Living the Global Transport Network in Great Expectations

Great Expectations (1860–61) offers a lesson in what it meant to live through the nineteenth century’s global revolution in transportation. The narrating protagonist Pip, looking back from 1860, structures his story partly around his recognition that he was born into an increasingly connected global network. From a first-person perspective, unknown activity at a distance—such as that of the convict Magwitch in Australia—turns out to be synchronically consequential. Rather than discovering, however, the fragmentation of an unknowable world, the narrator learns from the collocation and interchangeability of the transport system’s passengers. These help to contribute to the development of Pip’s limited third-person view of himself, from which the narrator relays his story as a networked subject.