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 Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture

Illustration 7: Manchester from Kersal Moor by William Wyld, 1851, oil on canvas.

The railway changed all that. The city and the country had managed to stay safely separate until the railway burst through the protective zone - both literally and metaphorically - and forced the contested site of the city into the awareness of country folk. The railway brought labour, noise and modernity into the idealised landscape. It threatened the country with all the social disruption and social unrest of the city. Indeed,

the shrieking engine was to carry the riot of the town into the sylvan retreat of pastoral life; sweltering trains were to penetrate solitudes hitherto sacred to the ruins of antiquity."

Nothing could fit less with the ideal construction of the rural life which served to maintain illusions based on increasingly fragile class structures and power relations.

Inside the cities, however, the middle classes celebrated the railways that were, in many cases, the source of their wealth and status: railway companies employed architects to erect the first cathedrals of modernity, with Euston station as a prime example. Even here modernity was not without its critics. In 1849 the influential art critic John Ruskin wrote:

Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is to the development of the railroad station. There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest por" Ellis: Railway Art, p. 27.

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