Reading is a town in England. It is an important stop on the London – Bristol, Great Western mainline. However, this is a post about the activity of reading. So, it’s books on the train.
Roy Porter has described how the advent of the 18C philosophical enlightenment played itself out in Britain through a profound change in the manner of reading. Previously, those that read had tended to re-read a single text, typically the Bible, in detail. This is the idea of textual scrutiny that still prevails amongst scholars. This was replaced, as part of a philosophical methodology, by a much wider reading…
The advent of the railway provided for a new type of recreational reading. The relative tranquility of the railway carriage provided just the type of environment for reading. Furthermore, the act of reading was understood as a powerful signal of “do not disturb!”
From the beginning, newspapers, magazines and books were supplied to entertain the railway traveller. W H Smith founded his eponymous company as railway station kiosks and newsagents.
More recently, Penguin books was established in the 1930s, by Allen Lane, as a way of supplying serious but inexpensive (paperback) books to the railway traveller. Interestingly, it was WW2 that provided a huge expansion in the market for books. The uncertain journeys and long waits of wartime Britain usually required more than one book!
In addition to these practical and business considerations, the railway journey also played a part in defining the form of the modern novel – defining chapters and length especially.
I’ve posted a couple of times about my looking forward to the remake of The Lady Vanishes. The BBC have been trailing this, as in-the-pipeline, since before Christmas. So, we can assume it has been one of their trophy projects.
The original novel, The Wheel Spins (1936), is by Ethel Lina White. The story was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock who made the first film version in 1938. There was a second film version, made in 1979, and the BBCs most recent effort. Basically, the whole film takes place on a train…(that’s good).
The Hitchcock film is regarded as one of the best of his British period, along with The 39 Steps and Rebecca. It’s worth describing, as the benchmark against which the most recent version must be judged.
Hitchcock began making films in the 1920s and was seconded to the UFA studios in Germany. At the time, the German cinema industry was the global leader in the development of film entertainment. The German industry was the first to see the expressionist potential of film and to engage with themes derived from Freud’s ideas.
Sigmund Freud defined the idea of the sub-conscious and the methodology of psychoanalysis. In popular terms, these ideas were presented as the mixture of anxiety and excitement associated with sexual desire…
Anyway, the film is a straightforward mystery thriller – a woman passenger disappears from the train. This is really a Jonathan Creek type “locked room” mystery, except that the room is moving – it’s a train.
The historical precedents of this kind of story go back to Allen Poe’s Rue Morgue (1841).
The other passengers all seem to be involved in a conspiracy to deny this disappearance…needless to say, the feisty heroine has to solve the mystery and expose the conspiracy. Needless to say, she also finds a handsome ally and romance along the way…
The film is a kind of prototype “screwball” comedy romance, made famous in the USA by films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940) and Some Like it Hot (1959).
The main protagonists in Hitchcock’s film are played by Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. The Hitchcock film was scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat as a comedy thriller. Nowadays, this partnership are best remembered for the four classic St Trinians films.
No one needs to be told of the comic psychoanalytical potential of girls in uniform…the recent re-launch of this franchise has not been successful.
One of the best jokes in the original film is that, amidst all the hiatus of the mystery, there are two British travellers whose main concern throughout remains the cricket score…This was briefly taken up in the new film, as two female horticulturalists. But, the joke wasn’t sustained. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the BBC remake was a complete absence of humour.
In the new film, the female lead, played by Tuppence Middleton, is presented as a beautiful young socialite… without any of the context that makes the disappearance so compelling. Without the various clues, the crime becomes arbitrary….it’s a question of context and style as much as anything else.
The great thing about a train is, as I’ve mentioned before, is that the combination of movement, detachment and image is very like how we understand dreaming. Freud suggested that dreams are an expression of the subconscious. So, dreams, trains and films are all variations on this theme.
It’s pretty straightforward to imagine a nightmare scenario where individual and collective realities are in opposition. That’s The Lady Vanishes…and a staple of Hitchcock thrillers.
The academic study of psychology began during the 1920s and 1930s, to identify the idea of reality as a kind of collective and cognitive consensus. Indeed, psychological trauma and illness were all-too often associated with claims to an alternative reality….that’s certainly the case in these films, where the female protagonist is thought mad for her belief in the missing passenger.
Carol Reed made a version of this story, with the heightened excitement of context, during WW2. It was a shame that the BBC version, in trying to distance itself from the Hitchcock original, threw the baby out with the bath water.
Notwithstanding the keen efforts of its young protagonists, the BBC Lady will vanish without a trace…
I was surprised to learn that steam locomotives didn’t have a speedometer in the cab. When the engine was trying to set the world speed record, and to break 100mph, they had to hitch a specially converted carriage with time-keping equipment.
The driver had to judge the speed, based on experience.
Also, they looked to the standard railway time, as seen on passing station platforms, to keep to schedule.
This put the skill of the drivers and crew into perspective…and made me appreciate them more.
