Trains,bodies,landscapes. Experiencing distance in the long nineteenth century

Sources and methodology

For this article, passages on subjective distances were scrutinised in a purposive longitudinal sample of over 40 western-European travelogues, both in print and in manuscript. All passages were included in the analysis, whether they describe distances as small or as large, in order to avoid the risk of presenting incomplete evidence. Besides offering good coverage of the long nineteenth century, the sample is also purposive in containing texts written from a variety of gender, age, socioeconomic and professional positions, which is unusual in the historical phenomenology of travel. ⁶ Still, accounts by women, children and less wealthy travellers remain harder to find than those by the more privileged. Examples will be taken from different European regions and languages, with special regard to travellers from the Low Countries because of their central location amidst railway-pioneering countries and, when writing in Dutch, because of the interesting linguistic case their texts present, as explained in the following section.

Key to selecting the first-person travel narratives has been that their authors were on the road or at their destination at the time of writing, or else were mentally transporting themselves back to those places, usually on the basis of notes they had taken while there. These travel texts therefore reveal some of the more physical, embodied and landscape-specific experiences of distance, which do not often surface in texts by those poring over maps at home, or following the news during one of the railway manias (Heine arguably excepted).

Two final remarks on methodology: my argument will be based on explicit mentions by travellers of experiences of distance or proximity, rather than on the extent of their mobility alone. This is because I do not want to assume that people whose mobility for the greater part of their lives remained limited to their fields, village or town, were more in awe of geographical distance than those who travelled farther and more regularly. Although mobility and subjective distance are clearly related, I wish to maintain a conceptual distinction between the two. Even an experience-centred approach to mobility would need to include many factors besides subjective distance, such as physical (dis)ability and social belonging. ⁷ Meanwhile, a location that seems far might be visited nonetheless, while another place might never be visited at all despite (or because of) feeling close at hand.

After this binary look at subjective distances in the first empirical section of the article, the final section explores what types of distance were meaningful to these authors. Whereas assertions that a particular place seemed far or near are still relatively easy to find in first-person travel accounts, for this section I had to exhaust the 40 texts of all textual passages that also shed a light on why this was the case: although the causes mentioned, ranging from cultural difference to faulty communication, formed familiar themes in travel writing, which buttresses their significance for experiences of distance, travellers were less likely to make such links explicit in their texts. In some instances, authors reflected on them in a self-conscious manner. In the majority of instances, however, these causes become apparent in the way a distance was described, and the physical and emotional contexts authors chose to offer in connection with the crossing of that distance. They might embed it in a description of the landscape for instance, of their means of transport, or of their own emotional state.

Theoretical framework: from the annihilation of distance …

So far, cultural historians such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Julie Wosk, Stephen Kern and Wolfgang Kaschuba have unearthed a wealth of nineteenth-century sources about subjective distances and the radical shift they underwent under the influence of new transport technologies. ⁸ In most of these studies, quotations such as Heine’s and Geel’s receive the limelight: passages which suggest that the introduction of the railways was tantamount to a shrinking of distances. Some emphasise sources such as Geel’s lecture, which unwittingly suggest this shift; while others (Kaschuba in particular) emphasise that the shift itself was largely subjective and “dramatised”, by the newspapers for instance. ⁹ Either way, most focus on those sources that present an image of (post-)industrial society as one where distances lose their significance; and where the bodies in which we traverse those distances, and the landscapes by which we traverse them, are no longer intricately bound up in the experience of our movement across space. This shift is commonly represented as one that affected people across society.

Thus, in his classic study, Schivelbusch called the railroad “that destroyer of experiential space and time” which caused travellers to lose their “immediate perception” of distance, of the “in-between space” and of the animal and human bodies that were doing the work. “[T]he old transport technology” was “[o]rganically embedded in nature […] that technology, in its mimetic relationship with the space traversed, permitted the traveler to perceive that space as a living entity”. On the contrary, the railroad “does not appear embedded in the space of the landscape the way coach and highway are”. This “shrinking of the natural world by means of mechanical transportation” is described in his work as a generally shared experience. ¹⁰

