Castle Aching

[Nearholmer]

When since did middle class = intellectual?

[corneliuslundie]

To be boring, i have been looking at the earlier Bradshaw I have, for just after the First World War, and hardly any of the more rural GER or M&GN lines have a Sunday service. If this was the same before the War, then I think we can assume that the WNR also had no Sunday services unless there was a mail train - at one time the only Sunday service on the Cambrian main line.

Jonathan

PS Fascinating about bishoprics. Back then the Bishops of St Asaph and St Davids almost came to blows over "ownership" of Kerry. And round here the boundaries between dioceses are very odd. We are on the edge of St Asaph and close to both Bangor and St Davids, while Sarn chose to be in an English diocese even though it is - just - in Wales. Mind you the boundary between England and Wales is pretty odd too. Have a look at Churchstoke.

 

[Edwardian]

12 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

When since did middle class = intellectual?

 

In the world of the Nineteenth Century novel, by and large.

[Hroth]

9 minutes ago, webbcompound said:

Though unpalatable it seems to me that Castle Aching would be the ideal base for a baby farmer, with its rail connections to the centers of population where "adoption services" could be advertised in the daily press. 

 

Imagining a Punch cartoon of two farmers looking over a gate: "Arrr, them'll be ready to ship to that Fagin down th'Smoke soon...."

 

10 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

When since did middle class = intellectual?

 

Perhaps one could say "better educated" instead or "part of the class that can afford to read multi volume novels".

 

Of course we really only remember the authors who have survived a century later.  there were also the potboiler novels churned out to satisfy the reading classes on long train journeys, the sale of which were the foundation of WH Smith. and other Railway Station newspaper and book vendors.

 

[webbcompound]

I fear Mr Hroth may be soon gulled into a scheme of some sort. The babies are "adopted " from the city and "looked after" by the baby farmer at a distant salubrious location. The mothers, but more likely their guardians, or employers, pay for their upkeep as the babies live a life of Riley in the countryside or near the sea. Unfortunately the mortality rate is quite high, and generally fairly rapid, but we don't want to trouble the mothers with that detail, so we just keep sending letters explaining how they are getting on.

[Hroth]

9 minutes ago, webbcompound said:

I fear Mr Hroth may be soon gulled into a scheme of some sort. The babies are "adopted " from the city and "looked after" by the baby farmer at a distant salubrious location. The mothers, but more likely their guardians, or employers, pay for their upkeep as the babies live a life of Riley in the countryside or near the sea. Unfortunately the mortality rate is quite high, and generally fairly rapid, but we don't want to trouble the mothers with that detail, so we just keep sending letters explaining how they are getting on.

So more like the current weepie "Adopt a snow leopard" type ads on digital television channels?

 

Of course, the rural "boarding schools" like Dotheboys Hall were more or less the same sort of thing...

 

Edited May 4, 2019 by Hroth

[Edwardian]

On the one hand, was in not poor little Buttercup who took up baby farming, many years ago?

 

On the other hand, we don't want any of this in CA! 

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

True, but the Nineteenth Century novel was primarily authored and read by the Middle Classes, who could, and did, use the railway. 

 

And, to complete the circle, read their three-decker novels whilst doing so. John Sutherland has an intriguing discussion: What English novel is Anna reading?* (on her way back to St Petersburg from Moscow by the overnight train). He discusses the possibility that it could be The Prime Minister (which came out while Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina) - planting the idea of a railway suicide in Anna's (and Tolstoy's) mind? Sutherland's more sophisticated conclusion is the Tolstoy is evoking a generalised Trollopian idea of English fiction, with its characteristic happy ending (for most), as a deliberate contrast with his Russian tragedy. "English novels are all alike, every unhappy Russian novel is unhappy in its own way"?

 

Tolstoy himself died at a railway station, trying to escape his comfortable gentry milieu. 

 

*J. Sutherland, The Literary Detective (OUP, 2000).

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Much in the way that Young People these days use internet dating to overcome the fact that the only people they otherwise meet are those they share an office with, the ability to meet members of the opposite sex was quite restricted for the Victorian Middle Class youth.

 

I am surprised that the opportunity of chance encounters afforded by railway travel was not more often exploited in the novels of the period. 

 

It was represented in painting at least once .... 

 

 

 

That's the revised version. The original was somewhat controversial:

 

 

And in any case, that's part 2 of 2. Our naval hero travelled out second class:

 

 

Abraham Solomon exhibited these in 1854; any ideas on carriage identification? One would assume the journeys are to and from Portsmouth.

[Hroth]

7 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That's the revised version. The original was somewhat controversial:

 

 

And in any case, that's part 2 of 2. Our naval hero travelled out second class:

 

 

Abraham Solomon exhibited these in 1854; any ideas on carriage identification? One would assume the journeys are to and from Portsmouth.

 

Is that the dozy ones topper sticking to the roof in the top one?  Meanwhile the angling cad is obviously taking his chances...

 

The Jack Tar and the family look like they're sitting on wooden benches, didn't Second have a bit of padding by then?  And it looks like the little lad is off to become a Midshipman, with Jolly Jack putting the wind up him...  Its also interesting that you can see shipping through the starboard window!

[Compound2632]

2 minutes ago, Hroth said:

The Jack Tar and the family look like they're sitting on wooden benches, didn't Second have a bit of padding by then?  

 

Remember this is one of the south-of-the river lines. Also, The Departure is, I suppose, set a decade earlier than The Return, though whether Solomon researched that point I doubt.

Edited May 4, 2019 by Compound2632

[ChrisN]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Which all assumes that people went anywhere much, which they largely didn’t.

