Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
II. Die Wahrnehmungen von Raum / The perceptions of space - Jill Murdoch: The Railway in Arcadia: An Approach to Modernity in British Visual Culture
The Spirit of the Age Is it accurate to refer to the decades after 1830 as ‘the railway age’? In answering whether there was “something about the railway that made it characteristic of an age,” Michael Robbins states that “the railway [...] virtually annihilated distance and became at one bound the most potent physical influence on the development of the world in the nineteenth century.” He decides that there “was a Railway Age. It began with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 and lasted until the First World War.”5 John Merriman, in the introduction to his history of the development of class in Europe concludes that “for many people and in many ways, the train became the symbol of an age.”6 This is not purely a retrospective twentieth century view. The Reverend Edward Stanley, who wrote a report of the opening of the Liverpool - Manchester line for Blackwood’s Magazine in November 1830, was not alone in his time in the enthusiasm and the faith that he expressed: “every person to whom the conveyance was new must have been sensible that the adaptation of locomotive power was establishing a fresh era in the state of society.”7 Even so, the reception accorded to the railway was mixed. Fears were expressed that “physical objects and private rights were [to be] stamped under the chariot wheels of the Fire King.”* But, while a number of people may have deplored the advent of the railway, few would have failed to recognise that it represented a new era. Much rhetoric of the time praised engineering achievements and lavished words on the splendour and inevitability of progress that for many was epitomised by the railway’s parallel tracks disappearing into infinity. In representing both entrepreneurial energy and engineering creativity, the railway was surely the perfect representative of the spirit of the age. Is it, however, only in retrospect perhaps that the spirit of the age can be accurately identified? For Hegel, any given moment or period in history has a unifying principle which he termed the spirit of the age - the Zeitgeist. This is what enables and justifies the study of a cross-section of a historical moment in isolation from the ever-changing progress of history. Hegel’s approach has been described in the following way: The cultural explication of any one age thus depends upon the interpretation of all cultural phenomena in the context of their relation to one another. In this synchronic view, The Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture ' Robbins, Michael: The Railway Age. London 1962, pp. 1 -2. 6 Merriman, John (ed): Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth Century Europe. New York 1979, p. I. 7 Quoted in Klingender, Francis: Art and the Industrial Revolution. London 1968, p. 128. * Quoted in Ellis, Hamilton: Railway Art. London 1977, p. 27. 1 15
