since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist the best critical study

since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind". What is art writing, ask the editors of this 600-page anthology of art writing. It comprises "histories, theories, anecdotes, epigrams, how-to-do-it manuals, recorded conversations, fictions and poems". So if the Victorians flirted and seduced and bounced up and down on the carriage cloth as they steamed through Brunel's tunnels under Durdham Downs, Freeman has decided to remain silent on the issue. Gayford and Wright, professional art critics themselves, follow Baudelaire's maxim that "the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic ... While dreadful sex crimes still occasionally take place on trains, the British railway long ago ceased to provide opportunities for consensual sexual dalliance.

The gum-spotted upholstery, slashed seats and humus of polystyrene cups found on today's railways militate, I'd suggest, against amour. The only sexual experience I've ever had on a train was in the Czech Republic, a country noted for the cleanliness of its rolling stock.There's no carnal plot in Railways and the Victorian Imagination. And more disturbingly, the Victorian porno classic, Raped in a Railway Carriage - reprinted throughout the 1890s - conjures the closed train compartment as a space in which all sorts of carnal outrages might be perpetrated. The existence of ladies- only carriages - a fact unrecorded by Freeman - suggests that impropriety occurred in the unsegregated parts of the train.

The tempo of train travel fuels the homicidal desires of the monomaniac protagonist of Balzac's La Bete Humaine (1890). The railway companies ensured that the ticket-pricing regime reinscribed the social structure of British society upon the train itself, but that can't have prevented passengers cruising each other within their own compartments. All was in keeping with his dark purposes."Rail travel also offered more obviously pleasurable stimulation The possibility of casual sex, for instance. Outside the clinic, the link between madness and rail travel proved a rich resource for novelists. The hero of Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel (1865) suffers a collapse exacerbated by the cross-country pursuit of his abducted sister. For some observers, the railway carriage was a potentially hysteric zone.