Mobility in the Victorian Novel

Placing the Nation

Charlotte Mathieson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137545473
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. With focus on representations of bodies on the move, it reveals how journeys create the place of the nation within a changing global landscape.

1

‘Wandering out into the world’: Walking the Connected Nation

A new mobile culture emerged in the nineteenth century which had implications for how the nation was conceptualised and represented in the novel, and in this chapter I consider the role of walking journeys in evoking a new sense of a connected nation-space. Walking provides an indicative starting point for exploring the interconnections between the mobility of the body and the space of the nation. Although walking may be the most basic form of mobility, it is also the most physically involved: the limbs are put to work, the body’s strength is drawn upon, and every step brings the traveller into contact with the space around them. Walking may at first appear to be detached from the changing space of the modern, mobile nation, as an older, pre-industrial mode of transport that was fast becoming outmoded. The novels which form the basis of this chapter – Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) – counter this suggestion, and resituate walking as a vital and pertinent space within their wider narrative networks of mobility and nation. In these novels, walking is a necessary corollary of literary settings which pre-date the transport revolution, as well as a consequence of the characters’ classed situations which necessitate walking. Yet walking becomes essential to each novel’s representational structures, which display a detailed focus on the corporeal processes of walking and how the body moves through and negotiates space. In so doing, embodied processes of mobility serve to open up discursive reflections on the changing space of the nation, in particular contending with the idea of the connected nation-space by raising the question of the politics of (dis)connection for those who are left off the map of modernity.

I start by considering how walking emerges as a mode for imagining the connected nation through a discussion of the classed politics of mobility more broadly in the period, reading Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop for its pertinent exploration of the classed factors involved in modernity and mobility. I then read the walking journeys made by Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel for their centring of the woman walker’s experience, looking at how these novelists create a narrative space in which to contend with the gendered politics of mobility and the resonances of ‘connection’ for women in the modern nation-space.

‘Forty mile a-day’: the socio-historic meanings of walking

In among the changes to travel technologies throughout the nineteenth century, older modes of transport prevailed as no less important in new structures of transport networks emerging across Britain. There was some decline in coach usage for long-distance travel, but railways increased the overall provision of horse-drawn transport by bringing about a new demand for connecting services taking passengers to and from railway stations; many more people travelled via a combination of coach and railway than had previously journeyed solely by stagecoach.¹ Walking experienced a resurgence in popularity, and a positive cultural shift in the perception of walking took effect throughout the early nineteenth century. Walking became a popular leisure practice among the upper classes, encapsulating the Romantic ideals of freedom, independence, and communication with nature, and providing space for philosophical reflection and creative thought; furthermore, walking represented the antithesis of modern modes of mobility for those who, like Wordsworth, derided the ‘rash assault’ of railways into every ‘nook of English ground’.² The positive revaluation of walking was evident in the increasing popularity of pedestrian tours within Britain, where the growth of pedestrianism coincided with and contributed to the rise of other touristic trends such as literary tourism.³ It is this form of walking, as a culturally valuable leisure practice, that has attracted most critical interest in literary and cultural studies, but the history of pedestrianism offers a limited perspective that is far from representative of the diverse histories of walking that co-existed with this leisured practice. Despite the growth and availability of other modes of transport, walking remained the ‘dominant and compulsory form of transport for most people’, the only affordable and practical option for the everyday activities of a wide variety of people across the country.⁴ These commonplace instances of walking might readily be overlooked, but they offer a rich and varied range of representations that provide a more nuanced understanding of the multiple socio-cultural meanings of walking in the mid-nineteenth century.

The practice of leisured pedestrianism could be culturally valued because it was undertaken by choice by those who could afford to do otherwise, but the reappraisal of walking did little to change its negative connotations for those lower down the social spectrum for whom it remained a necessity. A complex classed spectrum of the social meanings of walking is evident throughout literature of the mid-century period. At the lowest end of the social scale are the poor, for whom mobility is a condition of poverty. From countryside tramps to urban wanderers, such figures occur in brief but indicative glimpses in literary texts: Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), for example, has ‘always been a moving and a moving on ever since [he] was born’ and he is illustrative of the degradation implicit in the necessary mobility of the poor. Not only does Jo have nowhere else to go – ‘where can I possible move to, sir, more nor I do move!’ he cries – but his displacement and wandering represent a threat to social order, connoting criminality and vagrancy; as a consequence, his mobility is enforced by those who make him ‘move on’.⁵ Dickens is often sympathetic in depicting those who are ‘on the tramp’, walking in search of work, such as the Hertfordshire bricklayers in Bleak House, or in Dombey and Son (1846–48) the multitude of ‘stragglers who came wandering into London […] day after day, such travellers crept past’, representing the collective plight of those who suffer within a system of wider social problems pertaining to unemployment, urbanisation and industrialisation.⁶ Elsewhere, similar figures are much more negatively depicted, suggesting the general social disregard for tramps: in David Copperfield (1849–50), the young David encounters ‘most ferocious-looking ruffians’ on his walk from London to Dover, including the formidable figure of the tinker who threatens to ‘rip [his] young body open’ and proceeds to steal his silk neck scarf.⁷ In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) Maggie Tulliver falls prey to the ‘two shabby-looking men with flushed faces, one of them carrying a bundle on a stick over his shoulder’ who coax a sixpence from her.⁸

