The Accident, Part 3

The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
by Michelle Stacey

(Page 3 of 3)

Another local paper, The Brooklyn Daily Union, described a horsecar accident later in the year that strongly evokes Mollie Fancher's disastrous encounter. In a brief entitled "Street Car Accident-Narrow Escape from Death," a reporter told how a servant, Catherine Powers, barely escaped being run over by a streetcar in front of her employer's residence. While crossing the street, holding a child by the hand, Powers tried to avoid an approaching horsecar and instead ran under the feet of a team of horses pulling another car in the opposite direction. The woman was knocked down and severely bruised by the horses' hooves. Her clothing was caught in the forward brake of the car, and she was dragged for some distance, receiving severe bruises and suffering a scalp abrasion. In Powers's case being dragged probably saved her life, because the brake kept her from being pulled directly under the wheels of the car. The child, meanwhile, was thrown to the pavement by the collision and badly bruised. Woman and child both survived, and no blame was attached to the driver.

Not only were horsecars and railways frightening and dangerous, but riders quickly discovered that mass transit could be noxious as well. In newspaper editorials and letters to the editor in the 1860s, writers sounded a modern note, familiar to New York straphangers of later eras. In "The Infelicities of Local Travel," an editorial published in The Brooklyn Daily Times in the mid-1860s, the writer praised and damned the new technology. Street railroads had undoubtedly contributed to the growth and prosperity of Brooklyn, he observed, yet there was still plenty of room for fault-finding. "On most of the lines of city railway, accommodations are totally inadequate, the cars are inconvenient, dirty, badly ventilated, and always overcrowded. The consequence is the great discomfort of all who use them. Is there no way to remedy these defects, and make the public accommodation accord with the interests of the companies?"

An inventive feature-writer for the New York Herald (anonymous, as was usually the case in nineteenth-century newspapers) in December 1878 contributed a long front-page story that gives the flavor of traveling on yet another innovation on the rapid-transit scene, the elevated railroad. In a lighthearted piece, "Rapid Transit: Serio-Comic Aspect of Elevated Railroad Travelling on the East Side/Crowded Trains and Irate Passengers/Merchants and Clerks Fighting Their Way to Hot Dinners," the writer first set the scene in its history-making context: "The establishment of the elevated railways has given rise to scenes of a novel and striking character-scenes that would make even Rip Van Winkle himself open very wide his sleepy eyes at the changes that have come over this city. When the Herald urged the building of these roads many people declared they would never pay and that people would never ride upon them. Now, when they have been running only a few months, it is already found that they are inadequate to meet the requirements of public travel."

The most remarkable scenes of overcrowding, this writer went on, occurred between five and seven in the evening, when the cheaper, five-cent fare prevailed. The wildest venues during these hours were the downtown stations of the East Side road in Manhattan, where there was as yet only one narrow stairway from the first landing up to the platform. When a crowded train arrived from uptown, the disgorged passengers would rush down the stairs-or they would have rushed down, had they not been wedged between the masses of passengers, many of them with bundles under their arms, who were trying at the same time to fight their way up to catch the same train. "The ticket agents' arms fairly ache from the frantic manner in which they have to throw the five-cent tickets through their little windows. And still the people come-black masses of hurrying, bustling men, scurrying home from business, with a stray woman or child in their midst, whose courage in venturing into such a dense, struggling multitude must be admired."

But the hardest part was yet to come. Once the hungry businessman, anxious for his dinner, had pushed his way through the obstructing arms and elbows and safely climbed up to the platform, he still had to get himself onto a train. The platform was long and narrow, placed between two tracks, and crowded with hundreds of people straggling from one end of the platform to the other. The questions uppermost in everybody's mind were: Where, precisely, will the train stop? Where shall I stand to be nearest one of the platform gates? Everyone knew that the cars filled up rapidly, and people who were not close enough to the gates would be left behind. As the minutes passed, the jostling and struggling and even fighting intensified for the best places-those, the reporter explained, "nearest the edge of the platform, where the opportunities for tumbling down upon the track are excellent, but are coolly disregarded by the eager passengers."

Then perhaps a train would come, but it would be going only as far as Grand Central Depot; this news would be received with a general groan of disappointment by the crowd, most of whom were going farther north. Five or ten minutes might pass before a through train arrived-and often that train would be full and would rattle by nonchalantly without deigning to stop, while someone on the platform spied a cubic inch of space as it passed, and cried out, "It's a damned shame! There was plenty of room in there!"

By the time the desperate crowd got its chance at the next train, there was such a wild onset on the gates, and such a wedge of human bodies, that at first nobody could enter. The train, the reporter concluded, "is packed like a box of sardines and, by dint of hard fighting, the conductors and brakemen succeed in shutting the gates, while some enterprising passenger, who refuses to be left behind, tries to climb over them, and succeeds in being taken along, because to push him back now, when the signal has just been sounded, would endanger his life. Off goes the train, and the weary 200 passengers who have been left behind gnash their teeth."

These were scenes of complete novelty, and despite the writer's light tone, they were also scenes of daily social stress made even more stressful by the element of unfamiliarity. When one was faced with the real prospect of being accidentally flung on the tracks in front of an oncoming elevated train by the weight of the crowd, developing a fear of trains was not unreasonable. The forces, the very machinery, of rampant civilization could seem fearful unto themselves, exerting as they did an unrelenting pressure to change, adapt, learn new skills (such as how to squeeze oneself brazenly into a commuter train simply to get home for dinner). Railway spine or railway brain, writes one historian, "stands forth as the classical Victorian neurosis, that is, a psychocultural illness in which the human psyche collided with the changing nineteenth-century environment and gave birth to an epidemiclike neurotic illness whose form and severity are rooted in the Victorian era."

Copyright © March 2002, J.P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Michelle Stacey, the author of Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is a journalist who writes extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Allure.