It’s summer, travel in Europe is going ahead at full speed again now that the fear of CoViD-19 has lessened, and so, pleasure trips and long-distance train journeys are as accessible again as they always were: more accessible for some, less accessible for others. But even if you are not railing away romantically as we speak, you can always take a peek at this beautiful historical train kept by the German Museum for Technology:
It is a miniature railway carriage from around 1900, part of a series of around fifty carriages and locomotives kept by the museum that were originally built by railway companies to show off their services. The museum has created a wonderful opportunity to walk through them so I encourage you to take a peek. Every little detail of these scale models of real trains can be seen: from the radiators to the little signs that prohibit the eager traveller from peeing while the train is at a station.
In fact, three loos have been recreated on this carriage. But what do we see there?
There are two cubicles for men, and only one for women. Of course, women did travel by train around 1900. Perhaps the logic of these train builders was that each gender should have an equal amount of space allotted to them, but that women had wider skirts and therefore needed a bigger cubicle, while the same space would offer room for two cubicles to serve men?
Yet it is a well-known fact that people with smaller bladders, who are pregnant, or who menstruate – usually women – need the toilet more often and for longer. This piece of unpractical design thinking that we often see nowadays – people who need less space get more space -was clearly already around more than a century ago.
Then again, another remarkable thing is that the cubicle containing the urinal offers no facilities to wash your hands. Another thing that men did not need?
Instead, as an extra service, they received: a horizontal bar to hold on to…
Tape and chairs and even an entire sofa on a usually empty lawn along a busy road in an upmarket part of town. What is going on here?
I had seen some things like this before in the Netherlands, but never on such a scale and with such an array of furniture. It had to have something to do with the upcoming hiking event, held annually in the town to which I moved three years back, although because of COVID this is the first time in three years it is happening. The Nijmegen ‘Four Days’. Organised since 1909. Four days of long-distance hiking, seven days of partying. Tens of thousands of hikers participate, cheered on by hundreds of thousands along the route.
More than a week before the start of the trek, the chairs started appearing in the landscape.
They became more every day. Who put them there, and why?
People were ‘booking’ a seat in the audience.
There was something uncanny about these empty seats and stretches of tape. To me, a historian of the nineteenth century, they looked like a colonial gesture.
Before I go on I want to make it clear that of course the Four Days’s audiences are no actual colonists. They are:
here to enjoy themselves and to cheer people on, not to earn money;
not likely to kill anyone in the process;
leaving again after four days.
However, there are some striking similarities, too, between the claiming of these viewing spots and what Europeans did on other continents in the last five hundred years:
this land belongs to the municipality, to the commons, in other words: to everyone in Nijmegen. And yet small groups of people claim it as exclusively theirs;
they plant their flag and expect this to be enough to make a lawful claim on the land. If I were just to sit down on the grass within one of these marked areas, the people who had claimed it the week previous would no doubt be very angry and expect me to leave. It shows how big is this faith in flags and tape. It is not actual usage and work and daily interaction that makes you belong to a piece of land (sowing crops, building homes), but a superficial, symbolic intervention such as posting a notice on a tree and walking away again;
who gets to make these claims? People who have access to tape and chairs or even sofas and who are able to move these to the designated piece of land. These are people either with a big car and arms and legs capable of moving this stuff (their own arms and legs or those of people willing to help them), or who live in this upmarket part of Nijmegen so that they did not need to lug their sofas very far. In other words: you cannot make this claim if you ‘only’ get up early each day of the hike to be here in time for a good spot (the hike starts at 4am, although from a different location). Your own body isn’t enough. You need capital. Access to labour. A plan. You need to invest, in the capitalist sense of the word;
although people invest in a spot, that does not mean they pay in full for what they harvest. That is not what investment entails. The lawn was designed by the municipality. The trees were planted by the municipality. The grass is cut by the municipality. And after the party-goers are gone, it is the municipality who cleans up their Mars wraps and Aperol bottles. Who is the municipality in this case? For most of this work, it is gardeners and cleaners. Cheap labour provides some people with a seat in the first row.