Wandering figures such as vagrants, tramps and the homeless therefore continued to connote entirely negative assumptions. For the working classes, walking carried a different set of associations again. On the one hand, walking was simply a necessary and unremarkable fact of working-class life, the means by which labour was carried out: an early scene of Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), for example, depicts the Bede brothers walking the mile and a half to Broxton to deliver the coffin they have built.⁹ At the same time, walking was not just a fact of daily life but also held cultural weight as a valued asset of the working-class man whose labour is intrinsically connected with mobility. Adam Bede is reportedly able to walk ‘fifty miles on end’ (p. 134), and this ability is the subject of others’ respect for him, demonstrated in Mr Casson’s praise of Adam: ‘He’s an uncommon clever stiddy fellow, an’ wonderful strong. Lord bless you, sir – if you’ll hexcuse me for saying so – he can walk forty mile a-day, an’ lift a matter o’ sixty ston’’ (p. 21). Working-class masculinity is defined here by the use-value of the labourer’s ability to walk. Remarkable walking feats also occur for other reasons, and in the same novel, Old Martin recalls ‘Jacob Taft walking fifty mile after the Scotch raybels, when they turned back from Stoniton’ (p. 277); similarly, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Job Legh recounts a 60-mile walk from Birmingham to Manchester with Jennings carrying the baby Margaret – necessary because they were ‘very bare’ – and Will later proceeds to walk from Liverpool to Manchester, ‘a matter of thirty mile’, because he does not have the three-and-sixpence for the rail fare.¹⁰

Walking could also serve as an indicator of social status when placed in relation to horse-drawn transport. Although walking need not construe outright poverty it still signified a comparatively lower social status, and the need to walk, as compared with owning a carriage or being able to afford coach travel, is referenced as a marker of social position. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), Flora Finching reflects on how the Dorrits are ‘carriage people now no doubt’ following ‘all the changes of [their] fortunes’, and young girls aspire to one day having a carriage of their own to ride in: Mary Barton dreams ‘of the day when she should ride from church in her carriage’ (p. 78).¹¹ In Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53) the distinction between owning a carriage and having to walk is one marker of status for the socially-conscious ladies of the town: Mrs Jamieson’s possession of a carriage grants her a higher status than those who must walk, and she makes a point of emphasising this by ‘always [going] out in a sedan-chair to the very shortest distances’ and regularly stopping to ask the walkers, ‘Don’t you find it very unpleasant walking?’¹² The ladies who walk attempt to justify this practice not as a necessity but rather as a specific desire to do so ‘because the night was so fine, or the air so refreshing; not because sedan-chairs were expensive’ (p. 42), the ironic tone here implying that this justification is, of course, entirely superficial and founded on upholding an appearance of social status rather than a genuine enjoyment of pedestrian travel.¹³

Throughout the changes of the transport revolution walking continued to co-exist, in these many and varied forms, alongside modern forms of mobility. In these brief instances we see how walking forms a site of social interest for novelists of the period, and the extended discussions around walking in the novels that follow make important contributions to discussions of mobility cultures of the mid-nineteenth century. In the rest of this chapter, the social meanings of walking take on greater importance in journeys where novelists use necessary walking as a force that has resonant implications both for ideas of national connectivity, and for the narrative networks through which these are articulated. Although the idea of the networked nation emerged through the new structures of modern mobility described in the introduction, walking came to represent the condition of being ‘off the network’, beyond the communal and spatial structures of the modern nation-place. The novelists here render the politics of modern mobility – the patterns of uneven development it creates, and the implications for those who are left off the network – through representational attention to the experience of the walking body and its production of the nation-place as wrought with the contradictions of (dis)connection. For Brontë and Eliot, this comes through the gender politics of the mobile body, while for Dickens it is class that forms the locus of walking in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Walking the nation in The Old Curiosity Shop

In Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop the classed meanings of mobility are put to work in the novel’s exploration of the intersection between mobility, modernity and the nation, with particular focus on mobility as a socially and spatially cohesive force. The walking journey of Little Nell and her Grandfather is the walk of the neglected and dispossessed, those who have nowhere to go but the road and no option on that road but to walk; but Dickens reorients necessity as a condition of productive possibility that creates a space for a renewed understanding of the nation-space to be forged that, in turn, redresses the problems posed by modern mobilities.

