Railways and Literature (in the 1800s in Europe)

Literature has included references to the railway world since the train, with its diffusion, revolutionised how individuals thought about themselves and the conception of the natural landscape, effectively establishing itself as an emblem of looming modernity.

The first railway line (Stockton-Darlington) was inaugurated in England in 1825, while in 1830, again in English territory, it was time for Liverpool-Manchester; and the first French lines (Paris-Versailles and Paris-Saint-German) date back to 1836 and 1837. In Italy, as in Germany, the railway network also had the function of politically unifying the country: the first kilometres of railway in the Italian peninsula were those of the Naples-Portici line in 1839, and the following year, the network expanded with the construction of the Milan-Monza. In this historical phase, intellectuals held two opposing ideological positions regarding the railway. On the one hand, the romantics saw the train as a collective and individual threat (the new perception of time and space could, for example, cause intense anguish in man), and a mechanism that undermined a spiritualistic conception of nature. On the other hand, there were the followers of the Enlightenment (a part of the bourgeoisie interested in the economic potential) who positively saw the progress brought by this means of transport.

Starting from the nineteenth century, many texts were written in which the authors conceived trains and railways as disconcerting elements. In this context, some widely used metaphors include the locomotive as a fiery monster and blind force of destiny, the railway train as a dragon or serpent, stations as places of desolation, and tracks as violent defacers of the genuine beauty of nature. Among the ranks of high-calibre French writers hostile to the railway (at least in the first instance), there are, for example, Charles Nodier, Alfred De Musset, Gustave Flaubert, Antoine Deschamps, Theophile Gautier and Alfred De Vigny. Gautier wrote an article on his first train experience (as one of the first passengers on the Paris-Saint-German line in 1837), highlighting above all the terror conveyed to travellers by safety warnings and speaking of a vehicle with no future, of an absolute “industrial toy”; De Vigny in the poem La Maison du Berger, using expressions such as “taureau de fer qui fume”, “rude aveugle”, “dragon mugissant”, instead constructed the first poetic bestiary of the railway.

An emblematic case of retraction came from the English context from William Wordsworth: if, initially, the poet welcomed the advent of the railway with discreet enthusiasm, as evidenced by the 1833 sonnet Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways when the infrastructure came to affect his peaceful Lake District, he demonstrated all his opposition through adhesions to appeals, letters in newspapers and compositions (among these, Proud were ye, Mountains, when, in times of old is a prayer addressed directly to the mountains so that they too demonstrate indignation).

Henry David Thoreau, the American transcendentalist writer, expressed his negative view in Walden (1854). Even in the countryside where the work is set, the railway has become familiar, but the noise of the oncoming carriages still ruins the quiet of the place, and Thoreau equates the subsequent whistle of the train with the threatening cry of the hawk. This description is followed by an ironic reflection on how the new means of transport is celebrated for having allowed man to have a more regular life, even if references are then inserted to the themes of destiny and death (here is evident the criticism of modernity that deludes the individual into having control over everything).

Jules Janin can be included among the promoters of rail travel in the nineteenth century. He, like Gautier, took part in the inauguration of the Paris-Saint-German line but provided an account of the opposite flavour: the experience of the train was almost hyperbolically recorded as the most pleasant thing in the world, and the locomotive was described as a tireless and unrivalled horse. Among the voices that supported the recent change were those of two Italian intellectuals closer to politics and economics than to literature: Camillo Benso di Cavour and Carlo Cattaneo. The first established the importance of the invention of the train by comparing it to that of the press and the discovery of America, while the second concentrated on the need to preserve the historical, linguistic and economic identity of each Italian city by creating railway lines that did not connect among them only the large centres.

A sort of manifesto in favour of technological progress was the article The Poetry of Industry published on 15 July 1853 in the «Revue de Paris», in which Achille Kaufmann reflected on the poor use of the industrial dimension as a poetic muse; Maxime Du Camp, close to the theme of the relationship between poetry and industry, published Les Chants Modernes in 1855 with a preface entirely praising industrial literature.

