Mrs. Disney Leith: bibliography

Another annotated bibliography with an Isle of Wight connection: Mrs. Disney Leith is one of the several names in the literature for the Scottish author Mary Charlotte Julia Leith (née Gordon, 1840-1926) a.k.a. Mary Gordon a.k.a. "M. C. J. L." a.k.a. Mary Leith. Her chief route into history is as the first cousin of the poet Swinburne, who she corresponded with, and later recalled in memoirs.

South Devon Railway: 1844 NIMBY list

A while back I found this interesting list of the petitions objecting to the South Devon Railway Act, 1844, which set up the infrastructure for the building of Brunel's railway link from Exeter to Plymouth, following the now-classic coastal route via Dawlish and Teignmouth. The petitions relate to a number of people and places of historical interest.

On a spaniel's monument

A rather poignant exhibit from Brixham Heritage Museum: the 1826 gravestone of "Var, lapdog of the Right Hon. Lady Farnham", which was originally installed on a rock on the now-overbuilt fields of Parkham Hill, Brixham. Its details connect to a complicated genealogy, and a forgotten railway disaster.

Topsham: roads not taken

A bright afternoon, so I took myself for a walk and a quick glance at the Museum, newly-opened for the 2014 season, where I spotted some pictures of of historical 'roads not taken'.

Parson's Tunnel and The Ocean Sleuth

The Parson from Lea Mount - 4th March 2013

I think Network Rail are missing a trick; a lot of people (me included) would be very happy to pay £10 to don a hard hat and walk through the Brunel tunnels on the currently unused South Devon Main Line between Dawlish and Teignmouth. However, we'll have to make do with a fictional account in the 1915 crime thriller The Ocean Sleuth.

Sea Lawn Gap: déjà vu at Dawlish

Sea Lawn Terrace, Dawlish, 4th March - click to enlarge

The Exeter Express & Echo just featured a report - Dawlish historian: Damage to rail line could have been prevented if Brunel's original plans were followed - on the 'Sea Lawn Gap' and its role in February's disastrous damage to the South Devon Main Line at Dawlish. But a look in news archives finds the incident is a repeat of one nearly 150 years ago, at the same location, and for the same reason - a historical decision that has repeatedly come back to bite.

Lanes and landscape

Under the railway bridge, West Town Farm

I mentioned I had a backlog of photography.The above rather post-apocalyptic image is of the viaduct over the long-closed Teign Valley railway, at West Town Farm, near Ide (a village southwest of Exeter).

I went there in June with Clare for a workshop on site-specific writing co-run by Oriana Ascanio of  Resident Writers and Christine Duff of OrganicARTS. I've delayed writing about it because, to be honest, writing spontaneously in situ is not at all my kind of thing - I'm not a fast writer, and I tend to visit places and write later, after reflection and research. Nevertheless, it was a thought-provoking afternoon out. The location touched on a lot of issues I've mentioned previously, particularly the idea of the rural landscape as a construct; and the tension between rural England's role as an economically viable productive resource and as a kind of aesthetic experience for visitors and incomers (a conflict which manifests, for instance, in the controversies over windfarms, solar farms, and polytunnels). See previously: Rural photography - the shaping of aesthetics and Views of the countryside.

West Town Farm looks to me a successful compromise between different functions of the countryside. It's a working farm (producing organic beef, pork, potatoes, apples, squash and pumpkins) but also focuses on environmental stewardship to protect the landscape as a niche for wildlife, as well as hosting various educational and artistic projects (see the West Town Farm website for background).

As part of the visit, we were given a tour of the farm trail, which showcases the various aspects and habitats of the farm. Probably the most distinctive was the railway cutting, maintained as a habitat for badgers and bats. I did a runner from the writing exercise, pleading the not-entirely-untrue excuse that photography was my preferred medium, just to have another look at it alone.

At the moment, I'm finding landscape exploration a continuing fascination. I've found it a coping strategy with my CUP to avoid introspection, which rapidly leads to feeling depressed, and though you might think being alone in the countryside would foster introspection, I've found quite the opposite: for me, immersion in landscape drives out the 'internal' in favour of the experience, and I can go for hours without remembering more than momentarily that I have a terminal condition. I've never so fully understood Dr Johnson's comment:

Boswell. "But is not the fear of death natural to man ?" Johnson. "So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." He then, in a low and earnest tone, talked of his meditating upon the awful hour of his own dissolution, and in what manner he should conduct himself upon that occasion: "I know not (said he,) whether I should wish to have a friend by me, or have it all between God and myself."
- Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

I'm not in denial. I can think about it and discuss it whenever needed. But I'm not letting it dominate my life, and "keeping away the thoughts of it" at other times is part of that.

