Adams' broad sweep through the 1800s includes an analysis of the economic and social effects of the railroads, and speculates on the possible impacts of the airplane and automobile as he saw them at the turn of the century. Faulkner shows the arrival of the railroad in Mississippi, while Washington describes travel across rural Virginia. Wister explains its effects on the Western cattle industry. Rölvaag depicts settlement by wagon caravan just ahead of the trains in the Dakotas. Wilder's novels first show the dependency on rural Wisconsin on carriages and sleighs, and then dramatizes how small towns came to depend on the railroad for survival. Howells shows the moral and material consequences of railroad investments. James gives detailed scenes of the multiple transportation systems in eastern cities - all matter of carriages, railways, omnibuses, and horse cars in Boston, and the elevated trains in New York. Wharton focuses on the private carriages available to the wealthy in New York, and shows how carriages and trains were linked.
Author: Henry Adams (1838-1918)
Title: The Education of Henry Adams
Date: 1918 Written: 1907
Systems: Railroad, automobile, steamboat
Context: 1850-1905 (Autobiography), Boston, London, Washington, New York
Adams's autobiography is an idiosyncratic survey of nineteenth-century life as told through the eyes of President John Quincy Adams's grandson, a Real Adams. The narrating voice is an ironically bewildered, highly intellectual observer of a world which starts (psychologically) in the eighteenth century and ends (literally) in the twentieth. Adams's chief interests in the middle chapters are economic and political trends at the national level; the early chapters are a personal memoir, and the final ones are a proposal for a theory of history. This theory brings together the dynamo, a symbol for the twentieth century, with the Middle Ages' veneration of the Virgin in a critique of the centrifugal effects of the modern world and its developing technologies.
Events from the "new world" of his childhood, known about later but not remembered, are the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad in 1846 and the first Cunard steamers in 1838, and the telegraph (Ch. 1).
One early episode is a trip the twelve-year-old Henry took from Boston to Washington in 1850. He was already familiar with trains from family trips to New York. This time, they need an English carriage to the Camden and Amboy Railroad - then a steamer from Trenton to Philadelphia, boat to Chester, train to Havre de Grace, boat to Baltimore, and rail to the District of Columbia. "The railway, about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled through unfenced fields and woods, or through village streets…" Young Adams is shocked by being in slave territory, and finds the lack of pavements on DC streets a sign of the immorality of that system, "Bad roads meant bad morals" (Ch. 3).
After serving with his father, counsel to Britain during the Civil War, Adams returns in 1868 on a Cunard steamer after nearly seven years. As part of his assessment of the America he is re-entering, he comments, "From the moment that the railways were introduced, life took on extravagance." Europe, he notes, was only "habitable" along a few narrow stretches; "to fit out an entire continent with roads [railroads] and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit of the entire planet," a reference to the way American rail absorbed the capital of England, the Continent, as well as this country. Following the war, then, "society went back to its work, and threw itself on that which stood first - its roads…. The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the railways" (Ch. 16). Later, in the chapter dated 1892, Adams says, "Except for the railway system, the enormous wealth taken out of the ground since 1840, had disappeared." This new world "hurried on to its telephones, bicycles, and electric trams." Adams charts these changes also in the amount of coal produced and used (Ch. 21). In his international perspective, "The ocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number" (Ch. 22).
Adams becomes fascinated by the Paris Exposition of 1900; Samuel Langley, the developer of the first American airplane (1896), was his guide. "Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force." He ignores the industrial exhibit; "his chief interest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tram which was only ten years older; and threatened to become as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost exactly Adams's own age."
This chapter, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," also discusses the "moral" implications of new technologies, their inability to motivate ordinary peoples' spirits the way the medieval world was motivated by the Virgin Mary to build great cathedrals (Ch. 22). The railways and steamboats were centralized - the dynamo and the automobile promise to be more diffused: "The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power - steam, electric, furnace, or other - which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to manage it" (Ch. 28). The "new America" of 1903-1904 "was the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo." "The automobile alone could unite them [the scattered monuments of the culture] in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seeker of history" (Ch. 32). As before, Adams charts progress (partly) in terms of world energy output which doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, for example, "one might hire, in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of 30,000 steam-horse-power to cross the ocean, and by halving this figure every ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835" (Ch. 34). Adams is especially concerned that these changes are not in sequence, in smooth progression from one technological era to another - the jumps are such that the underlying culture is liable to be torn apart and put into chaos and anarchy.