More recently, David Harvey, brilliant interpreter of Marx’s work, has extended Marx’s economic thesis to the cultural realm in his own research about the impact of economic time–space compression on the human experience. He explores how since the mid-nineteenth century we have begun to represent travellable spaces in radically new ways to ourselves. ¹¹ In a similar argument about travel speeds and about how the modern aesthetic illustrates a new sense of space, Anette Freytag argues that “[p]reindustrial means of movement and transport preserved the continuum of space they traveled because of the mimetic relationship with topography. […] The railway by its enormous speed dissolved the given space continuum. Two distant places could suddenly be ‘close.’” Through “[s]peed, and the completely new experience of motion engendered by speed […] everything was rearranged: time as well as space, landscapes, cities, commerce, and society”. ¹² In his book with the telling title “the conquest of distance”, Kaschuba writes how the train’s velocity “made impossible the experience of space in the old manner, that is, as a psycho-physical recording of embodied experiences and sensory impressions along a linear spatial and temporal track”. ¹³ Another much-cited study on mechanisation and time–space compression, which for the nineteenth century bases itself to a large extent on Schivelbusch’s work, is Tim Cresswell’s On the Move. Here, the “invention of the railroad and its rapid spread across the surface of the globe forced a fundamental rethinking of space. Distances were practically shrunk”. ¹⁴ Stephen Kern, too, in his book about the relations between technology and (elite) culture around the turn of the twentieth century, dedicates a chapter to “the shrinking of lived distance” caused by faster transport and communication offered by steam and electricity. As he concludes, “[t]he ‘annihilation of distance’ was not a science-fiction fantasy or some theoretical leap of physicists; it was the actual experience of the masses”. ¹⁵ Stressing again the dwindling significance of the traveller’s body in their experience of distances, Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett credit the railways with “a transformation of the experience of motion and distance” and “the disembodied experience of modern travel”. ¹⁶ Many similar arguments from other studies could be cited.

…  to a multiplicity of distances

At the same time, some of the scholars mentioned above, as well as others, have suggested how the new transport technologies of the nineteenth century could, theoretically at least, have the opposite effect as well. Schivelbusch has called their introduction a dual process: the railway’s speed “both diminishes and expands space”. ¹⁷ Similarly, Kaschuba writes that “[f]rom the new perspective of speed, space becomes both at the same time: smaller, and larger”. ¹⁸ Kern, referring here to the later technologies of telephony and bicycles, also notes that they “expanded lived space too”. ¹⁹ Still, when writing about space as expanding, these scholars are primarily referring to the fact that people operated over increasingly extensive geographic areas, whether as travellers (e.g. workers), capitalists (investing money across ever-increasing distances) or consumers of products from across the globe. Yet this material globalisation in itself did not necessarily mean that people also experienced the geographical reach of their lives as increasingly expansive. I am especially thinking of those with little power over movement, and those who did not travel themselves but saw distant moneys and goods come to them instead – a fact which they may not even have noticed. Would a Parisian under the Third Republic have known whether their baguette was made of American wheat? As geographer Doreen Massey famously put it, “there are those who are simply on the receiving end of time-space compression”. ²⁰

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan contributes an important critique of a different kind: humanity “conquers space but does not nullify its sensible size”. ²¹ This statement opens the way for imagining all sorts of manners in which space has remained perceptible through the senses, through the body. Similarly, Kaschuba adds that increased travel speeds in fact helped travellers oversee places in their wider, national and even continent-sized context. George Revill has directly tackled Schivelbusch’s idea of the detached, alienated railway traveller, observing that passengers were in fact deeply affected by the landscape travelled through. Each of these themes will return in the empirical part of this article. More broadly, Revill argues that “we have tended to take Schivelbusch’s persuasive narratives at face value and have not engaged in a more creative and critical dialogue with his work”. ²² In another sustained critique of the notion of a shrinking world, Scott Kirsch already drew attention to the metaphoric character of the phrase several decades ago. Still, although these critiques point the way to a number of potential alternatives to the shrinking-world thesis, these alternatives still need fleshing out in the historical record. I would therefore like to take up Kirsch’s call to examine any potential modern transformations (not just the shrinking) of space by paying attention to people’s individual, “everyday” lives, and by not assuming that these were identical to what happened in the macro-economic realm. ²³

Two authors in particular inform the conceptual framework of this article. In their work, Doreen Massey and Roland Wenzlhuemer both emphasise the multiplicity and the social differentiation of spaces. In her book Space, Place and Gender, Massey criticises the notion of time–space compression – in this case as a description of late-twentieth-century processes – arguing among other things that it allows us to forget that mobility and the experience of movement are differentiated along lines of wealth, geographic location and the social categories of race and gender. ²⁴ When Massey therefore writes in a later work that “(contrary to popular opinion) space cannot be annihilated by time”, she invites us to be attentive of “the articulation of [new] forms of power within spatial configurations”. “This is not the annihilation of space; but it is a radical reorganisation of the challenges that spatiality poses”. ²⁵

