Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel: From Platform to Plot via the Railroad [Hardcover]

An innovative exploration of how railways and novel infrastructure became imaginatively entangled during the long nineteenth century.Railway and novel infrastructure shared the task of getting nineteenth-century society moving in new ways. In canonical fiction by Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Forster, Nicola Kirkby reveals imaginative entanglement between new large-scale infrastructure and changing logistical possibilities of the novel in the first railway age.Railway and novel infrastructure shared the task of getting nineteenth-century society moving in new ways. In canonical fiction by Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Forster, Nicola Kirkby reveals imaginative entanglement between new large-scale infrastructure and changing logistical possibilities of the novel in the first railway age.From 1830 onwards, railway infrastructure and novel infrastructure worked together to set nineteenth-century British society moving in new directions. At the same time, they introduced new periods of relative stasis into everyday life  whether waiting for a train or for the next instalment of a serial  that were keenly felt. Here, Nicola Kirkby maps out the plot mechanisms that drive canonical nineteenth-century fiction by authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster. Her cross-disciplinary approach, as enjoyable to follow as it is thorough, draws logistical challenges of multiplot, serial, and collaborative fiction into dialogue with large-scale public infrastructure. If stations, termini, tracks and tunnels reshaped the way that people moved and met both on and off the rails in the nineteenth century, Kirkby asks, then what new mechanisms did these spaces of encounter, entanglement, and disconnection offer the novel?Contents; Images; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Plotting a novel industrial infrastructure; 2. Writing between the lines: North and South and 'Cousin Phillis'; l: