ABSTRACT
Steam-powered train travel in Britain famously began on 27 September 1825, on the Stockton & Darlington railroad line, with the pioneering engineer George Stephenson aboard his locomotive in a festive top hat. Several authors have noted, and made much of, the new tyranny of timetables and precise schedules that began to prevail during this period, as people adjusted to the idea of being dominated by official, public time. Quotes, anecdotes, and pictures representing the astonishment and disruption caused by the coming of the railroads are an absolute commonplace in Victorian writing. Its effects on society and culture were at forefront of everyone's thought, much as digital technology is today, although then just as now not all predictions proved accurate. Marx's term was conceived with reference to nineteenth-century American literature, but there is no doubt that a very similar strain is clearly evident in British writing as the Victorians confronted industrial and technological change that altered their lives profoundly and irrevocably.
