‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s Railway Journalism and Victorian Risk Society

Abstract

This essay explores Charles Dickens’s railway journalism of the 1850s and 1860s and its differences from his more well-known fictional accounts of the British railway network. While fictional works such as Dombey and Son and ‘The Signalman’ emphasize the catastrophic aspects of railway accidents, Dickens’s journalism in Household Words and All the Year Round examines the modern systematicity of the railway network, which by its nature as system, necessitated accidents on the lines. The essay incorporates theoretical readings of risk by Ulrich Beck and Paul Virilio into its critical assessment of Dickens’s railway journalism. Fundamentally, it aims to demonstrate that Dickens’s railway journalism illuminates the complexity of Victorian narratives of technological and bureaucratic industrial and transport systems by prioritizing the global dimensions of systematic accidents over the period’s tendencies to focus merely on local accidental events.

Keywords:

• Charles Dickens
• railways
• railway network
• journalism
• risk society
• accidents
• media
• Ulrich Beck
• Paul Virilio

Notes

1. Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

2. Jen Cadwallader, ‘Death by Train: Spectral Technology and Dickens’s Mugby Junction’, in Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, ed. by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 57–68; Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3. Much has been written about the railway in Dombey. While I have some reservations about critical assessments of Dickens’s interest in the railway, the following resources offer significant analyses of Dombey that inform my interests in the intersections of narrative and modern time-space in Dickens: Murray Baumgarten, ‘Railway/Reading/Time: Dombey & Son and the Industrial World’, Dickens Studies Annual, 19 (1990), 65–89; Harland S. Nelson, ‘Staggs’s Gardens: The Railway Through Dickens’ World’, Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), 41–53.

4. The anecdote of Dickens’s involvement in the accident at Staplehurst is well known and often cited. For more on Staplehurst’s impact on Dickens’ writing, see Norris Pope, ‘Dickens’s “The Signalman” and Information Problems in the Railway Age’, Technology and Culture, 42.3 (2001), 436–61; Jill L. Matus, ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection’, Victorian Studies, 43.3 (2001), 413–36.

5. See Michael J. Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), p. 1.

6. For an exceptional reading of the railway in Victorian sensation fiction, see Nicholas Daly, ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, ELH 66, (1999), 461–87.

7. Dickens, ‘A Narrative of Extraordinary Suffering’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, ed. by David Pascoe (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 123–28 (p. 127).

8. Dickens, ‘A Flight’. Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 137–45; Dickens, ‘Railway Dreaming’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 170–76; Dickens, ‘Refreshments for Travellers’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 185–92. For a generalist survey and anthology of some of Dickens’s writings on the railway, see Ewald Mengel, ed., The Railway Through Dickens’s World: Texts from Household Words and All the Year Round (New York: P. Lang, 1989).

9. Pope, ‘Dickens’s “The Signalman”’, p. 439.

10. Since Schivelbusch’s important study of the nineteenth-century railway, railway historians have explored at length the cultural origins of traumatic neurosis in nineteenth-century medical debates about injuries inflicted upon passengers during railway accidents. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 134–49. See also Sigmund Freud’s own suggestion that traumatic neurosis has its origins in nineteenth-century medical diagnoses of railway injuries in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 18, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), pp. 7–64. See also Ralph Harrington, ‘The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. by Marc S. Micale et. al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): pp. 31–56. Matus’s reading of trauma in Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ takes a narrative-theory approach to traumatic repetitions, returns and belatedness.

11. John M. L. Drew, Dickens the Journalist (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), p. 116.

12. For an account of this oft-cited phrase’s significance as early as the 1840s, see Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 78.

13. Railway historians such as Schivelbusch and Freeman provide extensive commentaries on the print culture of the period, so I refer readers to their respective studies. Both contain healthy doses of illustrations from Victorian periodicals and dailies. For a more specific reading of representations of disaster, though, see Peter W. Sinnema, ‘Representing the Railway: Train Accidents and Trauma in the Illustrated London News’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 31.2 (1998), 142–68.

14. Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 31.

15. Virilio, The Original Accident, p. 5.

16. Throughout the middle years of Household Words, Dickens and his editorial staff published numerous ‘Chips’ on various extraneous titbits of information, often of minor consequence. This particular Chip on railway signalling is indicative of the overall tone of these short notes. Conceived as chips falling to the floor of the editorial team’s carving up of the daily news, these pieces in themselves are of minor interest to Dickens scholars. However, taken as evidence of Dickens’s overall approach to the reporting of everyday life, they take on more significance from the perspective of cultural criticism.

17. Dickens, ‘Chip: Signals and Engine Drivers’, Household Words, 14 (1856), 179–80.

18. Dickens’s argument that the safety of passengers is partially premised on the comfort of engine drivers conforms to much nineteenth-century discussion of the endless, minute shocks to the body received by passengers and railway drivers alike. See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 115.

19. Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 2.

20. Dickens, ‘Chip: Signals and Engine Drivers’, p. 180.

21. ‘A Railway Director’, The Rail: A Chapter on Accidents. The Affirmative Signal, a Means of Preventing Accidents, Being Remarks Contained in Letters to ‘The Times’, January 19th and 26th (Manchester: Johnson and Rawson, 1853), p. 22.

22. ‘A Railway Director’, The Rail, p. 15.

23. ‘A Railway Director’, The Rail, p. 9.

