Women and Railway Tourism in Anthony Trollope and Henry James

Chapters 1 and 2 have concentrated on fictional representations of women's rail travel within national borders, in local narratives of adventure, fear, or romance in which women figured as domestic or transgressive figures braving the challenges of railway travel, that is, orientation, timetables, suspicious or abusive co-passengers, and heavy luggage. However, train travel was also women's means of acquiring an international geographical consciousness, and the aim of this chapter is to explore narratives which investigate wider geographical settings. In an age of heightened tourism the railway provided middle- and upper-class women with easy accessibility to the world, multiplying their opportunities for geographical mobility and intercultural knowledge, while at the same time making them part of an interconnected world rendered possible by the European rail networks which collapsed distances, creating the illusion of international connectivity among borderless nations. It has been widely argued that cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century was mostly the privilege of men who had cultivated international artistic and literary tastes through travel and frequent relocation within Europe, and who, as James Buzard has argued, tended to establish a horizontal class consciousness, whose transnationality served to give men a shared sense of ‘responsibility for the welfare of Europe as a whole’ (‘The Grand Tour’, 40, 41). This humanitarian and political vision of cosmopolitanism which transcended national borders was not necessarily shared by women travellers who, apart from aesthetic cultivation and social facility in the international salon settings, had, due to social disenfranchisement, limited or no opportunity to partake of the exalted sociopolitical objectives of cosmopolitanism; nevertheless, the accessibility of Europe through the railway network allowed them to approximate in part this condition of intercultural cultivation and global consciousness which exceeded women's domestic or ethnically restricted realm. In the latter part of this section, I will return to the question of the extent to which international railway travel enabled women to embody classical and contemporary characteristics of the cosmopolite: i.e., freedom from restrictive cultural loyalties and prejudices as well as the ethical imperative of openness to the difference of the other.