Anyhow, back to West Town Farm. The cutting, especially the part under the viaduct, has a very "Where London stood" feel. When you think about, however, the line closed in 1958 and the cutting would be completely overgrown if it had been left untouched - as you rapidly find when you reach the south-eastern end of the farm trail section. In fact the cutting, like the rest of the farm, is a tightly-managed habitat, both environmentally and artistically.

This fallen rock is not left in the middle of the path by accident; it was a conscious choice. Originally intended to be sculpted, it was left by the artist untouched as an artwork in itself, and it now supports an Ansel Adams style fern. No doubt the same aesthetic is behind the fallen trees crossing the path, but not obstructing it. This knowledge doesn't detract, however, from the powerful atmosphere of the place, one of complete isolation and seclusion, despite it being only half a mile from the busy A30, and a mile from Exeter itself. It feels as if it could be many miles - or even centuries - from civilisation:

Mounds of earth are said to still exist in the woods, which originally formed the roads for these machines, but they are now so low, and so covered with thickets, that nothing can be learnt from them; and, indeed, though I have heard of their existence, I have never seen one. Great holes were made through the very hills for the passage of the iron chariot, but they are now blocked by the falling roofs, nor dare any one explore such parts as may yet be open.
- Richard Jefferies, After London, 1885, Project Gutenberg ID 13944

One positive aspect of the afternoon was a brief conversation with another of the course members, Clare Bryden. She runs a number of blogs, all of which put me to shame in terms of creativity and committment to real social causes - particularly sustainability - but one of them, And the end of all our exploring ("will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time") shows we share an interest in the connections between past and present landscape.

A trio of posts in particular interested me - collectively tagged Woodwater Lane - which document her exploration, in present and historical past, of a lane at the south-east of Exeter. Though cut by railway and roads, partially erased by development, the lane is still traceable.

The posts link to some extremely cool cartographic resources. I already knew about the Historical Maps section of the A Vision of Britain through Time site, but not the British Library Georeferencing site. This is a user-contributed project to correlate old maps with current Google Earth ones. Contributors identify common data points across an area of interest, then software adjusts for scale and distortion to bring the maps into coincidence. The result is then visible as an overlay, with a slider button to fade between old and new.

The example used in the Woodwater Lane exploration is this 1801 map of Exeter, and there are many more accessible through a convenient graphical map finder. Ones that connect with previous JSBlog topics include Niton (Isle of Wight), 1793; Shanklin, 1793; Axmouth, Devon, 1806; Ottery St. Mary, Devon, 1806; Exmouth, 1801; and Torbay, Devon, 1802.

- Ray

The Buckinghamshire Railway

Department of geeky poetry (found while Googling something else): Charles Whitehall's 1849 The Buckinghamshire Railway.

The Author of this little work
A Gardener has been
Most of his life-time has been spent
'Mongst flowers and shrubs so green.

My age now more than sixty is,
And work of late was short;
Thus for some other employment,
To rhyme I did resort.

First I wrote "The Beauties of Stowe,"
With very great success;
Then the Travels of our good Queen,
Indeed they were no less.

And something new this winter did
Across my mind prevail,
To describe the wond'rous benefits
Derived from Steam and Rail.

The Cuttings and Embankments all,
On this, the great Bucks Line;
The Bridges and the Viaducts
Of masonry so fine.

The advantages of travelling,
And great contrast between
The old stage coach, and post-horses,
As on the rail is seen.

And if this meets encouragement,
Which is my expectation,
I'll try and full description give
Of Wolverton's Grand Station.

- Charles Whitehall, Gawcott

NOW to describe the great Bucks Line,
I think I'll have a try,
And tell you how the work went on,
Through hills both hard and high;
The embankments stout, and viaducts
The valleys for to cross;
The numerous yards of earth brought there,
Removed by man and horse.
This Line had long time talked of been,
And in Forty-seven began,
Mr. Dixon, the head Engineer
Drew out the final plan.
Then the Surveyor did set to
His level for to gain,
And in good earnest persevered—
George Burnell drew his chain!
Then the Contractors soon appear'd,
Each man his ground to take;
The trees were fell'd, the hedges grubb'd,
Way for the rails to make.
John Tompkins did the first peg drive,
When they did first survey,
And is working for the Company now, 

Read on ...