Is there a connection between Dutch historical colonialism and Dutch people routinely claiming public space to watch a sporting event or sell their wares on King’s Day? How deeply is this ‘claiming logic’ embedded in Dutch normality? I have not seen this form of appropriation anywhere else so far, so there might be something in Dutch culture that normalises this way of thinking. Meanwhile, I have seen many other places where people get up early and go and queue in order to get what they need or want. Or perhaps that’s only those with little money. Perhaps we should see this present Dutch form of appropriating space as a relatively benign way of claiming something that the entitled otherwise claim by using violence?
But let us stop rummaging around in the Dutch soul for a moment, go to a piece of lawn or pavement bordering on the march*, and sit down, loiter, squat, politely request, stand in front of, or get up really early to enjoy a bit of the parade. And let us hope that it is actually the people staying at the hospital next to the road who get to sit or lie in the best parts of the reserved areas.
A post about Neel Doff and her novel Keetje Errand Girl (Keetje trottin).
In 1921, exactly one century ago, a novel was published which ends in a remarkable scene. The novel narrates the childhood of Keetje Oldema, growing up in a destitute household in Amsterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century. The novel sees her, her parents and siblings struggling for a living through a series of jobs. Although the novel also contains many more cheerful moments, there is an ominous undertone throughout. From the very start, the novel is larded with scenes of pain, violence, and Keetje’s fear of growing up a woman, and scenes about the power that those with more money have over her. These scenes culminate in the book’s final chapter.
It is New Year’s Day, afternoon, and Keetje is alone – she thinks – in the house of her employers, apart from a sick lodger to whom she has to serve tea. Everyone else has gone out to pay New Year’s visits. Keetje is fourteen years old and she has been feeling increasingly alienated from her family, from childhood friends who have entered circles with more money, and from her own body. Her belly feels heavy, she is shivering. When she lies down for a moment, she discovers she has started her first period. Suddenly, she hears her boss enter the room. He throws herself on top of her, naked. “I could not cry out: he had glued his mouth over mine.”
The narrator goes on to describe a rape scene in explicit detail, naming what Keetje’s boss does to her, the sounds and movements he makes, how she tries to prevent him, and how her body feels, during and after the rape.
This was an exceptional scene to write in 1921, and it raises many questions: who wrote this novel, and what was their own connection to this literary material? What exactly made their work stand out from other work before them? And why was it important that they wrote it?
Neel Doff as a writer. Photo taken in a professional Brussels studio (scan from local Studiegroep Leudal)
Writer Neel Doff (1858–1942) lived in a similar economic position as her protagonist Keetje for much of her life. She was born in Limburg in 1858. Her parents – mother from Limburg, father from Groningen – moved to Holland when Doff was a child, in their search for employment. As the family grew, and as her parents wandered from job to job and the family from cellar room to attic and back, Doff soon assumed responsibility for part of the family income. Many of her jobs took her onto the streets of Amsterdam, where she sold pots and pans, delivered medicines and hats, and acted as a domestic servant. She only visited school intermittently, yet she tried to read whenever she could. She found books in her employers’ homes and no doubt also made use of the commercial lending libraries that existed across town, often as part of a shop.
Nevertheless, the family remained poor. Some biographers mention that Doff took up sex work when aged fifteen for this reason; others that Doff has always denied this – though we have to take into account the tremendous social pressures for an aspiring writer to deny any personal association with sex work. The Doffs, still looking for work, then moved to Belgium. Here, we do know for certain that one of Doff’s new jobs was to model for painters and sculptors. Through these artistic circles and the money she earned there, she was able to befriend wealthier and more educated people, and to catch up on her own education. She moved out of her parents’ and hired her own private apartment. Like a Great Gatsby avant la lettre – though not in it for love but for a home of her own – she worked on her self-presentation and on her own professional artistic skills.
She trained for a career on the stage for a while but soon moved into writing. She began by publishing translations and short stories, for instance in her partner’s political art magazine La Société Nouvelle. In 1911, she presented Keetje Oldema to her audience: an alter ego that was to feature in three of her novels. The final volume in this trilogy was Keetje trottin, ‘Keetje Errand Girl’, published in 1921 and containing the scene with which this article opened. The trilogy met with considerable critical acclaim in France.
Meanwhile, she married, was widowed, and married again. She seems to have been very fond of both her husbands. Still, for much of her life, Doff continued to live on her own. She acquired a house with a garden, and with it, the calm and independence she had always dreamed of, in a small town in Belgian Limburg, and became increasingly engrossed in the countryside and the natural world. This is were she died, in the thick of the nazi occupation of Belgium, aged 84. In the final decade of her life, her work had received new attention, in Belgium itself this time, although it never entered either the Francophone or Dutch literary canon.
