Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation by Charlotte Mathieson (review)

This incisive and innovative study focuses on what Charlotte Mathieson terms the “nexus of body–space–mobility” (16). Considering novels written between 1840 and 1870, Mathieson is concerned to reorient discussion of the “journey” in Victorian fiction from the context of travel to that of mobility. As she sets out in her introduction (13), such a reorientation promotes consideration of a wide range of journey types, from the small-scale walk to the arduous intercontinental voyage, and of minor or secondary travel/mobility performances that may lie at narrative peripheries or appear incidental but which, within the theoretical framework constructed here, are revealed as thematically and contextually significant.

Mathieson’s readings of her chosen texts are designed principally to demonstrate how conceptions of the national space and its connectedness or otherwise emerge from narratives of journeys that foreground the relationship between mobility and the body, taking into particular account issues of class, gender and foreignness. Crucial to her perspective is her contention that “It is through bodies on the move that the place of the nation is produced, both internally and in confluence with global networks; like the mobile bodies themselves, this production is fluid and ongoing, a ‘placing’ that is always in process” (16). Throughout, Mathieson stays in control of her wide-ranging and complex subject matter thanks to her determination to test every fine detail of her thesis against specific textual evidence: unsupported or inadequately supported assertions are very hard to find.

In her first chapter, “Walking the Connected Nation,” Mathieson considers The Old Curiosity Shop and the long walk of Nell and her grandfather from London to the English Midlands. Against a background of rapid developments in transport she interestingly sees the walk – the mobility mode of the poor – not as a symptom of exclusion from the nation space that modernity is shaping, but rather as participation in “an alternative network of national community” (25). The range of experiences and encounters on the open road, she suggests, contrasts strikingly with what would become the isolation of the railway traveler, closed off from the passing world. The arduous walk in The Old Curiosity Shop “creates a mapping-out of the space of the nation, unfolding a vision of what the nation is, who inhabits it, and how its inter-connections are forged” (27).

When the walk is performed by a woman and extends beyond the boundary of her local community, it becomes essentially transgressive and the narrative of mobility therefore highlights gender (rather than class) as the lens through which the nation space is viewed and imaginatively developed. Mathieson examines Hetty Sorrel’s long walk in Adam Bede and Jane Eyre’s struggle across the moors after her escape from Thornfield to show how “Eliot and Brontë both depict walking as a uniquely physical, material process and use the female body as a locus through which to address the connections between gender, nation and place in the modern mobile nation” (55).

Moving from foot to rail, Mathieson next looks at train journeys in, among other works, Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, focusing on the interrelated themes of speed, disconnection, isolation and passivity: “The train created a disorienting contradiction between movement and immobility, in which travel was no longer ‘travail’ and the traveller was disconnected from the process of mobility.” (67)

Her analysis of Mr. Dombey’s rail journey from London to Leamington in Dombey and Son is among her most insightful readings. Mathieson uses the passage to illustrate the impact of the train journey on perceptions of landscape and the nation in the 1840s when rail travel was still, with its startling contractions of time and space, a new experience. With its lines cutting through the landscape, the dramatic increase in travel speed, the compartmentalization of the traveler from the outside world, and, importantly, the framing of that externality by a plate glass window, railway travel “presented a new perspective on space” (71...