A railway tunnel with sun shining at one end, Bath, UK, 2017.
13 May 2020
The phrase the light at the end of the tunnel is a metaphor used to refer to signs that a long period of adversity is coming to an end. The metaphor, if not exact phrasing, dates to at least 1879 when it appears in a letter by writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) about a recent bout with an illness:
On Saturday I had a rather severe relapse and though I am getting out of the tunnel into daylight, this renewal of weakness taken with the dreary prospects of the weather under which nothing ripens and fruits hardly escape rotting, makes it seem as if we should be wiser to defer the visit till the 19th when the promised Rubicon of the 16th will have been passed.
The familiar phrasing is in place by 1891, when this book review criticizing the long-windedness of some nature writing appears in the Saturday Review:
You sentimentalize about autumn in the abstract (200 words), about autumn in Somersetshire (150 words), and about the “orchard-lawns” of Avilion (50 words). This is rather below the mark, so you hurry on to the apple-crop (100 words) and “the story of an apple-orchard” (500 words), throwing in the cricket—that “musician of the autumn”—wasps, and the “unnumbered hosts of other insects” (400 words). You now see light at the end of the tunnel, and a vigorous attack on the hibernation of these insects (250 words) prepares for a final burst on winters of unusual severity (150 words), and the thing is done before you know where you are.
There are earlier appearances of the phrase in various wordings, but all the ones I have found have been quite literal, referring to traveling through a railway tunnel.
In the 1960s, the light at the end of the tunnel became associated with the confidence (to be proven misplaced) that the U.S. would quickly win the Vietnam War. Journalist Joseph Alsop wrote on 13 September 1965:
The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated. It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won now, or will be won later without great effort and sacrifice. But it does mean that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel.
And the next day he penned:
You can see the transformation in the faces of American leaders like General Westmoreland, who looks like a man who suddenly sees light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.
The phrase would be picked up by many others writing and speaking about the war.
Of course, the U.S. continued to fight until 1973, and Saigon would fall two years after that. As a result, the phrase took on a cynical connotation, and by 1975 an addition was made to the wording of the phrase. Canadian journalist Richard Gwyn, writing about the economy in March 1975 said:
Today the predictions of U.S. government experts have begun to sound like the “light at the end of the tunnel” promises of Vietnam. Forecasts of “recovery by mid-summer” have changed to “recovery by the end of the year.” Sometimes a light in a tunnel can be that of an oncoming train.”
The light at the end of the tunnel continues to be used to convey optimism, but since the debacle of the Vietnam War its reception has always included a note of pessimism.
Sources:
Alsop, Joseph. “Big Change in Vietnam.” San Francisco Examiner, 13 September 1965, 32.
Alsop, Joseph. “Light at End of Tunnel in Viet War.” Chillicothe Gazette (Ohio), 14 September 1965, 6.
Fallows, James. “2020 Time Capsule #8: ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel.’” The Atlantic, 25 March 2020.
Gwyn, Richard. “Restraint a ‘Farce,’ Controls a Must.” Vancouver Sun, 8 March 1975, 4.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tunnel, n.
“The Rambles of a Dominie.” The Saturday Review, 18 July 1891, 93.
Photo credit: Great Western Railway, 2017.