Context:

Tom reads a passage from Middlemarch describing Victorian attitudes toward railways, noting it was 'first published in 1870, but looking back 30 or 40 years earlier to the arrival of the railways in Middle England.'

Context:

Dan mentions that Samuel Smiles 'wrote an incredibly popular biography of him' referring to George Stephenson, and Tom confirms 'he did a whole series of lives of the engineers.' This is Smiles' biographical series about British engineers.

Context:

Tom references 'a famous counterfactual written by Arnold Toynbee in his, you know, multi-volume history of the world where he imagines what would have happened had the Macedonians developed the steam engine' with armored trains in Mesopotamia.

Context:

Dan reads a lengthy passage from 'Elizabeth Barrett Browning's kind of blank verse poem' (he calls it 'Aurora Lee') describing the sensory experience of traveling through railway tunnels, written in the 1850s.

Context:

Tom mentions 'one of the other famous passages from Victorian literature describing this process is at the beginning of Dombey and Son, where Dickens describes the railway going through Camden and the kind of process of destruction.'