ABSTRACT
It is with unmistakable irony that the famous nineteenth-century Dutch writer Nicolas Beets, alias Hildebrand, comments in 1839 on one of the revolutions in transport and travel in his own century: the steam train. The lines cited from his essay “Varen en rijden” [Travel across Land and Water] echo, yet to some degree dash, the high hopes associated with the introduction of trains and rail networks in the Netherlands. This new means of transport was expected to transform the life of the nation on all levels. Indeed, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has observed, “in the nineteenth century nothing seemed as vivid and dramatic a sign of modernity”.2 Yet the unrelenting mechanical energy of the train transformed the experience of travel in ways not welcomed by all. For Beets, the “shrinkage” of the Netherlands into a land traversed ever more quickly left little room for reection on the diverse range of socio-cultural encounters – some pleasurable, others more irksome – that travel had hitherto embodied.3 In contrast to these rather disagreeable developments, there were, he argued, time-honoured traditions and distinctions that continued to shape travel in the Netherlands in the rst half of the nineteenth century. By means of juxtaposition, Beets therefore made continuities visible in a eld perceived to be structured only by radical change.