24. ‘A Railway Director’, The Rail, p. 25.

25. Virilio, The Original Accident, p. 3.

26. Virilio, The Original Accident, p. 7. Virilio’s reference is to his own exhibition entitled Unknown Quantity, which was held at the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris from 29 November 2002 to 30 March 2003. The exhibition contained a ‘museum of accidents’ among other installations exploring representations of the accident in contemporary media. Virilio’s Foreword to the exposition has been published as Unknown Quantity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003).

27. This is an often-neglected aspect of Victorian railway culture. For an insightful reading of Victorian satire of the railway industry, see James Taylor, ‘Business in Pictures: Representations of Railway Enterprise in the Satirical Press in Britain 1845–1870’, Past & Present, 189 (2005), 111–45.

28. See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 61.

29. A comprehensive search through databases of nineteenth-century British newspapers reveals a seemingly endless range of accounts that borrow the title ‘A Melancholy Accident’, or similar titles linking accidents to melancholy. See Fyfe, By Accident or Design, pp. 39–40. For an engaging account of one such instance in the Hull Packet of 1834, see Allison Fieldberg, ‘1834: ‘Melancholy and Affecting Accident: Eleven Persons Drowned’, Victorian Review, 40.2 (2014), 13–17.

30. Fyfe, By Accident or Design, pp. 39, 40.

31. Dickens, ‘A Flight’, p. 137.

32. Dickens, ‘A Flight’, p. 139.

33. Dickens, ‘Railway Dreaming’, p. 170.

34. This concept of the ‘logic of speed’ or dromology is central to all of Virilio’s work, but is especially important to his study, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).

35. See the chapter entitled ‘Escape Velocity’ in Virilio, Open Sky (New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 119–45.

36. Ulrich Beck. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. by Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992), p. 33.

37. See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 83–88. My understanding of the ‘risk position’ of the railway compartment borrows from Beck’s definition of the term in Risk Society, p. 23. As much of Dickens’s literature attests, the railway compartment was a problem of isolation, mechanization and bewilderment. Producing new experiences and sensations, the railway compartment was also risky given the fact that passengers were locked in their compartments without knowledge of the operations of the engine car, and thus forced to associate in close proximity with strangers.

38. See Virilio’s Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology for an extended account of this concept.

39. Dickens, ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 45–50.

40. Dickens, ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, p. 50.

41. Dickens, ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, p. 50.

42. In this sense, Dickens anticipates recent scholarship after what John Urry calls the ‘mobilities turn’ in social and critical geography. See Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 8.

43. Charles Dickens, ‘Dullborough Town’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 64–72.

44. Dickens, ‘Dullborough Town’, p. 64.

45. Virilio, Speed and Politics, p. 47. Virilio refers frequently in his work to the logic of speed, or dromoscopy, in modern culture. The invention of steam power in the nineteenth century contributed extensively, Virilio argues throughout his work, to the increasing prevalence of speed as a type of third interval between time and space in the modern world. Modern culture can thus be characterized by the speed of information and transportation, particularly in modern warfare. While much of Virilio’s work is certainly not Dickens-specific, I would suggest that there are strong affinities between Virilio’s and Dickens’s conceptions of the logic of speed in Victorian railway culture.

46. With the exception of Freedgood’s Victorian Writing About Risk, Victorian studies is lacking in scholarship on the impact that nineteenth-century risk assessment had broadly in the cultural context of Victorian Britain. For more on this, see Daniel Martin, ‘Introduction: The Victorians and Risk’, Victorian Review, 40.2 (2014), 47–54.

47. Beck, Risk Society, pp.12–13.

48. See Tina Young Choi, ‘Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability’, Victorian Studies, 43.4 (2001): 561–89; Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

49. Charles Francis Adams, Notes on Railroad Accidents (New York: Putnam’s, 1879), p. 2.

50. For more on Adams, see Martin, ‘The Victorians and Risk’, pp. 51–52.

51. R. W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 280.

52. Edwin Chadwick, Papers Read Before the Statistical Society of Manchester (Manchester: Blackburn and Pardon, 1846), p. 18.

53. Charles Dickens, ‘Railway Strikes’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 277–82 (pp. 277–78).

54. Dickens, ‘Railway Strikes’, p. 278.

55. Dickens, ‘Railway Strikes’, p. 278.

56. ‘Self-Acting Railway Signals’, Household Words, 7 (1853), 43–45. Pope discusses in detail the significance of self-acting railway signals to both Dickens’s thought and Victorian anxieties about the mechanization of society. See Pope, ‘Dickens’s “The Signalman”’, pp. 442–43.

57. ‘Self-Acting Railway Signals’, p. 43.

58. ‘Self-Acting Railway Signals’, p. 43.

59. ‘Self-Acting Railway Signals’, p. 45.

60. Pope, ‘Dickens’s “The Signalman”’, p. 443.

61. Charles Dickens, ‘Fire and Snow’, in Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, pp. 146–51 (p. 146).

62. Dickens, ‘Chip: Signals and Engine Drivers’, p. 179.

63. ‘Up and Down the Lines’, Household Words, 15 (1857), 601–07.

64. ‘Up and Down the Lines’, p. 602.

65. ‘Up and Down the Lines’, p. 602.

66. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 195–228.

67. See Ralph Harrington. ‘The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. by Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 31–56 (p. 33).