Railways, Disjointed Mobility, and National Decline: Navigating George Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’

Abstract

This article thinks through the imagined impact of railway collapse in George Chesney’s short story ‘The Battle of Dorking’ (1871). By interrogating the representation of railway infrastructure and mobilities in the first example of invasion-scare fiction, it reads a conflation between nation, empire, and railway network, materially and symbolically. Noting the dependence on railway networks for national and imperial organization by the later decades of the nineteenth century, this reading shows that the invasion anxiety that surfaced in these decades unsettled presumptions around railway superiority and highlighted the political nature of railway construction, operation, and organization.

Keywords

• Infrastructure
• network
• empire
• fiction
• warfare
• journeys