As poetry it ain't great - but I suspect there's a deal of good historical material in there. I haven't been able to find his other works The Queen's Travels and Thoughts in Rhyme on the Beauties of Stowe, and Other Poems, on Various Occasions, but Robert Arnold Aubin's 1936 Topographical poetry in XVIII-century England says of the latter:

Uneducated genius continued to produce — as late as 1844 Charles Whitehall sang the beauties of Stowe in execrable doggerel.

-Ray

Along unusual lines

LNER Class A4 4464 Bittern

We were on the train at Taunton station on Sunday, when I noticed an unusual concentration of people aiming cameras, and furthermore, a member of station staff uncoiling a large water hose. I deduced that a steam train must be just pulling into the station. It shortly revealed itself to be the 1937-built and beautifully streamlined LNER Class A4 4464 Bittern. I'm not especially a steam locomotive enthusiast, but this is rather splendid, one of the few renovated to a state certified for mainline use.

In the picture above, you can see part of a strange-looking phenomenon: as we travelled through Somerset and into Wiltshire, there was a peculiar and ominous dark line in the clouds, at least 20 miles long, running parallel to our route.
 

It was only when the cloud cover broke that the explanation was revealed: the general cloud cover must have been a flat relatively thin layer, and the line was the shadow cast on it from above by a prominent jet vapour trail higher in the atmosphere. In the picture below you can see it and its shadow (lower right).

On the subject of train journeys, I've just started reading the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson's short story collection Art in Nature, Thomas Teal's translation published by Sort of Books in 2012. Jansson is of course best known as the author of the Moomin series of children's books, but she was also a distinguished artist and the author of a number of novels and short stories.

The Independent review by Christian House (here) describes the anthology as a "dreamlike trip through the magic of life" and as "a sublime little collection of stories that is full of boats and beach houses, painting and plays", which makes them sound rather twee. Far from it; despite bright and minimalist settings, many of the stories are very dark, especially the first I read, The Locomotive. It concerns a mechanical draughtsman who works for a railway company, and whose private hobby is drawing locomotives. As becomes rapidly clear from the focus of his obsession and his detachment from people, the unnamed narrator is evidently somewhere on the autism spectrum, and views what little human interaction he has entirely within twin metaphors of artwork revision and train arrivals/departures.

His routine is broken when he perceives what he believes to be a kindred spirit in a woman he meets at a station who expresses an interest in train travel. He hires her as a housekeeper, and over time, she falls  in love with him (this is obvious to the reader, but the narrator only feels disgust at her attempts to get close to him). So, with the meticulousness and methods of his draughtsmanship - drawing and erasing scenarios - he begins to plot her murder.

Although The Locomotive could be classed as psychological horror, the stories in Art in Nature are highly variable in genre, ranging through fantasy, explorations of art and its creators, and wry comedies of manners and relationships. It's very polished collection from an author whose other works have been largely eclipsed by the Moomins.

- Ray

Devon: more prospect-refuge

click to enlarge

A couple of book covers caught my eye today as nice examples where Jay Appleton's prospect-refuge theory looks applicable (see again Landscapes in mind).

The first, from Eric R Delderfield's Just Wandering in Devon (Raleigh Press, Chapel Hill, Exmouth, 1954 - this reprint 1955), is pretty classic, with the foreground buildings as refuge and the road leading off to the coastline prospect. The composition, apart from the intruding giant signposts, is very similar to that on the Badger Brewery beer glass I mentioned last year (Prospect and refuge in a beer glass). The book itself is interesting; it's not a general travelogue but a batch of essays on topics that grabbed the author, including Eggeford, Molland, mining history of Heasley, wildlife of Devon, various churches, bellringing, Brayford stone quarry, Honiton's Leper Hospital, fire insurance history in Devon, vilage blacksmiths, a Crediton viola-maker, and the Golden Hermoina. Eric R Delderfield was, by the way, the brother of the novelist RF Delderfield. Both lived in Exmouth for part of their lives (their father William was editor of the Exmouth Chronicle, and the family and paper have a Blue Plaque) and were writers, but Eric specialised in travel guides rather than fiction. The Topsham Bookshop currently has a couple of copies of the book.

click to enlarge

The second image, with its village refuge and moorland/coast prospects, comes from a general guide to South Devon, Rambles in South Devon (Hugh E Page, 1949) published by British Rail. The walks are still extant; the rail links, unfortunately, are largely not, closed within a couple of decades of the book's publication.  For instance, the days when you could get to Lustleigh and Moretonhampstead via the Moretonhampstead and South Devon Railway are long gone. The cover painting is by Chris Watkiss; the original - a 28 x 38cm done in gouache - sold for £320 in 2010 (see the Morphets catalogue entry). I haven't been able to find out much about the artist, except that he was a watercolourist and poster painter, Christopher David Watkiss, born in 1911 and active as an artist in the 1940s and 1950s.

