ABSTRACT
Apart from government itself, there were probably no institutions more unpopular with the late Victorian and Edwardian public than railway companies. Their vast size compared with other businesses and their considerable, if rather exaggerated, market power made them objects of deep suspicion to traders and industrialists. One particularly potent source of bitterness was the companies’ ability to act as discriminating monopolists, and the industry which felt itself most hardly used in this respect was domestic agriculture, particularly from the late 1870s onwards.
