In the 1830s and 1840s, railways were available to relatively few communities, with many encountering them on paper and in public discourse long before they had the opportunity to see them in person. This chapter examines what preceded the slow integration of railway infrastructure into narrative infrastructure: fantastical visions of technomodernity that did not fit well into established plots. Documenting efforts by railway companies, journalists, and cartographers to articulate steam-powered transit exposes how widely authors struggled to find a fitting form for railways on the page. Examples include Charles Dickens’s false starts in weaving railway imagery and mobility into prose, via The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). By changing track to explore the notion of ‘fellow passengers’ in A Christmas Carol (1843), and taking time and space away from writing on the move to develop a more deliberately engineered structure for his 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, Dickens adapts his approach to plotting long-form fiction in the steam age. These readings reveal the importance of carefully laying groundwork – or infrastructure – for large-scale shifts in novel form.

This chapter examines the afterlife of the Compact of 1836 in abolitionist and proslavery thought. To a significant extent abolitionists after 1836 accepted the authority of the spirit of 1787 and sought to fashion an abolitionism within that framework. One strand of such a response was represented in the Garrisonian rejection of the Constitution as a legitimate authority. A second strand challenged the characterization of that spirit as protective of slavery through a claim that the Constitution represented an attempt by antislavery founders to grapple with the reality of slavery in their historical moment. In concert with these developments, after 1836 supporters of slavery began to refine their own understanding of the role of spirit in constitutional interpretation by prioritizing the recognition of slavery as a constitutional institution. To different ends both groups would gravitate in the 1840s toward a view of the Constitution as correctly understood only with reference to the attitudes that were prevalent at the time of its creation. Thus the legacy of the compact of 1836 would be a legitimization of the constitutional authority of 1787–88.