Business in pictures: Representations of railway enterprise in the satirical press in Britain 1845-1870

Past and Present

Volumn 189, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 111-145

  Taylor, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Bit error probability; Exact analysis; Soft decision Viterbi decoding; Trellis coded modulation (TCM)

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750140139     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gti028     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (194)

1. Ian Jack, The Crash That Stopped Britain (London, 2001)
2. Andrew Murray, Off the Rails: Britain's Great Railway Crisis (London, 2001)
3. David Hare, The Permanent Way (London, 2003). For cartoons, see, in particular, the works of Steve Bell and Martin Rowson in the Guardian, and Dave Brown in the Independent. References for their cartoons are given in nn. 123-6 below.
4. Frank Ferneyhough, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830-1980 (London, 1980), 71. Huskisson was knocked down and killed by an engine while standing on the line talking to the duke of Wellington.
5. William Makepeace Thackeray, 'May Gambols; or, Titmarsh on the Picture Galleries', in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 13 vols. (London, 1898-9), xiii, 439-40.
6. G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998)
7. Jane Garnett, 'Commercial Ethics: A Victorian Perspective on the Practice of Theory', in Christopher Cowton and Roger Crisp (eds.), Business Ethics: Perspectives on the Practice of Theory (Oxford, 1998)
8. James Taylor, Creating Capitalism: Joint-Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture, 1800-1870, forthcoming.
9. Terry R. Gourvish, 'The Regulation of Britain's Railways: Past, Present and Future', in Lena Andersson-Skog and Olle Krantz (eds.), Institutions in the Transport and Communications Industries: State and Private Actors in the Making of Institutional Patterns, 1850-1990 (Canton, Mass., 1999), 120.
10. For an exploration of what Marx may have meant by this term, see R. A. Bryer, 'Accounting for the "Railway Mania" of 1845: A Great Railway Swindle?', Accounting, Organizations and Society, xvi (1991).
11. Herbert Spencer, 'Railway Morals and Railway Policy', Edinburgh Rev., c (1854), repr. in Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols. (London, 1878-83), ii; references will be to the latter.
12. Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London, 1998)
13. Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge, 1994)
14. R. W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (Oxford, 1994).
15. Kostal's book reproduces a handful of cartoons, but with no analysis of them.
16. Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, 1999). The same is true of Grahame and Angela Smith, 'Dickens as a Popular Artist', Dickensian, lxvii (1971).
17. See also Michael Steig, 'Dombey and Son and the Railway Panic of 1845', ibid.
18. Jack Simmons, 'A Powerful Critic of Railways: John Tenniel in Punch', in Jack Simmons, The Express Train and Other Railway Studies (Nairn, 1994).
19. The magazines were selected using Donald J. Gray, 'A List of Comic Periodicals Published in Great Britain, 1800-1900', Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, xv (1972). The titles were chosen in order to give fair coverage of the early to mid Victorian period. They are Diogenes (1853-5), Figaro in London (1831-8), Fun (1861-1901), George Cruikshank 's Table-Book (1845), Joe Miller the Younger (1845), Judy (1867-1907), Life: The Mirror of the Million (1850), Man in the Moon (1847-9), Mephystopheles (1845-6), Pasquin (1850), Punch (1841-1992), Puppet-Show (1848-9), Tomahawk (1867-70), Town Talk (1858-9) and Will-o'-the-Wisp (1868-70).
20. Mr Punch was a self-proclaimed defender of the public and opponent of 'cant', and other magazines adopted similar stances: See Diogenes, i (1853), 3; Puppet-Show, i (1848), 1; Pasquin, i (1850), 1.
21. Puppet-Show, i (1848), 1
22. Pasquin, i (1850), 1.
23. Taylor, Creating Capitalism, chs. 4-5.
24. For an examination of the role and powers of shareholders in joint-stock companies, with a focus on the insurance industry, see Robin Pearson, 'Shareholder Democracies? English Stock Companies and the Politics of Corporate Governance during the Industrial Revolution', Eng. Hist. Rev., cxvii (2002). The ESRC-funded project 'Shareholder Democracies? Corporate Governance in Britain, 1720-1844' is currently tracing changing practice in the governance of corporate enterprise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
25. For a survey of the nineteenth-century satirical press, see J. Don Vann, 'Comic Periodicals', in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds.), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (Toronto, 1994).