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1931.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: "An Odor of Verbena" In The Unvanquished
Date: 1938
Systems: Railroad
Context: 1870s, urban South
Most of The Unvanquished takes place during the Civil War, and, for our purposes, concentrates on wagons and horses used to convey soldiers and equipment during the Mississippi campaign. In the chapter "An Odor of Verbena," the narrator, Bayard, son of Colonel Sartoris, recounts the arrival of the railroad in the state in the early 1870s. The Colonel, with Redmond, a sometimes partner, "had put everything they could mortgage or borrow into it for Father to ride up and down the line, paying the workmen and the waybills on the rails at the last possible instant." After Redmond sells out, "seeing that he was going to finish it, some Northern people sold him a locomotive on credit which he named for Aunt Jenny, with a silver oil can in the cab with her name engraved on it; and last summer the first train ran into Jefferson, the engine decorated with flowers and Father in the cab blowing blast after blast on the whistle when he passed Redmond's house." After that, "he stepped straight from the pilot of that engine into the race for the Legislature."
These passages point out themes that have appeared in literary (and political) discussions of the post-Civil-War railroads - financing from outside the region or the country in the face of extraordinary, and inter-state capital, the local and populist enthusiasm which accompanied the railroad's arrival, and the way railroad investors used their positions for political advantage.
Edition used: New York: Vintage, 1965.
Author: Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
Title: Up from Slavery
Date: 1901
Systems: Train
Context: 1860-1890s, South, African-American perspective
During Washington's childhood in Virginia, "the slaves on our far-off plantation, miles from any railroad or large city or daily news paper, knew what the issues involved [in Lincoln's 1860 campaign] were" (Ch. 1). After liberation (in 1872), Washington hears about Hampton college, 500 miles east, and sets out with his satchel of clothing. Trains go part of the way; stage coaches cover the rest, but he hasn't money enough to travel the whole way. At one stop he has his first experience in a segregated hotel - "In my ignorance I supposed that the little hotel existed for the purpose of accommodating the passengers who travelled on the stage-coach." He walks, begs rides in wagons and cars, and gets to Richmond where he finds an elevated place under the board sidewalk to sleep. He gets a job unloading a cargo of pig iron at the wharfs which continues for several days and gives him enough strength and money to get to Hampton (Ch. 3).
The most famous chapter is on the "Atlanta Exposition Address," 1895, much of which talks about African Americans' potential to contribute to southern agricultural economy. However, Washington does pay a little attention to industrialization, a "path that has led from these [agricultural exhibits] to the inventions to the inventions, and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books" and so on. Washington returns from Atlanta to Tuskegee by train - at all the stations he finds crowds who want to shake his hand. At least for Washington, riding a train had become routine.
Edition used: Paul Lauter, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2. Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath, 1990.
Author: Owen Wister (1860-1938)
Title: The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
Date: 1902
Systems: Train, carriage
Context: 1874-1890, upper midwest, St. Louis
"The most famous Western novel ever written," The Virginian is as much a story of the railroad's impact on Wyoming as it is of horses and cows. The novel ends with the train coming into cattle country for the new-found coal (the end of an era), and it starts with the narrator's looking "through the window-glass of our Pullman car" at cow ponies in a corral (how the East sees the old west). The book is consciously retrospective, consciously romantic (Preface). Wister gives detailed pictures of the whole institution, from small-town farewell parties, to baggage handling and the inconvenience of botched schedules in the middle of the prairies.
