Genre:

Travelogue, Drollery

Relevant illustrations:

wdct. [5]

Subjects:

Railways, Transport, Representation, Travel, Religion

People mentioned:

Richard Owen

    The narrator describes his 'views of the scenery' during a recent 'trip by railroad'. Complains that as soon as he saw anything that he wanted to draw, 'it was whisked away from our vision, and just as we had commenced foreshortening something thirty miles off, some fresh object was suddenly brought close up to the window of the carriage, to the exclusion of everything else that our eyes had been resting on'. Notes how his attempt to draw 'a beautiful bit of still life at about twenty miles from London' was thwarted by the rapidity of the train's motion. However, he describes his pictorial representation of pastoral and agricultural scenes. Goes on to recount the 'true artistic feeling' provoked by a journey through a railway tunnel, which included the sublime emotions caused by the noise and smoke of the train. Ends by likening sketching the 'unpromising' subjects of a railway journey to drawing 'sermons in stones'. The illustrations show various aspects of the journey.