Book Review: They Knew Their Station in Life ; Railways and the Victorian Imagination by Michael Freeman Yale Pounds 25

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There are some things a don has to keep dark, in order to retain an air of academic authority. You can't be taken seriously as a Ruskin scholar, for instance, if it gets around that you dress up as him at weekends. Michael Freeman's illustrated survey of Victorian railway culture opens with this bombshell: "As a young teenager in the mid 1960s, I might have expected that a fascination with trains would quickly fade amid the rebellious youth culture represented by groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Somewhat curiously in hindsight, it did not." For the rest of the book, you're stuck with this image of the bobble-hatted author standing by the Dairy Milk machine on …