Roland Wenzlhuemer, writing about the nineteenth century, also nuances contemporary perceptions of the world as shrinking. Like Massey, he does so by drawing attention to the many people who did not have access to the new technologies, and by thinking of them not as technologies that conquered space, but as technologies “that transformed existing spaces and also created new ones”. It is in his treatment of these new spaces that Wenzlhuemer’s conceptual innovation lies. While Massey’s analysis already forces us to look out for different spaces as they may have existed for different social and cultural groups (partly, these spaces were literally apart; partly, they overlapped geographically but carried meaningful features that were different for different groups), Wenzlhuemer suggests that we also look for the existence of different spaces for the same group, or even the same individual. ²⁶ He offers several examples of the many distinct “spaces that co-exist with and are complementary to geographic space”. There is “communication space: how long does it take to communicate between two objects (e.g., people, apparatuses, institutions)? […] –transport cost space: how much does it cost to transport something specific from one place to another?” and so on. There are, as he puts it, “indeed, as many spaces as there are different forms of relations between objects”. ²⁷ Of course, socioeconomically informed distance and distance based on Wenzlhuemer’s “forms of relation” intersected. Poorer travellers would sooner notice differences in distance based on monetary price than would wealthier travellers. Yet Wenzlhuemer’s multiple conceptions of distance are not only relevant to different social groups but relevant in different circumstances, too. For instance, a city dweller opting for public transport around the year 1900 would experience distance as a function of tram network density, while the same person would be less concerned with this when choosing to walk.

Journeys far and near

Let us first analyse a typical example of a pre-railway statement of “farness”, mentioned earlier. Jacob Geel’s description of his journey as “far” formed part of the introduction to a light-hearted speech for a gentlemen’s club. In this introduction, Geel establishes himself as someone worth listening to: someone of sound judgment, who has seen enough of the world to be able to tell a good story. For instance, he makes the following off-hand mentions of things he will not be talking about: that he “almost fell into a 500-feet cleft on the Lilienstein” near Dresden or “was reckless enough to be floating around in a little boat on the Mediterranean near [political buffer state] Genoa, while the French were bombarding Algiers”. It is in this context that Geel also asserts, quasi-humorously:

I will look for my subject as far from here as possible, and shall talk a little about travel. I would be justified in saying I know a thing or two about that: for I have travelled twice, and pretty far from home, too. ²⁸

A more direct challenge to any simple shrinking-world thesis is posed by post-railway testimonies that emphasise distance. Dutch pastor Marie Adrien Perk (1834–1916) visited Italy by train in 1861. By this time, the railway system had grown vastly denser and more efficient than 30 years before: steam locomotion had reached its paradigmatic phase, to paraphrase Paul David. Still, the Alps were “far” from home for Perk, as he wrote in the published account that he based on notes taken daily during the journey. Next, to continue the journey from Genoa to Sardinia was simply too great a distance to cross. Even a day’s travel of 150 km, earlier on in his journey south, was perceived by him as “far”. ³⁰ In the following section, I will offer potential explanations for Perk’s perception of distances. A somewhat later instance is offered by Italy-based British writer Vernon Lee (1856–1935) who, again an author of her time, in 1897 published an essay “On Modern Travelling”. In contrast to Heine, Geel and even Perk, her world had always been brimming with railways. Yet still she was only referring to eastern-European destinations when she claimed: “I have never made a great journey”. ³¹

Further examples will be given in the next section, but perhaps even more telling than these are the many reverse instances, in which pre-railway travellers showed themselves dismissive of distances. In 1793, Johann Gottfried Ebel (1764–1830) published the first edition of what would become the most popular Swiss guidebook of the first half of the nineteenth century. Ebel himself was from Prussia in what is now western Poland, so Switzerland was not exactly around the corner for him, nor for many of his germanophone readers either. Still, he recommends Switzerland as a destination to those without time for anything but a “small [original: kleine] journey”. He lists several “small” itineraries in particular. One of these begins outside Switzerland – in Prussia?, courses to Biel via Geneva and Grindelwald and back home by way of Geneva. ³² Whether one looks at the “mileage” of this journey (roughly 500 km from Geneva) or its duration (two weeks according to Ebel’s own calculations), one cannot say that Ebel made much of distances.

Now, Ebel may have had commercial considerations to underplay distances in Switzerland, so let us look at some different examples. An even earlier traveller, after travelling from the northern Netherlands to France and Switzerland in 1765, left us a “Journal d’un petit voyage”. Despite this epithet, the journey had taken him as long as three months, during which he had covered a distance similar to Geel’s and Perk’s expeditions mentioned above. ³³ Another wrote a “Journal d’un petit voyage de Hanau à Strasbourg et Basle” in 1786, a single journey of almost 400 km. ³⁴ A particularly interesting title is Johan Frederik Willem van Spaen’s (1746–1827) Journal d’une petite course en Braband et en France faite au mois de Juillet et d’Aout de l’année 1789 par J.F.G. de Spaen de Biljoen [c. 500 km at it farthest point from his home in Arnhem]/et d’une plus grande en Angleterre deux ans après au mois de Juillet et d’Aout de l’année 1791 [700 km]. ³⁵ This text makes one wonder whether it was the 200-km difference that turned “a small ride” into “a bigger one”.

