Time Lord (20 page)

And for every Heine, there was a John Ruskin who remembered the stagecoach and detested every minute of rail travel. In the
Quarterly Review
he railed (so to speak) against “the loathsomest form of deviltry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes, destructive of all nice social habits or possible natural beauty.”

Both sides of the debate could easily project a time in the near
future, for better or worse, when the entire nation would be one continuous city. Railroad travel rearranged social interaction, it stole the passenger’s presumed autonomy. It forced upon him new ways of looking out a window (so as not to develop motion sickness). Instruction manuals taught him how to behave, how to safeguard his valuables, when not to initiate conversations. All new modes of travel and communication are briefly infantilizing, and railroads were no exception.

Much like today’s generation, split between the computer-literate and unskilled labor, attitudes toward the railroad defined classes and generations. Flaubert was famously bored to distraction by railways, and Ruskin felt himself mishandled like a package, not served as a client. Others, however, took to the trains and welcomed the breakdown of barriers, even of landscape and all that was pictorial in nature, as a confirmation of the world as a unified, mental, symbolic reality. In 1848, in
Dombey and Son
, Charles Dickens, no early admirer of railways and their relentless gorging, like rampant brontosaurs on country lanes and urban neighborhoods, nevertheless honored their power, even their redemptive ability, in one extraordinary chapter, “Mr. Dombey Goes Upon a Journey.” Dombey enters the train a defeated, near-suicidal wreck of a man. He alights, buoyed in spirit, freshly confident. Chapter Twenty is fiction of a high social-psychological acuity. Mr. Dombey, a wealthy industrialist, while preparing to board his train is accosted by Mr. Toodle, a “coalraker,” whose wife had been in service to the Dombeys. Mr. Dombey assumes he’s about to be touched up by Toodle for a handout.

In other words, as Thomas Arnold had noted, “feudality is gone for ever.”

In sociological terms, the class system was changing, and the mighty railroad was the cause. In psychological terms, Mr. Dombey enters his train compartment depressed:

Later in the journey, after his dark night of the soul, he comes to a tentative conclusion:

All of which—the night aboard the train, absorbing his own kind of energy-transfer—permits him to rise the next morning “like a giant refreshed,” and to conduct himself at breakfast “like a giant refreshing.”

By the end of
Dombey
’s nine hundred pages, we feel that the author has likewise made his peace with the sheer brute majesty of the iron rails. Locomotion is the life force,
and
it is death; it is fate itself. Dickens might have wanted to pose as a Romantic poet or a Tory lord of a manor, and he would have loved to condemn all that destroyed nature and history, but he’s Dickens; he cannot. He realized railways would bring life where previously there had been only despair and darkness. And just as surely, they will kill—famously, Anna Karenina and the eponymous hero of Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”—anyone who just can’t adjust.

Railroads rewrote the law. Was the rail a “road” like a turnpike or canal, open to public use upon the paying of an appropriate fee? No, it wasn’t. The British Parliament decided very early that the “rail-way” was something new and different. The right of way as well as the rolling stock could be deemed private property. Could they affect our health? The litany of physical complaints reads today like post-traumatic shock, and that exactly is what railroad travel was in the mid-nineteenth century, an uprooting of everything familiar, every notion of the tolerable, every received notion of time and space.

Eyes attuned to the pace and intimate perspective of the stagecoach were cautioned not to scrutinize roadside attractions but to focus on distant objects, the tallest tree, the church steeple or ruined castle, in order to avoid nausea, or worse, a disorientation that could lead to madness. Passengers had to develop “panoramic vision” to compensate for the disorienting fragmentation and treacherous glimpses of a blurred foreground. Inhabited landscapes, viewed from the moving train, dissolved into a series of blurs, mere impressions, shadows in doorways, distant shapes bent in fields, two-dimensional glimpses instead of long, per-spectival
approaches. This, as we shall see, fueled new aware-nesses, new expectancies.

A WHOLE
way of life had passed, as Victorian diarists were fond of noting, a slower time of luxury and sociability, a chance to know the intimate landscape from the stagecoach window, when they swayed to the natural undulation of the horse. Obliterating inventions—the railroad over the stagecoach, the automobile over the railroad, the typewriter over elegant handwriting, the computer over the typewriter—often unleash such sentimental reveries. Who wouldn’t prefer a train, a sailboat, a bicycle, or cross-country skis to some jet-powered or motorized contrivance? Or a distinctive handwritten note from a fountain pen, to some standardized, ill-composed e-mail?

We want more speed but we resent, or at least lament, the elimination of the slower and, arguably, finer, more graceful experiences they replace. Railroad buffs, vintage-auto owners, beer- and wine-makers, fly-tying anglers, gardeners—
they
are the “temporal millionaires,” who can afford to spend conspicuous amounts of time indulging their fancies, living partially in the past.

