Railway travelling chart, c.1846

Railway travellers’ route description and strip-map, c.1846

Railway Chronicle travelling chart ... Great Western. London to Hanwell and Southall. Printed by James Holmes (Chancery Lane), letterpress with wood-engravings, total size of folding chart 390 x 225 mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading)

On the coat-tails of railway mania came a little boom in railway publishing, of which this is a product. In 1846 the weeklyRailway Chronicle published a set of 13 of these ‘travelling charts’ – ‘iron road books, for perusal on the journey’, offering ‘a novel and complete companion for the railway carriage’. They in fact scooped the railway novel, a genre yet to emerge, for what enterprising publishers and booksellers must have reckoned acaptive audience.

While others in the series cost one shilling, the price of this chart – one penny, or c. £3 today – could have put it in the hands of the working class, had tickets been affordable. For most people they were not, and in any case style took away what price might have given: the look and feel and tone is formal, with no concessions to the popular. The publisher highly rated readers’ abilities: five ‘proper diagrams’ locating viaducts, bridges, pathways, cuttings and tunnels, requiring study and memorization by this reader, ‘hardly require a key’.

The imagined reader, a comfortable male bourgeois on upholstered seats in an enclosed carriage, is advised how to take advantage of the information disposed here by properly orienting himself for the nine-mile journey west from Paddington to Southall:

The traveller down from London should sit back to the engine, in the left-hand corner of the carriage. The traveller up to London should sit facing the engine, in the left-hand corner of the carriage, and read upwards. The objects and the Notes will then follow in the order in which they occur. The objects visible from the railway, and those quite adjacent to it, are denoted in smaller type, in the centre column, at the exact places where they are seen. The distance of the principal places from each station is stated. The Notes in the side columns refer to places and objects in the neighbourhood of the railway at the respective sides of it.

John Ogilby’s road book of 1675, Britannia, had pioneered stripmaps, and earlier still was the ‘Peutinger’ table, a mediaeval copy of a Roman route map. And there were recent precedents for illustrated companions to railway journeys: Edward Mogg, publisher of public transport information, produced several. But the Railway Chronicle series offered a distinctive and inventive integration of words, diagram, and pictures. The chart is folded five times to make windows of c. 92 x 225 mm: handleable, though folds – not matched to content divisions – go straight through text and pictures. A compromise has been struck between size and legibility, so the type is small.

The text establishes terms which had already appeared on timetables, and which would become part of rail vocabulary: one travelled ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ from it. The narrative is not entirely bland: in Kensal Green cemetery there is ‘very little of good taste in the monuments, some of which are made the mere advertisements of quacks’; Acton’s brick church, replacing its recently demolished 13th-century predecessor, is ‘desperately ugly’; and the ‘kind and wise’ director of the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Dr Connolly, ‘has abolished manacles and stripes’. Readers – male – may have been flattered at Kensington Gardens by ‘throngs of the fairest women in the world’.

Where did it sell? There were railway bookstalls in the 1840s, though the key date is later than this document: 1848, when W. H. Smith, bookseller and stationer, took a first foothold on what would become a near monopoly.