If we zoom in on travel writing in Dutch, expressions of this attitude multiply. One of the more well-known characteristics of the Dutch language is its frequent use of diminutives, which are indeed wielded copiously by pre-railway travellers. Parson’s daughter Jacoba Roosendael (1799–1853) called her five-week boat and coach journey to Switzerland a “Toertje” and a “pleziertogtje”, a little excursion and a small pleasure trip. ³⁶ Joachim Ferdinand de Beaufort (1797–1863), a man of private means, referred to his first ever journey to London – the crossing alone took more than 24 h – as “dit kleine reisje”. ³⁷ Linguist Barthold Hendrik Lulofs (1787–1849) even spent 40 h crossing the North Sea on his way to Hamburg: although steamers were less dependent on the weather than sailing boats, they did not marginalise journey times. Nevertheless, Lulofs called his voyage a “Reistogtje met de stoomboot”, a small trip by steamer. ³⁸ Preacher and magazine editor Bartholomeus Theodorus Lublink Weddik (1801–1862) wrote in a similar vein of his “zomertogtjes”, his small summer trips, to Germany. ³⁹ Another author also cultivated a trivialising tone when writing about a friend’s Swiss-Italian jaunt, or “uitstapje”. ⁴⁰ Even Charles Dickens’s American Notes were published in the Netherlands as Uitstapje naar Noord-Amerika. ⁴¹ In fact, Dutch first-person narratives in which journeys are designated as “small” or “no big deal” are easy to find in both the pre-railway and the railway age. ⁴² Without positing some form of Dutch exceptionalism, I suggest they offer a good example of how appraisals of distance could go either way.

To an extent they depended on their author’s individual situation. Travellers’ individual circumstances (work, health, family), personality, age (distances may seem larger to children) and travel experience will have shaped the worldliness or modesty, grandiosity, nostalgia or pessimism apparent in their sense of distance (as well as shaping the rhetorical flourish with which they expressed this sense; but in most cases it is fruitless to distinguish between the two). This would suggest that for some individuals, nearly everything felt far away, while for others hardly any distance seemed to matter. This, however, does not give us much opportunity to consider how the different layers of space along which an individual moved (railway travel time, transport cost, etc.) might have inflected their sense of distance: what did it mean to experience distance or proximity?

To have a sense of distance: components of a taxonomy

There are many reasons why the construction of a rail network and other new infrastructures in the nineteenth century did not turn long distances into short ones. Even during Europe’s age of steam, most traffic took place without the help of any steam engines at all, but on foot, by horse, sail, oar or other means. Technological breakdown was also not a thing of the past (see below for an example). Moreover, despite the sensation they caused when introduced, the railways were not always much faster, or even any faster, than existing means of transport. ⁴³ In their early days, steam trains would average about 15 km/h. By 1870, the express train from Paris to Lyon would still travel with an average speed of only 40 km/h from departure to terminus – although faster lines also existed. It indicates that advertised peak speeds could be a far cry from real average speeds. The difference was even more pronounced when considering the entire route from door to door – probably the most relevant measure from the perspective of the traveller. That route would in most cases involve a walk or a drive and a substantial amount of waiting. ⁴⁴

Still, perhaps the most important reason why railway speeds did not utterly transform the experience of distance must be the one explored theoretically above: that travellers held multiple conceptions of distance anyhow. Even those who did travel fast did not necessarily travel “close”, because experienced distances were not solely determined by travel time or speed. Uncoupling distance from speed alone, the remainder of this article will attempt to ascertain what other types of distance were meaningful to the authors of nineteenth-century diaries, letters and travel notes.