The narrator gets off the train at Medicine Bow, Wyoming, "a stranger, into the great cattleland," but his baggage is lost, "adrift somewhere back in the two thousand miles that lay behind me. And by way of comfort, the baggage-man remarked that passengers often got astray from their trunks, but the trunks mostly found them after a while." He stands, angry and deserted among the crates and boxes, and can't see any antelope in the sage-brush or a glorious Western sunset. Here he overhears a conversation in which one Uncle Hurley is sent off by a Southerner on the East-bound train to get his bride, it turns out, in Laramie. When that train leaves, "I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of space, until all sign of its presence was gone save a faint skein of smoke against the evening sky. And now my lost trunk came back into my thoughts, and Medicine Bow seems a lonely spot" (Ch. 1).
One problem in being left off the train is finding a place to sleep. The narrator is met by the Virginian, who will drive him over two hundred miles to his destination, Judge Henry's ranch, but they have to wait for the trunk. After negotiations and a bit of pistol packing, they wind up in a filled-up, five-bed hotel, nearly sharing beds with strangers. "In this public sleeping room they had done what ones does to secure a seat in a railroad train. Upon each bed, as notice of occupancy, lay some article of travel or dress" (Ch. 2). The next day, the Union Pacific train arrives "as if from distant shores. Its approach was silent and long drawn out. I easily reached town and the platform before it had finished watering at the tank." The narrator's trunk, and a fancy one tied with white ribbons belonging to Uncle Hurley's bride are there, along with a reception party for the couple, alerted "over the wires" about the marriage. As the narrator and the Virginian leave Medicine Bow they see a distant prospect of the train in the station, noting that the train has stopped before the sound of the whistle arrives (Ch. 4).
The ride to the ranch involves staying at cabins and farms where the Virginian is known. It also involves some rebelliousness on the horses' part (which gets the trunk tossed into a stream), but the travellers and the wagon manage to survive (Ch. 4).
Like other Western novels, this one has its love interest, embodied in Molly Stark Wood, a school teacher from Bennington, Vermont, who comes to teach in Wyoming. Wister gives a detailed account of her four days on trains and 30 hours on a stage coach to get there. At Bennington "some tearful people in petticoats waved handkerchiefs" see her off; she sees an engineer and conductor, "faces that she knew well," on the up-bound train at Hoosic Junction, and feels a strong sense of separation. At Rotterdam Junction, she's on the "through car," which gets to Ohio the next day, North Platte, Nebraska for breakfast two days after that, and off at Rock Creek, Wyoming that evening. At the first three stops she sends letters home, and dispatches a telegram upon arrival from Rock Creek. The non-stop coach ride, during which she is sort-of proposed to by the first driver and tries to sleep, also includes her being dumped in a stream when the drunken second coach driver loses control. She, her belongings, and the coach are rescued by… the hero (Ch. 9).
Aside from the schoolteacher's journey and some courtship scenes, the novel is built around episodes where the Easterner-narrator meets up with the Virginian. The second major one starts in Cyrus Jones's eating palace in Omaha, which is near the trains. "Our continent drained prismatically through Omaha once," and indeed that city in the 1880s was a place where people of various backgrounds came together. Judge Henry is shipping his cattle to Chicago in two "sections," i.e., two trains of 20 cars each, over the Burlington tracks, and the Virginian is in charge of the shipping. Because the Judge has been fighting the Elkhorn railroad, the trains are stuck on a siding: the immediate concern is to get food and water to the cattle since they hadn't been cared for since they had been loaded on board. The Virginian and the crew are to return by St. Paul and the Northern Pacific so he can negotiate with that road's directors for better service to Sunk Creek. After a brief card game on top of the cattle car, the train gets underway and the narrator watches it along with another train, the "Christian Endeavor," filled with missionaries on their way to Pike's Peak (Ch. 13).
