Second-generation Victorians were finding themselves increasingly anxious as they struggled to make sense of the rapidity of change in the world around them

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 34.

Sometimes called ‘newspaper novels’, the plots of these books might have been taken straight from the Newgate Calendar – an annual compendium of violent crime – and they mirrored the emotive press coverage of extreme offences, feeding the Victorian appetite for reading about transgression and brutality. Designed to electrify the nerves, they proclaimed themselves to be (as Mrs Braddon put it) morbid, hideous and delicious. In other words, fear was part of their appeal.

But while it was titillating to read about murder from the comfort of an over-stuffed armchair, sensation novels – because they located crime right at the heart of bourgeois homes – also hinted uncomfortably at cracks within the Victorian ideal, insinuating that even respectable society concealed a dark, criminal underside. Critics were alarmed both by their lack of restraint and by their tendency to drug our thought and reason; they considered them to be an ‘inferior’ form of fiction and derided them as the abominations of the age. Despite the fact that they were dubbed dangerous and foolish, the books were vigorously promoted by the new bookstalls established by W. H. Smith on station concourses in the wake of the railway revolution, and they were phenomenally successful, selling in their tens of thousands.

The murder of Thomas Briggs in a first-class “railway carriage so close to the centre of the metropolis, with its attendant air of impenetrable mystery, was supra-sensational. It suggested an implicit threat to the day-to-day safety of society as a whole, as if the plot of a novel were spilling over into reality. The critic Richard Holt Hutton had written in 1861 that every year [sensation novels] wander further afield in search of novelty, and glance more and more wistfully at the unexhausted store of the horrible, exceptional or morbid incident. This murder, committed in a public – but effectively locked – space, broke all known rules. It pricked at the horrible fear that, beyond the pages of a novel, one’s own ordinary existence could also be plunged into a chaotic hell. And, whereas sensation novels concluded with the discovery of wicked secrets and the restoration of order, the murderer (or murderers) of Thomas Briggs were unidentified and at large. It was a reality that unsettled every member of the public who travelled by train, shattering confidence in the security of their established routines.

The crime played, too, on an undefined but pervading sense of latent danger that had begun to develop during the 1860s. Second-generation Victorians were finding themselves increasingly anxious as they struggled to make sense of the rapidity of change in the world around them. It turned out that all that much-admired and ever-accelerating progress was also destabilising many of the orthodoxies that once sustained society. New and controversial theories propounded by men like Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species had been published only five years earlier, in 1859 – confirmed that people could no longer rely on centuries-old geological, Biblical and scientific certainties. New wealth destabilised old hierarchies and class structures. Modernity changed everything and its benefits and drawbacks were vigorously debated. Lurking beneath it all was a growing “uncertainty about where the individual fitted into this new moral and physical universe.

The railways more than anything else – both tyrannical industrial monsters and engines of progress – seemed to crystallise these conflicting feelings of admiration and doubt.

The present has been lived before in the past. We always fear the future.