- Ray

The "Bradshaw Baby", 1953

Reproduced from Helen Hemming's photo collection with kind permission of the subjects: characterful but rather excruciatingly retro images of 1950s childhood via the out-take press photos for a Daily Sketch feature from April 16th 1953, Ask Memory Boy. It concerns a relative portrayed as the "Bradshaw baby" because of his interest in Bradshaw's railway guide (then in the final few years before it ceased publication in 1961). I'm reliably assured that the powers depicted were exaggerated for the purposes of the story.

Necropolis Railway revisited

Worth watching, if you're in the UK: the second series of the BBC2 documentary series Great British Railway Journeys (see the list of upcoming episodes).

Today's episode - Waterloo to Canary Wharf - was fun: presenter Michael Portillo interviewed the author Andrew Martin on the Brookwood Necropolis Railway (nicknamed by railway workers "the Stiffs' express") that ran funeral trains from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery until the terminus was bombed in 1941. It's central to one of Martin's London-based crime novels, The Necropolis Railway - see the 2002 Guardian review. The episode further explores London's railway heritage - from the great 19th shopping centre of the West End to the now-largely-defunct docks - via Bradshaw. It's available on BBC iPlayer for 17 days from now.

Of interest, the Leisure Hour magazine (page 346, Volume 5, 1856) has a brief contemporary account of the workings of the Necropolis Company, which was established in 1854 to provide out-of-city burials to alleviate pressure on London's overcrowded cemeteries.

Cognizant of, and recognising these enlightened principles ; fully aware that unless the question of extramural burial for a vast metropolis like London were taken upon the basis of a wide generalization, ultimate failure must ensue; the Necropolis Company bound itself most liberally in its act of incorporation, to single interments in each grave; it selected and purchased a vast extent, namely, two thousand one hundred acres of valuable and most appropriate land, at such a distance from town as combined accessibility with due remoteness; it organized an inclusive plan of burial charges, optional as to adoption, but enormously reducing cost; it issued a scale of tariffs suitable to the means of all classes; it made arrangements with the South-Westerri Railway Company for the conveyance of the dead to the outskirts of its Cemetery; it erected a special station entirely for its own use in the Westminster Road; and, at the close of 1854, the Cemetery was consecrated and brought into use.

An archway of variegated brickwork lends from the Westminster Road into the station of the Necropolis Company. It was built from a design of Sir William Cubitt, and the shafts and curve of the light Norman arch brings to mind a similar one of great beauty in the choir of St. Bartholomcw-the-Great in Smithfield. From thence the narrow roadway, descending for some space between high walls, or rather sides of buildings on either side, brings hearses, carriages, and those on foot, on to the wide pavement of the station. This occupies one side only, the other being bound by the lofty buildings of the Westminster Bridge station of the South-Wcstern Railway. Across this pavement, which is as scrupulously bright and clean as a cathedral floor, the dead are lifted from their respective hearses into the seclusion of places purposely provided; and the vehicles drive on to the gate of exit at the further end. On to this pavement, or platform, many office windows look, some of them made cheerful by bright-flowered plants. On this level are the range of third class waitingrooms, well and appropriately furnished. A massive and handsome staircase of stone leads to the next floor, which is devoted to the use of second class funerals; it thence ascends to the third floor, level with the railway platform, and on which fie the first class reception and waiting-rooms. With the most trifling difference, the various class rooms aro furnished precisely alike: to the honour of the Necropolis Company, it has been the first to strip the necessary ceremonies annexed to death and the grave of an invidious distinction of rank. There is the same privacy, the same quietude, the same respect for poor as well as rich. The remains of "the weak and lowly " are honoured as well as those who, in the beautiful words of old Sir Thomas Browne, " are pompous even in the grave."

If the sun be shining, it pours down through the lofty glass roof; it lies upon the wide and spotless pavement; it lights the pleasant windows of rooms and offices; it rests on planks and flowers upon the window-ledges; it casts no shadow on the massive tender, waiting to convey the dead: nor on carriages that may convey the most touchingand profound of human grief.

