access to the Indian Ocean system. Malacca, the new colonies of Australia (1788) and New Zealand (1788, 1840), and later the treaty port of Hong Kong (1842) provided windows on the Asiatic Pacific. Equally important was the control of shipping lanes through the smaller straits and seas. The partition of Africa, the race for the Pacific, and competition for the Southeast Asian mainland and Indonesia were all secondary to Great Britain’s primary goal of paramountcy, not just over the Indian subcontinent but the entire southern half of Asia. British Prime Ministers, the Foreign Office, and Parliament never sought to challenge the Tsars for all of Asiatic Russia. But what Kipling called the “Great Game” in the late nineteenth century was in fact the Anglo-Russian rivalry over an imaginary north-south dividing line of Asia in the Crimea and Black Sea area, the trans-Caspian region and Persia, the Khyber Pass and Sind of northwestern India (now Afghanistan and Pakistan), and China before the rise of Japan.⁴ Great Britain withstood tests of its colonial policy and military might in the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny. Railways, canals, telegraphs, submarine cables, shipping lines, Reuters, and the Suez Canal all produced a greater British Empire by 1870. Railways played the largest roles in accelerating imperial expansion and integrating territorial possessions. The twenty-first-century resurgence of China and India, the continuing development of the globally networked economies of the “Asian tigers,” and restoration of a multipolar world greatly clarifies the priorities of British foreign policy decisions in the late nineteenth century.

Inception

Victorian railway cultures originated in London and radiated throughout England, then the world. Even before 1830, oceanic steamers and clipper ships had transformed London into the most visited and internationalized city in the world, especially after the French Revolution and Napoleonic period. Once London was linked by rail to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Nottingham, Bradford, Hull, Newcastle, Brighton, and Edinburgh, England became the undisputed center of capitalism, the heart of the Pax Britannica, and the epicenter of railway culture. Marx understood the significance of the L&M railway as a signpost that confirmed that Great Britain had achieved the highest form of capitalist production. In Grundrisse (1857–1858), a collection of then-unpublished writings produced between The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867), Marx singled out the L&M as a “necessity of production for the Liverpool cotton brokers and even more for the Manchester manufacturers.”⁵ Importantly, Marx understood the presuppositions that informed the railway’s construction as a road. The limitations of freight carriage were well known. The cotton industry had maximized its profitability with no discernable improvements in circulating its goods given extant modes of transport. The exchange value of the two primary products of cotton and coal threatened to eliminate their surplus value due to rising transportation costs. This was especially true for the Lancashire merchants who sold surplus production in the distant markets of India. Surplus capital and labor were readily available. There was no interruption in production or circulation of commodities during railway construction. Capitalists even presumed that railways would acquire what Marx later described as “surplus time,” the acquisition of more productive labor resulting from reductions in the labor and material costs associated with horse and barge modes (carters, horses, fodder, tolls, transshipment, barges, and canal fees). Hence, Marx asked: Can capital squeeze surplus value out of the costs of transportation?⁶ The L&M Board of Directors had answered in the affirmative, acquiring surplus time by building a mechanical road that moved by itself. The physical conditions of exchange required the annihilation of space by time.⁷

Like canal construction and other massive excavations, railways destroyed in order to create. Contrary to the way railway promoters depicted other modes of transportation as archaic vestiges of the feudal past, every transportation system prior to the onset of railways underwent widespread material improvements based on the influence of industrialism.⁸ Railway companies devastated their rival canal companies by promoting the increasing efficiencies of steam-powered ground communications while exposing the defects of canal systems. Early treatises on railway technology privileged the word “celerity” to assert that steam power offered to overland routes what canals could never guarantee: speed, reliability, and cost efficiency.⁹ The proponents of railways educated different segments of society about the universal applicability of the technology as overland transport surmounted every geographical, topographical, geological, and climatological obstacle. Once again, the L&M experiment under the supervision of George Stephenson proved engineers and workmen capable of cutting their way through uneven hills, erecting embankments, bridging and diverting water, conquering the wetlands of Chat Moss, and even tunneling outside of Liverpool. All told, engineers and workers erected sixty-three bridges, extended the Olive Mount excavation for two miles, moved three million cubic yards of earth, and built each of the nine arches of the Sankey Viaduct seven stories high.¹⁰ Canals served only those riverine communities with ample natural water supplies, and the costs of canal excavation and locks to surmount inclines were astronomical. Railways ascended hills effortlessly and adapted to preexisting roads in ways that eliminated the troublesome labor inefficiencies of loading and carting, carting and uncarting, shipping, unshipping, and transshipping. For example, river and canal vessels, such as shallow-draft barges and steam-paddle ships, were unsafe in open seas, and large clipper ships struggled with impassable depths, bends, and obstacles in rivers. In both instances, freight had to be loaded and unloaded from ships and wagons. In addition, canal companies were not carriers. In order to ship anything from Wolverhampton to Hull, for example, the freight had to be transshipped four times by different carriers, all of whom charged fees: Wolverhampton to Shardlow, Shardlow to Gainsborough, Gainsborough to Hull, and Hull to destination.¹¹ Unlike canals, railway construction did not “interpose so formidable a barrier between the contiguous portions of an estate.”¹² Whereas railways operated rain or shine year-round, canal companies limited or discontinued service during summer droughts when water levels were low or the winter months when ice impeded traffic. Ice flows had always threatened barges from the Mersey River and Bridgewater Canal in Liverpool to Lake Baikal in Siberia. When railways broke down in poor weather, repairs delayed traffic for a few hours or days, while canal defects shut down traffic for entire seasons. In addition, engineers praised railways for connecting two points by direct lines through space, as opposed to the circuitous routes of canal systems, which inevitably tied into equally serpentine natural river systems. Horse-drawn colliery lines that moved coal from point A to point B had proven the geometrical simplicity of trains for decades. Railway experts also rolled out the golden actuarial scroll of overland carriage for one-third the expense – an oft-repeated list of cost savings in railway construction, maintenance, and repairs that required one-third the financial outlay of canals. Tolls were cheaper, if levied at all, and freight charges per mile were one-third the prices that canal companies charged. They predicted freight rates for railways to drop further with high-volume shipments and mechanical improvements. The same benefits of technological modifications did not apply to “stationary” canal systems. The time-savings of transporting freight and passengers by rail also justified switching to railways. Canal transport by paddle-wheel propulsion topped out at four miles per hour due to water resistance, while steam locomotives routinely ran at twenty miles per hour in the 1830s.¹³ In the end, capitalists used standard industrial-age arguments related to time savings, work discipline, economies of scale, and spatial and mechanical efficiency to promote railway systems over its closest competitor.