Also, it must have been very dangerous not to have accurate speed and time information in the cab. There must always have been a tendency to go more quickly than strictly necessary.
I’ll have to try and find out why this was so and when things changed.
Bob Godfrey, the award winning animator, has passed away aged 91.
I’ve posted a picture of the great Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to make the connection to his biographical film, Great (1975). Brunel is a larger-than-life figure who conceptualised an integrated system of enormous machines connecting London and New York!
The steam railway to Bristol and then steam ships across the Atlantic.
Bob Godfrey was one of a whole lot of people who really transformed the moving-inage culture of Britain in the early 1970s. Along with Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame, he combined ready-made elements, surrealism and irreverence to create fast-paced, clever and funny films. He attacked various sacred-cows of British culture and an establishment tendency to pomposity and hypocrisy.
It’s difficult, nowadays, to understand how fresh and radical this kind of moving image was.
Apart from a few notable exceptions, the word animation had become linked to a specific, American, style of cartoon. At its worst, this was exemplified by the exquisite banality of the huge Disney studio productions.
By literally drawing on the sex, drugs and rock and roll traditions of the counter-culture; Godfrey created something clever and funny.
There was an interesting story about American plans for a high-speed (HS) rail network.
The chances of this happening any time soon are pretty remote. The vested-interests have the politicians in their pocket. The best thing would be to reconceptualise the network as an issue of national security…the military-industrial-complex could then step in.
Here in the UK, plans for HS2 to Birmingham and beyond have been published…
Here, the vested interests are probably in favour of HS rail. It’s the nimbys blocking the plan in the Chilterns.
The lessons of the financial crisis are obvious. The only thing the Government can do is to build infrastructure – in the UK, HS railway and a new London airport are needed to get us through the next few years of the economic doldrums. Incidentally, HS2 is reckenned to be a thirty-year project.
If you want blue-skies thinking, how about this…
An integrated global rail network. I’ll drink to that.
Grand Central Station is one of the great stations of the world. But, I doubt that it is the loveliest, or even close.
That claim was made by David Cannadine, historian, on BBC Radio 4s “Points of View.” You can read the story, here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21353825
The station is architecturally grandiose – it’s slightly over-scaled in an American way, even for NYC. The appeal to classical Rome is a bit hackneyed too, even for the time it was built. It looks like a very big provincial bank!
It’s impressive; but not lovely.
For me, the great weakness in the design is the absence of trains – I much prefer a station with visible platforms and trains. Also, I want to be able to access platforms and walk to the engine. This diminishes the general sense of theatre, adventure and romance.
Basically, the best bit of GCS is the waiting room!
If you want to find out about railway stations, look at Steven Parrisien’s “Station to Station” (1997).
Perhaps the greatest example of railway neo-classicism was London’s Euston terminus (1837). I’ve already posted about the brutal demolition of this station, here
Pulling it all down was bad enough, but replacing it with what is now Euston was certainly tragic. Luckily, there are plans to redevelop Euston, and to rebuild the arch.
Things are turning nasty on the Swiss Railways! Generally held up the paragon of service and efficiency; things have turned sour following new rules about validating tickets. The rules are being ruthlessly enforced by cheerless inspectors who are handing out big fines…(sounds familiar)
You know things are bad when the Swiss, who are good with rules, start protesting.
Some of these films are a bit slow, like the trains, for modern tastes. But they are quite charming.
Dan Snow did get a bit better…but overall his history was too anecdotal. He mentioned interesting connections between, say, the speculative railway mania of the mid 19C and the more recent dot com bubble; but left it there.
Basically, the whole thing was based on Christian Wolmar’s excellent books
Fire and Steam and Engines of War
Also, I thought his wearing a tee-shirt throughout was rubbish really. I don’t think he should do the pink shirt and chinos thing that Michael Palin or Michael Portillo do; but there must be something inbetween up-tight and slack.
Still, the films did give me a few ideas for more posts…
Lynn, my sister-in-law, was complaining about there being too many TV programmes about trains…
there’s been Indian and African Railways, Michael Portillo’s retreading of John Betjeman at home and across Europe, there’s been Dan Snow’s useless history. ITV even got in on the act with Chris Tarrant. Now, there’s a film about model railways the Joy of (Train) Sets (geddit?).
The film about railways modelers, like all the films listed above, was great as long as you forgot that is about trains. The point is that the railway system, in full-scale or miniature, is a unique machine that combines people and technology. It integrates and networks, just like the computer and the internet.
At ground level, it’s pretty simple. It’s about service and punctuality. But at a more elevated and conceptual level, it can be about issues of space and time; from that perspective, it is almost as good as a Tardis.
I have a feeling that trains are popular because at least 50pc of the population love them…and that they provide an easily accessible metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace.
Anyway, the film about models was terrific. There were moments when is was impossible to tell tat you weren’t seeing something full size! You can watch the film, here
