Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature [Hardcover]

Many Victorian novels take place not in the steam-powered railway present of that era, but in the recent past: a world moving by stage and mail coach. Ruth Livesey explores the historical consciousness of such works by Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy, and explains how they convey an idea of a national belonging through a sense of local place.Why is it that so many of the best-loved novels of the Victorian era take place not in the steam-powered railway present in which they were published, but in the very recent past? Most works by Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy set action neither in the present nor in a definitively historical epoch but rather in a just past of collective memory, a vanishing but still tangible world moving by stage and mail coach. It is easy to overlook the fact thatJane Eyre,Bleak House, andMiddlemarch, for example, are in this sense historical novels, recreating places and times that are just slipping from the horizon of here and now. Ruth Livesey brings to the surface the historical consciousness of such novels of the just past and explores how they convey an idea of a national belonging that can be experienced through a sense of local place.The journey by public coach had long been an analogy for the form of the novel as it took shape in the eighteenth century; smooth engineered roads and the rapid circulation of print was one means by which Britain was reimagined as a modern, peaceable, and communicative nation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. But by the later 1840s the end of the stage coach was assured and that made it a highly-charged figure of a lost national modernity. In its halts, relays, stops at inns, and crossing points, the stage and mail coach system offered a different experience of mobility and being-in-place--passages of flight and anchoring points--from the vectors of the railway that radiated out from industrial and urban centers. This book opens by examining the writing of the stage