This adventure continues as the narrator is trying to get to a Montana hunting trip. He goes by rail to Fort Meade, then by horse, and then, with three passengers in a bumpy stage coach, "six legs in the jerky." A goal of one of these is the gold excitement at Rawhide (Nevada?). In the morning they rush to catch the Northern Pacific express at Medora, North Dakota, but it had changed its schedule and left early. One of the trio curses the Northern Pacific: "the whole thing was sired by a whole doggone Dutch syndicate," a reference to German bondholders of American railroads. Fortunately they meet up with the Virginian in the caboose of the mile-long empty cattle train, since his delivery had been successful (Ch. 14). The narrator and the other two are welcomed aboard, and explaining that they missed the express satisfies the freight's crew. They sleep on the "shelves" of the caboose as the train goes along the Yellowstone river (Ch. 15).
The next morning, each stop is announced by its distance to Portland (1291 miles), and it turns out that they are losing ground owing to a washed out bridge at the Big Horn four days ago. This starts a general "discussion of the Northern Pacific's recent policy as to betterments, as though they were the board of directors." They discuss easing the grades (on the mountain runs), especially whether it is cheaper to put the water tank at the bottom or pumping water to the top and getting the trains a down-hill start. At the Rawhide station they wait with four stalled expresses and several freights for at least two hours. Lots of people, milling around: "Travellers stood and sat about forlorn, near the cars, out in the sage-brush, anywhere. People in hats and spurs watched them, and Indian chiefs offered them painted bows and arrows and shiny horns." The crowd is hungry, and so, in a humorous scene the Virginian sets up a frog hunt in the nearby marshes and cooks up frog legs (following his inspiration in the Omaha restaurant). This leads to fantasies about a regular market for frog's legs in dining cars and Yellowstone Park restaurants (Ch. 16).
In the final chapter, the Virginian and his bride, Molly Wood, take the train to Vermont to see her family and friends - so the drift of the travel is to introduce the westerner to the east as the frontier closes in the 1890s (Ch. 35).
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1956 [Second edition, 1911].
Author: O. E. Rölvaag (1876-1931)
Title: Giants in the Earth
Date: 1924-25
Systems: Wagon caravan, train
Context: 1873-1877, Dakota territory, Minnesota
The opening trip from Fillmore County, Minnesota has Per Hansa and his family first on the slim trail going west to the Dakota territory guiding their two oxen-drawn wagons. While they lose the path temporarily they pick it up at a ford and then continue to 52 miles from Sioux Falls (Ch. 1: 1). Once they settle in at Spring Creek, they watch the occasional caravans of other settlers who are moving west, including some Irish Civil War veterans who had claims to their lands but abandoned them (Ch. 1: 4), and other Norwegians who push on toward Vermillion (Ch. 1: 5). "That [second] summer many land-seekers passed through the settlement on their way west. The arrival of a caravan was always an event of the greatest importance. How exciting they were, those little ships of the Great Plain!… Many queer races and costumes were to be seen in these caravans, and a babble of strange tongues shattered the air.… And the caravans would roll onward into the green stillness of the west" (Ch. 2: 2).
In the background is the advancing railroad. In Chapter 1: 5 it is at Worthington, Minnesota, and Hansa travels the ninety miles in the fall to stock provisions for the winter. At the end of that difficult season, he devises a scheme to buy pelts from the Indians at Flandreau and to take them to Worthington for sale (Ch. 2: 1). In the summer and fall of 1877 "many schooners sailed across the wide prairie." Also that year, "One fine day a strange monster came writhing westward over the prairie, from Worthington to Luverne [another 30 miles]; it was the greatest and most memorable event that had yet happened in these parts. The monster crawled along with a terrible speed; but when it came near, it did not crawl at all; it rushed forward in tortuous windings, with an awful roar, while black, curling smoke streaked out behind it in the air. People felt that day a joy that almost frightened them; for it seemed now that all their troubles were over, that there could be no more hardships to contend with." The continuation of the rail line to Sioux Falls is seen as confirming that this was "a place fit to live" (Ch. 2: 3).
Edition used: O. E. Rölvaag and Lincoln Colcord, trans. New York: Harper and Row, 1929.