The dead are received at the Necropolis Station the night.previous to interment, but for no longer period. The Company intended otherwise. It proposed to bring into force, as far as a public body might, advantages similar to those belonging to the German reception-houses; but the intention met with parochial opposition, and Bo for the present it rests. But ultimately there is little fear that this and other advances will rise superior to the objections of prejudice and unreflecting affection. The coffins are conveyed by a steam-lift to the second and upper floors, according to the class of funeral; ultimately all are conveyed to the level of the railway by the same process. Then, with the utmost privacy and dispatch, the massive tender receives its load, each coffin having a distinct and separate compartment; the steam and other carriages arc attached, the whole go slowly a little way, till out of the precincts of the Necropolis Company; they then reach the line of the South-Western Railway, are attached to an express train, and are off with the speed of the winds.

Google Books has a few dozen more accounts from the same period shortly after the railway's launch: an especially complete one is The After City: a visit to the London Necropolis in The Ladies' Companion and Monthly Magazine, Volume IX, 1856.

See also: Trains in Literature, where I briefly mentioned the topic a couple of years back.

- Ray

Atmospheric history

While clearing some bookmarks, I found Beach Pneumatic: Alfred Beach’s Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York. This is an assiduously researched study of the early days of New York's subway and rail system, with a particular focus on Beach's concept of running the system by air pressure. Brunel's atmospheric railway (as in the above painting by Nicholas Condy) gets a mention in the chapter on precursors.

Brennan's site is very worth exploring if you like railway / architectural history and subterranea: see also Abandoned Stations, Beach Train, and Dunderberg Spiral Railway.

In the same territory, check out capsu.org - Capsule pipelines: an old technology still going strong. An SF reference that springs to mind: the scene in Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero where the hero, who has fallen in with a band of outlaws in the depths of the planet-city Helior, is helping them steal food from such a pipeline.

Two blows did it; the top part of the severed pipe bent out of alignment with the bottom and from the opening began to pour an endless stream of linked green frankfurters. Litvok grabbed the end of the chain and threw it over Bill's shoulder then began to coil loops of the things over his shoulders and arms higher and higher. They reached the level of Bill's eyes and he could read the white lettering stamped all over their grass-green forms. CHLORA-FILLIES, they read, and THERE'S SUNSHINE IN EVERY LINK! and THE EQUINE WURST OF DISTINCTION and TRY OUR DOBBIN-BURGERS NEXT TIME!

"Enough..." Bill groaned, staggering under the weight. Litvok snapped the chain and began twining them over his own shoulders when the flow of shiny green forms suddenly ceased. He pulled the last links from the pipe and pushed out the door.

"The alarm went, they're onto us. Get out fast before the cops get here!" He whistled shrilly and the lookouts came running to join them. They fled, Bill stumbling under the weight.

- Ray

Magical trains and London

Via Ansible #264, news of yet another tenuous plagiarism claim against JK Rowling: see Harry Potter publisher denies plagiarism (The Telegraph, 16th June), concerning a lawsuit on behalf of the late Adrian Jacobs, alleging that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire plagiarised Jacobs' 1987 The Adventures of Willy the Wizard No 1: Livid Land.

The Willy the Wizard title in question is a 36-page illustrated book; it has a website, with extracts apparently chosen to highlight the claimed resemblances such as "Strange Eye Wizard", "Wizards Prisons", "Wizard Goverment" and "Wizard Trains".

As to Wizard Trains, Ansible asks "did Jacobs nick the train concept from Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree (1977)?" Actually you can track the magical train motif even further back, particularly to Lord Dunsany's Edge of the World mythos, where the magical lands bordering the edge of the world can be reached by train from London by getting a special ticket:

So Neepy Thang set out. He bought the purple ticket at Victoria Station. He went by Herne Hill, Bromley and Bickley and passed St. Mary Cray. At Eynsford he changed and taking a footpath along a winding valley went wandering into the hills. And at the top of a hill in a little wood, where all the anemones long since were over and the perfume of mint and thyme from outside came drifting in with Thang, he found once more the familiar path, age-old and fair as wonder, that leads to the Edge of the World.
- The Bird of the Difficult Eye, Tales of Wonder, 1916

The ways to that town are winding; he took the ticket at Victoria Station that they only give if they know you: he went past Bleth: he went along the Hills of Neol-Hungar and came to the Gap of Poy. All these are in that part of the world that pertains to the fields we know; but beyond the Gap of Poy on those ordinary plains, that so closely resemble Sussex, one first meets the unlikely.
- The Long Porter's Tale, Tales of Wonder, 1916

