Industrial Traffic

In his evocative description of urban alienation and indifference in the nineteenth century, Raymond Williams considers Dickens's railway in Dombey and Son to be a part of the impersonal institutional forces of modern society that physically and ideologically disrupt the established architectural and social order so as to impose new discipline and uniformity. Dickens's railway novel of the forties almost compulsively traces the impact of railway construction, journeys, and employment on character, perception, and urban planning, capturing both the vertiginous rhythms of technological progress and the alienating and dehumanising effects of mechanised mobility. Turning whole city areas into waste ground and houses into carcasses while preparing them for more efficient functioning within interconnected systems of technology and science, Dickens's monsters, dragons, and giants are the vehicles of socio-economic success at the expense of nature, of the physical manifestations of a historical past, and even of individuality. In Dickens's preoccupation with the railway we find a protomodernist vision of people as impersonal railway passengers, anonymous members of moving crowds which function as if automatically at the command of a timetable or a railway clock. Railways in Dombey and Son promise economic power but also bring tragedy and death. They embody speed but they also prompt meditations on fatality, on the ‘swift course’ of life mocked by the mechanical speed of the train, as Dombey realises during a dizzying railway journey after his son's death (280). They demand the efficiency of their workers but ultimately distort simple habits which define them as human: in order to sustain himself and function, Mr Toodle, the railway engineer, needs to ‘[shovel] in his bread and butter with a clasp knife, as if he were stoking himself’ (514).