Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 by Josephine McDonagh (review)

Josephine McDonagh has significantly advanced recent attempts to situate Victorian fiction in a global perspective by addressing a neglected but timely topic: the nineteenth century’s unprecedented, extraordinary demographic movements and the impact they had on fiction. Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 is a ground-breaking, provocative exploration of this relationship—if not the definitive account. It derives its authority from McDonagh’s remarkable cultural literacy. She locates canonical and popular novels in relation to legal and legislative reforms, pro-emigration pamphlet literature, railway guides, newsletters, advertisements accompanying serial publications, philological debates, correspondence between authors and publishers, natural histories, ethnographies, textbooks of language instruction, and many more sites of cultural production. The book teems with seemingly inexhaustible contextual material. At its best, it provides us with a thick description of the discourse of migration with which, as McDonagh persuasively argues, Victorian fiction is deeply engaged.

Stretching her topic to its limits, McDonagh writes about both global movements of people and the United Kingdom’s internal redistribution of population, permanent reset-tlements and seasonal migrations, forced emigrations and voluntary relocations—“the extraordinary range of types and styles of migration that were current” (3). She further expands the concept of migration to include such things as the global dissemination of texts, the worldwide circulation of objects, the passage of thematic patterns across fictional and nonfictional genres, the convergence of ideas in seemingly unrelated writers and texts, even the restless “kineticism” of cultures and fictional personalities (276). As a result, it is sometimes unclear just what the category of “migration” does not contain. The book’s analytical threads are correspondingly diffuse: sometimes, they trace fiction’s textual violence and its acts of exclusion; sometimes, its creation of new demographic constituencies; sometimes, its role in the production of a liberal ideology of individual and economic freedom; and sometimes, its “experimental, provisional, and contested” engagement in questions of migration (18). All of these discussions are incisive and sophisticated, and McDonagh’s oceanic approach is a legitimate response to the messiness and contingency of texts of global migration themselves. But such breadth often results in a miscellany of competing arguments. The book sometimes reads like a medley of ideas about migration (an excellent one, to be sure) rather than a unified account—a tendency, incidentally, that forces reviewers to be list-makers.

The many exciting achievements of the book, nonetheless, include its tracing of the reciprocal impact new printing technologies and the global dispersal of literary texts had on one another; the influence fiction exercised on pamphlets, essays, and other writings promoting migration; the creation of new global readerships and an expanding market for fiction through travel; the mediation of questions about community by fictional and parafictional texts; and much more. Most importantly, unlike the majority of critical works on imperial ideology, McDonagh’s work shows how fictional texts were themselves embedded in the colonial scenes they describe. In all these ways, McDonagh brilliantly reverses the common assumption that nineteenth-century fiction turned inward, away from the world beyond England’s shores—a remarkable achievement.

Less helpful are the book’s sweeping generalizations about form, particularly those about migration’s affiliation with metonymy. Do global migrations really express themselves in such narrative structures as the webs and tissues of Middlemarch (1871–72) and the networks of social connection in Bleak House (1852–53)? Do discussions about shipboard accommodation, accounts of roads and canals, attempts to negotiate the vast distances separating family members, and administrative links between the Foreign Office and far-flung colonies share a common formal logic because they all employ tropes of adjacency? Maybe. How would we know? And what analytical difference would it make? In particular cases, McDonagh is almost always convincing. She documents a variety of specific attempts by the literature of migration...