In Dunsany, the train isn't the only way to the magical. Another route, in some of his stories, is the shop in Go-by Street, which leads through to The Lands of Dream. There's an evocative section in The Avenger of Perdondaris where the narrator, returning through the wrong portal, finds himself in a far-future London and is baffled by the language until he realises a stallholder is trying to sell him a cake:

...The door opened, and to my surprise I found myself in what seemed like a shepherd's cottage; a man who was sitting on a log of wood in a little low dark room said something to me in an alien language, I muttered something and hurried through to the street. The house was thatched in front as well as behind. There were no golden spires in front, no marvellous birds; but there was no pavement. There was a row of houses, byres and barns but no other sign of a town. Far off I saw one or two little villages. Yet there was the river; and no doubt the Thames, for it was of the width of the Thames and had the curves of it, if you can imagine the Thames in that particular spot without a city round it, without any bridges, and Embankment fallen in. I saw that there had happened to me permanently and in the light of day some such thing as happens to a man, but to a child more often, when he awakes before morning in some strange room and sees a high, grey window where the door ought to be and unfamiliar objects in wrong places and though knowing where he is yet knows not how it can be that the place should look like that.

A flock of sheep came by me presently looking the same as ever, but the man who led them had a wild, strange look. I spoke to him and he did not understand me. Then I went down to the river to see if my boat was there and at the very spot where I had left it, in the mud (for the tide was low) I saw a half-buried piece of blackened wood that might have been part of a boat, but I could not tell. I began to feel that I had missed the world. It would be a strange thing to travel from far away to see London and not to be able to find it among all the roads that lead there, but I seemed to have travelled in Time and to have missed it among the centuries. And when as I wandered over the grassy hills I came on a wattled shrine that was thatched with straw and saw a lion in it more worn with time than even the Sphinx at Gizeh and when I knew it for one of the four in Trafalgar Square then I saw that I was stranded far away in the future with many centuries of treacherous years between me and anything that I had known. And then I sat on the grass by the worn paws of the lion to think out what to do. And I decided to go back through Go-by Street and, since there was nothing left to keep me any more to the fields we know, to offer myself as a servant in the palace of Singanee, and to see again the face of Saranoora and those famous, wonderful, amethystine dawns upon the abyss where the golden dragons play. And I stayed no longer to look for remains of the ruins of London; for there is little pleasure in seeing wonderful things if there is no one at all to hear of them and to wonder. So I returned at once to Go-by Street, the little row of huts, and saw no other record that London had been except that one stone lion. I went to the right house this time. It was very much altered and more like one of those huts that one sees on Salisbury plain than a shop in the city of London, but I found it by counting the houses in the street for it was still a row of houses though pavement and city were gone. And it was still a shop. A very different shop to the one I knew, but things were for sale there shepherd's crooks, food and rude axes. And a man with long hair was there who was clad in skins. I did not speak to him for I did not know his language. He said to me something that sounded like "Everkike." It conveyed no meaning to me; but when he looked towards one of his buns, light suddenly dawned in my mind and I knew that England was even England still and that still she was not conquered, and that though they had tired of London they still held to their land; for the words that the man had said were, "Av er kike," and then I knew that that very language that was carried to distant lands by the old, triumphant Cockney was spoken still in his birthplace and that neither his politics nor his enemies had destroyed him after all these thousand years. I had always disliked the Cockney dialect and with the arrogance of the Irishman who hears from rich and poor the English of the splendour of Elizabeth; and yet when I heard those words my eyes felt sore as with impending tears it should be remembered how far away I was.
- The Avenger of Perdondaris, Tales of Three Hemispheres, 1919 (Gutenberg E-text No. 11440)

I must pass this example on to David Platt, who just contacted me with news of current updates of his Where London Stood project, which explores the meme of ruins in art and literature, particularly visions of the ruins of contemporary cities such as London.
- Ray

Recommended miscellany #1

Just plain recommendations today. At the greycat blog they just said extremely nice things about us, and I'd like to return the compliment by strongly recommending greycat.org. It's run by Dr Ralph Harrington, the author of one of the papers I mentioned in the recent Trains in literature, and showcases a varied set of research papers in what might classed as cultural history - topics at the crossover of technology, literature, architecture and sociology. I particularly like greycat's papers on the railways. The topic is rather tarred by its association with insightless Asperger-style focus on the technical detail; but these Victorian railway studies go deeper into what they meant culturally. Why were they described in biological metaphor? Why are engine-drivers so iconic? How did train travel shape the Victorian perception of time? How did the railways buy into the symbology of heraldry? What kind of aesthetics underly model railways? What was the cultural geography of the growing inter-war transport network? Just skimming the rest of the site, you find monster bulldozers, transport in LA, atomic advertising, MR James stories, the architecture of Dresden, 1930s kitchens, Anthony Burgess and Islam, English landscape gardening, the popular culture of Cold War submarines, and Alexander Pope. It's all fascinating; the only downside is that it contains so many interesting articles that now I'm going to have to annotate previous posts here.