(1) Distance as effort. Effort was already suggested in the nineteenth century itself as an indication of distance: whatever took much effort to reach, felt far away. ⁴⁵ Here, effort could mean the energy needed to put oneself in motion (walking, driving, changing trains); the work done to survive over the course of a journey (the number of times a bed must be made, or food found); or the discomfort or even pain that must be endured on the road (cold, thirst, motion sickness). When considering space in this manner, distance becomes directly linked to human physical activity. A destination might, for instance, be perceived as far because someone had to sleep in five different inns to reach it, which might be experienced as more troublesome, and therefore have more impact, than the journey itself lasting five days. On the other hand, two factors that could greatly relieve effort and distance were reliable services and dense infrastructural networks with convenient coach or railway stations or embarkation points. Yet this also meant that the temporary failure of a service that would normally be available to a traveller of a particular status and affluence was experienced as a real obstacle. ⁴⁶

One of the most high-profile writers on effort and modernity was John Ruskin (1819–1900). Ruskin, however, linked the idea of distance as effort straight back to the arrival of the railways. Before this historic turning point, he wrote in The Stones of Venice, “distance could not be vanquished without toil”. ⁴⁷ This also formed part of Schivelbusch’s argument: pre-railway travellers gained an immediate grasp of distance as they observed their own bodies and those of their draught animals. The introduction of steam travel meant the disappearance of the exhausted body and therefore of tangible distances. ⁴⁸ Yet let us see how Ruskin continues his narrative about “the olden days of travelling”. The pre-railway traveller to Italy would recollect “few moments […] more fondly […] than that which […] brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre”. This is how Ruskin was used to passing the last stretch of his journey to Venice before a railway station had become its terminus. Significantly, however, he employed a private gondolier. What has happened here to the happy toil described earlier? This is not to accuse Ruskin of hypocrisy, but to point to the role of amnesia in the shrinking-world thesis. Symptomatic of the debate is that writers seem to forget that affluent eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century travellers would almost without exception travel by road carriage, boat or sedan chair, and that these were all operated by servants. ⁴⁹ The old diligence may have been less comfortable than the railway carriage, but this is not quite what Ruskin meant by toil. Rather, he idealised a way of life in which the travelling intellectual would be in charge of their own locomotion – usually as a pedestrian. As he did so, he forgot that he was not depicting the historical situation. If, for the wealthy, effort distances were disappointingly negligible after the coming of the railways, they had been quite similar before. What Ruskin also seems to have forgotten when writing this, was that he was describing a presumed loss felt by only a tiny portion of society.

The effort needed to move thus depended on class and therefore distance did, too. The same social groups that could travel with very little “toil” before the railways could also do so afterwards, while the less wealthy continued to have to contend with a lot of pain and trouble, thus really “vanquishing” more distance. This situation had several causes. Just like public coaching services had always been expensive, so rail fares, too, remained high for a long time. The price of motorcars, later on, was exceptionally prohibitive, but even bicycles were not very accessible until a while after their introduction. As a consequence, many people continued to travel on foot.

Take apprentice draughtsman Abraham Mossel (1891–1943?), socialist, Esperantist, vegetarian. In 1911, he set off with two equally idealistic friends to travel the world on foot. Mossel took extensive notes and after his forced return to Amsterdam at the outbreak of the First World War, he turned these into a book. Especially when it came to crossing the Alps, he painstakingly detailed the efforts demanded by their trek (Figure 1). Although he and his friends covered impressive distances – 45 km on a day was not unheard of – there were days when their feet were in so bad a condition that they preferred “not to cover [such] a large distance”. Here, the meaning of distance becomes truly palpable: on such days, 45 km was a long way. The following summer, the party traversed the Hungarian puszta. This was so extended, so monotonous, shadowless and scorching hot – in short, “walking presented a very real effort” – that even their daily hikes of 20–30 km were “considerable distances”. Even when the friends did travel by train, after saving up, conditions were often crowded and uncomfortable. One of them had to stand a whole winter journey long squashed on the open balcony of a railway carriage: a long distance indeed (see also Figure 2). ⁵⁰ OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

When travelling by train, lived distances could be long, too. Source: Honoré Daumier, “Voyageurs de troisième classe – complètement gelés” [Third-Class Travellers: Frozen to the Bone] (Le charivari, 1855), Noack Collection, Ascona (daumier-register.org), no. 2732.

When intersecting with gender, the role of class was a different one. We see this, for instance, in the 1820 journal kept by Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855). Wordsworth contrasted her own plucky determination to cross the Alps on foot with the sensitivities of a “country-town-bred young Lady” in England. When the lady’s female friend decided to walk the final mile from London to Canterbury herself, and consequently alighted from their coach, the lady “exclaimed from the coach-window, ‘what! walk all the way by yourself! you will have a sad long dreary walk!’” ⁵¹ There was a general sense in the nineteenth century, among both women and men, that women lacked the proper strength for such walks. Especially in the ascent, they were often helped along by guides, or carried in sedan chairs or on donkeys or mules. Foot journeys were therefore often described as long – occasionally by the hikers themselves, but, unsurprisingly, more usually by the men and women around them, as in Wordsworth’s scene.

