The Sacrifices for Progress: Dickens and the Railroad

Charles Dickens seems to try all sorts of analogies to understand and justify the spread of the railroad, but he finds—as he intends his audience to find—that he cannot. One way that he tries to reconcile this atrocious phenomenon is by describing it as accidental, as if by wishful thinking he could make it so. In an excerpt from his Dombey and Son, he begins his description of the railroad as “[t]he first shock of a great earthquake” which “had . . . rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre” (496). If Earth itself had torn the land apart, the experience could have been written off as an unfortunate but unplanned incident. It is as if Dickens cannot face the full reality: people brainstormed, planned, measured, and dug in the ground, ruining nature and people for the sake of a questionable progress. Dickens goes on to further describe the wreckage as “a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, [laying] topsy-turvy”: whatever this development may be, it is not going as planned (496). Elsewhere, “confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond,” but should not have been one (496). Dickens’ wording provides a stark contrast: “treasures” have been neglected as they steep in filthy water that should not exist; no wonder these treasures are “confused” as they, like the land and people around them, fade away to dingy pollution.

Throughout the entire first paragraph, where Dickens first describes the “great earthquake,” down through “Babel towers of chimneys” to “[h]ot springs and fiery eruptions,” it is difficult to know precisely to what Dickens refers (496). In the second paragraph, Dickens relents and provides a more prosaic description: “the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and . . . trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement” (496). This single sentence comprises the second paragraph in its entirety; it looks and reads rather out of place in comparison to the preceding paragraph. This formal element serves to enhance Dickens’ view. Dickens, a man generally given to lengthy descriptions, would only give such apparent short shrift to an idea if he were making a specific point by this stylistic element. In short, he is being sarcastic. Dickens lengthily pans this so-called improvement, and even in attempting to be approving, he quickly falls away in disgust.

Probably my favorite description in that first paragraph is that of “Babel towers of chimneys” (496). The reference to the Babel tower, an Old Testament story wherein a group of people trying to build a tower to reach God only to have God splinter the group and divide them, not only refers to the height of the chimneys but also the circumstances of their being built. The Babel tower was built in the name of progress and even in the name of God, though it was truly for neither; as a result, it led to confusion and strife. Dickens makes a poignant parallel to his world: these “towers” of sorts, also built in the name of progress, may well suffer the same fate. God split the Babel tower builders by inventing a new language for each of them, so that they were unable to understand one another ever again. Perhaps, Dickens suggests, these railroad tycoons speak a new, frightening language. People who once communicated freely may never again understand one another, all thanks to these supposed beacons of progress.

By the end of this excerpt, Dickens outright compares the ground to the people: “If the miserable waste ground . . . could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbors” (497). The land has become gray, dry, filthy, poor, and miserable; the people had become the same way. As the railroads deplete the land of its precious natural resources, leaving behind rusting pools of filthy water and dingy soil, so it leaves gray, dusty people, desperate people. People became wretched, like “patches of wretched vegetation,” and had their life depleted from them, as the soil itself was depleted. In fact, the railroad barons treated people as if they were land, and nothing more than a resource to be used and then forgotten, a behavior with which Dickens seems to take great exception.