Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (review)

It is by now a banal observation that published collections of conference papers tend to add up to a whole that is considerably less than the sum of the parts. Nineteenth-Century Geographies, a book that grew out of an interdisciplinary conference held at Rice University in 1998 falls into this category. While assuring my readers that each individual contribution is independently worth a read is likewise a predictable cliché, it is in fact the case that every one of the 17 articles collected here—notwithstanding the rather convoluted Introduction—has much to offer the study, broadly speaking, of "cultural spaces" of British and American imperialisms in the nineteenth century.

I suspect that if I were to attempt to bring these essays together under a single unifying theme I would have as difficult a time of it as editors Helena Michie and Ronald Thomas do in their Introduction to the volume. Much of the Introduction is oddly devoted to a brief historiography of the field of geography itself, the "embattled" history of geography as an academic discipline and profession (though I doubt that early Anglophone geography was any more embattled than any other discipline). While I found their discussion of geographical societies in the nineteenth century to be of personal interest, especially in the way Michie and Thomas analyzed the iconography displayed on the seals of two nineteenth century professional geographical societies (the New York-based American Geographical Society and the London-based Royal Geographical Society) to show the changing relation of each to their nation's expansionist agenda; this discussion was unhelpful in orienting the reader to the rest of the book. The fact that the editors confessed that the book was not about geography per se was of little consolation; as was the name dropping of a large array of theorists of space, culture, and history without putting their work to any direct use anywhere in the volume.

What is this book about, then? Its stated subject is the shift in dominance from British to American expansionism in the nineteenth century and the accompanying changes in ideas and experiences of space. Thus, rather than seeing rigid demarcations in space during the Victorian age—such as between home/work, public/private, foreign/domestic—these scholars argue "for a Victorian crisis of spatial division, produced in part […] by the appearance of new spaces and new ways to negotiate and categorize them" (p. 17). Some of the articles in the book extend what might be labeled cultural studies of imperialism, while others examine new identities produced through developments in technology, communications, and transportation. The articles are organized around four main themes: "Time Zones" (with articles by Ronald R. Thomas, Ussama Makdisi, and David C. Lipscomb); "Commodities and Exchanges" (Diane Dillon, Julie Fromer, Jules Law, and Joseph Litvak); "Domestic Fronts" (Helena Michie, Philippa Levine, Betty Joseph, Martin Brückner, and Robert L. Patten); and "Orientations" (Mona Domosh, Jill L. Matus, Ana Vadillo, Mary Pat Brady, and Jon Hegglund). (Readers might be already familiar with Domosh's [1998] and Matus's [2001] essays as they are reprints of earlier articles.)

The lines of demarcation separating the essays are not that intuitive, and actually, a statement buried in an introductory end note provides the best entrée to how to think collectively about these works: that is, as an "attempt to turn the gaze of humanists to physical space […] with an emphasis on lived experience of space and spatialized discourses" (20 n25). Lived experience of space includes, for example, the effects of London's mass transit system on women poets and their poetry (Vadillo); the "reorientation work" that honeymoons perform for tourists to Rome (Michie); and how everyday "transgressions" in public space remake notions of bourgeois womanhood (Domosh). Spatialized discourses include study of the "representational rivalry" between the map and the film versions...