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
Title: Little House in the Big Woods
Date: 1932
Systems: Wagon and sleigh
Context: Rural Wisconsin, "sixty years ago"
The family lives on an isolated farm which is treated about twice a year by visits from relatives in wagons or sleighs. One highlight is the big bobsled at Christmas with Aunt Eliza and Uncle Peter - lots of bells. Another is Laura's first wagon ride to town the following spring. Since this world is seen from young Laura's point of view it's hard to tell whether the comings and goings are frequent or not. Pa walks the seven miles to town with his winter's gathering of furs, even though he owns both wagon and sled, and resident horses.
Edition used: New York: Harper & Row, 1953.
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
Title: These Happy Golden Years
Date: 1943
Systems: Wagon and buggy, train
Context: Rural Wisconsin, 1883-5
The central events in the courtship between Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls involve Wilder's sleds, wagons, and buggies, and the various horses he owns and trains to pull them. The first chapters involve Laura (age 15) teaching for a winter term at a rural school, and Almonzo's weekly (12-mile one way) sleigh ride to pick her up, so she can spend the weekends with Ma and Pa. At -40° they have to stop every few miles to thaw the horses' nostrils; but, more picturesquely, "Prince tossed his head high and shook music from his bells" (Ch. 8). Almanzo starts to teach Laura to drive the horses, which is not typical for girls or women to do. A few months later she is accomplished enough to help break in a pair of unusually pesky colts (Ch. 21). The seasonal year is punctuated by the first buggy ride of the spring amid slushy and muddy roads (Ch. 13), the weekly events where the young men take the young women for rides up and down Main Street, special Fourth of July excursions, transferring the wagon box onto the bobsled runners in the fall, and closing the curtains and putting a rubber storm apron across the front of the buggy to protect Laura and Almanzo from a driving thunderstorm. The success of the courtship is emphasized when Almanzo's wagon arrives at the Ingalls' house to pick up her trunk of clothes and childhood memorabilia for the move to the house he has built for them.
One side tale, involving Uncle Tom's trip to the Black Hills gold rush in 1874, describes ox-drawn covered wagons. Another tells of sister Mary's returning home from college in Vinton, Iowa, by train with the attendant difficulties of getting her trunk from the station. An ongoing problem is for various families to control their claims outside the town by living on them for five summers in a row. Laura helps the McKees one summer, first by going with them and their furniture on the seven-mile train ride to Manchester and then transferring the goods to a wagon for the ride to the claim (Ch. 14), and the return process in October where the influx of children fills the school where Laura teaches. Mr. McKee commutes from town to the claim on the weekends.
Edition used: New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
Title: The Long Winter
Date: 1940
Systems: Train, wagon
Context: 1877-78, eastern South Dakota
A striking illustration of the dependency on the railroad by settlers in southwestern Minnesota and eastern South Dakota, and the prairies in general during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A devastating series of two-, three-, and four-day blizzards hits a town of a handful of buildings during a winter that goes from October to the end of April. The trains deliver coal, kerosene, flour [this in a grain-producing region], and sugar, along with clothing, Christmas gifts from out east, and other niceties and necessities. The railroad system is quite vulnerable at the thirty-foot deep cut at Tracy, Minnesota, which fills up with snow. The town's frustration is exacerbated because information about efforts to keep the tracks clear is constantly available (by telegraph or telephone? - it's never spelled out).
Various efforts are made by railway officials and people from town to clear the tracks. For example, early in the season, men from the town take a hand car to clear the tracks with shovels, and a work train but no supplies get through. Up to the first of January there is still hope that a supply train will get through. No luck. The railroad superintendent himself tried to ram two engines with plows through the ten-foot, iced drift at Tracy but got totally frozen in and decided to close the line until spring (Ch. 21). The work train and one regular one are stranded on the track. Meanwhile back in town, people are near starvation from Christmas until a very late spring thaw.
