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For the purposes of distinguishing reference from agency as another aspect of our transpositional grammar, and now speaking for it out loud, here is the event: “The train is quickly passing by in the storm; soon, train and storm will be gone.” In speech, we need clauses to express an event structure, a relationship of a noun to a verb, and a subject (“the train”) to its predicate (“is quickly passing by”). Or to move the analysis to the level of generality we want to capture in our grammar, entity (“the train”) predicates action (“is quickly passing by”).

Then, clause by clause we say what happens first, then next: “soon, train and storm will be gone.” In an image, the entities are volumes (the locomotive, the train, the rail line, the bridge, the sky, and more that we may not have included in the spoken words), and action is marked by vanishing point and vector (the vanishing point of the train’s origin, the vector the direction of the railway line).

We mean the same train in our speaking now as Turner did in his picturing then, but the two forms of its meaning are fundamentally different. Speech presents in time, where the speaker places word after word, clause after clause. As the listener hears “the train,” they haven’t yet heard “is quickly passing by,” and later they will hear “soon, train and storm will be gone.”

Image presents in space, so that when the eye falls upon the painting – from a distance walking into the room where it is hung in the National Gallery in London, or pulling up a digital copy on your computer screen (other events) – first you see the ominous swirl of a storm, then you make out the locomotive and the train, then if you look longer, you may be able to make out details such as the scared hare running away from the train, the farmer ploughing a field, the arch of the bridge, and people watching from the riverside.

There is a necessary temporal order in the meaning when presented in speech, but no necessary spatial arrangement. There is a necessary spatial order in the meaning when presented in image, but no necessary temporal sequencing. Speech affords agency to the listener to configure space in their mind’s eye. Image affords agency to the listener to configure time in their mind’s eye – imagining the origins and destination of the train, the fate of the hare scurrying out of harm’s way, the comparative speed of the plough in the field, the people at the river’s edge who will still be there when the train has passed, until they, at their own pace, have time to go their way.

What did Turner mean to communicate about agency in Rain, Steam and Speed? A woman who boarded the Great Western Railway in Exeter was later to tell the story of how she found herself in a compartment on the train, sitting opposite an old man. “The weather was very wild, and by-and-by a violent storm swept over the country, blotting out the sunshine and blue sky, and hanging like a pall over the landscape. The old gentleman seemed strangely excited at this, jumping up to open the window, craning his neck out, and finally calling her to come and observe a curious effect of the light. A train was coming in their direction, through the blackness, over one of Brunel’s bridges.” The old gentleman, apparently, was Turner.

And another witness report, from a man who was nine at the time and watching Turner working on the canvas at the Royal Academy: “He used very short brushes, a very messy palette, and standing very close up to the canvas, appeared to paint with his eyes and nose as well as his hand. Of course, he repeatedly walked back to study the effect … He talked to me every now and then, and painted the little hare running for its life in front of the locomotive.”³

After meanings have been transposed from representation into communication, there can only be slippery uncertainties. The woman and the man were speaking when the painting had become famous, and these were their brief encounters with fame. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, the painting has been in the National Gallery since 1865.

To the extent that the painting instantiates, part reality or part imagination, the Great Western Railway was new when the painting was made, opened in 1838. People marveled at its modernity, the audaciously broad 7ʹ1/4″ gauge rail lines, the longest tunnel in the world at Box Hill, the magnificent iron and glass arches spanning the platforms of its London terminus in Paddington, and here in Turner’s painting, the bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead. With its long, gently elliptical arches, many observers thought the Maidenhead Bridge would not hold up, even the contractor who was supplying the bricks.⁴

The railway was an expression of the engineering genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the hard labor of tens of thousands of “navvies” who dug the tunnels and filled the embankments with shovel and wheelbarrow. The express trains on the Great Western averaged 43 miles per hour, but Brunel prophesized that one day trains would travel at one hundred.

What might Turner have been thinking in his seeing? Beyond the canvas, we know a little from the title of the painting, but further than this it is hard to know, and the meaning of the painting is in part in the space it leaves for alternative meanings. Of the concept of “railway,” contemporary interpretations varied. The poet Wordsworth asked in anger, “Is there no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?”⁵ In Turner’s painting, English ground surrounds. The hare is alarmed, the ploughman slowly treads his furrows at the speed of his horse, and we might be able to imagine his ambivalence.

