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

When I heard of the death last year of the geographer Doreen Massey, I thought of a passage in her work that encapsulated for me her wit and brilliance as a theoretician of place and space. Massey was adept at teasing out the significance of postmodern scholarship on place and mobility, and rooting it down into a politics of materiality and experience. Amid "the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace," she argued, "most people still live in" inner suburbs crowded with old housing stock, "like Harlesden or West Brom," and "much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes" (Space, Place and Gender [Polity Press, 1994], 163).

Charlotte Mathieson's welcome study of mobility and Victorian fiction—Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation—is, in its own way, a similar riposte to recent theorizations of nineteenth-century place and mobility. While influential studies by Jonathan Grossman and Jo Guldi, among others, have emphasized the agency of transport infrastructure in systematizing and speeding up networked ways of being in nineteenth-century Britain, Mathieson's careful illuminations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, places embodied subjects at the center of her account regarding the ways in which the Victorian novel thinks and writes about mobility. Drawing on the work of Massey, Tim Cresswell, and other cultural geographers, Mathieson traces mobility in the Victorian novel as a form of "socially produced motion" (13). The wider social structures that determine who is able to travel, when, where, and how, come to the fore in her analyses as a result of this materialization. A passenger, in Mathieson's study, is always an embodied subject whose relation to movement is defined by expectations around gender, class, and national identity. In this book, such instances of "embodied mobility" also become "lens[es] through which to re-perceive the negotiation between national and global concerns as they unfold in the structures of the novel" (17).

Mathieson's departure from the actor network theory model that has influenced many recent accounts of nineteenth-century communications results in some significant rereadings of novels already well traveled by critics in this field. Her first chapter, on the figure of the pedestrian, for instance, is an attentive account of the alternative communities of place and nation that emerge through women walking in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Adam Bede (1859), and Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). For Grossman, Little Nell's walk from London to the Midlands represents a severing from a community connected by networks of public mobility. In a guarded critique of that analysis, Mathieson highlights the reality of pedestrian journeying for the poor in this period and Dickens's construction of "alternative forms of national understanding" through the act of walking through a landscape (27). Mathieson draws attention to the emphasis given to the physical strain of walking by Brontë and Eliot as Jane and Hetty drag their weary outcast limbs across the nation. In Adam Bede, Mathieson concludes, this foregrounding of Hetty's tramp makes the female body "a privileged site through which an exploration of the connection between the body and nation-space becomes acutely focused" (40).

The later chapters of the book focus on railway journeys across Britain, the Continent, and a globalized Victorian modernity. So much has been written on these aspects of mobility in nineteenth-century fiction that Mathieson sets herself a hard task to craft an original contribution. Yet Mathieson alights on the glorious self-description of Robert Audley, in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), a character for whom to become a railway passenger involves transforming into a "perambulating mass of woollen goods" (Braddon qtd. in Mathieson 85). Out of this bundle of...