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 comment on the railway or on technology that Turner is making in Rain, Steam and Speed through his manipulation of landscape discourse is far more complex and controversial. Everyone who has written on the painting has their own interpretation of Turner’s intentions. Does it support technological developments or oppose them or simply describe them? I will not debate that issue here, as for my purposes the important thing is that some form of comment, of whatever nature, was being made in a major exhibited work." I will, however, along with a number of other commentators, note that the engine in the painting is steaming out from the city (London) bringing all its fire, its noise, its speed and its modernity into a landscape that is symbolically (although possibly ironically) presented as a traditional and idyllic pastoral scene. The City and the Country The relationship between the city and the country was problematic. The city was a contested site that carried all the ills as well as the triumphs of modernity. For some like Robert Southey in 1807 the city was a place of‘infernal noise and infernal sights’ deracinating people such that ‘there was a fearful danger of social disorder and sexual demoralisation’. For others like Macaulay, 30 years later, the city was a place where ‘liberty, freedom and progress flourished and were embodied.’ Anxieties were growing about what the city meant and about the contagion of the appalling conditions that had developed in them. Fear and horror of their encroachment into the countryside was expressed artistically by the portrayal of cities as distant, confined locations on the edge of a safe, traditional landscape. (See Wylie, View of Manchester, 1851; Constable, View of London from Hampstead Heath, 1833; Samuel, View of London from Greenwich Park, 1816; Richardson, View of Newcastle from Gateshead Fell, 1816) The viewer is placed safely within the familiar landscape and typically, members of the leisured classes, or perhaps content labourers, are shown strolling or relaxing in the foreground, undisturbed by and safe from the smoking chimneys on the horizon. The viewer can identify with the figures in the foreground and can know that, while the city exists, and may even have its place in modem life, life in the country goes on untouched by it.'4 * 34 " For a detailed discussion of the many meanings of this painting, see Murdoch: From Elephant to Penge West, Chapter 6. 34 Caroline Arscott makes an interesting argument about this issue in Wolff, Janet Seed, John (eds.): The Culture of Capital: art, power and the nineteenth century middle class. Manchester 1989. 130
