{"id":3046,"date":"2023-10-31T16:07:03","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T16:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=3046"},"modified":"2023-10-31T16:07:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-31T16:07:45","slug":"trains-and-omnibuses-on-the-means-of-transport-in-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2023\/10\/31\/trains-and-omnibuses-on-the-means-of-transport-in-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0TRAINS AND OMNIBUSES: ON THE MEANS OF TRANSPORT IN FICTION"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As readers and spectators, we tend to think of the means of transport as background elements of moderate importance. Yet, the moment I do some digging, what emerges is a rather complex picture of their relevance in the stories we tell and consume.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I am thinking of this matter today because of two lectures. Jordi Font-Agust\u00ed, a Catalan SF writer and train enthusiast, was the guest lecturer at the award ceremony of the Premi Pedrolo (I had the honour of presiding the jury), and he delighted us with a very complete overview of trains in print and audiovisual fictions. The place was the main library of Matar\u00f3, a city about 40 kms north of Barcelona, which is now celebrating the 175th<\/sup> anniversary of the first train line in Spain, which was inaugurated in 1848 and linked the two locations. The other guest lecturer (for the welcome session of my Department\u2019s doctoral programme in English Studies) was Elizabeth Amman, of the University of Ghent and the author of the volume The Omnibus: A Cultural History of Urban Transportation<\/em>, in the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I mention the series because I have found there what appears to be a pioneering volume published in 2012, Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940<\/em> (edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries). Or not so pioneering, considering that the editors mention in the preface as predecessors Wolfgang Schivelbusch\u2019s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century<\/em> (1977), Stephen Kern\u2019s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918<\/em> (1983), Laura Otis\u2019s Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century<\/em> (2004), and, above all, Jonathan Grossman\u2019s Charles Dickens\u2019s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel<\/em> (2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The novel by Dickens I usually teach, Great Expectations<\/em>, was serialized between 1860 and 1861, when trains had been around for three decades (the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830). However, Dickens set it in the early 1830s, as we infer because the characters move about in horse-drawn carriages (stagecoaches between urban centres, cabs in the city). Although Pip tries to help Magwitch scape by boarding a steamship (the line to Hamburg was established in 1825), his benefactor most likely returns from Australia in a sailing ship travelling round Cape Good Hope (the Suez Canal was inaugurated in 1869). Authors always need to take into account how their characters travel from one point to another, and when each means of transport is available, to avoid anachronisms. Even in fantasy stories. In Dracula<\/em> (1897), Harker and company take the Orient Express, inaugurated in 1883, to chase the Count back to Transylvania. Today, they would use fly in a low-cost airline, from Lutton to Cluj Avram Iancu International Airport in Cluj-Napoca in a few hours. And, yes, when Jules Verne published Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours<\/em>, in 1872, it did take 80 days to travel around the world; today you can manage the feat in less than 80 hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Whereas in realist fiction (including Gothic Dracula<\/em>), transportation is circumscribed by the available means, in fantasy (of the marvellous type) and in SF authors are free to invent new means. In SF there is a sharp division between the authors who embrace faster-than-light travel and those who do not, on the grounds that it is apparently physically impossible. Beyond this division, there is another one into sentient and non-sentient spaceships, which does not necessarily mean between organic and inorganic ships. In Iain M. Banks\u2019s fiction, for instance, the spaceships are inorganic but run by powerful, fully sentient AIs called Minds. In Yoon Ha Lee\u2019s Machineries of Empire<\/em> universe, the spaceships, known as moths, are in fact an enslaved alien race, both organic (though cyborgized) and sentient. I could go on naming strange spaceships, but I would like to note among the strangest flying objects fiction has seen the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift\u2019s classic Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/em> (1726).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Allow me to name rather randomly some other magical means of transport: Tolkien\u2019s walking trees, known as Ents (the Hobbits travel on Treebeard, the oldest one); magical creatures than can be ridden, from dragons to hippogriffs; Howl\u2019s moving castle in Diana Wynne Jones\u2019s eponymous novel, or Hayao Miyazaki\u2019s cat bus in his delicious film Totoro<\/em>. And others that SF dreams of but we don\u2019t have yet (thankfully!): the flying car, the time machine imagined by H.G. Wells and much later re-imagined by Robert Zemeckis as a cool DeLorean car, Dr. Who\u2019s Tardis, jetpacks, teleporters (as in Star Trek<\/em>). The taxis driven by robots that we saw in, for instance, Paul Verhoeven\u2019s Total Recall<\/em> (1990), and that so annoyed Arnold Schwarzenegger, are now seen in San Francisco\u2019s streets (minus the dummy driver!), where they are causing countless trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            