Novel Transports

The explosive dynamism of eighteenth-century Britain’s transport revolution (c.1700–1830) was never so well encapsulated as by Edmund Burke who, in 1761, considered the erstwhile state of the kingdom’s domestic traversability to be as ponderous as a voyage to the furthest reaches of the empire. ‘But now’, he continued, ‘the amendments of the roads, with the many other improvements of travelling’ had aided in the radical redefinition of one’s experience of speed, mobility, of time, and of space. Where once there was isolation and silence, ‘a new communication between the several parts of our island’ connected the habitually insular constituencies of the country – England became better connected to itself than it had ever been before. It was now possible to shuttle between the metropolis and almost anywhere one chose with a new-found ease and comfort, and at an expeditious rate in ‘Stage-coaches, machines, flys, and post-chaises’, so that the ‘lover now can almost literally annihilate time and space, and be with his mistress before she dreams of his arrival’.¹

Considering the energised state of the nation’s systems of travel, transport, and communication, it is no wonder the conversation surrounding Britain in the eighteenth century has long characterised it by an ethos of mobility, of circulation – as a nation on the move. The effect of the burgeoning travel networks on the period’s literature is undeniable. Whereas prose narratives had been organised by a journey motif for at least two centuries previously, the eighteenth century saw this motif gain an unprecedented new power as the genre of the novel gained currency. In the words of Elizabeth Bohls, ‘it is scarcely possible to discuss the eighteenth-century novel without speaking of travel’.² If the novel’s intimate connection with motion is already the acknowledged standard, what does Chris Ewers bring to the table in his book Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen? Until now, the reigning critical consensus has been that mobility functions solely as a narrative trope – this claim, for me, errs on the side of ‘undercooked’ given the historical moment of the first great transport revolution. Ewers, though, moves us past this, correcting the notion that the twin developments – the growth of transit systems and the emergence of the novel as a dominant genre – were parallel. Instead, we are told, they over-lapped, indeed, they were responsive to each other. Ewers marches us on to consider the idea that there exists a direct, tangible connection between the changing infrastructure and mobility experienced in Britain and the novel form.

That texts create their own geographies has been acknowledged by many scholars, from geographers to spatial theorists, and narrative theory invests a great deal in the ways readers traverse a given text. But, thus far, scholarship has directed the majority of its investigations into the effects of steam power and the railways towards the development of the novel genre, leaving the eighteenth-century novel by the wayside as some sort of deficient precursor to its Victorian successor. Ewers, though, refreshingly champions the eighteenth-century novel in the context of its own historical moment, its own geographies and poetics, but also challenges the academy’s neglect of the coaching network’s significance in the turn towards modern speed and accessibility, hitherto ascribed to steam and rail. Changing tack in this way allows Ewers to map the continuous improvement and expansion of the coaching network of roads and turnpikes onto the novel’s structure. He avoids being deterministic, though. It is not as simple as claiming a reductive correlation between novel form and the superstructure of society. Instead, he argues that the domestic transport systems created ‘lines of force that . . . profoundly shap[ed] texts in terms of geography and movement’ (p. 23).

This mapping is a fundamental aspect of Ewers’s book that is especially successful. As radical as the nation’s mobilisation was, it did not occur overnight; there was no sudden switch from...