Chapter 12 - Horsepower in the Railway Age

Summary

Nancy Henry examines the mid-century coexistence of trains and horses and argues that horses became industrialised, machine-like commodities as they entered a new place in the cultural imagination. Railway construction in the 1840s meant that by the 1850s novelists recognised the coexistence of train and horse travel and raised questions about their economic and physical dependence on both mechanical and animal forms of power. The number of horses actually increased dramatically during the railway age as horses were needed to access stations and to carry freight to be loaded onto trains, and this led to an increasing number of accidents which figured as the focus of anxieties about risk, danger, and the unexpected. Henry observes a tipping point in the relationship between the Victorians and progress that manifests in this case in fictional narratives of travel accidents that generated plots of financial loss, disfigurement, and death.