'Railway novels' made their appearance in the late forties; one popular series was Routledge's Railway Library, a shilling series of reprinted fiction starting in 1849. W. H. Smith secured a monopoly of the bookstalls on the London and North-Western system in 1851, and by 1862 had covered most of the important railways; his care in selecting books earned him the nicknames of “The North Western Missionary” and “Old Morality” [a pun on Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality] . . . . (Tillotson 18-19)
Last modified 9 April 2022