Overview

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, Brontë, 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 that Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, 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 centres. This book opens by examining the writing of the stage coach nation in Walter Scott's fiction and in the work of the radical journalists William Hazlitt and William Cobbett. Livesey suggests that in turning to the 'just' past of the stage coach imaginary, later novels by Dickens, Brontë, and Eliot reach out to the possibility of a nation knitted together by the affect of strongly felt local belonging. This vision is of a communicative nation at its liveliest when the smooth passage of characters and words are interrupted and overset, delivering readers and protagonists to local places, thick with the presence of history writ small.

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9780198769439

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Reviews

Ruth Livesey argues that Victorians spatialized the recent past, conceiving it as nonlinear. This temporal mapping, Livesey contends, was achieved by understanding the nation not in terms of the homogenizing effects of rail travel but in terms of the localism preserved by the stagecoach. * Andrea Henderson, Studies in English Literature * Firm scholastic foundations underpin Livesey's thesis; she engages with numerous critics and theorists, and is meticulous and generous in her referencing. * Kathy Rees, Dickens Quarterly * Livesey's argument is complex yet highly rewarding, and the energy of the writing makes the reading as enjoyable as it is informative. Not least, the book will make readers wish to revisit nineteenth-century fiction, pausing in those places where the stage coach makes its appearance, however fleeting. * Karin Koehler (Bongor University), The Modern Language Review * Writing the Stage Coach Nation is recommended reading for anyone interested in the way that the nineteenth-century novel theorizes time and space, imagines the region or nation, or responds to the new and old technologies of transportation that moved people, letters, and ideas from place to place... The book also makes frequent reference to relevant eighteenth-century contexts and influences. * Ruth M. McAdams (Bogazici University), The Hazlitt Review * ...Writing the Stage Coach Nation does what it sets out to do admirably, returning us to the original novels with a new sense of the cultural work that their evocation of the past performed for a nation that felt itself to be hurtling into the future. * Nicholas Daly, Victorian Studies * Livesey's willingness to work across literary periods in this way greatly enriches the value of this excellent and eloquently written study. One hopes that this aspect of Livesey's scholarship, and the integration of literary criticism, cultural history, and mobilities studies that her book models, will inspire other researchers to follow her lead. * Christopher Donaldson, The BARS Review * Livesey handles the literary texts and the socio-historical context with equal assurance and her study brings the two into fruitful conjunction.The web of connections between text and context is finely spun...this scholarly study, whose arguments are supported by reference to the latest scholarship, will prove highly rewarding. * John Rignall, George Eliot Review *

Livesey handles the literary texts and the socio-historical context with equal assurance and her study brings the two into fruitful conjunction.The web of connections between text and context is finely spun...this scholarly study, whose arguments are supported by reference to the latest scholarship, will prove highly rewarding.

Author Information

Ruth Livesey is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (OUP, 2007), and co-editor of The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776-1914 (Ashgate, 2013). She was an editor of Journal of Victorian Culture from 2008 to 2015.

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