Wolfgang Schivelbusch - The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

The Industrialization of Time and Space
in the Nineteenth Century

With a New Preface

University of California Press

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University of California Press
Oakland, California

1977, 1986, 2014 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

ISBN 978-0-520-28226-1 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-95790-9 (ebook)

The German text of this book was published under the titleGeschichte der Eisenbahnreise by Carl Hanser Verlag,Munich, 1977

English translation first published in the United States byUrizen Books, 1979

First University of California Press edition 1986

The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition ofthis book as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

For their hospitality and assistance I would like to thank thefollowing American libraries: Library of Congress, New YorkPublic Library, New York Historical Society, New YorkAcademy of Medicine, the Boston Athenaeum, the Kress RareBooks Library and, especially, John McLeod of the AmericanRailroads Association Library.

W. S.

For Shirley D. Carse

I thought of railway travelling.

Lewis Carroll

Nothing else in the nineteenth century seemed as vivid and dramatic asign of modernity as the railroad. Scientists and statesmen joinedcapitalists in promoting the locomotive as the engine of progress, apromise of imminent Utopia. By the end of the century their naivetcame home to them, especially in the United States where railroadcorporations were seen as the epitome of ruthless, irresponsible businesspower, a grave threat to order and stability, both economic andpolitical. But in fact from its beginnings the railroad was never free ofsome note of menace, some undercurrent of fear. The popular imagesof the mechanical horse manifest fear in the very act of seeming tobury it in a domesticating metaphor: fear of displacement of familiarnature by a fire-snorting machine with its own internal source ofpower. Once it appeared, the machine seemed unrelenting in itsadvancing dominion over the landscape in the way it lapped themiles, in Emily Dickinsons words and in little over a generation ithad introduced a new system of behavior: not only of travel andcommunication but of thought, of feeling, of expectation. Neither thegeneral fear of the mechanical and the specific frights of accident andinjury, nor the social fear of boundless economic power entirely effacedthe Utopian promise implicit in the establishment of speed as a newprinciple of public life. In fact the populations of the industrial world,including the American Populists who aimed their profound hostilitytoward corporate capitalism at the railroad, accomodated themselves tothe sheer physical fact of travel by rail as a normal fact of existence.

Now, as the railroad recedes in importance as a mode of personaltravel and of economic distribution, it reappears as an object of study,of historical contemplation. Scholars have weighed its importance inthe making of industrial capitalism, as transportation and as thebusiness of organization. Not only was its economic function of firstimportance, but that function exerted itself in many indirect ways uponwhat seemed to be simple personal needs for getting from one place toanother. Personal travel by railroad inevitably (if unconsciously)assimilated the personal traveller into a physical system for moving goods.Behind the railroads annihilation of space by time, wrote Karl Marx,lay the generative phenomenon of capital. The creation of the physicalconditions of exchange was an extraordinary necessity for capital,which by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Productsbecome commodities only as they enter a market. They must be movedfrom the factory to the customer. Entering a market requires a movementin space, a locational moment. The industrial system also requiresthe movement of resources from mine to factory a movementwhich is already a transformation of nature. Thus the railroad fulfilledinner necessities of capital, and it is this alone that accounts for itsunhindered development in the nineteenth century.

The railway journey which fills nineteenth-century novels as anevent of travel and social encounter was at bottom an event of spatialrelocation in the service of production. By exposing this hidden nervewithin mechanized travel, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has placed the journeyby rail in a new and revealing light. It was a decisive mode ofinitiation of people into their new status within the system ofcommodity production: their status as object of forces whose points oforigin remained out of view. Just as the path of travel was transformedfrom the road that fits itself to the contours of land to a railroad thatflattens and subdues land to fit its own needs for regularity, thetraveler is made over into a bulk of weight, a parcel, as manytravelers confessed themselves to feel. Compared to what it replaced,the journey by stage coach, the railway journey produced novelexperiences of self, of fellow-travelers, of landscape (now seen asswiftly-passing panorama), of space and time. Mechanized by seatingarrangements and by new perceptual coercions (including new kinds ofshock), routinized by schedules, by undeviating pathways, the railroadtraveler underwent experiences analagous to military regimentation notto say to nature transformed into commodity. He was convertedfrom a private individual into one of a mass public a mere consumer.

This puts too crudely and schematically the form of Schivelbuschsastute analysis. But the brief summary does suggest the special kind oflight that flows from his insights. He wishes to recover the subjectiveexperience of the railway journey at the very moment of its newness,its pure particularity: to construct from a magnificent display of documentswritten and graphic what can be called the industrial subject. Inthis enterprise Schivelbusch writes in the spirit of Siegfried Giedion,Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias and Dolph Sternberger culturalhistorians who look for evidence of new forms of consciousness arisingout of encounters with new structures, new things. One feature ofmodernity as it crystallized in the nineteenth century was a radicalforegrounding of machinery and of mechanical apparatus within everydaylife. The railroad represented the visible presence of moderntechnology as such. Within the technology lay also forms of socialproduction and their relations. Thus the physical experience oftechnology mediated consciousness of the emerging social order; it gave aform to a revolutionary rupture with past forms of experience, of socialorder, of human relation. The products of the new technology produced,as Marx remarked, their own subject; they produced capacitiesappropriate to their own use. In their railway journeys nineteenth-centurypeople encountered the new conditions of their lives; theyencountered themselves as moderns, as dwellers within new structuresof regulation and need.