Abstract
A new mobile culture emerged in the nineteenth century which had implications for how the nation was conceptualised and represented in the novel, and in this chapter I consider the role of walking journeys in evoking a new sense of a connected nation-space. Walking provides an indicative starting point for exploring the interconnections between the mobility of the body and the space of the nation. Although walking may be the most basic form of mobility, it is also the most physically involved: the limbs are put to work, the body’s strength is drawn upon, and every step brings the traveller into contact with the space around them. Walking may at first appear to be detached from the changing space of the modern, mobile nation, as an older, pre-industrial mode of transport that was fast becoming outmoded. The novels which form the basis of this chapter — Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) — counter this suggestion, and resituate walking as a vital and pertinent space within their wider narrative networks of mobility and nation. In these novels, walking is a necessary corollary of literary settings which pre-date the transport revolution, as well as a consequence of the characters’ classed situations which necessitate walking.
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Notes
On the changes to road and water transport in the railway age, see chapter 6 of Philip Bagwell, The Transport Revolution from 1770 (London: Batsford, 1974).
William Wordsworth, ‘Sonnet: On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, lines 1–2; in William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 389–90. On the revaluation of walking
see: Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (London: Macmillan, 1997);
Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
Jeffrey Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989);
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001);
and Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London (Edinburgh: Pearson, 2009), p. 104.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–53), ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 308. As Bradbury notes, the Metropolitan Police Acts of 1829 and 1839 gave police constables the right to make loiterers ‘move on’ (Bleak House, p. 1028). On the historical associations between poverty and mobility see the Rural History special issue on ‘Poverty and Mobility in England, 1600–1850’ (April 2013), in particular Keith Snell’s ‘In or Out of their Place: The Migrant Poor in English Art, 1740–1900’, Rural History 24.1 (April 2013): 73–100; Langan’s Romantic Vagrancy is also indicative on the cultural designation of the mobile poor.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1846–48), ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 522–23.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 180–81.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 113.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. Margaret Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 57–8; subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses in the text.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), ed. Shirley Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 104, 187; subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses in the text.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57), ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 447. In David Copperfield, the social status of carriages and travel is alluded to when David Copperfield retraces by coach the London to Dover route that he first travelled on foot: on the second occasion he is ‘well educated, well dressed, and with plenty of money’ and literally able to ‘look down at the trampers’ from his elevated position upon the carriage: David Copperfield, p. 278.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and Cousin Phillis (1851–53, 1864), ed. Peter Keating(London: Penguin, 2004), p. 126.
Particular types of carriage also signal different social statuses; for example, Lady Ludlow is said to ‘not like to go out with a pair of horses, considering this rather beneath her rank’: Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow (1858; Alan Sutton: Gloucester, 1985), p. 26. Flora Tristan notes in her London Journal that there is ‘a hierarchy in everything, even down to the vehicles on the public roads’ and lists a succession of vehicles in class order:
Flora Tristan, London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s (1840), trans. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincett (London: George Prior, 1980), p. 151.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 100; subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses in the text.
On religion, Pilgrim’s Progress and The Old Curiosity Shop, see in particular Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971),
and Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981). Other significant readings of the journey episode in The Old Curiosity Shop include Philip Rogers, ‘The Dynamics of Time in The Old Curiosity Shop’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 127–44;
Laurie Langbauer, ‘Dickens’s Streetwalkers: Women and the Form of Romance’, English Literary History 53.2 (1986): 411–31; Catherine Robson, ‘Girls Underground, Boys Overseas: Some Graveyard Vignettes’, in Wendy Jacobson, ed., Dickens and the Children
of Empire, pp. 116–27 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and Lauren Byler, ‘Dickens’s Little Women: or, Cute as the Dickens’, Victorian Literature and Culture 41.2 (2013): 219–50.
Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 103.
