The Railway Journey: Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the 19th Century - Softcover

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 085496505X ISBN 13: 9780854965052

Publisher: Berg Publishers, 1986

About this title

Review

Because it made possible relatively rapid movement and shipping across large distances, joining far-off towns to economic and cultural capitals, many people who lived in the nineteenth century regarded the railway as an instrument of progress. Because anyone with the price of a ticket could board a train, regardless of social class, the railway was also seen as a democratising technology.

But, Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes in this vivid history of early rail travel, the promise of progress and democracy was swiftly compromised: the railways became an agency for the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and they created a class of passive consumers who simply climbed aboard and waited to arrive at their destinations. The railways, Schivelbusch writes, changed the nineteenth-century world for good or ill. They helped rewrite the industrialising world's sense of time, for now precise schedules had to be kept; they reinforced a sense of forward-plunging movement into the future; they even introduced the reality of mass disaster, for trains were always crashing, sometimes taking hundreds of travellers to their deaths.

Delving into urban planning, psychology, architecture, and economics as well as the history of technology, Schivelbusch paints a revealing portrait of the role of the railways in shaping the nineteenth-century mind--one whose influence endures in the present. --Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com

Review

"This delightful, probing, and very quirky book is, surprisingly, a pioneering work in the sociology and psychopathology of the railway revolution. . . What's more, it's a gas."--"The Village Voice

Edition details

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 085496505X
• ISBN 13: 9780854965052
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 236