This chapter focuses on imaginative engagements with the steam engine in nineteenth-century literature. Following James Watt’s patent in 1781, the steam engine became an obsessive focus of literary writing, with reactions ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of the steam-powered mechanization of the mind to Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic vision in “To a Locomotive in Winter” of the steam railway engine as “The type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent.” In the nineteenth century, the steam engine became a symbolic magnet for working through new conceptions of logic and rationality, mobility and freedom, distance and proximity, city and country, and the natural and the manmade. Kirkby shows how Victorian authors picked up the new rhythms of the steam age, also providing their readers with “psychosomatic inoculation to the impact of railway travel on the nervous system.”