AQA (A) Literature: Victorian literature in context
For many students of Victorian literature, the cultural commentator John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera provides a first glimpse of nineteenth-century attitudes to the coming of the railways. This open letter is a savage attack on the directors of the Midland Railway who promoted a line through the Peak District in 1863: ‘You enterprised a railroad through the valley, you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone.’ Ruskin gives an amusingly scathing assessment of the line’s pointlessness here — ‘and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’ — but his attitude to railways was not always so condemnatory. Only two years later, in the collection of philosophical essays entitled Cestus of Aglaia, Ruskin wrote:
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