Even after the Chinook winds, the trains don't come. "The blizzard winds had blown earth from the fields where the sod was broken, and had mixed it with snow packed so tightly in the railroad cuts that snowplows could not move it. The icy snow could not melt because of the earth mixed with it, and men with picks were digging it out inch by inch. It was slow work because in many big cuts they must dig down twenty feet to the steel rails" (Ch. 31). Since the town is served by a single track, they have to wait until the stranded work train goes through to Huron, South Dakota. The spring thaw puts all of the roads under water so wagons cannot get through - actually the only way in or out would be by walking the railroad track one hundred miles to Brookings. The train whistle and smoke cause much hope, but the first freight through had only a commercial load (telegraph poles, farm machinery, and one "emigrant car" with a few bags of potatoes, some flour and salt pork). The second freight finally had the provisions ordered by the stores as well as the Ingalls' "Christmas barrel," filled with fancy clothes and a (very frozen) turkey at the bottom, sent by relatives in Wisconsin.
By the way, the people in town build special-purpose sleds for carrying hay from near-by claims and for tracking down a farmer who had actually grown some wheat last year. They do this between blizzards presumably because existing gear was under the snow drifts or because they hadn't thought through the problems.
The whole story is striking for how poorly the town's people are prepared to shift from subsistence farming to community life which depends on regular shipments by rail.
Edition used: New York: Harper Trophy Books, 1971.
Author: William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Title: The Rise of Silas Lapham
Date: 1884/5 (Serial)
Systems: Railroad, carriage, horse car, ferry
Context: 1875, Boston
Much of the plot centers around the Laphams' new house which is being build on the Back Bay, even though their Nankeen Square address is "more convenient to the horse cars." Silas, a wealthy owner of a paint company, has several vehicles including a four-seated bench wagon, a sleigh, and (probably) a buggy; the horses are kept at the livery stable around the corner. He enjoys driving fast, as he does at a detailed scene of horse-drawn sleighs and "thousands of" cutters on the Boston Milldam (Ch. 2). Members of the family take "hacks," or hired carriages, when they are not using their own vehicles. The road congestion is matched by the heavy traffic at the wharf at Nantasket, a summer-home place with a view of the Bay: "'Someday … there's going to be an awful accident on those boats,'" the steamboat ferry from Boston. Silas Lapham likes the ride because it gives him a "complete rest from business"; he likes the fresh air and he compares it with the rest he gets from driving his horse carriage (Ch. 6). The carriage is the site of a private talk between Silas and Persis, his wife, a place to get away from their daughters, servants, and visitors. This conversation is interrupted by a slight buggy crash (Ch. 18).
Lapham's financial problems and eventual bankruptcy are compounded by a property deal which shows the way railroads use their economic power and monopoly over freight hauling to drive down property prices. His former partner, Milton Rogers, owns a mill operation in the Midwest which is serviced by a small railroad, "the only road that runs within fifty miles of the mills, and you can't get a foot of lumber nor a pound of flour to market any other way." The local railroad, "P.Y.& X.," is leased to a bigger one, the G.L.&P. (the "Great Lacustrine & Polar") which plans to build car works next to the mills. [Persis Lapham falls "helplessly into his alphabetical parlance" in talking about the deal (Ch. 20).] While Foster might get a decent price for the property from the local road, he will surely lose money under the current arrangement. Rogers has given his ownership of the mills to Lapham to pay old debts, but his has not been honest about the impending devaluation of the property, so Lapham, properly, calls him a thief (Ch. 21). Eventually British investors show an interest in buying the property; Rogers strings them along, but Lapham will not be dishonest and the deal falls through, even though he is ruined.
Along the way trains are routinely used by Silas and his family. Persis and Irene, one of their daughters, take the Pullman train to Vermont - to get away from emotional entanglements in Boston (Ch. 19). Silas, after a business trip, where he finds that he will probably lose his business, is "sleepbroken, from the sleeping car in the Albany depot at Boston" (Ch. 25).
Edition used: New York: Signet Classic, 1980.
Author: Henry James (1843-1916)
Title: The Bostonians
Date: 1886
Systems: Carriage, street car, train, elevated train
Context: 1870s, Boston, New York city, Cape Cod
The opening chapters describe Boston's feminist leadership while the second half of the novel focuses on Basil Ransom's courtship of Verena Tarrant and the opposition by Olive Chancellor to their union. Basil is a cousin of Olive from Mississippi. James moves his comments from the political to the personal as the book unfolds.
