The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam is a beautifully mapped journey. Visual metaphors for travel abound in the expansive design and double-page color layouts reproducing the spaces and social relations synonymous with the train: crowded stations, private compartments, tourist spectacles, conquest narratives. Interspersed throughout the book are eye-filling details that mirror the fragmented, mobilized gaze of the traveler. The text includes a generous selection of paintings, some well known, others not. But it is the wealth of posters, photographs, and prints that convey the economic ties between the railway industry, mechanical reproduction, and visual consumption. Together, the book’s four authors capture the alienating and exhilarating possibilities of the railway era, its psychic and spatial dislocations, and restore to the twenty-first century an earlier sense of the wonder inspired by the machines considered marvelous monsters.

The Railway comprises four chapters on nineteenth-century visual culture framed by two introductory and two concluding essays. Michael Freeman and Matthew Beaumont each contribute interdisciplinary commentary on the breakdown of socio-economic norms and literary codes in the “age of steam.” In “The Railway Age: An Introduction,” Freeman positions the mixing of classes in rail stations within the sensorial chaos of travel. Anxiety at the foment of crowds into mobs, strangers into criminals, and the rise of forces from below, namely immigrant railway labor, are discussed in relation to the larger pressures of urbanization that Freeman rightly associates with industrial capitalism. In “The Railway and Literature: Realism and the Phantasmagoric,” Beaumont interprets the railway as phantasm and trauma, forms that could not be described fully through Realist narrative conventions. Through close readings of several texts, most notably Charles Dickens’s serialized novel Dombey and Son (1846–48), Beaumont argues persuasively for a hallucinatory “railway consciousness” (41). At the same time, he identifies a mass “fiction industry” (37) turning out pulp specifically for sale at the station and consumption on the train.

The next essay is Ian Kennedy’s “The Formative Years in Europe.” He describes visual culture in the early years of Britain’s rail construction (1830–50) and speculative “Railway Mania” (1844–47) by focusing on drawings and mechanically reproduced images. First, he traces the influence of J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway (1844) on popular prints, and links high and low visual imagery in a single aesthetic termed the “railway Sublime” (59). A larger connection joins the production of printmakers and engineers who re-drew the landscape with precipitous curves, vertiginous heights, and cavernous depths on the one hand, and bridges, trestles, and tunnels on the other. Kennedy brings to the center printmakers, including John Cooke Bourne, prominent in an epoch more readily associated with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He sees parallels between developing photographic and railway technologies, using images seldom studied for a new look at topography and industrial infrastructure. We learn that approximately two thousand railway lithographs appeared between 1830 and 1850 (67). This impressive number would take on greater meaning if Kennedy examined the circulation and reception of these popular prints, with particular attention to the roles of newspapers and illustrated journals. What remain unanswered here are larger economic questions concerning who bought the prints, and how printmakers shaped public attitudes toward the railway.

Julian Treuherz follows with “The Human Drama of the Railway.” His organizing theme is the railway interior—compartment and station—as class narrative. By the mid-1840s, artists had discovered a ready market for the subject among Royal Academy and popular audiences who shared a taste for storytelling and an eye for pictorial detail, but mass transport fueled anxiety. Mingling classes threatened social order, and the increasing visibility of the dispossessed blurred traditional hierarchies. How artists negotiated these issues with a nervous public is told through Treuherz’s account of Abraham Solomon’s First Class: The Meeting and Second Class: The Parting (1854). The paintings portray a courtship scene inside a sumptuous private railroad compartment, and, open to the gaze of strangers, a widowed mother’s farewell to a son off to sea. After an art critic dismissed First Class as “vulgar,” Solomon painted a second version, which toned down the luxurious excess of the original work and re-cast the old gentleman earlier dozing over his newspaper as a vigilant chaperone seated between the couple. By the time engraved versions circulated in 1857, two new titles, The Departure (Second Class) and The Return (First Class), and a reversal in the order of the scenes, transformed them into an entirely different continuous moral narrative (87).

The demands of modern marketing also lie at the center of Treuherz’s account of William Powell Frith’s Railway Station (1862). Frith’s painting was a pre-cinematic showpiece, first exhibited at Louis Victor Flatow’s London gallery. The panoramic drama of classes interacting at Paddington Station became a corporate enterprise, ultimately involving the artist as well as Samuel Fry, an architectural photographer, William Morton, an architect and painter of interiors, Marcus Stone, who copied the painting for engraving, and Francis Holl, who engraved it. An art critic, moreover, authored a descriptive booklet for the public. A skilled entrepreneur, Frith thus exploited three systems: communication, transportation, and mechanical reproduction. Newspaper reviews drew paying crowds to Flatow’s gallery. The painting toured Britain, presumably carried by train, and later reached international audiences in Philadelphia and Paris. Frith doubtless perceived the engraving as a way to enhance his artistic reputation, but he clearly was equally interested in the multiple as a moneymaking venture, and maximized his profits by selling both the painting and the copyright to the dealer Flatow.

