British Railways and the Lure of the Fabulous

Some scholar papers:

Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s
Andrew Odlyzko
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Digital Technology Center
January 15, 2010

Abstract:
The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing demonstration of market inefficiency. There were trustworthy quantitative measures to show investors (who included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and the Bronte sisters) that there would not be enough demand for railway transport to provide the expected revenues and profits. But the power of the revolutionary new technology, assisted by artful manipulation of public perception by interested parties, induced a collective hallucination that made investors ignore such considerations.
They persisted in ignoring them for several years, until the lines were placed in service and the inevitable disaster struck. In contrast to many other bubbles, the British Railway Mania had many powerful, vocal, and insightful critics. But the most influential of them suffered from another delusion, which misled them about the threat the Mania posed. As a result, their warnings were not persuasive, and were likely even counterproductive, as they may have stimulated increased investments.
The delusions that led to the financial disaster of the Railway Mania arose from experience with the railway mania of the mid-1830s. Seldom even mentioned in the literature, it was about half the size of the big Railway Mania of the 1840s (and thus still far larger than the Internet bubble). The initial financially exuberant phase of it did collapse. But it appears to have been unique among large manias in that a few years later it was seen as having collapsed prematurely, as projects started during its exuberant phase became successful. That mania demonstrates the difficulty in identifying bubbles that are truly irrational. Both railway manias provide a variety of other lessons about the interaction of technology and financial markets.

The complete paper can be read on the personal webpage of the author and contains a lot of references to the Brontës involvement in the railway investments. Incidentally, we mentioned this article a few days ago in our daily newsround.

The 'Lure of the Fabulous': Gift-Book Beauties and Charlotte Brontë's Early Heroines
Author: Elaine Arvan-Andrews
Women's Writing, Volume 16, Issue 2 August 2009 , pages 263 - 282

Abstract
Charlotte Brontë indulged her early fascination with “high life” by reading and imitating silver-fork literature and iconography in her juvenilia. Although critics have contended that Brontë's rejection of silver-fork subject matter was necessary for her artistic growth, the legacy of “the fabulous” persists in her mature fiction, particularly in the development of her female characters. Her literary representations of aristocratic beauties, as they were rendered in gift annuals and silver-fork fiction, signal her attempt to negotiate female desire as it is represented through fashionable dress. With her “copies” in the late juvenilia, Brontë both closely reproduces and satirizes the feminine consumption of material excess in order to discover a more original means of depicting feminine subjectivity. The period between 1838 and 1839, during which Brontë wrote the novelettes Stancliffe's Hotel, Captain Henry Hastings, and Caroline Vernon, marks such a crossroads; while all three contain superficial elements of the annuals and silver-fork fiction, they also exhibit Brontë's emergent concern with interiority. Her eventual shift to a plainly dressed yet actively desiring female heroine in her late juvenilia represents a new visual template for representing female subjectivity which becomes the prototype for heroines in her mature work.

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