Accordingly, James starts out with passages on the politics and economics of Boston's architecture and transportation. After Olive and Basil finish dinner at a restaurant, Olive orders a hackney ("one of the advantages of living in Charles Street [was] that stables were near") so they can go to the South End of Boston. Olive herself would have taken the streetcar, not for economy and not for safety, but to "mingle in the common life," even though she loathes the public conveyance. She sympathizes with the poor girls from South Boston who have to squeeze into horsecars every night. The carriage is symbolically inappropriate for the way the roadway is designed: "As they rolled toward the South End, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over the railway tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had been fitted to them" (Ch. 3). Some chapters later, Verena takes a crowded streetcar from Cambridge to Charles Street, although the "direct connection" hardly seems direct since she "had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a leathern strap from the glazed room of the stifling vehicle, like some blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these perpendicular journeys" (Ch. 10).
The unnamed narrator gives a panoramic view of Boston in winter from Olive's drawing room. "There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railwaylines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horsecar, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of places." Verena finds this "lovely" - she sees "pink flushes on snow" and hears the car-bells, "no longer vulgar, but almost silvery, on the long bridge" (Ch. 20).
This scene, from the wealthy part of Boston, is contrasted with Basil's two-room apartment in New York, "rather far to the eastward, and in the upper reaches of the town." He overlooks a grocer's, smells smoked fish and molasses, and sees "a smart, bright wagon, with the horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilization." He also has a view, "at the end of the truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway, overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws of an antediluvian monster" (Ch. 21)
Basil returns to Boston and meets Miss Birdseye, a Bostonian who had carried her belief in the abolitionist cause to the South before the Civil War, outside Olive's house. She "looked vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a streetcar." As an entry for a conversation, he offers to signal the car for her, "the big party-colored human van which now jingled toward them." The conductor recognizes Birdseye as a frequent passenger. Basil accompanies her home in the nearly-empty car. Ransome defends his Southern, conservative position, and, pointedly, finds out about where Verena lives. When they arrive at the change place, he helps her out with a "certain amount of propulsion from the conductor," and they wait for the blue car, "the oblong receptacle." The scene points out that, in some ways, it is easier to corner a person you want to talk with in a public vehicle than in a private carriage or car (Ch. 23).
The initial stages of Basil's courtship take place in New York. The events start when his rival, Henry Burrage, takes Verena for a drive in Central Park, to the Museum of Art, and Delmonico's for dinner in his private carriage - "the wonder of the young man's acquaintance with everything [the Museum] contained, the swiftness of his horses, the softness of his English cart, the pleasure of rolling at that pace over roads as firm as marble…" (in contrast to Basil's street) (Ch. 30). This drive is contrasted with Basil's expedition, where he and Verena leave where she's staying at Tenth Street and take advantage of the train: "The beauty of the 'elevated' was that it took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place." The narrator reflects her thoughts: "It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr. Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing incident and opportunity.… she could feel as if she were out for the day" (Ch. 33). After exploring the Park, sitting on a bench and flirting, they wind up at the southern border at Sixth Avenue, "The glow of the splendid afternoon was over everything… the streetcars rattled in the foreground, changing horses while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers… Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park." Basil offers to put her on a (street)car but she chooses to walk in order to think about his overtures (Ch. 34).
Private versus public transportation points out the difference between the two men and highlights Verena's choice.
Olivia takes Verena to Cape Cod to exercise her control, to give her time to prepare for an important public lecture she will deliver, and to get her away from Basil. He goes by train from Boston to "the small, lonely, hut-like station" near the village of Marmion on the Cape. There's no room on the carriage (a "carryall") for the hotel so Basil has his valise put on the rear and walks. The Cape is, for Basil, an isolated, quiet setting, and, as with other places in the novel, James describes the streets: "The road wandered among [the houses] with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even cross-streets, and an oil-lamp on a corner, and here and there the small sign of a closed ship, with an indistinctly countrified lettering" (Ch. 35). Eventually Basil meets up again with Verena on the Cape and their courting continues until, again, Olive gets her on the Cape Cod train, back to Boston (Ch. 39).