The rest of us buy upgrades on planes or trains in hopes of restoring a touch of glamour, a bit of slower time, to an otherwise uncomfortable experience. For a stiff supplemental charge we can imbibe again a whiff of Orient Express or
Titanic
luxury, a bit of celebrity status the way Hollywood stars used to wave coming down the airplane stairways as though they were political leaders. We can share a drink in the club car with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, or conduct black-market business like Joseph Cotten, face-to-face, cigarette-to-cigarette, with Harry Lime in the cold, cramped space between the railroad cars in gritty postwar Vienna. Is that Bogart and Bergman on the tarmac, Claude Rains watching with a smirk? It wasn’t so long ago that all the drama, romance, and comedy of America was tied up
in trains, from Preston Sturges to Billy Wilder, all sung to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.” And the reason for that, I suspect, was because automobiles and airplanes had already “framed” trains, made them a site of memory and nostalgia, no longer a principal mode of conveyance.

STEAM TECHNOLOGY
was about more than speed, power, and punctuality. Steam transformed more than the landscape. Steam was hot, loud, smoky, smelly, and dangerous, but there was also something intuitive about its working, and its direct successor, the internal combustion engine. One can imagine the 1850s version of the 1950s teenage grease-monkey, working on a steam engine, polishing, oiling, improving its efficiency. The leap from a James Watt to a Gottlieb Daimler or a Henry Ford is not unimaginable.

Steam was sophisticated, but apprenticeable. Unlike electricity, it was visible, a celebration of practice over theory. With steam, mountains could be bored and harbors dredged. Rivers were crossed, ships’ designs turned from wood and sail to steel and iron, hold capacities and passenger cabins expanded a hundredfold, with a need to fill their holds with thousands of tons of coal for ocean passage. Meticulous planning and astronomical start-up costs entered the calculation for any new enterprise, and London and Continental banks oversaw bond issues for projects that might have seemed fanciful only a generation earlier: undersea cables, new shipyards, new steel mills, new mining equipment; transcontinental railroads spanning Canada, South Africa, America, India; telegraphs down the African coast. The new technology ran on coal, on more coal than traditional methods could ever extract. Workers had to be at least semiskilled just to handle the demands of the new technology, and, in the end, many grew sufficiently confident to challenge ancient wisdom, or to suggest shortcuts to greater efficiency. Quite a few, like the
men who created time, learned enough on the job to become engineers themselves.

The traditional country blacksmith by his forge, the carter, the carpenter, required skills, but no skill that could not be passed on by way of apprenticeship. Imprecision was part of their rustic charm, and no one was seriously affected by minor imperfections. Until the 1830s, as Thomas Huxley and others pointed out, technological improvement and the velocity of events, the perceived speed of living, had lain dormant since the Renaissance. The economy was land, textiles, and agriculture. Imports and exports were triangle trades, carried on mostly by means of sailing ships, within the empire.

The technology of steam created the need for civil engineers to supervise the construction of tunnels, the laying of track, the deepening of harbors, and the analysis of subsoils for ever-heavier bridges—every practical application of engineering skills and applied physical and natural science. It needed mechanical engineers to set the minute tolerances and to oversee the manufacture of turbines and machine tools and to establish standard weights and measurements, and mining engineers to improve coal extraction, and metallurgical engineers to oversee new modes of steelmaking. Steam was an unforgiving power source: any weakness, any miscalculation, any misreading of the dozen or more temperature and pressure gauges could result in disaster. Stronger metals were needed, metals forged at higher temperatures, from purer ores, with experimental additives. The need for engineers directly benefited the middle classes and the great urban universities in London, Glasgow, and Manchester, not the aristocracy, whose sons headed for the prestigious universities and the more traditional professions.

In little more than a generation, England had gone from an agricultural and forest-based economy, unchanged since King John’s time, as Huxley put it, to a rail-dependent, coal-based dynamo that was, by anyone’s measure, demonic in its scale, noise,
power, speed, and filth. Mountain ranges of slag ringed the new industrial centers. The long-range future of steam, however, was imperiled by its own inefficiency. The technology was condemned to gargantuism. The protective shielding and insulation required of a steam turbine, along with the difficulty of maintaining the proper pressure, made smaller steam engines uneconomical. Steam technology, therefore, developed noisily, sootily, even lustily. In the long run, the dimensions of steam applications were limited only by the availability of its energy source, and England, like France, Germany, and the United States, was endlessly blessed with coal.

The size and power of steam encouraged a swagger, a certain Gilded Age social and economic flamboyance, a cigars-and-brandy, godlike, frontier-pushing presumption of entitlement. The image of the glittering salons of the ever-larger steamliners and riverboats, of the upholstered saloon cars of the railroad elite, and the danger that lurked from sparks and boiler explosions—all fed a mounting psychic rebellion against restraint. The Gilded Age’s desire to see more, travel farther, and go faster, in luxury and in freedom, with aggressive displays of tasteless consumerism, has to be set against the measured restraint of a Sherlock Holmes, or the staid images we’ve preserved of Victorian decorum. Both, of course, are accurate. The accumulation of new wealth—the emergence of the bourgeois model of Victorian affluence, so much a feature of literature on the Continent, as well as in England and America—is matched by the hazard of new fortunes, and the speculative losses that wiped out securities, and lives, as often as it created them. New wealth—dirty money, literally and figuratively—was won in high-stakes, high-risk operations in dangerous places. Bribes had to be paid, junk bonds floated, buffalo herds and recalcitrant Indians removed from the right-of-way by any means available. Consolidation and monopolization, starving out the competition, forcing mergers, calling in political debts, fighting the unions (most infamously by
George Pullman himself): it was a glorious time to be a buccaneer capitalist.