On the basis of gender ideologies and separate spheres, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992);
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988);
Martha Vicinus, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977; London: Methuen, 1980). For discussions of how women transgressed and reconceived the rigid boundaries of separate spheres, for example by entering into public roles through social work, see:
R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger, The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)
and Lynne Walker ‘Home and Away: the Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London’, in Rosa Ainley, ed., New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, pp. 65–75 (London: Routledge, 1998).
Wendy Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), ed. James Kingsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 24, 26, 25.
Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture, p. 30. On the fine borderlines of feminine respectability, see Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) which discusses debates over prostitution. On the gendering of walking and its sexual connotations see
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (London: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992);
and Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991).
I have explored the specifics of the rural context for Eliot’s delineation of gendered mobility: see Charlotte Mathieson, ‘“Wandering like a wild thing”: Rurality, Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss’, in Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson, eds, Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920, pp. 87–102 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).
On Eliot’s rural vision, see Raymond Williams, The Country and City (1973; London: Hogarth, 1993) and Karen Sayer, Women of the Fields: Representations of Rural Women in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995);
Josephine McDonagh, ‘The Early Novels’, in George Levine, ed., The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, pp. 38–56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: the Limits of Realism (California: University of California Press, 1968);
Ian Adam, ‘The Structure of Realism in Adam Bede’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 30.2 (1975): 127–49;
and Hao Li, Memory and History in George Eliot: Transfiguring the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), in Thomas Pinney, ed., The Essays of George Eliot, pp. 266–99 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 269.
See also Henry Auster, Local Habitations: Regionalism in the Early Novels of George Eliot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 272. However, although Eliot’s aim was to move away from stereotypical portrayals and achieve a more attentive portrayal of rurality, some critics have been sceptical as to how successful Eliot is in this:
The Country and City
Simon Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); and Sayer, Women of the Fields.
Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge: New York and London, 2006), p. 4.
Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 118.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1977; Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), pp. 11–12.
On female sexuality and mobility in these novels, see Parkins , Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels; Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986);
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959);
and Margaret Homans, ‘Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels’, Victorian Studies 36.2 (1993): 155–78.
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 132. Drawing resonant connections between Adam Bede’s narrative of child-murder and the contemporary concern with infanticide in India, McDonagh specifically iterates the burial as a suppression of the problematic colonial past: ‘the murdered infant had returned to Britain across the intricate networks of colonial desire’ (p. 145).
See also Josephine McDonagh, ‘Child-murder Narratives in George Eliot’s Adam Bede: Embedded Histories and Fictional Representations’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.2 (2001): 228–59.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 112.
See Ruth Livesey, ‘Communicating with Jane Eyre: Stagecoach, Mail and the Tory Nation’, Victorian Studies 53.4 (2011): 615–38; pp. 617, 618.
Enid L. Duthie provides an indicative reading of the ‘planned and meaningful progression’ of Jane’s movement through different natural environments that allow for Jane’s unfolding expression of self: see The Brontës and Nature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
Katherine F., Montgomery explores Brontë’s gendered use of nature in the walking journey: see ‘“I never liked long walks”: Gender, Nature and Jane Eyre’s Rural Wandering’, in Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson, eds, Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920, pp. 103–16 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).
Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 13. Anna Krugovoy Silver notes a similar point on hunger in Brontë’s Shirley and Villette in which she discusses how Brontë’s heroines are frequently ‘hungry in silence’: see Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 115.
Jo Little, Gender and Rural Geography: Identity, Sexuality and Power in the Countryside (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 65.
Roger Ebbatson, An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
See Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996),
and Angelia Poon’s Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) which both discuss the novel’s metaphoric linking of Jane and racial others.
Alan Bewell provides an indicative reading of the health of the English landscape, and Jane’s final movement at the end of the novel: see ‘Jane Eyre and Victorian Medical Geography’, English Literary History 63.3 (1996): 773–808.
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© 2015 Charlotte Mathieson
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Mathieson, C. (2015). ‘Wandering out into the world’: Walking the Connected Nation. In: Mobility in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545473_2
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