Mobility in the Victorian Novel ─ Placing the Nation

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores the role of mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Focusing on representations of bodies on the move, it reveals how journeys serve to create the place of the nation and understand its relationship to a global landscape that was being restructured by new modes of mobility. Looking at journeys by rail, stagecoach, and on foot, undertaken by travellers and tourists, governesses and dairymaids, sailors and factory girls, and many more figures in between, this book reveals a rich and varied canvas of mobile practices and argues that these are central to understanding the idea of the nation, and its connections to the rest of the world, in the Victorian novel.

Charlotte Mathieson is Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, UK, where she was awarded her PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in 2011. She researches and teaches nineteenth-century literature, and publications include Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 (2014).