1. The most substantial assessment of railways in Victorian fiction is Nicholas Daly’s Literature, Technology and Modernity 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For other discussions of railways in mid-century British fiction,
2. see Matthew Beaumont, ‘The Railways and Literature: Realism and the Phantasmagoric’, in Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, eds, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, pp. 35–43 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007);
3. Ian Carter, ‘“The Lost Idea of a Train”: Looking for Britain’s Railway Novel’, Journal of Transport History 21.2 (2000): 117–39;
4. Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), pp. 195–218. On the wider cultural impact of the railway see
5. Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: the Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)