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

that represented their everyday social problems, such as William Frith’s Paddington Station (1863) or Augustus Solomon’s The Meeting - First Class (1854). But the appearance of the railway in the artist’s landscape had to wait until the 1870s when the Impressionists arrived in France and the bourgeoisie was a far more confident class. Then artists like Pissarro, Monet, Manet and Van Gogh were able to take up some aspects of Turner’s pioneering work and the railway was at last able to take its place in the landscape.

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

Illustration 9: Lordship Lane Station by Camille Pissarro, 1871, oil on canvas.

Conclusion

It is not a retrospective arrogance to call the years up to the late nineteenth century the ‘railway age’ but the label carries far more complexities than are usually credited to it and serves to hide the extent to which its defining spirit was contested. The spirit of the railway age did contain exuberance and a new and developing self-confidence for the middle class industrialists, but it also contained fear of change, distrust of modernity and concerns about the destruction of the basis of social relations throughout the country, a concern that was accompanied by changing assumptions about where power should lie. The middle class expressed their success and prominence in the city but,

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