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 experience of this new technology as well as to a deeper understanding of the process of profound change, either occasioned by or accompanying the spread of the railway, as it touched different groups in society. The railway’s impact on everyday life, transforming concepts of distance and time and revolutionising access to knowledge has been well documented by, among others, Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey.' More recently writers have looked more closely at the railway in purely cultural terms — how the railway was represented in written, visual and spoken art of all types, using novels, poems, newspapers, music, pictures.1 2 * This paper examines the representation of the railway in art, specifically landscape art, during its first half century; so what should pictures be able to tell us about the railway’s life and times - aside, that is, from straightforward description? Art is a discourse as much as the written word and, of course, there are many conflicting discourses within art. At a time when the railway was making fortunes, changing lives and possibilities beyond recognition, it is especially instructive to look at how it was seen by artists and by those who purchased art. I do not approach this as an art historian myself, but it fits within the parameters of an attempt to, in the words of a recent book by Andrew Hemingway, recover the critical potential of an art history which does not just speak about objects but. rather, has something to say about key issues in the historical development of modem society.' Images of the railway are so common nowadays in the form of paintings and photographs that it is difficult to realise that in the category of fine art there was an almost complete silence on the subject of the railway until the last third of the nineteenth century.4 J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed from 1844 is the notable exception. After 1830 the railway became the icon of progress - the touchstone of eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy; but it played an ambivalent role in cultural life, straddling the contemporary imagination and the conventions both of class and art as well as - perhaps uniquely - straddling the conflictual cultures of city and country. 1 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang: The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, 1981 (First published 1977). 2 For example. Carter, lan: Railways and Culture in Britain. Manchester 2001 ; Freeman, Michael: The Railway in the Victorian Imagination. New Haven 1999. y Hemingway, Andrew: Landscape imagery and urban culture in early nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge 1992, p. 9. 4 For the purposes of this essay fine art is loosely defined as paintings, usually in oil or possibly watercolour, produced for public exhibition or sale. 114
