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Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
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1 Introduction Like all evolutions in social perception and organization, the restructurings that increased the speed of travel and information exchange in nineteenth-century France were complex. To circumscribe them requires identifying textual sources that give insight into how people adapted their daily practices to incorporate the potential for more rapid movement . The analysis I undertake here is not exhaustive: it does not pretend to cover the entire nineteenth century in a descriptive mode meant to encompass the full gamut of elements associated with questions of speed and communication. Instead I will concentrate on an interval that begins at the end of the eighteenth century and covers roughly the first half of the nineteenth century. The texts that will occupy me most, moreover, are novelistic narratives. These are strategic choices. I want to show that there was already a growing sense of speed—in both the movement of people and the conveying of messages—before the extensive development of the railroad in the 1840s and 1850s in France; hence the decision to focus on the first half of the nineteenth century. And if I have not chosen an archival approach to construct my loosely phenomenological description of the effects of speed, this is because I believe that the controlled nature of the novelistic text offers real insight into the way speed and communication were being woven into the fabric of social perception during the period I have studied. Novels highlight the effects of speed in particularly visible ways. Accordingly, I have chosen to organize my argument around a series of key novels written by four of the most acute social observers of their time: Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola. To talk about speed is necessarily to talk about communication—the 00.INTRO.1-12_Bell 9/11/03, 1:29 PM 1 2 Introduction two are inseparable during the historical period that will be treated here. I would argue that they are inseparable from the start in any analysis of communication seen as the moving of people and messages. Speed has at least two meanings in this context: (1) the raw speed with which messages and people can get from one place to another, and (2) the quickness— as well as the breadth—with which information, once it transits to a destination, is disseminated among the population sharing the information carried by the messages. How fast people and messages get from one place to another but also who shares messages and has access to them— and how quickly—are crucial questions in any approach to communication . As the reader will see in chapter 2, devoted to relays and stagecoaches , for a significant period of time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, messages (in the form of letters) and passengers transited in the same conveyances under the same tariff models based on distances traveled. Moreover, passengers themselves were vectors for the spread of information and messages. As the stagecoach systems in France and England—and in Europe more broadly—improved, the passing of information up and down the line by drivers, mail guards, and passengers became an important function of the overland transportation network. The speed of movement of passengers will be as much at stake in the pages that follow as the speed of message exchanges. A brief scene in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (serialized between 1837 and 1839) captures quite symptomatically some of the elements characteristic of the convergence between speedy and precise overland travel, on the one hand, and the exchange of messages and information , on the other. Bill Sikes flees London after having beaten Nancy to death. Starved for information about whether the murder has been discovered and the pursuit of the culprit organized, he stumbles onto the passage of the mail coach in the small village of Hatfield: “He almost knew what was to come; but he crossed over, and listened” (427). What is to come in the scene is none other than the dissemination of the news concerning the murder he has committed. Sikes (almost) knows that the mail coach brings the news and that the passengers and the employees all have the same desire to be the first to announce it—yet he is drawn into the process almost magnetically. Within seconds he hears what he most fears: “Anything new up in town, Ben?” asked the gamekeeper, drawing back to the window-shutters, the better to admire the horses. “No, nothing that I knows on,” replied the man, pulling on his gloves. “Corn...