But here is a John Francis, by profession “of the Bank of England,” by vocation a writer of history books. In his 1851 History of the English Railway, he quotes a commentator whose exuberance was common in those heady days that were at the time called the “railway mania.” “The length of our lives, so far as regards the power of acquiring information and disseminating power, will be doubled, and we may be justified in looking for the arrival of a time when the whole world has become one great family, governed in unity by like laws.”⁶

If this sounds like the heady rhetoric in a later century about the powers of the internet, it is because the phenomenon is in essence the same. The vectors of social transformation in both cases are lines of communication, whether they be the railway lines that send bodies and letters from station to junction to station, or the cables and wireless beams that send packages of information from computer to router to computer. In our multimodal grammar, the compression of human activity in the time and space of modernity is the same historical phenomenon whether it’s a letter or a body on the move in a train, or in the era of the internet, text sent via email or body image, gesture, and speech sent via Skype, Google Meet or FaceTime. Of course, these media of communication are also different in the specific nuances that are their affordances.

The parallel in the 1840s to the breathless IPOs of the internet era was the “railway mania” of the 1840s. By a law of the English Parliament, the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844, a registry had been created where new companies could be listed and public companies traded on the stock exchange. Railways became the focal point of speculative frenzy. “The most cautious were deceived by this apparent prosperity; and men esteemed good citizens and sound moralists were drawn into acts which avarice urged but conscience condemned … They pledged their purses and their persons to a great delusion … They entered the whirlwind and were carried away by the vortex.”⁷

And then the crash. Turner was painting a storm of nature while whirling around him was the metaphorical storm of industrial capitalism’s first great crisis, a crisis of already global proportions. The vector of the train was accompanied by the abstract vectors of capitalism. Turner could have been saying any or all of these and other things, or not.⁸

The train in the picture is unnervingly still. The weather is the same in every viewing of the painting. We have to work to interpret the image as event, because all we can see is entities, and actions are conjectural. We can project action from the orientation of the vanishing point and the vector of the railway tracks. The train must have come from somewhere; it must be moving to be going somewhere; and it will soon pass into a future of uncertain weather that lies behind us viewers. Although the hare is scared, it will likely not be killed, and the trajectory of the tracks assures viewers that we will survive the train’s passing.

The train in the image could possibly have stopped, but the words of the title tell us definitively that it has not. And it can’t have stopped in the words of our second, made-up clause, “soon, train and storm will be gone.” In words, we can also be assured that the storm ends soon.

If we struggle with time in images, we struggle with envisionable spatial detail when our representation or communication is in spoken words. You could talk about the visible contents of the image and the spatial arrangement of the scene for a lot longer than would normally be reasonable, without ever exhausting its detail. To supplement or break free from the affordances of pictures, we title paintings or caption and label diagrams and make movies. To supplement or break free from the affordances of speech, we juxtapose pictures.

Image is action stilled and represented conjecturally in vectors and vanishing points. Speech predicates action on the presence of entities in hypothetical space, where circumstances are separated into the antinomies of noun and verb, subject predicating object, disconnecting from their having been actioned then reconnecting them. These are radically different configurations of event, even though we want to insist that we mean these to be the same events, the agencies of nature and people as the train passes, or the railway mania that was its larger frame of world-historical agency.

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³ John Gage, 1972, Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed, New York, NY: Viking Press, pp. 16, 19.

⁴ Isambard Brunel, 1870, The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer, London, UK: Longmans, Green, and Co, pp. 96, 172–74; L.T.C. Rolt, 1957, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, London, UK: Longmans, Green and Co.; Colin Maggs, 2016, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Life of an Engineering Genius, Stroud, UK: Amberley.

⁵ John Gage, 1972, Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed, New York, NY: Viking Press, p. 28.

⁶ John Francis, 1851, A History of the English Railway: Its Social Relations and Revelations, 1820–1845, Volume 2, London, UK: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, p. 139.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 144–45.

⁸ Gerald Finley, 1999, Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History, Montreal, Canada: McGill–Queens University Press, pp. 138–43.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 176-179. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed §MS2a