26. Attempts to undercut Punch met with only limited success: While Punch's sales were consistently around the forty thousand mark in the mid Victorian period, Fun and Tomahawk peaked at around ten or twenty thousand: Alvar Ellegård, The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain (Göteborg, 1957), 35.
27. Puppet-Show, i (1848), 192
28. Punch, xix (1850), 171.
29. Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851 (Columbus, 1997)
30. Harold Nicolson, The English Sense of Humour and Other Essays (London, 1956)
31. Ronald Pearsall, Collapse of Stout Party: Victorian Wit and Humour (London, 1975)
32. R. C. G. Price, A History of Punch (London, 1957).
33. Nicolson, English Sense of Humour, 49.
34. Susan and Asa Briggs, Cap and Bell: Punch's Chronicle of English History in the Making, 1841-61 (London, 1972), pp. xi-xxxiv
35. Simmons, 'Powerful Critic of Railways', 133.
36. Nicolson, English Sense of Humour, 51, 53.
37. Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, 102.
38. Punch, xix (1850), 140, 159.
39. Figaro in London, vi (1837), 14.
40. Pasquin, i (1850), 57.
41. Joe Miller the Younger, new ser., i (1845), facing p. 136.
42. Punch, xxv (1853), 97-8
43. ibid., xliii (1862), 151.
44. Puppet-Show, iii (1849), 58.
45. Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1914 (London, 1969), 280.
46. Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1947), facing pp. 49, 204.
47. See also British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, English Cartoons and Satirical Prints, 1320-1832, in the British Museum, microfilm (Cambridge, 1978), print 15779, 'March of Intellect'.
48. Figaro in London, v (1836), 45.
49. Puppet-Show, ii (1848), 86.
50. George Cruikshank's Table-Book, i (1845), facing p. 261.
51. John George, A View of the Existing Law Affecting Unincorporated Joint Stock Companies (London, 1825), 73
52. Times, 9 Oct. 1840
53. ibid., 9 Nov. 1840.
54. Anon., 'The Stock Exchange, No. II', Fraser's Mag., iv (1832), 721
55. Anon., The Real Del Monte Mining Concerns Unmasked, and a Few Facts on Stock Jobbing Schemes, with a View to Prevent the Public from Becoming the Dupes of Self-Interested Speculators and Adventurers (London, 1833), 10-11.
56. Times, 4 Sept. 1845.
57. See also the earl of Dalhousie's speech in the Lords: Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxxv, col. 868 (23 Apr. 1846).
58. Complaints about the railways' powers of compulsory purchase also attended the second railway mania of 1864-6: Punch criticized the 'sordid Vandalism' of the companies which wished to tear up middle-class homes in London. Punch, xlvi (1864), 49.
59. Richard S. Lambert, The Railway King, 1800-1871: A Study of George Hudson and the Business Morals of his Time (1934; London, 1964), 127.
60. See also Alfred Crowquill, How He Reigned and How He Mizzled: A Railway Railleiy (London, 1849), frontispiece
61. Joe Miller the Younger, new ser., i (1845), facingp. 176
62. Punch, xvi (1849), 191.
63. Joe Miller the Younger, new ser., i (1845), 170.
64. Puppet-Show, ii (1848), 41.
65. Mephystopheles, i (1845-6), 1-2. The story is continued on pp. 13-14, 45.
66. Edward Stirling, The Railway King! A Laughable Farce in One Act (London, 1845).
67. Punch, x (1846), 2.
68. Mephystopheles, i (1845-6), 187.
69. See also Angus B. Reach, The Comic Bradshaw
70. or, Bubbles from the Boiler (London, 1848), 57.
71. Lambert, Railway King, ch. 12
72. A. J. Peacock, George Hudson the Railway King, 1800-1871, 2 vols. (York, 1989), ii, chs. 23-4
73. A. J. Arnold and S. McCartney, George Hudson: The Rise and Fall of the Railway King (London, 2004).
74. Punch, xvi (1849), 133, 156, 178, 191
75. ibid., xvii (1849), 34, 50, 183, 187
76. Puppet-Show, iii (1849), 92-3, 99, 101-2, 124, 174, 192, 235, 246, 284
77. Pasquin, i (1850), 12-13, 18, 54
78. Diogenes, i (1853), 95-100.
79. Robert Bell, The Ladder of Gold: An English Story (London, 1850)
80. Emma Robinson, The Gold-Worshippers (London, 1851). The figure of the corrupt railway despot proved enduring, and resurfaced in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (London, 1875).