Critics of canal systems also cited their poor environmental and public health record as rationale for modernization. By the 1830s, farmers in the UK, U.S., and even India filed complaints that canal leakages waterlogged their fields and pastures on one side and desiccated lands on the other. All over the world, the rise in subsoil water tables caused by canal construction rendered groundwater availability unpredictable, thereby defeating the purpose of canal-fed irrigation. Medical health professionals and even engineers began to implicate canals and other large-scale excavation projects as sources of infectious diseases that were injurious and often deadly to nearby workers, settlers, and residents.¹⁴ The coincidence of massive earthworks, canal building, and malaria in Europe (English fens), the Americas (Mississippi Valley), and India (Indo-Gangetic plains), for example, led to theories about the release of toxic miasmas or poisonous “animalcules” that caused marsh fevers in workforces. Not until the microbiological discoveries of the 1890s was malaria properly understood as a disease caused by a germ borne and transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. Public health officials began to condemn canal, railway, and road-building companies, not for originating malaria – which was well-known for decades – but for inadvertently producing mosquito hatcheries in “borrow pits” and irrigation ditches along their lines and exposing laborers and nearby settlements to epidemics. “Railway malaria” was a significant killer of railroad workers and the rural poor in India, Italy, the U.S. South, and many other world regions. Canal and irrigation projects also shouldered some of the blame for water-borne illnesses, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery, that infected work camps.

England’s main trunk lines extended between a handful of important cities that eventually linked to the industrialized port cities of London and Liverpool. Regional clusters centered on Manchester, Leeds, Derby, Birmingham, and York, Sheffield, Bradford, Hull, Newcastle, Brighton, Southampton, and Bristol. Norwich, Exeter, Cardiff, and Chester either began their own lines or were linked into existing ones by the early 1850s. The cities of Dublin and Belfast began their expansions in Ireland. In Scotland, Edinburgh connected with Glasgow. Railways urbanized the United Kingdom. By 1851, Great Britain became the first modern nation in which more people lived in cities and towns (51 percent) than in rural areas (49 percent).¹⁵ From over 100 railway companies, eight principal lines emerged and dominated passenger and freight traffic in the 1870s. If London was the center of a clock, the Great Northern ran in the direction of the hour hand at noon, the Great Eastern to two o’clock, the London, Chatham, and Dover to four, the London and South Western to eight, the Great Western at nine, the London and Northwestern at ten, and the Midland at eleven. The only main line that did not end in London was the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, which connected Liverpool and Hull. To take the clock metaphor a step further, the Railways Act of 1921 amalgamated British railways by combining the numbers of the clock into four three-hour blocks: the Great Northern was noon to three, the Southern three to six, the Great Western six to nine, and the London and North Eastern nine to twelve. Removing the face of the clock reveals the regional gears and sprockets of a complex communications and transportation system that ran of its own device.

The machine that moved itself, like the clock, was powered by an invisible source of energy. Period illustrations reproduced that hiddenness in the silent pages of Mechanic’s Magazine, in Isaac Shaw’s striking engravings of the L&M inauguration, and the many lithographic prints, reproductions, and aquatints of J. C. Bourne, R. Ackermann, and T. T. Bury.¹⁶ Illustrated newspapers, histories, and magazines featured the woodcut engravings of George Dodgson, W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Railways and their metonyms: technology and terminology that transformed world cultures, 1830–1930
• VOLUME I The United Kingdom