In the final chapter, Verena quits on the verge of giving her big Boston lecture to run away with Basil, on the night-train to New York where they will get married (Ch. 41).
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1956.
Author: Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Title: The Age of Innocence
Date: 1920
Systems: Carriage, train
Context: Late 1870s, New York City, Newport
Wharton looks back half a century to the time of her youth (she was born in 1862) and portrays the upper-class world of New York City. The central story involves Newland Archer, May, his wife for the second half of the novel, and Ellen Countess Olenska, the woman he Really Loves. The logistics of Ellen and Newland's meetings involve trains, boats, and, chiefly, carriages of various sorts.
"Everybody" here has a private carriage - a brougham, landau, or barouche - equipped with a driver and available nearly all the time. May's parents give her a brougham for her wedding, and Newland and she select two horses in the months after the event (Ch. 21). When Newland's mother was a girl (in the 1820s?) their family knew "everybody between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had carriages" (Ch. 12). Now the newly rich also have private transportation, but we see that it is restricted to the very well to do.
The coupé is almost as "honorable" as a private carriage for the opera, and they are at the front of the line while others have to wait for their coachmen to arrive (Ch. 1). At various times Newland hires a "runabout" with a pair of livery stable trotters at Newport, (Ch. 22), hires a cab with Ellen in Boston, where the "clatter of the loose windows" makes conversation impossible, (Ch. 23), and takes a crowded horse car from Wall Street and transfers to one of the "huge, staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line" at 14th Street for a long trip uptown to his house (Ch. 27).
A possible tryst between Newland and Ellen is ended with the approaching trot of the horses, which she had arranged for ten o'clock (Ch. 18); that sound echoes in his mind soon after he marries May, and he recalls an image of Ellen driving behind a friend's horses at Newport while he lies next to his wife in bed (Ch. 20).
The Archers have a reserved train compartment for their honeymoon to upstate New York, the train, "shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring" (Ch. 19). While the Archers are at Newport, he takes the Fall River train to Boston: "The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit, and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom," a nice line on the location of urban railroad stations. A French visitor comments that there are few porters in American depots. (Ch. 24).
When Ellen's grandmother has a mild stroke, the family telegraphs her to catch the next train from Washington D. C. (Ch. 27).
Ellen's arrival is a major event in the novel. There are "material difficulties," since she has to be met in Jersey City and the Archers have to meet her there with a carriage. "[O]ne could not ask May, at the close of a winter afternoon, to go alone [the driver doesn't count] across the ferry to Jersey City, even in her own carriage…. It might appear inhospitable… if Madame Olenska were allowed to arrive without any of the family being at the station to receive her." So Newland goes in his wife's brougham, ironically "with the wedding varnish still on it," to the Pennsylvania Railroad terminus. The carriage emerges from the "coil about the station" and then crawls down the snow-slickened incline to the wharf where they see coal carts, "dishevelled express wagons" and, symbolically, an empty hearse. They stay in the carriage for the ferry ride and the bump when the boat comes to the New York wharf throws them together and he steals a kiss. The impossibility of their romance and the "searching illumination of Fifth Avenue" ends the contact (Ch. 29).
In a curious passage, as he waits for the Washington express, Newland "remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run right into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels" (Ch. 29).
Early in the book, on an impulse, Newland takes a boat to St. Augustine, Florida to settle on his wedding date (Ch. 15); a stock speculator is reputed to have bought a "new steam yacht" with tiled bathrooms and other extravagances for half a million dollars (Ch. 21). The final chapter, moving forward by 26 years to the first decade of the new century lets Wharton do a "where are they now" with the characters, and also lets us see the prophesied long-distance telephone, electric lights, and the five-day voyage of the Mauritania to Europe (Ch. 34).
Edition used: New York: Signet Classic, 1962.
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