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 when it came to their patronage of art, awareness of the fragility of newly developing relations was too strong and anxieties about social unrest were too immediate for them to risk undermining the protective illusions spun by landscape art.'* In the early years of the railway the relationship that developed with the art world was a complex manifestation of the emergent bourgeoisie’s search for an identity and the conflict between classes in the establishment of cultural hegemony. More simply put, it became one among many manifestations of the struggle for dominance - political and economic - in ‘the fresh era in the state of society’. Railway owners commissioned engravings for mass sale in order to promote the business. But fine art that was for exhibition was part of the public process through which one’s identity was defined. The bourgeoisie was trapped between display and disguise of modernity. Landowners old and new colluded with artists and designers to disguise the reality of industrialisation all around them. Their estate parks were landscaped around the house so as to hide the agricultural activity beyond, and they purchased works of art that presented a long disappeared vision of bucolic bliss. The construction of the landscape, real and imaged, had become important not only in order to maintain a hierarchical system that was under threat but also to hide the economic realities of life that were themselves a part of that threat. Thundering into that fragile fantasy of the countryside came the railway, Walt Whitman’s ‘Type of the modem - emblem of motion and power’,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘machine in the garden’ that brutally trampled all finer feeling and all carefully constructed illusion - despite the promotional lithographs that desperately sought to show otherwise. The ‘sylvan retreat of pastoral life’, the content, traditional, cohesive way of life seen in so many paintings no longer existed, if, indeed, it ever had.4" But the illusion had to be maintained. And the railway, by directly bringing the city, and all it stood for in terms of modernity, dirt, noise and people into the countryside, both sym’* This point can be related to the 1960s debate between Perry Anderson and E.P. Thompson on whether the bourgeoisie betrayed its 'historic role’ in the revolutionary change of society. 1 do not enter that debate here, but would contend that their refusal to rock the boat in which the aristocratic vision of the landscape was located was a positive move in the establishment of their identity and not an attempt to submerge their ‘revolutionary’ identity in an older model. See Anderson, Perry: 'Origins of the Present Crisis’. In: New Left Review 23 (Jan/Feb 1964); Thompson, Edward Palmer: 'The Peculiarities of the English'. In: The Poverty of Theory and other essays. London 1978. w Whitman, Walt: ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’. In: Marigolds grow wild on platforms: An anthology of railway poetry, ed. by Peggy Poole. London 1996 (first published in Leaves of Grass, 1855). 411 See, in this context, Barringer: Representations of Labour in British Visual Culture 1850-1875. 134