A second recommendation: Aunt Violet's Book Museum (aka Violet Books). Run by co-curatrices Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Rhonda J Boothe, it's billed as "A Website About Collecting Antiquarian Supernatural, Fantasy & Mysterious Literatures, Vintage Westerns, Swashbucklers, & Juveniles. Just dipping into the essay list reveals a lovely range of eccentrically specific studies, many focused on Rider Haggard and many others on now-almost-unknown authors. Who has heard these days of Georgia Wood Pangborn, Frederick Stewart Greene or Emma-Lindsay Squier? Way way back I always enjoyed JAS's acerbic and dead sensible writing-related posts as "Paghat" on Usenet (what's Google Groups now), so check out also the sections On Writing & Editing and Essays on bookselling & booksellers, as they certainly tell it like it is...

- Ray

Trains in literature

I was just reading It's time to take a look at alcoholic literature (Victor Sonkin, Moscow Times, December 17, 2004), an article mainly about Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moskva-Petushki, a novella-length prose poem originally produced as samizdat literature in Brezhnev-era Russia. Variously translated as Moscow to the End of the Line (Google Books preview here), Moscow Stations, and Moscow Circles, it's a darkly witty indictment of Soviet life seen via the train journey of an alcoholic cable-fitter, Venichka, travelling from Moscow to see his lover and child in a nearby town.

The alcohol details are ghastly, apparently from first-hand experience (it's not much surprise that Yerofeyev died of throat cancer in 1990), but Moskva-Petushki caught my interest when I ran into it from a rather geeky direction - Googling "trains in literature". This led to a litcrit paper, Where Did Venička Live? Some Observations on the World of V. Erofeev's Poėma Moskva — Petuški (Joost van Baak, Russian literature, Volume 54, Issues 1-3, 1 July 2003-1 October 2003, Pages 43-65) whose author has some interesting observations on the role of trains in literature.

Although the train as a mobile setting and conflict space can generate certain traditional mobile plot features (which it has in common with coaches, and the like), it is, no doubt, a modem literary setting, technically, and in the perspective of literary history.
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As a plot-generating device and conflict space the train primarily motivates movement, and the accidental meeting between people.
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Trains can also act as instruments of fate, and the first example from Russian literature that comes to mind is, of course, Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina, in which fatal train accidents ... literally frame the doomed heroine’s plot.
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Trains and stations can function as “improper” houses, as partial (and defective) substitutes for the domestic qualities of the house in the proper sense. Often this function of the train is connected with the disruptions and peregrinations that come with war, as in Babel’s Konarmija, or in Pastemak’s Doctor Zhivago.

It's not difficult to think of other classic examples of novels and stories that feature trains centrally: Nesbit's The Railway Children, Dickens' The Signalman, Émile Zola's La Bête Humaine, a psychological murder thriller set again the backdrop of the Paris-Le Havre railway, and Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

Certainly in early-mid Victorian England, the railway was cutting-edge technology driving, and driven by, major social change, and so it's unsurprising that it turns up a lot in fiction of that period. The Victorian Web's Victorian Railways and their Predecessors page links to a number of essays, led by this introduction, on the role of railways in Victorian literature, finding apart from plot devices, three chief themes: "their destructive effects on the city, particularly on housing for the poor, their cutting up the English landscape, and their involvement with greed, swindling, stock fraud and the Railroad Mania". Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, for instance, is set against the social upheaval caused by the impending arrival of the railway in a small Cheshire town.

There was an added edge for the Victorians: the overall mix of jolting travel, risk of accident, and social anxieties came together in the syndrome of "railway spine". Marked by chronic back pain, anxiety and other symptoms in passengers, whether public or rail workers, who had been involved in rail accidents, it usually appeared weeks or months after the accident, and was the subject of hot debate. Was it physical, as first thought, a delayed reaction to 'concussion to the spine'? A type of 'neurasthenia'? A con to get compensation? None of these: in hindsight, it can be viewed as a Victorian equivalent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The railway accident: trains, trauma and technological crisis in nineteenth-century Britain by Dr Ralph Harrington, and The Derailment of Railway Spine by Milton L Cohen and John L Quintner go into the details. Harrington's paper is largely about the historical context for Railway Spine: a culture gripped by fears of train accidents and social change; Cohen and Quintner's explores the changing medical view in relation to similar modern syndromes such as post-traumatic fibromyalgia. Nicholas Daly, in Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000: 1860 - 2000 (CUP, 2004, ISBN:0521833922) - see Sensation fiction and the modernization of the senses - argues that the general Victorian fixation on the shock of railway accidents was one of the driving factors behind literature with a growing focus on surprise and sensation.