Remo Ceserani (2002), departing from a good sample of texts, attempted to construct a system of the semantic and metaphorical structures of nineteenth-century railway imagery. Ceserani’s model envisages a series of dichotomies typical of railway literature due to the different existing perspectives on the train: the contrast between the locomotive as a harmonious natural organism and the locomotive as a disturbing metal machine, the sound of nature equated with natural music and the sound of the train to artificial music, the slow movement of the wanderer walking across the landscape and the speed of the train moving on a fixed path. Regarding this last point, it is inevitable to cite John Ruskin, who in Praeterita (1885-1889) nostalgically describes the slowness of ancient carriage journeys, and Thomas Hardy, who often inserted walks at the beginning, at the end and in the fundamental moments of his novels and considered them to characterise rural society (as it happens in Tess of the D’Ubervilles published in 1891).

A locomotive as an organism (in this case, even humanised), “Lison”, is a character in the novel La Bête Humaine by Emile Zola, published in 1890. This work can be considered a crime novel (two murders occur), a novel social story on the evils of Napoleon III’s France, and a study on criminal madness. However, it is, first of all, a railway novel: the story develops entirely within the confines of a railway line between the station of Gare Saint-Lazare (Paris), and Le Havre and across intermediate stops are Croix-De-Maufras and Rouen; there are plenty of references to the world of railways (locomotives, tracks, wagons, specific techniques, environments, stations, hierarchical structures of workers, roadman’s houses, level crossings, tunnels, etc.); all perfectly reconstructed by Zola’s pen. One of the central aspects of the text turns out to be the difference between the train that runs fast on its tracks without caring about what happens around it and the men and women who experience pain and death on the sides of the railway line; furthermore, the train is conceived as an emblem of a society launched towards progress, while the hereditary defects of the human being (here especially concerning Jacques Lantier, of the Macquart branch) are presences destined not to go extinct. Also, Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1846-1848) expands the railway theme into nineteenth-century literature.

Gradually, the positions of the intellectuals became more nuanced and lacked the extremism characterising the first productions. Literature then had the task of eliminating the disturbing elements regarding the railway from the collective imagination, thus trying to make pleasant something now inevitable. Memoirs fulfilled this task since an unpleasant experience looked at through the lens of childhood memories certainly softens: Peter Rosegger with Waldheimat (1877), Gustave A. Becquer with Desde mi celda (1864) and, inevitably, Marcel Proust with the Recherche, gave rise to this attempt to bring the reader closer to the hitherto disconcerting technological novelty. The novel also had its role in this context, for example, by attributing symbolic and allegorical meanings: the protagonist of Der geteilte Himmel (Il cielo diviso) by Christa Wolf from 1963 finds herself in a divided Germany and has to choose whether to buy just one ticket outward (gaining escape and love but moving to the other portion of the nation) or also purchasing the return (returning to his home but leaving love behind). Therefore, a piece of paper belonging to the world of railways is loaded with a significant meaning.

Furthermore, by blending traditional and modern landscapes and making both a source of inspiration, poetry gave new light to the railway, and children’s literature, with simple procedures, did the same.

One must refer to tourism when discussing trains and railway tracks in literature. The development of the railway in the nineteenth century led to an inevitable increase in travel and, above all, to a revolution in the purposes of travel, as the idea took hold that people could travel mainly for leisure and, therefore, for tourism purposes. Literary texts can reconstruct the relationship between railways and tourism because the use of trains for tourist purposes is represented in some texts (Capecchi, 2019). This is the case of Carlo Lorenzini (Collodi) with Un Romanzo in Vapore. Da Firenze a Livorno. Guida Storico-Umoristica (1856), a book where the writer addresses those who use the railway (especially the Leopolda). Also relevant are the experiences of Italians abroad and foreigners in Italy, e.g., Edmondo De Amicis writing about Holland and Spain, and Henry James and Mark Twain writing about Italy in Italian Hours and The Innocents Abroad.

Currently, there are literary trains, such as the “Dante’s Train” (a historic train that travels along a stretch of the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines, from Florence to Ravenna and with Borgo San Lorenzo, Marradi, Brisighella and Faenza as intermediate stops) and the five freight wagons that can be visited in Roccalumera containing a photo gallery of the Quasimodo family.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Colombi F. (2024). Railways and Literature (in the 1800s in Europe). In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.