Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman (review)

Though this is not, alas, a book about a Great Vacuum Tube whisking passengers from Greenwich Hill to Bengal, nor about the transport of convicts to Australia by winged mechanized batmonster, it is a fine book about a series of equally fantastic techno-imaginary developments in Britain beginning in the 1820s. In Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel, Jonathan H. Grossman addresses the effects of developments in public transportation and transportation networks on the ordering of reality: “This book is about the history of public transport’s systematic networking of people and the difference it makes—how it revolutionized perceptions of time and space, how it involved re-imagining community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it” (3).

Grossman’s subject is Charles Dickens. Observing trenchantly that Dickens’s understanding of passenger transport’s networking effects predates the emergence of railways, Grossman begins with a masterful reading of Dickens’s understanding of stage coaching and community formation in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). In subsequent chapters on The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and Little Dorrit (1855–57) Grossman traces Dickens’s evolving understanding of the passenger transport system as a new form of conceptual network. Grossman writes, “In each [novel], Dickens takes the measure of the passenger transport revolution from a different present moment and returns to depict roughly the same period—the 1820s and 1830s—because each time he is discovering, along with his readers, something new that retrospectively can be seen to have always been true of the way the passenger transportation system networks people, warps space and time, and transforms the art of the novel, which provides a means for its comprehension” (5).

I admire the disciplined focus Grossman demonstrates in his emphasis on the novel, and in particular on the novel as a precision tool wielded by Dickens. A rich bedrock of scholarship in network and media theory—Richard Menke’s Telegraphic Realism (2008) and Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (1990), for example—and transport history—Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (1987) and Philip Sidney Bagwell’s The Transport Revolution from 1770 (1974)—supports his effort. Grossman develops an important insight into simultaneity from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983): simultaneity, in Grossman’s account, involves the development of uniform railway time, and its powerful reorientation of both temporal and spatial ways of being. Grossman demonstrates “how the systematic co-location of individuals’ journeying standardized time and space—and not just in timetables and route maps” (9). In Grossman’s deft critical hands, Dickens’s novels clearly both register and deploy the implications of new modes of being human in time and space.

The wonderful first chapter on Pickwick sets the stage for the book that follows. In its opening section, “Time,” Grossman starts with the deceptively simple question of why Dickens, writing in 1836, pointedly sets Pickwick a decade earlier, in the late 1820s. Dickens does not depend on the historical specificity of the late 1820s, but rather, Grossman argues, exploits the decade’s gap in order to underscore the importance of rapid stage coaching and developments it prompted, at the very point at which railways were supplanting stagecoaches as the medium of rapid transit. Grossman argues compellingly that the novel produces a modern sense of human community by means of the fleeting, passing temporality both reported in and mapped by the novel. Retrospection enables Dickens, and Grossman, new insights into time and space; it provides entry to a new novelistic technology that creates community by means of the circulation of people through a newly coherent network.

Extending his analysis of time and space in Pickwick to serialization (of novels) and systems (of transport), Grossman shifts to an analysis of the contrapuntal relationship of Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840) and The Old Curiosity...