Abstract
Histories and cultural studies of nineteenth-century railways have long kept English railways
separate from imperial lines, suggesting that the parallel development of these networks was
unconnected. This thesis contributes to ongoing efforts to re-evaluate the impact of the British
Empire on Britain by investigating the ways nineteenth-century English railways were
understood as a constant physical and ideological point of contact between the nation and the
empire it headed.
Beginning with the first railway periodical, The Railway Magazine (1835), chapter one
explores the ways in which railways became an integral part of national culture and identity from
early on in their development, and that simultaneously the national interest in them was coupled
with colonial investment and expansion. The second chapter then considers the way early
railway poetry in the form of Railroad Eclogues (1846) grappled with the national implications
of expansive railway development during the Railway Mania, and how imperial rhetoric fuelled
the debate between a pre-railway and railway nation. Chapter three marks a turning point in the
thesis, as it moves from the nationally introspective texts of early railway construction to Indian
travel writing that consolidated England’s railway characterisation while demonstrating the
imperial reach of these ideas. The final two chapters then demonstrate the connections between
end-of-the-century imperial anxiety and the presentation of railways as a national, imperial,
social and physical threat in varying forms of invasion literature, from George Chesney’s ‘The
Battle of Dorking’ (1871), to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898).
This thesis argues that English railways in literature offer a far more insidious connection
to empire than has previously been acknowledged. As a characteristic of the nineteenth-century
nation, they demonstrate one of the ways in which empire was woven into English culture and
became indivisible from the country’s identity.