As suggested above, although many authors explicitly ascribed this weakness to all women, it had strong aristocratic and upper-middle-class connotations. In other words, women from the elite did not often have to exert themselves physically in order to cross distances, but if they did, the resulting subjective distances seem to have been disproportionally large for some of them, and also in the eyes of some of their companions. For the majority of women, meanwhile, walking remained the self-evident mode of (medium-distance) transport until the general cheapening of railway tickets and bicycles: for domestic and agricultural servants on their way to a new employer for instance, but also for Wordsworth herself during her early years of straitened circumstances.

We should also consider other types of effort besides those that required physical energy or created bodily discomfort. Those lower down on the social rungs had more difficulty securing accommodation, for instance, because of their straitened means but also because of their smaller social network and their appearance, which was deemed less presentable, as accounts like Mossel’s testify. Moreover, before the journey itself had even started, they had to work longer to save up for their period off regular work and away from their family’s care – although we cannot assume that this always led to a sense of the world as a big place. ⁵² For these reasons and more, people of different socioeconomic and gender backgrounds moved in different effort spaces.

(2) Distance as the “size” of the landscape in between. The way travellers engaged with the passing landscape created another layer of distances, or rather several layers. Like effort, these layers were grounded in the traveller’s body and in the physical spaces which that body moved through, whether the landscape was passing their window, as from a train, or brushing their shins.

Take Dutch Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), who in 1892 made a three-month journey to America. His travel notes show that journey time from Europe to North America had been vastly reduced over the course of the nineteenth century, from several weeks at the start of the century to just 130 h by Bavinck’s days. Yet in his words, “130 hours […] is quick to say, but one feels the length and the cost first, when one sees nothing but water — infinitely wide, everywhere — day after day, night after night”. For Bavinck, the transatlantic distance was vast, the voyage boring and America “far” and “distant”. Yet these feelings were not caused by travel time in itself. In fact, his journey lasted shorter than, for instance, Geel’s journey to Italy. Rather, it was the insistent repetition on the Atlantic Ocean of a single landscape type that mattered: water, and nothing but water. Distances were long within America itself as well. Even though Bavinck travelled by train and steamer and remained close to the Great Lakes, he found the country “wondrously large […] We do not understand its expanse”. These observations were also prompted by the sheer size of America’s natural phenomena, such as its rivers and falls. In sum, Bavinck’s sense of distance was enhanced by his moving through a long series of landscapes of the same kind, as well as by passing large landscape elements. ⁵³

Landscapes could inspire a sensation of immensity in yet another manner. In her essay on travel, Bavinck’s contemporary Vernon Lee described an “immense journey” she made on one of her Italian sojourns. Yet in a reverse figure from Bavinck’s, Lee associated this experience with the variety of landscapes she encountered, instead of their monotony: “We seemed to traverse all countries and climates; lush, stifling valleys […]; oak-woods […]; desolate heaths […]; green irrigated meadows […]; so that in the evening we felt homesick for that distant, distant morning” – Lee’s point being that, in terms of the number of kilometres covered, this had been a remarkably short journey: “we had only covered as much ground as from London to Dover!” Nevertheless, her Ruskinian attention to detail, made possible by travelling in the open air in a pony cart, had provided access to the many variations in the Italian landscape and hence to her experience of its size. ⁵⁴

Even industrial speeds did not prevent a sense of great distance – on the contrary. This is demonstrated by the account of lawyer and politician Jan Willem Staats Evers (1828–94), who travelled across Italy by express train in 1870. While he emphasised the high velocities with which he travelled and the short journey times this resulted in, he also underscored the size of the distances he traversed. In fact, it was precisely the availability of an express train that revealed to him “how big Italy is” – “Wat is Italië groot!” – though we are left to speculate whether this was caused by his knowledge of the train’s speed, or the sensation of its hunting oscillation, points changes, noise, or the trees and telegraph poles whizzing by. At the same time, Italy’s size made the effective operation of its railways all the more impressive to Evers. In his experience, high speeds and large distances enhanced each other, thus turning on its head the assumption that swift transportation creates proximity. ⁵⁵

In all these instances, distance, rather than being time people spent in their seats, detached from their bodies and isolated from the landscape, was something people could feel, hear, and see. This was precisely the point of another nineteenth-century essay on travel: Thomas De Quincey’s (1785–1859) 1849 “The English Mail-Coach”. De Quincey associated velocity with both old and new means of transport; with both the road carriage and the railway carriage. Only, De Quincey contended, on the old mail this velocity was tangible in so many more ways than on the train (Evers in Italy might have disagreed). “The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling”. This passage, describing a sensational coach trip, further demonstrates the historical relativity of speed: each period, each mode of transport perhaps even, produces its own sensations of speed. Yet De Quincey’s account, like Evers’s, also shows that (subjective) speed and (subjective) distance may well go together and even emphasise each other. For if part of De Quincey’s praise in this essay is reserved for the British mail’s velocity, another is for the powers of coordination with which the mail traversed the island’s “vast distances”. ⁵⁶

