The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

Samuel Sidney’s Rides on Railways (1851) dared to prefer the ‘vulgar and amusing’ companionship of third class to the ‘dull and genteel’ assortment at the other end of the train; this after a starchy outward journey in the company of an Oxford MA, an army officer, a Somerset House clerk and a man who had been visiting a lord, and a cheerful return spent with a tailor, a sailor, a bird-catcher and an ex-convict in greasy velveteens, for whom Reading gaol was the winter resort of choice (‘plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed’). A similar rigidity was observed by American visitors. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded of first-class carriages in 1852: ‘Nothing is to be seen or learnt there; nobody to be seen but civil and silent gentlemen, sitting on their cushioned dignities.’ Harriet Beecher Stowe – she of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (also 1852) – found the railway compartment an analogy for ‘that privacy and reserve which is the dearest and most sacred part of an Englishman’s nature … a stranger might travel all through England, from one end to the other and not be on conversing terms with a person in it’.