ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with early representations of a new technology and its hazards – the railway and railway accidents – as elaborated in that other unprecedented technological form of the mid-nineteenth century, the Illustrated London News (ILN). Trauma resulting from high-velocity accidents and the loss of aura caused by enhanced access are therefore issues which have already attracted scholarly attention. Admittedly, examination of the two categories will not adequately account for the phenomenal effect nineteenth-century railways had, not only on the English economy and social fabric, but on the lives of people around the world. One of Victorian literature’s most memorable examples of this confusion is the demonic James Carker’s violent death in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, a death preceded by the victim’s intense and feverish anxiety. Carker pays the ultimate price for attempting to seduce Edith Dombey. Clearly, the ILN would aspire to something quite different than the literary in its attempts to objectify the ‘news’.