(3) Distance as difference between origin and destination. Cultural and topographical differences between travellers’ homes and their destinations also enhanced travellers’ sense of distance in many cases. Places which looked familiar or which had been visited before, whether in person, through the eyes of friends or visual artists, or by means of the overwhelming amount of travel writing available at the time, might feel closer than they would have felt on the basis of different criteria. A post-railway instance of a nevertheless “distant” journey illustrates this.

A small volume, published pseudonymically in Amsterdam in 1909, possibly by a priest, sought to promote Lourdes as a place of pilgrimage. Unfortunately, the author wrote, “to travel all the way to Lourdes seems to many people so far, so remote, something so extraordinary, that they do not soon undertake it and hardly suppress a smirk”. Yet in those days the journey from Amsterdam to Lourdes was a quick and smooth train ride. The author’s explanation is therefore worth noticing. He felt that Lourdes, under the influence of the irreverent writings of Huysmans and Zola, in a time of fierce anti-clericalism fired by the Dreyfus affair, had come to be viewed as too exotic or too silly a place to merit a visit. Even the author himself on occasion felt a stranger to the culture he encountered in the south of France. This happened, for instance, when he became engulfed in a processional crowd which was making a deafening noise: an expression of religious feeling he was unaccustomed to. It was this unfamiliarity which caused the sensation for both the author himself and the people he mentions in his introduction, that Lourdes was far removed from the Netherlands. Other destinations felt closer, he adds as an illustration, including destinations several times more distant in terms of geographic space or travel time: “yes, even Norway and Denmark”. ⁵⁷

Vernon Lee relates another railway-era experience of being “immensely far off”. Only 16 miles from Florence, on what was probably the same pony-cart trek alluded to above, she

arrived in utter darkness at the friendly mountain farm, and sat down to supper in the big bare room […] the cool night air still in our throats, the jingle of cart-bells and chirp of wayside crickets still in our ears! Where was Florence then? ⁵⁸

The contrast between the bright bustling city and the calm and dark countryside suddenly turned a distance of 16 miles and only 4 h of travel into a substantial one. Again, this was difference distance, not geographic distance or time distance.

The relevance of cultural and landscape differences might also explain Johan Frederik Willem van Spaen’s “plus grande” journey to England, mentioned earlier. The francophone Van Spaen perhaps expected to find a less familiar culture and topography in England than in France. Yet perhaps he also considered the sea crossing more arduous than a journey overland (distance as effort), intended to visit a greater number of locations on the island (distance as landscape variety), or spend more money there (distance as cost, already mentioned by Wenzlhuemer).

If difference could cause distance, recognition could create proximity. In 1858, educational reformer Elise van Calcar-Schiotling (1822–1904) visited Paris for work. After she had arrived, she was troubled for a while by a sense of being far away from home. One night, however, she experienced an unexpected moment of nearness: “that same ancient star-spangled sky curved” over her, and she recognised “the familiar constellations to which [she was] so used each night to look up”. For a moment, she felt “quite close to home”. ⁵⁹ This observation also sheds a new light on Heine’s essay. Although in Paris, he felt that the North Sea was on his doorstep. Yet Heine was standing at the end of a railway line, and so his feeling made sense. Here was a single iron road stretching all the way to the northern coast, a road which forged a symbolic link between here and there: the two places were captured in a single image.

Such bonds, created by railways or starry skies, rivers or mountains, are related to the importance of homeliness in creating a sense of proximity. In my earlier work, I identified two factors that contributed to homeliness: familiarity, briefly discussed here, but also safety. When travellers did not feel safe they had difficulty feeling at home, which may in turn have magnified their sense of distance. ⁶⁰ In fact, the Dutch use of the diminutive for journeys may often have referred to these same aspects. Rather than simply denoting smallness, the suffix “-je” could communicate a certain hominess about the journey. A “reisje” was a safe journey, a journey within the realm of the known, distinct from the overseas voyages of discovery and plunder that the Dutch had also been undertaking for centuries. Similar devices to express understatement in other languages may equally have helped domesticate the known world. As a somewhat distinct expression of proximity, in those rarer cases when such devices were used ironically they could also impart an aura of worldliness to travel writers and their readers, akin to the pseudo-modest manner in which Jacob Geel dismissed his more spectacular exploits. They seem to say: this place is dangerous but we are at home there.

