Distance is Abolished

Abstract

Two years before the serial publication of William Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon in Fraser’s Magazine (January to December 1844), Victorian commentator the Reverend Sydney Smith exulted that with recent improvements in England’s skeletal and disjointed railways, ‘Time, distance and delay are abolished’.¹ By the time Barry Lyndon appeared such delight was tempered with fear, for 1844 marked both the onset of the mid-nineteenth-century Railway Mania (1844–7) and the passage of William Gladstone’s Regulation Act that mandated low-cost access to the railways. By democratizing travel, the Regulation Act paradoxically affected a form of social deregulation that contributed to the fears of a nation in flux. The discussion that follows asserts that the coincidence of Thackeray’s publication and Gladstone’s legislation makes Barry Lyndon an unwitting symbol of the worst social problems increased travel and the death of distance could generate for the middle and upper classes: class transgression, and the social and legal crimes that anonymity fosters. Thackeray himself mused over to ‘what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised?’ trains would lead.² This necessarily troubles Thackeray scholarship, which has historically defined Barry’s near-epic transience as a function of the picaresque tradition.