ABSTRACT
Like the proverbial parson pontificating on sin, Ruskin had only one attitude to the railway: he was against it. The steam engine itself, however, filled him with amazement. In a passage worthy of Thomas Carlyle, he marvelled at its sophisticated mechanism, its imagery of limitless power:
So it was not the steam engine, but its misuse, which aroused Ruskin’s anger. In effect, he came to see the railway as an instrument of the devil; an agent of modernism, disruptive of the peace, the beauty, the civility, and the natural harmony of the world. Railroads, he informed The Times in 1887, ‘are to me the loathsomest form of devilry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes, destructive of all wise social habit or possible natural beauty, carriages of damned souls on the ridges of their own graves’.2 Throughout England, Ruskin saw the railroad’s tentacles strangling town and countryside; eroding the contours of familiar landscapes, and sundering a multitude of social relationships built up seamlessly over centuries. And it was a European phenomenon, not just an English one. From Conway Castle to the Castle of Chillon; from Furness Abbey to the Falls of Schaffhousen, the progress of the iron monster seemed irresistible. What alarmed Ruskin particularly was the cultural chasm which appeared to be opening up between past and present. With Venice,
Florence, Paris, and Birmingham all reduced to the equality of mere platforms on a gigantic network of railway lines, Ruskin sensed the impending disintegration of all traditional cultural forms. ‘The life of the Middle Ages’, he concluded, was surely ‘dying’; and with it ‘the warm mingling of past and present’ on which human civility was based.3
