Fast and Forward: Women and Railway Manners

The above description from Braddon's very popular 1863 sensation novel rather than referring to the dangers of fast trains, in fact juxtaposes, through metaphor, two types of women that men felt they had to choose from in a period of strained gender relations. In the particular extract one of the novel's characters, Talbot Bulstrode, justifies his choice of marriage to Lucy rather than Aurora, by pinpointing the risks that marriage to an impetuous, fast woman like Aurora might incur and employing the familiar discourse of danger, violence, and death that the accident prone train had generated in the press and popular fiction. At a time of railway speed, when numerous daily and weekly articles in the press heatedly debated the practical, social, and medical dangers and benefits of high velocity, and when urban activities of business and leisure were often visualised as following the dizzying tempo of ‘the railroad of life’, it is not surprising that the speed of trains was applied as metaphor to young women of the upper middle class who rejected the slow pace of domestic existence and who strayed from the ordinary path of feminine delicacy, modesty, and self-effacement. Compared to the pale and angelic Lucy, who at another point in the novel is fantasised by Bulstrode as an aestheticised dead female body, Aurora Floyd, the bigamous and violent heroine of Braddon's fiction, is the epitome of speed.

Speed and haste had since the early Victorian times entered the discourse of social texts that described the lamentable effects of urban life – of the increasing work-related urge for continuous literal mobility and rapid business manoeuvres – on masculinity and urban or professional relations.