I want to find out a little about the railway, and how it changed Victorian Britain. While trains brought with them excitement, speed, and endless opportunity, they also brought a completely new kind of fear. For many Victorian people, the railways were thrilling and unsettling in equal measure. People could travel faster than ever before, but there were accidents and disasters which were inevitable, because it was completely new.
When the first passenger railways began to expand in the 1820s and 1830s, many people were amazed by them. Journeys that once would have taken days by horse and carriage could now be done in only hours. But not everybody trusted the railways. Some people worried that travelling at such high speeds could damage the body or worse damage the mind. The noise, smoke, sparks, and violent shaking of the earlier carriages must have felt quite worrying to many of the first passengers.
These fears became far more real in 1830 during the opening celebrations of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. William Huskisson, a politician who was attending the event, stepped onto the tracks and was hit by George Stephenson’s locomotive Rocket. He became one of the world’s first widely reported railway fatalities. Victorians were horrified because it showed them how easily disasters could happen.
Artist: A.B. Clayton
Date: 1830
Railway lines spread rapidly across Britain and tragically accidents became all the more frequent. In 1842, the Versailles rail disaster in France shocked people across Europe. A train derailed and caught fire, killing more than fifty people. Stories like this increased the fears people had in Britain as well. Then in 1861 the Clayton Tunnel disaster happened in Sussex. There were signalling errors which caused two trains to collide inside a dark tunnel. Twenty-three people were killed and around 176 were injured. Survivors of the disaster described all of the confusion, the screaming, the darkness, and the wrecked carriages that were piled together underground. It must have been absolutely terrifying for the passengers trapped inside.
Benderloch railway station
Date: 1905
Another disaster that really affected Victorian Britain was the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865. Part of a bridge had been removed for repairs when a train carrying the writer Charles Dickens crossed it. Ten people were killed and around forty were injured. Dickens managed to survive and he later wrote about how shaken he was afterwards. His experience reflected the anxieties many Victorians felt whenever they travelled by rail.
Perhaps one of the most infamous tragedies was in 1879 with the collapse of the Tay Bridge in Scotland. During a violent storm, the bridge gave way under a passing train. Around seventy-five people were killed and there were no survivors. The disaster completely shocked the public because the bridge had been celebrated as a triumph of Victorian engineering. Many people started to question whether even the greatest structures could really be trusted. In spite of these tragedies, Victorians continued to travel because railways had transformed work, trade, and family life. Over time, safety systems started to improve but railway disasters still continued to concern the Victorians for many years.
Do you think that Victorians saw the railway as progress, or do you think that many secretly feared them?
No comments:
Post a Comment