CHAPTER .THREE
Iron Horse

"And along the iron veins that traverse the frame of
our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion,
hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated
through those throbbing arteries into the central cities;
the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow
bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer
crowds on the city gates."

John Ruskin^ The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

To TURN OVER the pages of the early volumes of the Illustrated
London News, which was founded in 1842, is to experi-
ence a social revolution. The first volume depicts an
England that, apart from the capital, is mainly rural—a land
of cathedral spires embowered in trees ; fairs and markets; fat
cattle, gaiteredr farmers and squires and smocked peasants.
Where the manufacturing districts appear they do so as an
almost savage terra incognita, with rough unpaved roads, grim
gaol-like factories and men and women of sullen and brutish
appearance. Even here one feels the country has only been
occupied by a horde of nomad invaders: on the outskirts of
the Manchester of 1842 there were still sloping wooded valleys
with girls keeping sheep a stone's throw from the flat slate
roofs and tall smoking chimneys.

Yet before the end of the 'forties the scene has completely
changed. It is an urban England that is engraved on the crowded
page. The stress is now on paved streets, vast Gothic town halls,
the latest machinery, above all the railroad. The iron horse,
with its towering, belching funnel and its long load of roaring
cpaches plunging through culvert and riding viaduct, had
spanned the land, eliminating distance and reducing all men to
a common denominator. And the iron horse did not go from
village to village: it went from industrial town to town. The
England of Winchester and Canterbury and Chester was a thing
of the past. The England of smoking Rotherham and -Hull and
colonial Crewe had arrived.

This revolution in transport came with an extraordinary
rapidity. In 1830, and in most places in 1840, a man who wanted

79