Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
Injustice breeds injustice
Accidents will occur in the best regulated families
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some
The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.
Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy,--they do, thank God!
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Dickens's Writing and the Railways: Fact or Fiction
Kew Library, North Road, Kew (UK)
Tue, 17th April 2012 - Tue, 17th April 2012
Charles Dickens's personal history is wrapped up with his involvement in the Staplehurst Accident on 9 June 1865. While travelling home in a boat train with his mistress and her mother, a ganger's error while repairing a bridge caused the middle section of the train to career off the tracks. Forty passengers died, yet Dickens and his companions survived by being in a front first class carriage. Nevertheless, this event caused Dickens considerable trauma and possibly contributed to his death in 1870. Yet, Dickens's association with the railways goes far beyond the accident and he commented frequently on the British railway network in its early years. Whilst he campaigned after 1865 for the improvement of railway safety through his magazine All Year Round, he frequently criticised other apsects of the railway industry in his writings, most notably in Mugby Junction, where railway station 'Refreshments Rooms' came in for particular criticism. However, while Dickens's representations of the railways have been analysed as literature, the question as to whether they represent an accurate depiction of the British railway industry before 1870 has been largely ignored. This talk explores the aspects of the early Victorian railways that Dickens described and considers whether what he wrote was true to reality.