The Old Curiosity Shop began in 1840 in Dickens’s weekly miscellany Master Humphrey’s Clock, initially presented as a short adventure of the narrating Master Humphrey who finds a young girl, Little Nell, lost in the streets of London, and helps her find her way home to her grandfather’s curiosity shop. As Dickens gradually expanded the instalments into a more coherent serialised narrative, the tale developed into a number of distinct threads involving a larger cast of characters, largely effected by the movement of Nell and her grandfather away from the city. The old man has accrued a large amount of debt through gambling, and when the moneylender Quilp discovers that his money has been lost, he takes possession of their home and the shop. Having no money or place to go, and wanting only the assurance of one another’s company, Nell and her grandfather take to the road and commence a life together as wanderers: ‘we will travel afoot through fields and woods, and by the side of rivers, and trust ourselves to God in the places where He dwells’ proposes Nell’s grandfather.¹⁴ Departing early one morning to escape notice, the pair make their way through the city streets away from the ‘monotony and constraint’ of home (p. 103) and out into the open countryside; their eventual destination at the novel’s close is a village to the north of the Midlands region.¹⁵

The journey reads as an allegory modelled on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), commencing with an explicit reference to ‘an old copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, with strange plates, upon a shelf at home, over which [Nell] had often pored whole evenings’ (p. 122).¹⁶ Nell and her grandfather are cast as ‘the two pilgrims’ (p. 120) and, in reference to Bunyan’s hero Christian, Nell states ‘I feel as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again’ (p. 122). Throughout the journey, Nell is tested by various trials to demonstrate such attributes as Christian charity, suffering, endurance and faith, finally reaching the promised end in the village church at which their journey finishes, and where Nell meets her premature death.

In among the religious overtones of the journey, Dickens also opens up a pertinent discourse on the connections between nation, mobility and place. First and foremost, the journey brings Nell and her grandfather into a sense of national community, as their walking results in a series of encounters with other figures wandering the open road: the travelling puppeteers Codlin and Short who walk from place to place with their Punch and Judy show; Mrs Jarley’s waxworks exhibition journeying by caravan; and the schoolmaster, encountered early on in their journey and then again at a later stage where he is found walking to his new place of employment. Such figures assist Nell and her grandfather with food and respite, such as the cottager and his wife who give the travellers food and wash Nell’s ‘blistered and sore feet’; at moments such as these, Nell feels ‘a tranquil air of comfort and content to which she had long been unaccustomed’ (p. 126). At other times, the travellers become part of a community of wanderers ‘all wending their way in the same direction’ (p. 141): as they near the races, they pass ‘numerous groups of gipsies and trampers on the road, wending their way towards it, and straggling out from every by-way and cross-country lane, they gradually fell into a stream of people […] all tending to the same point’ (p. 153).

These encounters serve to create the walk as a space of positive community formation. Although the characters they meet are, for the most part, neither especially admirable or virtuous figures – the misanthrope Codlin being an example – these positive social interactions emphasise the importance of individual connection between people: time and again, Nell and her grandfather are helped on their way by those who offer the smallest of comforts that reiterate the essential goodness of humanity. In relation to other mobile practices available at this time, walking might be seen to represent exclusion from the modern, networked nation, and Jonathan Grossman suggests as much in his reading of the journey as a process of exclusion and isolation: ‘in the context of the contemporary passenger transport revolution, Nell’s walking forth on a long-distance journey severs her from her community’ – which is ‘her goal: to escape’.¹⁷ If by this time countryside pedestrianism ‘has come to signify exclusion from a network of public mobility’, then Nell’s journey represents a ‘falling out of the public transport system as a falling out of communal time and space’.¹⁸ Walking elucidates the discrepancies of mobility, located as an alternative order to the idea of the networked nation that is, at this moment, being created through the stagecoach (and, after the time of the novel’s setting, the railway) but which is revealed as unavailable to those without financial means.

Yet Dickens uses the condition of being off the network as a space that allows for a re-visioning of national community. Nell and her grandfather are ‘networked out’ of the modern nation, but their journey serves to reveal an alternative network of national community: one that can only be experienced by those who are on the open road, a space that makes them available to such interactions as unfold through their journey. Although Nell’s aim might be to escape, the journey instead reiterates the impossibility of doing so: throughout the journey Nell repeatedly enforces a break away from those they meet, finding security in the suddenness of flight, and yet despite her best efforts, each stage of the journey soon results in a new encounter, such that there emerges a persistent inevitability of so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Journeying Victorian Britain
• 1 ‘Wandering out into the world’: Walking the Connected Nation
• 2 ‘Flying from the grasp’: Embodying the Railway Journey
• 3 ‘It’s all one’? Continental Connections
• 4 ‘The distance is quite imaginary’: Travelling beyond Europe
• Conclusion: The Mobile Nation of The Moonstone
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index