(4) Distance as interrupted communication. One more type of proximity or distance which must be mentioned consisted of travellers’ communication arrangements. These really formed a whole series of spatial layers, including, for instance, minimal communication cost space (the lowest price for communication with different locations, depending on the infrastructures available), communication time space (the shortest time it took to hear back) and communication quality space (how much information or emotion could be conveyed or received). Of course, these various maps of general minimums and maximums can also be drawn for different means of communication separately.

This article offers room for just one example, one that sums up several of these layers. In the nineteenth century, common channels of communication used by travellers were letters, periodicals, books, diaries, sketches and prints. Later on, photos, postcards and the telegraph were added to the list of options. Yet the telegraph, however revolutionary in its speed, was only used sporadically by private individuals. After all, telegrams remained expensive for a long time, they depended on the availability of a telegraph office and were only suited for short messages. ⁶¹ As said, each method of communication generated its own distances – its own maps – in terms of the amounts of time or money required in order to convey messages to various destinations: a town with a telegraph office might feel closer than a town without one. Yet each of these methods could also create an especially heightened sense of distance when not functioning as expected. As a result, the same location might feel close one moment, but far away the next.

Performer Mina Krüseman (1839–1922) and her maid Jeanne H. (?) were living in Paris in the summer of 1870, with Krüseman’s father and H.’s aunts staying behind in Brussels. Letters seem to have been their main line of communication to their respective families. Suddenly, H. began to feel her aunts to be “so far away”. The culprit was the Franco-German War. By August of that year, it inhibited communication considerably. As Krüseman wrote in one of her letters: “We […] live in the middle of Paris, as if Paris lay at the other end of the world!” ⁶² On the communication maps mentioned above, such events of failure can be pictured as increasing communication time and cost by a vast amount, or, which is equivalent, dramatically decreasing communication quality. Whichever of these maps is used therefore, distances between Paris and the rest of the world, usually so short, had in the summer of 1870 grown to a grim size. Like Heine’s, Krüseman’s mental map had just been redrawn.

Many more potential layers of distance could be imagined, but most with a much smaller presence in nineteenth-century travel writing than the ones illustrated here. For example, in their by now classic research on mental maps and distance cognition in more recent decades, D. J. Walmsley found that distances towards a city centre are generally imagined to be shorter than their intersubjective (e.g. kilometre) distance warrants, while distances away from a city centre are imagined to be longer. ⁶³ Because people in wealthy countries tend to travel towards the centre in the morning, this may well relate to commuters’ levels of positive anticipation or morning-time wakefulness; and to levels of fatigue when they return to the suburbs or the countryside. Similar types of space may have existed in the minds of nineteenth-century citizens, but sources different from travel writing will be needed in order to uncover these.

Concluding remarks

In one of her last books, Doreen Massey ironizes the strange phenomenon that, if we take the existing literature at face value, modern space has been expanding and contracting at the same time, and by the same cause, too: the speed-up of modern infrastructures. ⁶⁴ Travel writing offers one way out of this conundrum. The evidence cited here suggests that nineteenth-century experiences of distance cannot be reduced to a consideration of railway speeds alone: space cannot be reduced to time. We find many a “slow” pre-railway traveller dismissive of distances, while many “fast” post-railway travellers regarded those same distances as considerable. Instead, travel writing invites us to consider other layers of distance – bodily and material and geographical layers – in order to appreciate how individual travellers conceived of distances.

What caused people to perceive places as near or far can be pictured as a series of spatial layers. Each layer could become foregrounded in the traveller’s mind and so inform their sense of distance at that point in the journey. European writing of the nineteenth century features a number of such types of distance in particular. Distance was often conceived as effort. It could mean the “size” of the landscape between origin and destination; or the cultural and topographic differences between the two. Distance could also be a function of the ease of communication, with communication breakdown making places suddenly seem a long way off. Each of these layers can be taken further apart, revealing multiple sublayers determined by, for instance, physical effort as well as social effort, or landscape monotony as well as landscape variety.

However, rather than arriving at a definitive taxonomy of distance types, my aim has been to show that in many of these layers, distances were still an intensely embodied, material and landscape-oriented experience; that these layers had a different relevance for different travellers depending on their wealth, gender, occupation and other structural social characteristics, as well as on individual circumstances; and that many places therefore continued to be far away for many people in many instances. Rather than vanishing, distances remained a tangible reality to travellers, firmly anchored in their bodies, the landscapes they traversed and the materialities of transport and communication.

John Ruskin, besides being critical of what the steam engine might bring, also had an inkling of space as unshrinkable. In another art critique, in which he again broached the subject of the railways, this inkling found succinct expression:

And [people] will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using. ⁶⁵