'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel (Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2000 by Carter, Ian) takes a broader view of the theme, with an exhaustive discussion of other examples of works featuring trains such as Dombey and Son and Howard's End, examining railway historians' claim that Britain has no major railway-based novels of the stature of the Tolstoy and Zola examples. One should, by the way, distinguish novels about railways from the genre called "railway novels"; cheap pocket-sized book editions - also called yellowbacks - sold at railway station stalls and designed for reading on a train (the "airport novels" of their day).

In the 20th century, the railway no longer being new technology, the thrust of its fictional role moved more into the plot mechanism / fateful journey slot described by van Baak, and this continued into the cinematic genre. Again, examples are easy to think of: Buster Keaton's The General; Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and its Hitchcock adaptation; the classic The Train (whose progress can be seen as allegory for the waning power of Nazi Germany at the end of WW2); Dr Terror's House of Horrors (mismatched characters carried towards their doom); Northwest Frontier, whose train passengers are a microcosm of the conflicts of India in the final days of the Raj; The Cassandra Crossing; Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ Express, a fairly strange erotic-psychological-experimental story set aboard a train; Horror Express; Runaway train; Death Train; Sliding Doors (where catching vs. failing to catch a train is the fateful dividing point for two timelines); and The Last Train (where a train is the vehicle that takes a mismatched group into a post-apocalyptic future). See Wikipedia's Rail transport in fiction list for other examples.

Even now, railways make rich settings for fiction. As shown by recent examples such as Andrew Martin's murder mystery The Necropolis Railway (see here for background), Michel Thaler's Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train From Nowhere), written with no verbs, and the first-mentioned Moskva-Petushki, the genre shows no signs of running out of steam. Maybe the Great British Railway Novel is yet to be written.

For further reading, check out the National Railway Museum's Moving Stories site, "a global snapshot of the railways' impact on all of our lives, collecting stories about rail travel and journeys through the ages: fiction, non-fiction, anecdotes and poems from around the world".
- Ray

Addendum: I've focused on English literature, but obviously this is just a slice of the genre. Googling, I find Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature (Leah Garrett, Jewish Social Studies 7.2 (2001) 67-88) which analyses a particular historical sub-genre written in Russian during the last days of the shtetl era, when "The third-class train car was the place where Jews from the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe would, typically, meet, conduct business, speak Yiddish, and talk about their families". This led to works such as the 1890 Shem un Yefes in a vogn (Shem and Japheth on a Train) by Sholem Abramovitsh, the 1911 Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem (whose Tevye and his Daughters was the source text for Fiddler on the Roof) and the 1909 Arum vokzal (At the Depot) by David Bergelson. In this context, Garrett shows the train was portrayed "as a vessel that brings the tides of change into and out of the shtetl" and a negative force of change and modernisation.

Addendum #2: further reading. I've just been exploring greycat, the website of the abovementioned Dr Ralph Harrington, and there's a great deal of interesting material on the topic of railways in literature and general culture. See, particularly, Miniature railways and cultural microsms - railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950, Victorian railway studies and Ghosts, trains and trams - the technologies of transport in the ghost stories of M. R. James.

Addendum #3, December 2008. Some interesting train-related stuff cropped up this week. One: the Guardian Books blog had a nice feature by Billy Mills - Poster poems: railway lines - about train-related poetry. Two: BBC2 had a good TV programme about trains in literature in film and the appeal of trains, Between the Lines (at the link you can catch it on BBC iPlayer for the next week). Particularly enlightening was the drift from authors seeing trains as scary (fiction fuelled by serious accident rates in early Victorian times) to trains as an efficient means of getting from place to place, with timings often crucial to plots. It was presented by Andrew Martin, who has written a number of detective novels in Edwardian railway settings, as well as some Comment is Free pieces arguing for better marketing for the train, which he thinks could be done by stressing its green credentials and even returning to steam now that current technology could improve the thermodynamic efficiency.
- Ray