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
Jill Murdoch The Railway in the Landscape Although this paper examines the absence of the railway from landscape art, there are, nonetheless, five significant pieces of evidence that stand against Klingender’s view that no-one wanted to be reminded of the social and technological revolution that was transforming their lives. First, the industrial paintings of the late eighteenth century were well received by patrons of art and artists themselves. It was not uncommon to see beauty in such prosaic objects as a cotton mill. Klingender himself quotes a Mr. Byng who wrote in his diary a few years after Arkwright’s Mill at Cromford was painted: These cotton mills, seven storeys high, and fill’d with inhabitants, remind me of a first- rate man of war; and when they are lighted up, on a dark night, look most luminously beautiful.24 Secondly, the railway’s place in nature and Art’s relation to it was boldly defended by William Wordsworth, a leading poet of the Romantic movement - despite the fact that he is famed for his passionate opposition to the railway’s arrival in the Lake District. In 1833 he wrote a poem entitled Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways which praised the developments in transport technology and makes a powerful case for the artistic inclusion of railways: [...] Nor shall your presence, howso’er it mar The loveliness of nature, prove a bar To the mind's gaining that prophetic sense Of future change, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are. In spite of all that beauty may disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; [...]25 Third, there were many people who did choose to be reminded of the technological revolution going on all round them through artistic means. These were the purchasers of the many engravings of the early passenger railway lines. It is these engravings that can cause confusion in response to the claim that there were few representations of railways in landscape art. But these well-known railway engravings were produced expressly for ‘mass’ reproduction and consumption, and were explicitly promotional material, very often commissioned by the railway companies themselves. The engrav24 Quoted in Klingender: Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 49. 25 D o w d e n , Edward (ed. ): The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London 1905, vol. iv, p. 188. 122