 

Aside from commuters, and a few fairly well-off people who had regular business ‘in town’ (whichever town), a great many people almost certainly didn’t have many occasions to use the trains. Urban workers and their families might go on an annual outing to the seaside, maybe two outings each year, but I don’t think that the ‘market penetration’ of railways for passenger transport in rural areas was as great as we often assume.

 

The impact was probably more subtle, almost below the level of consciousness, in things like coal not being as expensive as otherwise, and factory made food coming onto the table every now and then, and being able to send rabbits to the London markets.

 

Even quite recently, the 1960s, for a great many people, especially the older ones, a trip outside their home town/village, to the ‘big town’ was a tiny bit special, not a daily or weekly event. When I was a boy, we had no car, used the bus maybe a dozen times each year, and the train (massive, exciting highlight) no more than twice, which wasn’t untypical c1960, but was a decidedly old-school lifestyle by c1975 (i’d Long got fed up with staying at home all the time by then, and was off all over the place by bike, bus and train). My mother still pursues this lifestyle, and it is now nouveau fashionable, because it is very green!

 

A colleague of mine who is in his late thirties, who has lived most of his life in rural Norfolk told me recently that one eighty year old from his village, and 'it was not that long ago' had only been out of the village three times in her life, twice to the market town, and once further afield but never outside Norfolk.  When asked what she thought of the market town she said that, 'she did not like it much'.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

54 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Tolstoy himself died at a railway station, trying to escape his comfortable gentry milieu. 

 

 

I've been in some railway stations that have nearly had that effect on me. 

[Compound2632]

Astapovo isn't the most picturesque of stations but not exactly Birmingham New Street:

 

[petethemole]

About 1990, an aquaintance who lived on the Isle of Wight in a village, seven miles from Newport, told me he had several elderly neighbours who had never been as far as Newport. Some apparently regarded it as a hotbed of sin.

[rockershovel]

I seem to recall that one of Jerome K Jerome’s novels about young men travelling, contains a risqué (for the period) drinking song about the opportunities offered by dark railway tunnels? Ends something like “.... when there appeared/a tiny golden earring in that wicked students beard”?

 

....and of course, Evelyn Waugh’s egregious Trimmer had been a hairdresser on ocean liners...

 

Sherlock Holmes certainly offered some fairly dark views on the nature of things which took place in the countryside..

 

 

[rockershovel]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

When since did middle class = intellectual?

 

Lenin certainly thought so, to be in possession of wristwatch (let alone a novel) could earn you a one-way ticket to an unknown fate, redeemable at a KGB station near you! 

[Compound2632]

2 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Lenin certainly thought so, to be in possession of wristwatch (let alone a novel) could earn you a one-way ticket to an unknown fate, redeemable at a KGB station near you! 

 

Well, he'd certainly read Anna Karenina. Something of the young Lenin in Levin?

[rockershovel]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Well, he'd certainly read Anna Karenina. Something of the young Lenin in Levin?

 

Perhaps it was just the knowledge that anyone capable of reading a whole Tolstoy novel was capable of almost anything? 

 

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

The popularity of the monthly and weekly journals that were thriving in the middle of the 19th century meant  a constant need for content. And the works we see as novels by writers like Dickens, Trollope etc. were originally all written as instalments and paid for by the word. The authors were expected to produce sufficient text to fill a set number of pages each week or month. Unlike today where best selling authors seem to work on a yearly schedule the 19th century best selling author more or less had his nose to the grindstone all the time. Only after the journal series was complete was the work then produced as a standalone novel.

 

It certainly has left a legacy of many fine novels, but also a lot that weren't and which have disappeared. Trollope was a writing machine but there are a number of his novels (and I'm a Trollope fan) that are best left unread. The Last Chronicle of Barset while neatly tying off a lot of loose ends is nearly ruined by an extraneous sub plot involving an artist and a model who by the standards of the day should have known better which leads the reader off on a tangent which has little to do with the main plot concerning the Rev. Josiah Crawley and the mysterious cheque he is accused of stealing and cashing. But in the days before film, radio and TV people who did read expected value for their money so the thicker the book the better the value.

 

But back to the railways. The interesting thing is the way the paintings are set in that we see the actions using the artist's trick of removing the compartment wall rather than from a window or door perspective.  While in the painting posted above that young Jackie Fisher has the apprehensive look of someone who may have decided that perhaps a job as a clerk might be preferable to becoming a sailor and naval hero. 

Edited May 4, 2019 by Malcolm 0-6-0
Sheer pedantry.

[Compound2632]

25 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Perhaps it was just the knowledge that anyone capable of reading a whole Tolstoy novel was capable of almost anything? 

 

 

Well, I've read Anna Karenina and War and Peace but have as yet failed to start a revolution. One has to allow for (a) reading in English translation and (b) being laid up in bed for a week, both times.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Some years ago I spent two and half weeks in hospital and worked through Daniel Deronda and a collections of Dickens' shorter works. I don't know what I found more depressing, my ailment or Daniel Deronda. 

[Compound2632]

7 minutes ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

But back to the railways. The interesting thing is the way the paintings are set in that we see the actions using the artist's trick of removing the compartment wall rather than from a window or door perspective. 

 

Better? Or has the artist removed the whole carriage side?

 

 

BTW I don't think that's Torquay.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Thank you Compound - now I'm wondering how those two actually fitted through the door. Perhaps it was necessary to remove the side just to get them in.

[rockershovel]

32 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Well, I've read Anna Karenina and War and Peace but have as yet failed to start a revolution. One has to allow for (a) reading in English translation and (b) being laid up in bed for a week, both times.

 

Perhaps you don’t possess the correct sort of wristwatch....