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

As Jonathan Grossman explains in the introduction to his generally superb piece of cultural and literary analysis, Charles Dickens’s Networks, the public transport system of the early- and mid-nineteenth century systematically networked people, changed perceptions of space and time, and reimagined community. Of particular interest to Grossman is the transport system’s effect on the novel, which in reciprocal fashion, “played a special role in synthesizing and understanding” the network (p. 3). One might have expected Grossman’s discussion of the transport network to begin with railway construction in the 1830s. He begins, instead, more originally, with the fast-driving stagecoach system of the 1820s, which was “efficient, regular, interlinked, and continuously available, offering a polished national system of routes, with coaches leaving continually out of London for all the popular destinations” (p. 19). The later railway system, he believes, was simply a continuation of this earlier form of networking (p. 32). In a similarly original manner, Grossman also does justice to the complexity of the British transport system. Not only do horse-drawn stagecoaches form part of the network, and steamboats on canals, and the railway, but also such odd means of transport as the passenger steam coach (p. 57).

In Grossman’s view, it is Charles Dickens who “most deeply understood” the systemized nature of stagecoach travel and “the difference it made” (p. 5). It’s here that the book really comes to life. Grossman engages in very close (and sometimes very long) readings of three Dickens novels and a handful of ancillary works. As he sees it, Dickens’s attitude toward the network evolved from The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), which celebrated the “unifying, communal dimension” of the transport revolution; to The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), which was more sensitive to the “tragic dimensions” of the transport network; to Little Dorrit (1855–57), which depicted the network’s international scope and provided a more distanced perspective on the systematized nature of modern travel (p. 5).

Grossman’s long chapter on Pickwick is particularly rewarding. He convincingly complicates the idea that Dickens’s first novel is some “last hurrah for Olde England and the simple country days of rambling coaches and cozy coaching inns” (p. 12). Rather, Pickwick “is always skimming along, racing, crashing, going” and is “truly a novel of the road” (p. 12), though, importantly, Grossman reminds us, this is a road that circles back on itself (p. 28). Whereas travelers typically travel to reach a final destination, Pickwickians “ride the stage coaches simply to travel around and about.” Their adventures, in other words, are “subordinated to the purpose of traveling around to have them” (p. 39). It is this tension between the undirected travel in Pickwick, and the fundamentally purposeful and directed nature of stagecoach and rail travel, that resonates throughout Grossman’s book.

If in Pickwick the focus is on the late-1820s coaching network, in The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens “pointedly shifts his readers into the railway present,” and it is here that Grossman detects a turn toward the tragic. Whereas the public transport revolution is usually equated with speed and freedom of movement, in The Old Curiosity Shop there is sometimes a countertendency at work. As Grossman remarks, “individual mobility has become … collective entrapment.” Rail passengers are shown to be locked in their carriages, “their trips regimented, … stuck ‘behind the bars’ of the police station” (p. 98). Such passages reflect Grossman at his best.

For all the book’s many strengths, there are a few weaknesses. At times, for instance, Grossman tends to overstate his case. Did Pickwick’s success “widely [transform] people’s everyday perception” (p. 53)? This seems a lot to claim of a work of fiction, no matter how popular and influential in its day. Did ballooning really look like the future of public transportation in the 1830s (p. 58)? The fact that there were regular recreation ascents at Vaux-hall...