ABSTRACT:
Ralph Harrington examines responses to railway travel within nineteenth-century British society. He argues that the railway, with its speed, power, and danger, became a focal point for the experience of nervous and psychological disorders within an urbanising and modernising society. The sense of crowding on platforms and in carriages, the anticipation of social mixing no less than the prospect of catastrophic accident, combined with the velocity and vibration of the journey to produce a range of embodied symptoms ripe for medical interpretation. Following Schivelbusch, Harrington believes that the pathologies of railway travel bring into sharp focus the experiences of psycho-social shock which accompanied the development of a machine-dominated, urbanised, fast-moving, industrial modernity. He suggests that the scale of railway development, its extensive impact upon the landscape, as well as its widely-felt social ramifications, provided a commonality of experience unique to nineteenth-century technologies.
