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Age Of The Railway, The By Harold Perkin Soft Cover 1970
The Age Of The Railway By Harold Perkin
Soft Cover
Copyright 1970
351 Pages
Contents
Introduction 11
1 The Man on Horseback 15
2 Why the Railways came 48
3 The Men who made the Railways 77
4 The Great Connecter 96
5 New Towns for Old 122
6 The New Class Society 151
7 The Railways as Big Business 176
8 A Day by the Sea 201
9 The Commuter Age 238
10 The End of an Age 277
Table of Important Dates affecting
Communications 312
This is not just another book about the history of railways, interesting and enjoyable as that might be for the small boy - or girl (see the dedication) - in all of us. It is an attempt to introduce to the general reader, young and old, the new kind of history, social history, which is now beginning to be widely studied in schools, colleges and universities. It does this by approaching the history of our own country in the last century and the early years of this one through the medium of transport and communications in general, and in particular through the impact on the lives of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the revolution wrought by the steam locomotive, the first mechanized, power-driven prime mover of land carriage known to man. In the process it touches on many aspects of life in the past: the standard of living and the structure of society before and after the transport revolution, the transition from life in the village and countryside to life in great towns and cities, the development of large-scale industry and big business, the beginnings of leisure and holidays for the mass of the population, class conflict and the development of democracy, trade unions and the Labour Party, as well as the building of the railways themselves, their progress in speed, efficiency and comfort, and the beginnings of the ultimate decline of steam. Through this approach to social and general history it is hoped that the ordinary reader will see at one view the importance of transport and communications in everyone's life, and the railway enthusiast the wider context and implications of his special interest. For both, the 'great connecter is a symbol of the connectedness of things, especially things in the history of our own society.
The book grew out of the first of two series of programmes, on 'The Railway Age' and 'The Automobile Age', which I wrote and presented some time ago for Granada Television. They were watched and, from their many letters I believe, enjoyed both by schools and by late-night viewers throughout the country. I should like to record my gratitude for his original suggestion to that irrepressible railway enthusiast, Jack Smith, the producer of the programmes, and for their unstinted and vastly enjoyable teamwork and co-operation to both him and the director, Eric Harrison. For once it is no exaggeration to say that without them this book would not have been written.
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