New technologies are often greeted by wild optimism which later seems misplaced. Here is an extract from Our Iron Roads of 1852, extolling the moral benefits of the railways:
The individual benefits conferred by the facilities of travel now enjoyed are most important. To make the tour of Europe was once regarded as essential to the completion of the education of a gentleman; and still very many will declare, with old Du Bartas :—
“O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares
Of city troubles.”
[...] The change already effected in our own land by the Railway System is most surprising. The country may now be traversed from the South coast to the Borders in a few hours. The extremities of the island are now, to all intents and purposes, as near the metropolis as Sussex or Buckinghamshire were two centuries ago. The Midland counties are a mere suburb. With the space and resources of an empire, we enjoy the compactness of a city. Our roads are contracted into streets, our hills and dales into parks, and our thousand leagues of coast into the brief circumference of a castle wall. Nineveh was a city of three days’ journey round, Great Britain can be traversed in one, in its longest dimensions, during the same time. For questions of distance, we are as mere a spot as Malta, St. Helena, or one of the Channel Isles, or as one of the little states of the ancient Ægean. One circumvallation includes all the cities of the island. “A hundred opposite ports are blended into one Piræus, and to every point of the compass diverge the oft-traversed long walls that unite them with our engirded acropolis.”
By the union of activity and sympathy thus promoted, the great social, commercial, and political interests of the nation are drawn nearer together. Local distinctions and district prejudices are disappearing for ever, and the unit of British enterprise, wealth, and wisdom, is becoming more compact, energetic, and potent, and more promising of prolonged health and permanent stability. Men who but a few years since scarcely crossed the precincts of the county in which they were born, and knew as little of the general features of the land of their birth as they did of the topography of the moon, now unhesitatingly avail themselves of the means of communication that are afforded to visit spots and explore regions; to which the solicitations of friends, the beauties of scenery, or the charms of historic association, may offer attractions. The spread of ideas, as well as the conveyance of persons and of merchandise, depends greatly on means of transit; men become better acquainted with the condition and habits of their fellow men, and ignorance is diminished before the onward and resistless march of knowledge and of truth. The same principle is applicable to the affairs of other lands. Long-cherished national animosities are lulled, and wither away as the intercommunion of people extends; the once oft-repeated axiom, that proximity of situation between empires necessarily makes them hereditary foes, is repudiated as a defunct absurdity—friendships are making sacred the intercourse of families, who, debarred of means of communication, would otherwise never have met-a selfish patriotism will at length be lost in an enlightened and generous philanthropy! In proportion as intercourse is diffused, the happy period will be hastened when countries will become but as counties,—when, united by the same feelings which now actuate different portions of the same nations, they will regard the practice of settling a disputed question by a mutual slaughter as absurd as it is inhuman,—and will see, that though they may be separated by a diversity of tongue, or by the barriers of an arbitrary geography, yet that they, the children of a common Father, brethren of one great family, are heirs of the same destiny, and that their own highest interests are best advanced by the promotion of each other's welfare, and by the assiduous diffusion over the earth of peace and good-will among men.
Williams, Frederick S. 1852. Our Iron Roads – their history, construction and social influences. Ingram, Cooke and Co, London. 284-285.Related themes are taken up in these three excellent books:
Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New – thinking about communications in the late nineteenth century. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: the industrialisation of time and space in the nineteenth century. University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
Standage, Tom. 1998. The Victorian Internet. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London
