The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed fiction - for ever

Secret Life of Books

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19d ago 1:04:19

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It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an all-stations train journey through literary locomotion.

One of life's great pleasures is reading a good book on a train, as it rattles through scenic countryside. But what's more annoying than cramming onto a packed underground train at 8am, desperate for a moment with a book before work, only to be wedged between an armpit and a stroller? Trains are social levelers: a means of bringing unlikely people together; and often keeping them apart. Trains help tell stories about social divisions and distinctions in status, love affairs and heartbreak, unwanted changes in landscapes and the ever-increasing encroachments of modern life.

Tune in to find out why, in short, trains are at the heart of many great books, and why train travel turned out to be the ideal metaphor for the experience of reading modern fiction.

Books mentioned in this episode:

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, "The Signal Man"

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Graham Greene, The Little Train

Lev Grossman, The Silver Arrow

Edward Thomas "Adlestrop"

Jilly Cooper, Rivals

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