There are, then, two basic forms to approach the matter of transportation in fiction, if you happen to be interested: making lists of the diverse means of transport, from walking to digital uploading, or, taking a specific means of transport and drafting lists as complete as possible of the fiction where it appears. The problem, from an academic point of view, is what exactly we gain with this efforts. I\u2019ll consider first teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            My introductory PowerPoint presentations for Victorian Literature include plenty of images connected with transportation, and I make a point of telling students about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, though I very much doubt that any of my students is interested in what they see as trivia. I myself only learned from Elizabeth Mann a few days ago the difference between a 19th<\/sup> century omnibus and a tram: the former was a biggish horse-drawn carriage with two decks, the latter was similar but ran on rails to ease the horses\u2019 efforts. This nags me because my PowerPoint for Unit 2 has a photo of London\u2019s first tramcars, introduced in 1861; they were designed by one Mr. Train (fancy that!) of New York to replace the far less stable omnibuses. Only in 1819 did the city of Leeds introduce the first electric trams. Being a Cultural Studies scholar I am indeed interested in these matters, but I have no illusions about my students\u2019 interest in them. Perhaps if I mention the very Victorian King\u2019s Cross station and platform 9\u00be in Harry Potter<\/em>, they may get the point!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            As for research, perhaps the main problem is that it runs the risk of being too descriptive. Jordi Font-Agust\u00ed\u2019s heavily illustrated talk is a good foundation for a beautiful coffee-table volume on trains in SF, particularly attractive because of its retrofuturism (he showed us many images of how future trains had been imagined in the past, the craziest ones came from Nazi Germany!). Or for enticing popularization. Read for instance, Jason Heller\u2019s article<\/a> \u201cBeyond the Tracks: The Locomotive in Science Fiction Literature\u201d and enjoy it. He does have a thesis (\u201cLocomotives are the original spaceships\u201d, meaning that they totally altered how we travel) but I am not sure whether this is enough for an academic article or monograph. Elizabeth Amman\u2019s volume \u201cexamines\u201d and \u201cexplores\u201d, as its blurb indicates \u201chow the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit\u201d and \u201chow the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century\u201d, but I am not sure whether this amounts to defending a thesis, beyond \u201cthe omnibus was a revolutionary means of transportation\u201d. Perhaps some types of research don\u2019t need a thesis but just the will to inform readers about a topic, and they should be as descriptive as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I am myself getting curious about speed. I have found a book by Martin Roach titled The History of Speed: The Quest to go Faster, from the Dawn the Motor Car to the Speed of Sound<\/em> (2020), but he connects speed to cars, and I believe that the concept of speed changes first with trains. Horses, a specialized website notes, can run up to 55 mph (88.5 kmh) and on average thoroughbreds run at 40 mph (64.37 kmh). That was the fastest humans could travel before trains, and only for a very short time. A horse-drawn carriage, another specialized website informs, can travel at around 8-10 mph, at a trot, far less (2-4 mph) at a walk; you might expect to travel 10-30 miles only in one day. Trains started at a speed of 30 mph (48.28 kmh) in the 1830s, and reached 80 mph (128.75 kmh) in the 1850s, which is quite amazing. Past the 1870s, trains could run up to 112 mph (180.247 kph). The first true production car, the 1894 Benz Velo, only travelled 12 mph, which proves my point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Of course, there is an immense difference between feeling speed in a small vehicle one drives, and feeling speed in a collective transport as a passenger. 300 kmh (186 mph) are brutal in a car, but surprisingly smooth on a high-speed train like AVE. Masculinity, of course, is a factor to take into account, in both the development of the car and of the train, and, indeed, of air navigation from the Wright brothers to the first flight to the Moon (tin-can Apolo X set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle at 39897 km\/h or 24790,846 mph). Women, as we all know, do not like speed that much. We tend to be more prudent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            So, all this to call attention to how we move on land and on air without a second thought about what this means culturally, and how fiction needs to reflect the mundane reality of transportation, unlike authors choose to fantasize about new means of transport. I personally hope never to see a city full of flying cars and flying people, but who knows?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As readers and spectators, we tend to think of the means of transport as background elements of moderate importance. Yet, the moment I do some digging, what emerges is a rather complex picture of their relevance in the stories we tell and consume.             I am thinking of this matter today because of two lectures. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,22,27,34],"tags":[1008,1007],"class_list":["post-3046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-literary-studies","category-research","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","tag-means-of-transportation","tag-speed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3047,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046\/revisions\/3047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}