ABSTRACT
All ages are periods of transition, but the twenty or thirty years ushered in by the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway in September of 1830 are particularly so, and not least because contemporaries seem to have become suddenly and acutely aware of the revolutionary changes which were taking place on every side and in every facet of the fabric of Britain. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1831, ‘mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones’. The transition was, in his eyes and in those of Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens, and many more, not so much from the immediate past of the late eighteenth century as from a medieval, feudal world of a fixed and ordered social hierarchy based upon a landowning aristocracy and upon shared certainties in religious and political principles and in matters of taste, all based in their turn upon an economic system in which peasant farming was more important than manufacture, something which in any case should be domestic and small-scale in its organization. Such a world picture was of course an idealized view of the past, one which conveniently overlooked the nastiness of much of medieval life, the bloodshed of the Civil War and the shock of the Scientific Revolution. It was nevertheless a genuine reaction against the ugliness and squalor which industrialization seemed everywhere to bring in its wake, and in its uncritical turning towards a lost medieval Golden Age it has left its own traces in the landscape through the high moral purpose which it came to attach to the revival of Gothic architecture. It was also a world picture which had long been under attack, at least since the Renaissance and the Reformation, but it was really only the outbreak of the French Revolution together with the changes following upon rapid and large-scale industrialization as epitomized in the railway that brought these new developments suddenly and forcibly into the open.