First edition
As mentioned, the Keetje trilogy is partly autobiographical. That does not mean it is a “true story” from A to Z – if such a thing exists at all. In fact, Doff herself has said in an interview about one of the other volumes that it was 25% fiction. But whether the scene took place exactly as described is perhaps of less relevance to most readers. Of greater interest is Doff’s relation to the theme of sexual violence in her own life and how that compares to her protagonist’s relation to sexual violence.
Rape has always been an important literary theme in the Netherlands, Belgium and France as in the rest of the world. Yet the way Doff addresses it is strikingly new.
Depictions of rape in European writing have usually been less open that Doff’s and the same goes for the visual arts, and, I suspect, also for oral traditions. They speak of a before and an after, for example, but not of a “during”. Or they speak of rape in metaphors. Frequently, narrators also transport the theme to faraway places and times. They depict the Roman Lucretia, for instance, or retell one of the countless rape stories in the Bible. Add to this these famous stories’ sense of inevitability, their often euphemistic translations, and the respect given to many of their violent characters (they made up the male elite’s Classical heritage and religious identity, after all), this worked to obscure the actual mechanics and experiences of rape in them. (If you read Dutch, you might want to take a look at Mieke Bal’s study Verkrachting verbeeld.)
Often, rape in such stories also functions as a metaphor. In early-modern war propaganda, for instance, the defended country (the Dutch Republic, for example) is portrayed as being raped by the enemy (the Spanish emperor). (See Amanda Pipkin, Rape in the Republic.)
Finally, when they do actually speak about rape in explicit and real-life terms, which seems to have happened more often from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, most narratives focus on the experiences of men, not as raped persons themselves, but as bystanders (hurt in their honour, failing to protect their wives) or as rapists. At other times, the perspective of the rapee is taken – the rapee almost invariably being a woman in nineteenth-century literature. Yet in those cases, the story was usually created by a male artist who imagined, and often in fact fantasised, how a female character might experience her rape. (See Mary Kemperink, Het verloren paradijs.)
In Keetje trottin, rape is none of these: not implied or distanced, not depicted from the perspective of anyone who is not its victim, and certainly not used as metaphor only. Instead, it is explicit, literal and felt through the body of the raped person. What is more, the author herself shared her social and economic position as a child with her protagonist. Both were poor working-class girls employed by a series of wealthier men, likely also employed in sex work, and definitely in occupations that were at that time closely linked to sex work: modelling and stage performance. As a result, Doff will inevitably have had many encounters with sexual aggression and sexual claims across her childhood and youth. When I write that Doff was possibly the first Dutch author to explicitly depict a rape scene from a survivor perspective, I therefore mean both that the passage describes the experiences of the victim, and that Doff herself knew about that perspective. (Do you know of similar, earlier depictions by Dutch, Belgian or French authors? Please let me know.)
Now my argument is not that in order to write a good book about a working-class girl, one has to have been one oneself. This is an identity-based form of art politics that I do not subscribe to. Instead, my argument is that when writing about a certain experience, the resulting text will most likely be richer and more insightful if one has had similar experiences oneself, or has closely investigated that experience. Doff, in her decades-long financial dependence on those around her, and living in an age when the sexual availability of women and of the working classes was taken for granted by most, will have had many similar experiences to Keetje’s in this key scene, experiences which she must almost inevitably have drawn upon. It is this that makes her books truly remarkable.
Access to such scenes, written explicitly and by an author intimately acquainted with some of its meanings, has a lot to offer. It offers us historical insights. It offers an insight into literary history: what enabled, perhaps even encouraged twentieth-century authors to write about rape in this manner? Yet above all, it contributes at least two forms of non-academic knowledge.
In a novel such as Doff’s, some readers may find recognition and comfort.
Others may broaden their worldview. In an article in journal Vooys (“Hoe lezers lijden lezen”), Emy Koopman explains that explicit descriptions of rape are experienced differently by readers from implicit descriptions. In particular, in an explicit text that uses a lot of stylistic, literary means, readers empathise with the victim more than in an implicit text, but without being scared away from reading the story, as they might in a more businesslike explicit account. To broaden readers’ worldview by encouraging empathy with experiences outside their own life: that is what a literary text can do; and that is one of the things that Doff’s Keetje books can do for us.
