Nor is it really a history of technology, for whenever the author attempts to discuss such matters, he reveals a poor underĀ standing of the subject. It is not intended to be a history of travel. This book is about the social/psychological impact of' railway travel in Western Europe ancl North America. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 515 The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century. (6) Consequently, the railway companies' marketing.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The growing approbation of the consumer in the early twentieth century turned both on men's increasing consumption and on women's assertion of full political, economic and social status. (5) And as Sheryl Kroen reminds us, gender infuses the history of consumption and hence that of commercial cultures. These commercial cultures are constructed and communicated through a wide range of literary, visual, aural and physical media, including technological objects and spaces such as vehicles. Related processes include the development of corporate brands, trademarks and public relations. (4) One such process is aspirational marketing based on the social distinction conferred by the purchase of a service like a train journey. are inherently concerned with the commodification of various kinds of cultural difference' as a consequence, 'the apparently rational calculus of the market is inescapably embedded in a range of cultural processes'. The term 'commercial culture' acknowledges that 'various aspects of cultural production. In a market economy, as soon as people have any choice about whether to move, and if so by which means, their mobility becomes shaped by the commercial cultures of transport providers. Such a narrative embeds the consumption of railway travel in a history of personal mobility understood as a commodity. Why, then, should historians be interested in such cultural practices between the two world wars? Because in order to compete with the rapid spread of motoring from the early 1920s, the railways had to re-engineer the train as a masculine space, which might also appeal to the growing numbers of women with the time and money to travel. (2) By the First World War, the unparalleled safety, comfort and speed of British express trains was a staple of the private railway companies' efforts to persuade people to travel more. Accentuating the domestic comforts also eased women's acceptance of the train, helping to regulate interaction between the sexes when strangers came together in the confined space of the compartment. In particular, recasting the train's amenities as a mobile version of those found in the home served to reconcile men to a way of moving that might otherwise have been construed as effete. In Victorian Britain the invocation of bourgeois notions of civility had countered widespread anxieties about this novel way of travelling. From one perspective this photograph was just the latest twist in a long history of the train's representation as a civilised form of transport. (1) Freed from any worry of crashing, and watched over by the railway's disciplined employees as well as by any accompanying adults, the girl was lulled by the train's gentle motion and upholstered seating, even while at speed, into that most vulnerable condition of everyday life: sleep. The winning entry in a competition aimed at the company's workers, the image connoted the civilised nature of British railway travel in the inter-war decades. In February 1937 the London & North Eastern Railway Magazine published a photograph of a young girl sound asleep on a train (Figure 1).
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