Book contents
- Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Plotting a Novel Industrial Infrastructure
- Chapter 2 Writing between the Lines
- Chapter 3 Junctions
- Chapter 4 Rerouting Plot Lines in Daniel Deronda
- Chapter 5 Tunnel
- Chapter 6 The End of the Line
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century Literature and culture
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2025
Book contents
- Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Plotting a Novel Industrial Infrastructure
- Chapter 2 Writing between the Lines
- Chapter 3 Junctions
- Chapter 4 Rerouting Plot Lines in Daniel Deronda
- Chapter 5 Tunnel
- Chapter 6 The End of the Line
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century Literature and culture
Summary
How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.
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- Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian NovelFrom Platform to Plot via the Railroad, pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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