This post was originally written for Women on the Timeline, a project run by Anouk Wolkotte, Charlotte Hermanns and other students at the Radboud University (Netherlands) that aims to rebuild the canon.
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the national-history museum of the Netherlands, is making an increasing number of its collection items available online. Online museum visits have a lot of benefits (next to some important downsides!). One of these is that one item can be shown in combination with many different items, and used in many different thematic exhibitions at the same time. The same photo of Amsterdam can, for instance, illustrate urban history and the history of photography.* Using this idea, one Rijksmuseum curator has assembled a ‘Queering the Rijksmuseum’ collection, in which works ranging from early printed books to modern jewellery are shown alongside each other.
One of the items is this picture from 1871:
Photo by Paul Ney, 21 July 1871. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, no. RP-F-F23327. Public domain. Accessed via Rijksmuseum
It was taken on a summer morning near a Bavarian salt mine: ‘Glück auf’ is a German miners’ greeting. According to the Rijksmuseum description, it shows two men, and we can see them carry what is probably a miner’s lamp. Are they two German miners in romantic embrace?
There are three noteworthy things about this photograph.
In the first place, of course, we see two men sitting very close together and looking comfortable. The picture reminded me of many of the photos in the recently published book Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love. And I agree with the Rijksmuseum curator that a case could certainly be made that the two people on the photo were intimately befriended. Check out the book if you want to compare notes: it is probably available in the Rijksmuseum library!
Second, that mine’s rocky facade looks suspiciously like papier-mâché. Also, the entrance is weirdly symmetric. And, most important of all, it would have been unusual for two miners in 1871, if they had the money to have a photo of themselves taken at all, to hire a photographer and pose with clean-scrubbed faces but still holding their miner’s lamp, in front of the entrance to their work. Much more likely, they would have arranged for a gentlemanly family portrait in their Sunday’s best, posing next to a Greek column or a vase. Or, if posing as miners, it would have been their employer who arranged for a photo to be taken of a group of workers, in order to promote their own enterprise.
You guessed it: the two figures are no miners at all, but tourists. According to the handwritten text on the photo they were ‘on the way to the Königssee’, a lake close to where the photo was taken. This text is in Dutch, so they had probably travelled from the Netherlands or Flanders, and were perhaps taking an Alpine trip of a few weeks.
What’s more, the photo itself was not taken in front of a mine, but in a photographer’s studio specialising in tourist snapshots. The studio was located close to an actual salt mine, but it was much more convenient to make these photographic souvenirs in front of a replica of the mine. We can only guess at whether the two tourists even saw the real mine in the first place. In many ways, tourism back then was already very much what it is like now.
Thirdly and finally, I wonder whether the mine is the only ‘fake’ on this photo. Here I enter the realm of speculation, I must add. But the picture does raise the question: were these tourists men at all? There is something in their oversized coats, the hat of the person on the right and the white pantaloons (with lobed edge) of the person on the right; something about their posture and the way they bear their head; the build of their shoulders, their face, and perhaps most of all the way their hair seems to be tied up – that suggests to me that they may have been female tourists masquerading as male miners.
There would not have been anything too remarkable in that: dressing up was a favourite middle-class pastime, and this occasionally included cross-gender-dressing. The moustache of the right-hand person, I must admit, would have been a bit more unusual to slap on. As I said, we are rummaging around here in the realm of the speculative. And of course there is a chance that instead, we see a feminine man or a masculine woman, with no sense of dressing up for the photo but a more enduring mixing of gender styles.
But the really remarkable thing, in case these really were two women, would be that they would be two women travelling together, possibly without men. Not unheard-of in the nineteenth century, but certainly less usual than all-male or mixed parties.** Which is of course what this couple could be as well: a ‘mixed party’.
Whichever way we bend it, all this confusion certainly makes this photo a valid example of a queer collection item in the Rijksmuseum.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, edited by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. 5 Continents Editions, 2020.
* A downside of this practice of siloing visitors according to their interests, is that people are challenged less to learn about new topics. The integration of important themes such as homophobia or slavery into permanent exhibitions that all visitors get to see, might work better here. Also see the reservations that have been expressed about the Rijksmuseum’s temporary exhibition on the history of Dutch slavery that is opening now. Fortunately, the Rijksmuseum has announced it is also incorporating information about slavery into their permanent display.