81. For comment on the novel, see James Taylor, 'Greed: The Way They Lived Then', BBC Hist. Mag., ii (Dec. 2001), 40-2.
82. Bell, Ladder of Gold, 303.
83. Taylor, Creating Capitalism, ch. 5.
84. Punch, xviii (1850), 122.
85. For comment on banking fraud, see Punch, xxxii (1857), 49, 117, 133, 152-3
86. ibid., xxxiii (1857), 17, 23.
87. For a discussion of responses to the Royal British Bank fraud, see James Taylor, 'Commercial Fraud and Public Men in Victorian Britain', Hist. Research, lxxviii (2005).
88. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, 1994), 56-62.
89. Geoffrey Channon, Railways in Britain and the United States, 1830-1940 (Aldershot, 2001), 183.
90. Walter Besant and James Rice, The Golden Butterfly (1876; London, n.d.), 88-9.
91. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 281.
92. Many of the jokes appearing on the pages of the satirical press assumed a detailed knowledge of the railway experience on the part of the reader. For example, in 1846 Mephystopheles joked that criminals should be punished by being made to travel third-class upon the Great Western Railway, and in severe cases be made to 'drink daily a basin of scalding soup at the Wolverton Station': Mephystopheles, i (1845-6), 119.
93. Punch, xxxiii (1857), 146.
94. Diogenes, iii (1854), 109.
95. Fun, new ser., vii (1868), 248.
96. Punch, xix (1850), 171.
97. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 281. Figures gathered by the Board of Trade showed that railway employees rather than passengers were the primary victims of the railways. In the period 1845-70, on average 116 employees were killed every year. Even allowing for the fact that these figures underestimated the problem, for companies were not obliged by law to make returns, it is clear that it was far more dangerous to be an employee on the railways than a passenger. P. W. J. Bartrip and S. B. Burman, The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy, 1833-1897 (Oxford, 1983), 39-42.
98. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 309.
99. Two pieces have recently explored the traumas caused by railway travel: Ralph Harrington, 'The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain', in Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds.), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge, 2001)
100. Jill L. Matus, 'Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection', Victorian Studies, xliii (2001).
101. Punch, xxiii (1852), 129.
102. Ibid., 119.
103. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 280.
104. The same was true elsewhere. See, for example, the comments of the Times on Edward Watkin's argument that 95 per cent of railway accidents were caused by the negligence of railway employees: Times, 31 Jan. 1874.
105. Punch, xlv (1863), 243
106. ibid., lvii (1869), 219.
107. Diogenes, iii (1854), 109.
108. Tomahawk, iii (1868), 23.
109. Puppet-Show, i (1848), 179.
110. Punch, xxiii (1852), 207.
111. Ibid., xxx (1856), 180.
112. Ibid., v (1843), 48-9
113. ibid., viii (1845), 3
114. ibid., xxix (1855), 47
115. ibid., xxxv (1858), 207.
116. For Cruikshank's views on sweated labour in the clothing industry, see Graphic Works of George Cruikshank, ed. Richard A. Vogler (New York, 1979), 94.
117. Railway workers, though seemingly much greater victims of railway boards, play a marginal role in this analysis, and did not really form part of the public the magazines wanted to represent.
118. P. L. Cottrell, 'Railway Finance and the Crisis of 1866: Contractors' Bills of Exchange, and the Finance Companies', Jl Transport Hist., new ser., iii (1975). By 1866 there were 366 railway companies with tradeable shares.
119. Judy, i (1867), 185.
120. For similar sentiments, see Punch, 1 (1866), 260.
121. Tomahawk, i (1867), 180-3.
122. Fun, new ser., v (1867), 178-9.
123. Cited in Alborn, Conceiving Companies, 191.
124. Times, 12 July 1849.
125. For an exploration of Victorian perceptions of the differences between 'speculation' and 'investment', see David C. Itzkowitz, 'Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England', Victorian Studies, xlv (2002).
126. J. B. Jefferys, 'Trends in Business Organisation in Great Britain since 1856, with Special Reference to the Financial Structure of Companies, the Mechanism of Investment and the Relations between the Shareholder and the Company' (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1938), 386.
127. Spencer, 'Railway Morals and Railway Policy', 283-4.
128. Diogenes, iii (1854), 63.
129. For another view of shareholders and directors equally interested in exploiting passengers for financial gain, see Punch, xxiii (1852), 113.