Treuherz also discusses the Russian Wanderers and British Graphic illustrators who recorded the presence of the marginalized in trains—prostitutes en route to a brothel, peasant-soldiers aboard troop trains, and emigrants bound for Australia. Using these and Honoré Daumier’s Third Class Carriage (1864), among other examples, Treuherz measures the place of the railway in the complexities of an industrializing world. The way he situates these images in commodity capitalism—titles altered, meanings reversed, autonomy forfeited—becomes a powerful metaphor for reified social relations.

In the next two chapters, Kennedy focuses on the United States and Impressionist France. Comparing the rationales behind rail development in the United States and Britain, he relates the process of industrialization to the development of distinct national identity. Kennedy explains Leo Marx’s “machine in the garden” thesis (The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) through two American masterworks, George Inness’ Lackawanna Valley (1856) and Jasper Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (1865). Using celebrated paintings and photographs by Albert Bierstadt, Andrew Russell, and others, Kennedy traces westward expansion. He clarifies the web of government and corporate funding that backed the transcontinental line, including the notorious Crédit Mobilier. And he fixes the railway at the center of corporate art patronage meant to entice tourists, justify federal grants, and advertise progress. Much of this was realized through new photographic technologies and the development of “mammoth prints” that brought the landscape of the continent to eastern audiences. Kennedy’s skilled analyses remind readers that these photographs are reflections on the American sublime as well as records of the subjects. Throughout, Kennedy interweaves the familiar narratives of Manifest Destiny and Native American conquest. Significantly, he ends the chapter with a comparative view of colonial India and Africa, as seen through the lens of British photographers Samuel Bourne and William Young. Bourne’s haunting Bhore Ghat, near Bombay (ca. 1863–70) distills the imperialist project into an endless railway track and a single turbaned figure. Kennedy’s elegant interpretation of this image, and others by Young, brings the American conquest narrative into a global context

Kennedy then takes on the difficult task of writing about Impressionist paintings long defined in the art-historical literature. He puts his own stamp on Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series by positioning it within French architectural and technological history. Comparative material by Giuseppe De Nittis moves the station and bridge theme outside the French Impressionist circle. Kennedy also explores the railway as it altered topography in Argenteuil, Pontoise, and Arles, places strongly associated with painters. Formalism is the approach to paintings and drawings including Vincent van Gogh’s The Blue Train (1888) and Camille Pissarro’s Level Crossing at Les Pâtis, near Pontoise (1873–4). Consequently, Kennedy does not address the railway’s flattening of regional identities, distinctive market towns, and cultural geographies.

The last two chapters bring the railway motif into the twentieth century. Treuherz thematizes fin-de-siècle alienation caused by the finality of industrial transformation and the collapse of traditional beliefs. Images from European countries that industrialized at different rates and times—Denmark, Spain, Norway—lead readers into the Symbolist realm of Edvard Munch and train travel as an allegorical life journey. From there, Treuherz proceeds to Futurist Italy and Umberto Boccioni’s States of Mind (1911), which he analyzes as the twentieth-century counterpart to Frith’s Railway Station. Readers can draw their own analogies between Paul Delvaux’s erotic Last Carriage (1975) and Augustus Egg’s enigmatic Travelling Companions (1862) featured in Treuherz’s earlier chapter. Trains now become vehicles for memory, poetry, isolation, and war. Treuherz discusses railroad imagery found in Europe during World War I, Russia during the Russo-Japanese War, and the United States during the Great Depression. Henri Bergson’s concept of durée informs the chapter in philosophical and metaphorical ways to return readers to the beginning of the text, and the railway as phantasmagoria. The Railway could have ended neatly here. Instead, a co-authored final chapter loosely defines the machine age. Kennedy and Treuherz include powerful work in Bill Brandt’s Depression-era photographs and Gustav Klucis’s Soviet posters, but without a strong organizing premise, the essay slips into pictorial montage.

The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam deserves critical attention and a place in a vast bibliography on the subject. At the same time, the book is a reminder of the difficulties in addressing both broad audiences primarily interested in canonical paintings and specialized readers looking beyond them. For example, the authors emphasize that fine artists seldom represented labor (84). Fair enough. But popular illustrators did; and some engagement with those images would have been useful, particularly in comparison to American paintings. Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s published numerous cartoons of the Great Strike of 1877, which paralyzed the post-Civil War railway system and set off fears of an American Commune. Similarly, crude caricatures of Chinese and Irish workers shaped prejudices against immigrant rail labor. The Railway provides a foundation for studies of such images, and the economic, class, race, and ethnic differentials at the center of modern industrial life and its visual cultures.