** See my forthcoming book on travel and space in the nineteenth century.
Niet lang geleden publiceerde ik een wetenschappelijk artikel over een curieus verschijnsel uit de Nederlandse taal: het uur gaans. Wat is een uur gaans? En waarom is het zo interessant? Dat wil ik hier laten zien aan de hand van een paar voorbeelden uit een bekend boek.
Een van de populairste Nederlandse schrijvers van de negentiende eeuw was Hildebrand, pseudoniem van Nicolaas Beets. In zijn jonge jaren schreef Beets een serie komische essays en verhalen over het dagelijks leven in zijn tijd, verhalen die tijdens zijn leven vele malen werden herdrukt en door hemzelf ook af en toe werden aangevuld met nieuwe verhalen en voorwoorden, bijvoegsels en commentaren die steeds lieten zien hoezeer dat dagelijks leven onderhevig was aan de voortsnellende geschiedenis.
Een van de bekendste opstellen van Beets is ‘Varen en rijden’ uit 1837. Het is het pleidooi van een ongeduldige, wat verveelde student voor een zo snel mogelijke invoering van de spoorwegen.* In Engeland waren die er al maar in Nederland nog niet. In Nederland was de trekschuit nog het gewone passagiersvervoersmiddel, ook voor een student als Beets die ermee naar zijn universiteitsstad Leiden forenste. In 1839 kwam het eerste passagiersspoor van Nederland daadwerkelijk tot stand. Beets blij. Alles ging nu een stuk sneller, hoopte hij.
Maar al in 1840 veranderde hij van gedachten over de trekschuit en de spoorwegen. De oude trekschuitbedrijven begonnen namelijk het een na het ander failliet te gaan. En dat speet hem toch wel, schreef hij in het portret ‘De veerschipper’. Hij had namelijk goede herinneringen aan de veerschippers die die schuiten bestuurden. Zij hadden altijd als vaders voor hem gezorgd op hun schuit, die vaak een tweede huis voor Beets was, en ze vertelden de aardigste verhalen.
Een van die schippers, Rietheuvel, werd volgens Beets eens uitgedaagd door een van zijn eigen passagiers:
‘Je zelt haast gedaan hebben, schippertje!’
– ‘Hoe zoo, juffrouw?’ vroeg de kapitein.
– ‘Wel, met die Spoorwegen’
– ‘Spoorwegen! juffrouw da’s geen duit waard. As ‘t anders niet was; die hebben haast gedaan. Maar dat nieuwe.’
– De juffrouw wist ter wereld niets nieuwer dan spoorwegen, en ‘men zou er haar ook niet opkrijgen’.
– ‘Ja maar,’ merkte Rietheuvel aan, ‘in dat nieuwe ga je wèl. Je hebt ommers wel gelezen van dien Onderaardschen Schietblaasbalk?’
– ‘Van die wat?’ vroeg de juffrouw, haar bril van den neus nemende, ‘van die wat?’
– ‘Wel, van dien Onderaardschen Schietblaasbalk?’ riep de schipper, zoo hard als zijn verweerde stem gedoogde. ‘Heerlijk hoor! Je hebt pijpen, buizen, kanalen; onderaardsche, weetje? ‘k zel zeggen van Amsterdam na Rotterdam, en vicie versie; dat zijn de twee grootste. Nou heb je dan ook korte, voor Halfweg, Haarlem, Leiën,… dat begrijpje, na venant.’
– De juffrouw spitste de ooren en opende den mond.
– ‘Best; je komt in ‘t ketoor; je ziet een partij luiken in de’ vloer, met groote letters, beschilderd; al de plaatsen, weetje, die staan der op. Halfweg, Haarlem, Leiën, allemaal. Je ziet een groote schaal hangen en een knecht in leverei, netjes as ‘t hoort, der bij. Waar mot de juffrouw nou b.v. wezen? Zeg maar wat!’
Hier wachtte de verhaler op een antwoord, maar de juffrouw wist niet wat ze zeggen zou, en vreesde dat het geheele verhaal een strik was om hare onnoozelheid te vangen.
– ‘Nou goed; as je ‘t dàn maar weet. Ik zel maar zeggen: je mot te Rotterdam zijn. Je krijgt een kaartje. Best. Belieft u maar op de schaal te stappen.’