130. Punch, xxxvii (1859), 209
131. ibid., xxxix (1860), 99.
132. Ibid., xxv (1853), 226
133. ibid., xxxiii (1857), 113
134. ibid., xxxvii (1859), 109.
135. Herbert Spencer believed that controversial measures were frequently carried against the sense of the meetings 'by means of the large number of proxies previously collected by the directors' from shareholders 'weak enough to sign the first document sent to them': Spencer, 'Railway Morals and Railway Policy', 278-9.
136. Times, 17 June 1867.
137. Ibid., 11 May 1867.
138. See 'Railway Calls', 'Mr. John Bull' and 'The Railway Dragon', in George Cruikshank's Table-Book, i (1845), facing pp. 237, 239, 261.
139. Miles Taylor, 'John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c.1712-1929', Past and Present, no. 134 (Feb. 1992).
140. Fun, new ser., vii (1868), 248.
141. Letter to Times, 24 Aug. 1852.
142. Alborn, Conceiving Companies, 202-5.
143. Times, 4 Oct. 1852.
144. Alborn, Conceiving Companies, ch. 8.
145. Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway (London, 1970), 193
146. David Hodgkins, The Second Railway King: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Watkin, 1819-1901 (Cardiff, 2002).
147. Geoffrey Alderman, The Railway Interest (Leicester, 1973), 232.
148. Punch, lv (1868), 98.
149. Ibid., xlvi (1864), 63.
150. Ibid., lv (1868), 98.
151. Fun, new ser., i (1865), 55.
152. Anon., The Railway Meeting: A Satire Dedicated to the Pillaged and Plundered Shareholders of Great Britain by a Lancashire Victim (London, 1856), 18.
153. Punch, xxxiii (1857), 64-5.
154. See also ibid., 154.
155. Channon, Railways in Britain and the United States, 165.
156. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 305-6.
157. However, companies were largely spared the extra burden of compensating injured and killed employees and their families, owing to the courts' narrow interpretation of the vicarious liability of corporate employers, an issue rarely addressed by the periodicals: Ibid., ch. 7.
158. Punch, xxi (1851), 66
159. ibid., xlv (1863), 92.
160. It thought that fines should also be levied on companies for near-misses as well as actual accidents: Ibid., xxi (1851), 129.
161. Ibid., lvii (1869), 85.
162. Ibid., xxiii (1852), 209
163. ibid., xxiv (1853), 147.
164. Ibid., xxx (1856), 33.
165. Diogenes, iii (1854), 63.
166. For two large cartoons on this theme, see Punch, xxiv (1853), 125
167. ibid., xxxiii (1857), 25.
168. For an earlier version of the same idea, see Man in the Moon, i (1847), 117.
169. Fun, new ser., x (1869), 103.
170. F. G. Trafford, City and Suburb, 3 vols. (London, 1861), iii, 195. Mrs Riddell wrote under the pen name F. G. Trafford.
171. Times, 4 Oct. 1852.
172. For cartoons on joint-stock bankers, see Town Talk, i (1858), 55, 79, 322, and also the Christmas Supplement to Town Talk (1858), 1-8
173. for cartoons on gas and water monopolies, see Hornet, vii (1873), 8
174. and also the cartoon 'The Monopolies', from Funny Folks (1879), reprinted in Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, 106
175. for cartoons expressing sympathy for defrauded shareholders, see Punch, lvi (1869), 48-9
176. Will-o'-the-Wisp, i (1868-9), 253-5.
177. Punch, lxvii (1874), 129.
178. Simmons, 'Powerful Critic of Railways', 155
179. but see Punch, ci (1891), 55, for a striking exception.
180. Daily Mirror, 8 Dec. 1905
181. ibid., 23 Oct. 1907
182. ibid., 9 Nov. 1907
183. ibid., 29 Nov. 1919.
184. Guardian, 26 Feb. 1997
185. ibid., 6 June 1997
186. Sunday Telegraph, 8 Mar. 1998
187. Independent, 11 Oct. 1999.
188. Independent, 5 Aug. 1996
189. Guardian, 30 Aug. 1996
190. ibid., 6 Feb. 1997.
191. Glasgow Herald, 13 Aug. 1998.
192. Guardian, 1 Oct. 1998
193. Independent, 29 Nov. 2001.
194. Simmons, 'Powerful Critic of Railways', 157 n. 43.