Railway and modernisation

Question 1

Wolfgang

Answer 1

Wolfgang Schimmelbusch ‘If an essential element of a given sociocultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation. ‘

• before the railroads ‘annihilated space and time”, space consisted in a ‘patchwork of varying local times’, but in the mid-nineteenth century, regions of the country ‘lost their temporal identity in an entirely concrete sense: railroads deprived them of their local time”… ‘in 1880, railroad time [became] general standard time in England’.

Question 2

Lady Audley clock

Answer 2

• opens with an arresting and enigmatic image of a ‘clock-tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which jumped straight form one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes’.

Question 3

elipses in woman in white

Answer 3

• ‘I open a new page. I advanced my narrative by one week. The history of the internal which I thus pass over must remain unrecorded. My heart turns faint, my mind sinks into darkness and confusion.’

The ellipses or gap between marians diary between 22nd Dec and 11th June is another example.

Question 4

Erwin on effects of modern travel on the sense of space

Answer 4

The modern forms of traveling in which intervening spaces are, as it were, skipped over or even slept through’

Question 5

that funny little depiction of tunnel and now… and now

Answer 5

Elizabeth Gaskwell in Mary Bradon conveys this sense of missing space through elipses in a rather amusingly bathetic account of train travel: ‘And now they were in the tunnel!’ – and now they were in Liverpool.’

Question 6

critic on preaching to nerves

Answer 6

• H.L. Mansell, ‘sensation novels’, Quarterly review, 1863: ‘a class of literature has grown up around us’… by ‘preaching to the nerves’… excitement, and excitement alone… they carry the whole nervous system by steam

Question 7

Nietzche

Answer 7

• ’ Friedrich Nietzche, Human, all too human 1878: ‘[W]ith the tremendous acceleration of life, mind and eye have become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveller who gets to know a land and its people from a railway carriage.

Question 8

walter woman meeting sensation

Answer 8

• : ‘when, in a moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. / I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. / there, in the middle of the broad bright road – there… stood the figure of a solitary woman

Question 9

contemporary account of what trains did to the body

Answer 9

train would ‘jarr’ the body and make ‘impressions upon the nerves of skin and muscle’. (Malcom morris 1878)

Question 10

Braddon on insanity

Answer 10

• : ‘we are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life – this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine… it is strange [a madhouse] is not larger… when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and same to-day. ‘

Question 11

dickens and collins

Answer 11

“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices”

They had no intention of going anywhere… They wanted only to be idle

Question 12

ruskin

Answer 12

the body of the train traveller being more than a “living parcel

Question 13

robert viewed by the locals

Answer 13

• “inoffensive species of maniac” with “no inclination for any of [the] outdoor amusements”

Question 14

Mr Farlie effeminate

Answer 14

‘I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it’s on the nerves’

• D.A Miller ‘an effeminate’
• ‘delicate’ hands, ‘effeminately small’ feet’ ‘womanish’ slippers

Question 15

journal of medical science

Answer 15

‘if there is not an actual increase of insanity, there is developed a very considerable tendency towards it, and I think it arises from the exaggerated state of society… I have ascertained that many persons, who have been in the habit of travelling by railway, have been obliged to give it up, in consequence of the effect upon the nervous system’
(1858).

Question 16

reading for the plot

Answer 16

• Peter Brooks, reading for the plot (1984): ‘desire as narrative thematic, desire as narrative motor, and desire as the very intention of narrative language and the act of telling all seem to stand in close interrelation… ambitious heroes… may regularly be conceived as ‘desiring machines’ whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire’.

Question 17

serial publication MO

Answer 17

• Margaret Oliphant, Blackwoods, 1862: ‘the violent stimulant of serial publication – of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident – is the thing of all others most likely to develop the germ, and bring it to a fuller darker bearing.’

Question 18

marian last pages

Answer 18

‘so cold, so cold - and the strokes of the clock, the strokes i can’t count, keep striking in my head - ‘

Question 19

how new concepts of time helped form the novel

Answer 19

New concepts of time: The development of new timepieces also contributes to a modern sense of time; the novel is marked by chronological consistency, temporal specificity and historical setting rather than the timelessness of allegory and romance.

Question 20

novel as machine

Answer 20

Nicholas Dames: the novel is a literary machine appropriate for the conditions of modern consumption

Question 21

Mr Fairlie sees in Machines (the children)

Answer 21

• ‘I want a reform in the construction in children’
• ‘nature’s only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of noise’
• cherubs with perfect faces, ‘no dirty little legs…no noisy little lungs’ a ‘superior construction’

Question 22

Mr Fairlie as a malfunctioning machine

Answer 22

neither man or woman ‘looked natural’. he is neither.

fingers ‘listlessly toying’ with coins

“don’t let the sun on me, Mr. Hartright!’

he had a ‘small table attached to his chair’

Question 23

mechanical men from old exam question

Answer 23

Thomas Carlyle warns… (1829)

“men have grown mechanical in the head and in the heart, as well as in the hand”

Question 24

hartright ptsd

Answer 24

‘i tremble now while i write’ . he feels the shock of the original incident.

Question 25

hartright ptsd

Answer 25

‘i tremble now while i write’ . he feels the shock of the original incident. a body-made-nervous

Question 26

dickens accident

Answer 26

1865 railway accident. even a year later ‘i have sudden vague rushes of terror’

Question 27

d a miller

Answer 27

As D. A. Miller describes: “The genre offers us one of the first instances of modern literature to address itself primarily
to the sympathetic nervous system, where it grounds its characteristic adrenaline effec

Question 28

Robert description of his body

Answer 28

a “perambulating mass of woollen goods rather than a living member [of society]”

‘worn out’ … “his mind was beginning to grow confused upon the point of time. it seemed to him months since he had last seem george … [not] less than 48 hours ago”

the commodification of human

Question 29

roberts meditation

Answer 29

“meditative in the jolting vehicle”

This woman knows half my secret; she will soon possess herself of the rest, and then—and then—”
The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audley’s meditation,

Question 30

Daly

Answer 30

the pleasures of fictional suspense and the anxieties of clock watching appear as part of the same historical moment’