"Worshipping our railroads". Victorian Catholic Writers and the Railway as a Cultural Metaphor

Was the railway an apt cultural metaphor for the Victorian Age? The answer to this question seems easily predictable: though, obviously, among many others, the railway certainly was an apt cultural representation for the Victorian Age, and this especially, e. g., through its internal “ambivalence”. Rather less predictable is its cultural and literary impact on both Victorian (broadly speaking) Christian writers – whose variegated panorama this paper briefly sketches by mentioning just a few illustrious representatives in order to give a specialized sense of its more generalized variety – and Victorian Catholic writers – taken in general and all together for now and for simplicity’s sake, that is, in their cumulative (Old) English, Roman, ultramontane, new convert, etc. qualifications. This paper investigates the attitudes taken by Victorian English Catholic writers towards the railways, arguing that they should not be trivialized through an often rigidly ideological and, therefore, negatively-oriented general vulgate of the relationships between nineteenth-century Catholics and the triad (or more…) science-technology-machinery. Many of them did obviously participate in the so-called Railway Revolution (1825-1875), very often with a peculiar awareness that “the conquest or production of nature had profound implications for Christian belief”. Victorian English Catholic writers often gave textual embodiment to a kind of middle way, which this paper illustrates by examining a few notable textual representatives.