In the 1830s and 1840s, railways were available to relatively few communities, with many encountering them on paper and in public discourse long before they had the opportunity to see them in person. This chapter examines what preceded the slow integration of railway infrastructure into narrative infrastructure: fantastical visions of technomodernity that did not fit well into established plots. Documenting efforts by railway companies, journalists, and cartographers to articulate steam-powered transit exposes how widely authors struggled to find a fitting form for railways on the page. Examples include Charles Dickens’s false starts in weaving railway imagery and mobility into prose, via The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). By changing track to explore the notion of ‘fellow passengers’ in A Christmas Carol (1843), and taking time and space away from writing on the move to develop a more deliberately engineered structure for his 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, Dickens adapts his approach to plotting long-form fiction in the steam age. These readings reveal the importance of carefully laying groundwork – or infrastructure – for large-scale shifts in novel form.

Venturing beyond Britain’s established railway lines, this chapter investigates fictional entanglements with late-nineteenth-century ambitions to build a railway tunnel between England and France. It explores debates surrounding the proposed Channel Railway (1880–82), showing how fiction exacerbated fears about what (other than trains, passengers, and freight) such a line might carry. Thomas Hardy’s 1881 novel A Laodicean depictstransport and communications infrastructures enabling and impeding cross-Channel understanding. By linking A Laodicean to the Channel railway debates, this chapter reveals the political stakes of connection in a text that has attracted critical attention for its treatment of telegraphy and the postal service. Hardy’s rich railway soundscape of subterranean rumblings and distant disturbances taps into late nineteenth-century preoccupations with the reverberative qualities of industrial architecture. A by-product of the machine ensemble, reverberation could be both heard and felt. In this chapter, reverberation becomes evidence of the leakiness of a supposedly rational system, and with errant sounds working against the railway’s vector-like ideal.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel concludes with a brief analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903), crystallising its argument that infrastructure reshapes narrative form across genres. It asserts the critical value in maintaining dialogue between railways as built and railways as imagined in fiction and other narrative media in light of the constant interplay between engineering and authorship demonstrated throughout the book. From the midst of the ‘Infrastructural turn’, the afterword asserts the value of understanding conceptual groundwork – or conceptual infrastructure – laid during the nineteenth century when interrogating contemporary understanding of this politically, socially, and indeed historically complex term.

If literary form and railway infrastructure do not neatly align in nineteenth-century novels, then what is the significance of their close, inconsistent entanglement? Chapter 4 examines George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which takes full advantage of transport and communications infrastructure in its two mainline plots. Throughout Eliot associates markers of such systems – ‘dusty waiting rooms’, un-consulted Bradshaw’s railway guides, and telegrams relaying old news – with stasis and regression. Even where they advance the plot, they draw the narrative back in time. This chapter parallels communication infrastructure and novel form to interrogate how and why Eliot reconfigures established and well-traversed form in her final novel that pushes against the margins of literary realism. By offering an upset chronology and a refusal to drive plotlines to a conventional resolution, to what extent does Eliot reconceptualise systems rooted in timeliness and destination in Daniel Deronda?

This final chapter traces railway infrastructure’s lasting impact on novel form through structural and affective dimensions of the railways in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End. A text poised in a transitional period in transport and literary history, Forster’s novel passes traverses the range of infrastructures examined through this book. This chapter provides a much-needed railway reading of a novel critically framed to date through its representation of motor cars and their attendant geographies. I explore how characters personalise public infrastructure in Howards End by unpacking the parallels Forster establishes between domestic space (the house at Howards End) and railway termini. While hypermobility via the motorcar affords a new kind of freedom of movement, it cannot match the established infrastructure in enabling imaginative mobility. Characters with a social outlook entrenched in railway infrastructure move less but see more than those who prefer the motorcar. This chapter argues that this work’s enigmatic instruction to ‘only connect’ is rooted in infrastructural railway poetics.