– Hier kon de juffrouw zich niet bedwingen: ‘Op de schaal, schipper?’ riep zij uit, en hare oogappels werden van verbazing zoo groot als tafelborden, ‘wat mot ik op de schaal doen?’
– ‘Dat zel je hooren. u e. wordt gewogen. Je bent nog al dikkig. Goed. Zooveel pond, zooveel kracht op de’ blaasbalk. Belieft u maar op dat luikie te gaan staan. Pof! je zakt in de’ grond. Ruut! daar ga je, hoor! Je ziet niks niemendal as egyptische duisternis. ‘t Hoeft ook niet. Tien menuten! knip, knap, gaan de veeren. Daar sta je weer in een ketoor; je denkt in ‘t zelfde? Mis! Je bent te Rotterdam. Is ‘t waar of niet, Piet?’
Op dit beroep antwoordt de aangesprokene, die als knecht met den Mottige [=de schipper] vaart, niet anders dan door het hoofd te schudden en een pruimpje te nemen.
– ‘Piet wordt er Weger bij,’ vervolgt de schipper: ‘je kunt er de teekening van zien; ‘t zou al lang ingevoerd wezen, me lieve juffrouw! maar ‘t het motten wachten totdat die wije mouwen uit de mode waren.
Beets tekende het op als een van de humoristische verzinsels van deze lievelingsschipper. Maar in 1865 kwam hij erop terug in zijn ‘Brief van Hildebrand aan schipper Rietheuvel’. Aanleiding was het nieuws uit Engeland, dat land waar die eeuw al wel meer ongelooflijks uit over was komen waaien.
Alfred E. Beach, print showing the testing of the London Pneumatic Despatch at Battersea (1861), available on Wikimedia Commons. Net als in Beets’ verhaal wordt hier de zaak even haarfijn aan dames uitgelegd.
De schipper had in de jaren 1830 zijn ‘goede luim’ gered onder alle dreigende voorspellingen dat zijn schuit het spoedig zou afleggen tegen de veel snellere trein, door daar het futuristische denkbeeld van de ‘Onderaardschen Schietblaasbalk’ tegenover te zetten. Díe was zo snel dat-ie alle aanjagers van de spoorwegen al spoedig in hun hemd zou zetten.
Beets was verheugd het nieuws aan Rietheuvel te kunnen overbrengen: zijn eigen uitvinding was verwezenlijkt! Weliswaar niet in Nederland, maar dat maakte het belang van de uitvinding alleen maar groter. Londen was immers de grootste stad ter wereld:
Engelands groote hoofdstad Londen, waarvan het u wel bekend zal wezen dat zij alleen eene oppervlakte beslaat van een uur of zes, zeven in ‘t rond, nergens van eenig kanaal of trekvaart doorsneden!… Geen nood! Zij heeft hare talrijke omnibuslijnen, die haar in alle richtingen doorkruisen; zij heeft hare spoorweglijnen, over hare hemelhooge huizen heen en tusschen hare ontelbare schoorsteenen door, zoowel als hare spoorweglijnen onder den grond; doch thans ook; wie is het geweest, Rietheuvel! die uw denkbeeld gestolen, die uw echt Hollandsche vinding, onder den grond, onder den bodem der zee door, naar Brittanje overgevoerd heeft, en er tot zijn eigen profijt hoogstwaarschijnlijk bij het Engelsche parlement een patent op gevraagd, dat u van alle voordeelen uitsluit? – thans heeft zij ook haar Onderaardschen Schietblaasbalg
Maar hoe groot is die enorme stad nu precies?
een uur of zes, zeven in ‘t rond
Dat betekende: te voet zou het zes of zeven uur duren om om de stad heen te lopen. Het ‘uur’ was dus een lengtemaat, en een afstandsmaat. Nu zeggen we tegenwoordig nog steeds wel eens dat iets een ‘uurtje lopen’ of een ‘uurtje met de trein’ is. Maar in eerdere eeuwen was het ‘uur’ of het ‘uur gaans’ echt een vastgelegde afstandsmaat, onafhankelijk van hoe snel je als individu een afstand in de praktijk aflegde. Dat toont wel het vervolg van Beets’ brief:
Het moet een treffend oogenblik geweest zijn, waarde vriend! toen, voor weinige weken, na eenige voorloopige proefnemingen met levenlooze pakjes en ongevoelige zakken, de eerste personentrein van het zoogenaamde Holborn afging om, men mag zeggen ‘in een zucht’, en niet alleen ‘in een zucht’, maar nu ook ‘door middel van een zucht’, een afstand af te leggen van meer dan een half uur gaans, en dat heen en terug.
