Reading on the Railroad

The Effects of the Rail Road on the Brute Creation. Printed textile. c. 1830 

By around 1830 the “iron horse” (railroads) began to make actual horses obsolete. The Liverpool to Manchester Railway, running between the port of Liverpool and the textile mills in Manchester at the rate of seventeen miles per hour, was the first to haul both freight (textiles) and people. Railway travel was quicker and more affordable than road transport, allowing people to travel farther, and more quickly. Railway expansion was rapid, increasing from 125 miles in 1830 to 13,000 miles in 1871. 

Henry Heath. The Pleasures of the Rail-Road – Showing the Inconvenience of a Blow Up. London, 1831.

Anxiety and fear surrounding rail travel and other rapid social and technological changes were exploited by satirists in the nineteenth century. This hand-colored engraving spoofs the genuine risk of explosion posed by the early steam engines that powered railroads.  

James Scott Walker. An Accurate Description of the Liverpool and Manchester Rail-Way. Liverpool, 1831.

Railroads inspired an entirely new form of literature: the railroad guide. The frontispiece of James Scott Walker’s guide shows the Liverpool and Manchester Railway pulling textiles and other freight from the mills in Manchester to the port at Liverpool for export.  

George Bradshaw. Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables. London, October 1839.  

Running between cities and towns along fixed tracks, railroads had to operate on set schedules, forcing people to adapt to standardized time. This tiny volume was the very first of a new class of publications: the railroad timetable, or railroad schedule. It contains route maps and train schedules for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway. In England these guides were known simply as “Bradshaws” until they ceased publication in 1961.  

Appletons’ Railway and Steam Navigation Guide. New York, 1869.

As the century advanced, publishers in the United States also exploited the developing railroad market with series such as Appleton’s Railway and Steam Navigation Guide. 

The Book of Ready Made Speeches. London: George Routledge, n. d.

Common British Moths. London: George Routledge, n. d.

In the 1830s, the first public railroads in England enabled distribution of books, pamphlets, newspapers, and mail over wider distances in less time. The large numbers of rail travelers themselves were a new market for printing, publishing, and bookselling. Nonfiction works and inexpensive novels known as yellowbacks, or railroad novels, like the ones pictured here were published at low cost and marketed as entertainment to a wider range of society. 

Henry Sampson. A History of Advertising. London, 1875.  

As railroads developed in the 1830s, magazines like The Penny Magazine were distributed to subscribers by railroads throughout England, but it was nearly twenty years before the bookseller W. H. Smith recognized the value of train stations for selling books and other printed matter. He opened his first railway bookstall on 1 November 1848, in London’s Euston Station. By 1874, printed posters plastered the walls of train stations. A sign for a W. H. Smith & Son bookstall is pictured in the lower right corner of this illustration from Henry Sampson’s book.   

Robert Seymour. The March of Intellect. London, 1828.  

This hand-colored print signed with Robert Seymour’s pseudonym, “Shortshanks,” satirizes, and probably exaggerates, the social impact of steam-powered printing. A steam-powered automaton made of printing machine parts, sporting a head of books and topped by a university, is shown sweeping away quackery, delayed parliamentary bills, and court cases. It was published in 1828, just as reformers like Henry Brougham, Charles Knight, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) were exploiting mechanized printing and low-priced publications as a tool for educational, governmental, and social reform.