Abstract
Since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), literary scholarship has eagerly taken up his identification of novels as expressions of the national imaginary. Ruth Livesey considers a more specific question about nationality in nineteenth-century British fiction: how novels could chart the route from everyday, local life to a sense of national belonging. Livesey argues that writers from Walter Scott to George Eliot turned to the stagecoach as a vehicle that tied localism to the nation. The chronotope of the stagecoach journey didn’t merely survive the coming of rail travel; in Livesey’s account, it became more emphatic as the railway network developed. Railway travel seemed to annihilate time and distance by shooting its passengers through the provinces, turning place into abstract space. But with its repeated arrivals and departures, its occupation of a down-to-earth world of inns and human landscapes, the stagecoach suggested how both a transport network and a feeling of national cohesion could arise out of – rather than in place of – a sense of the local. Furthermore, Livesey argues that ‘turnpike roads, and the coaches that rolled along them, became a site of political struggle in defining the nation and its relation to non-metropolitan locality’ (pp. 178–9).
In the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding had proffered the comparison between novel reading and the start-and-stop, communal activity of riding a stagecoach. But Livesey shows how Scott’s novels developed the sense of a world in which national history itself seemed in motion. The British mail coach system that began in the 1780s made even remote destinations seem accessible yet still distinct and full of colour. Novels such as Waverley (1814), The Antiquary (1816) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) frame the narrative with coaches and reiterate their intermittent narrative rhythm as they move readers and protagonists into stories in which the movement of national history is available in romantic places just outside the vehicle.
As the mail coaches ran across roads designed by John McAdam and Thomas Telford, the coach became a key reference point in British accounts of modernity, politics and the nation. A variety of images made coaching part of the iconography of government, as the nation embarked on a journey into fitful, uneven reform. Yet even radical fellow travellers could disagree about what the coaches meant. William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1822–26) treats mail coaches and turnpike roads as the signs of a corrupt system of financial and political power that was leaving rural people and places in the muck. As coaches hurtle from London on smooth roads, Cobbett’s rural England provides potential sites of resistance, places filled with communal experience and memory. For William Hazlitt, in contrast, the coach and turnpike roads mediate between modern speed and the slower world of the recent past, between centre and periphery, to produce an inclusive model of dispersed community. Yet Livesey also shows how the coach and the coachman become jocular images of royalism, with the king riding the coach of state. In an era when the impressive Royal Mail coaches provided the fastest transit, the symbolism hardly seems a stretch.
Livesey’s chapters on fiction by Charles Dickens, Eliot and Charlotte Brontë are the heart of the study. They are particularly good at evoking the kind of local transport conditions elided by sweeping descriptions of an all-encompassing railway age. Indeed, Livesey points out that the railway initially supplemented the infrastructure of turnpike roads. For these novelists, she argues, the stagecoach does not represent nostalgia for simpler times or even for an obsolete form of modernity. Instead, Livesey associates the stagecoach in Victorian texts with a sense of place and motion that departed from the paradigm of steam-powered centralisation.
In this account, Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) appears less backward looking than previous critics have claimed. In fact, Livesey argues, the novel treats the stagecoach journey as a paradigm for a free nation of middling people on the move, a ‘mobile communit[y] of feeling’ (p. 109). This sense of community is based not on ignoring locality but on creating a feeling of the local that could circulate everywhere, the localism epitomised by Pickwick’s pointedly nonspecific Dingley Dell. The local is a state of mind, a state accessible via speedy trips between town and country, present and just-past, everyday life and serial fiction. In Livesey’s argument, this portable localism was strongly challenged by Dickens’s first visit to the United States, an experience refracted through the English and American settings of Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–44). American railways sped across an abstract geography created by transport itself. ‘Eden’, Chuzzlewit’s American settlement, is the ruin of a future that never happened; a non-place with no past, it offers a rebuke to the mobile, portable emplacement summed up by Dingley Dell. Rather, from Martin Chuzzlewit on, Dickens’s fiction imagines an England filled with layered histories. Characters move around, but this deep sense of place helps ensure that they never leave the past behind.
Works by Brontë and Eliot also stage questions of place and belonging as narratives of transport. While modern readers might see Jane Eyre (1847) as a monument to feminist individualism, Livesey argues that Jane’s travels confirm the novel’s affiliation with a moderate Toryism in which transport networks reinforce the bonds of community. Indeed, Livesey delineates the way in which Jane journeys from being ‘a deracinated modern individual to a figure intimately bound into a system of local obligations’ (p. 164) via letters and roads. In another compelling reading, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) emerges as a text centrally concerned with the political implications of roots, its very title confirming this etymological play. Returning to Cobbett’s milieu, Eliot reimagines the transit infrastructure of the 1820s as a paradigm for rootedness rather than for modern deracination. In this ‘mobile conservatism’ (p. 199), attachment to a place becomes a matter of conscious choice, not of rural idiocy. The recent past and the Victorian present are stages on the way to an alternative future in which locality will reclaim its meaning. In contrast to this prescriptive paradigm, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex would present the sense of the recent past as a different country, a self-contained realm no modern passenger could reach. By the end of the century, the turnpike road lies abandoned.
Like any work of historical literary scholarship, Writing the Stage Coach Nation establishes thematic connections between imaginative writing and other contemporary modes of discourse. But it also works on a deeper level, as it shows how the stagecoach journey offered a historiographic topos for narrating connections between place and nation, change and stasis. By setting their work in the recent past and treating local places as bearers of history in a mobile age, writers advanced the persistence of that past and its relevance for the nation’s future. Recent political events in both the UK and the US confirm that the twenty-first century has hardly left problems of region, modernity and the nation behind. In this context, we might take Livesey’s book as another stimulus to rethink and rewrite our own narratives of history, mobility and national belonging.