In een zucht, dat wil zeggen, in een paar minuten, legde het wagentje een afstand af die volgens Beets ‘meer dan een half uur gaans’ mat. Met het nieuwe vervoermiddel kon je dus binnen een uur meerdere ‘uren’ afleggen.
In Londen sprak men overigens van ‘miles’ en ‘yards’: het ‘uur’ lijkt binnen Europa voornamelijk een afstandsmaat in de Nederlandse en Duitse taal te zijn geweest – in het Duits: ‘Wegstunde’.
Ook in een ander verhaal van Beets zien we deze magische truc, maar dan omgekeerd: de ‘Limburgsche voerman’, een geduldig figuur die de hoofdrol speelt in Beets’ gelijknamige schets, legt rustig uit dat het tochtje met de huifkar dat Beets gaat maken ‘drie uren gaons’ is.
‘dats begens vierde-half uur met de ker.’
Zoals Beets vervolgt:
Men merkt op dat de huifkar een uitmuntend middel van vervoer is voor personen die niet gaarne willen dat al wat zij voorbijrijden hun geel en groen voor de oogen wordt.
Maar nog even terug naar de Londense buizenpost. Is er nou echt een ondergronds vervoersmiddel geweest dat mensen tussen Londense stations heen en weer blies en zoog? En dat al in de negentiende eeuw? Het klinkt als een Jules Verne-verhaal, of een twintigste-eeuwse steampunkfantasie.
Wonderlijk maar waar: in de jaren 1860 zijn er inderdaad een paar jaar kleine wagentjes heen en weer geschoten tussen een aantal stations binnen Londen. Maar Beets nam ook wel wat dichterlijke vrijheid. Meestal bevatten die wagentjes slechts post en kleine pakjes. Daar waren ze voor ontworpen. Van een personentrein was geen sprake. Alleen nam op de eerste lijn blijkbaar eens een verder niet bij naam genoemde dame plaats in een van de wagentjes. En later als openingsstunt bij een nieuwe, bredere tunnel deed ook de voorzitter van het bedrijf dat, en op verzoek ook nog weleens andere nieuwsgierigen.
De dienst was ook zeker geen lang leven beschoren. Waarschijnlijk leverde hij toch niet genoeg tijdswinst op tegenover alle andere infrastructuren die al bestonden, en die ook passagiers en grotere goederen konden vervoeren: de stoomspoorwegen, de waterwegen, de landwegen. Maar kleinere pneumatische buizen zijn op allerlei plaatsen wél in gebruik gebleven. Onlangs kwam ik er nog een tegen in mijn lokale apotheek, die doosjes medicijnen van achter in de zaak naar de klantenruimte blies. Ook in ziekenhuizen wordt het systeem nog volop gebruikt.
Het ‘uur gaans’ mag nu een begrip zijn uit vervlogen tijden; het buizentransport doet nog steeds zo geavanceerd aan dat we maar moeilijk kunnen geloven dat het stamt uit de negentiende eeuw.
In mijn artikel zoek ik precies uit wanneer het ‘afstandsuur’ werd gebruikt en wat dat zegt over het gevoel voor afstanden dat onze Nederlandse voorouders hadden: ‘The Language of Distance: Itinerary Measures in Europe, before and after the Coming of the Railways. With Special Reference to the Distance-Hour’ in Environment, Space, Place, jg. 12, nr. 1, 2020, pp. 25-51.
Samenvatting van dat artikel: The introduction of the kilometer in nineteenth-century Europe, within a context of broader processes of standardization and capitalism and the proliferation of maps and railways, has been associated with the disembodiment, deindividuation and decontextualization of travel. This article offers a critique of this notion by examining the various meanings different units of distance had for travelers; to what extent these units were related to the body and the physical activity of travel; and whether these relations changed between the 1770s and 1910s. Focusing on texts of instruction and texts about travelers’ own journeys, written in the Dutch, German, English and French languages, the article argues that a number of more embodied ways of describing distances survived alongside more standardized measures.
Historian at large 