Abstract
This chapter examines a novel of the mid-nineteenth century that anticipates fundamental questions about the relationship between materiality and mobility, Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys. Written in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the novel resonates with contemporary concerns about the materiality of mobility, the mobility of material culture and the status of the human in a world overrun by objects on the move. In so doing, it provides ways of rethinking the relationship between mobility and materiality in the nineteenth century, and in turn, allows us to reconceptualise the theoretical connections between mobility and materiality today.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
On the politics of the Exhibition floor plan, see Buzard (2007).
- 5.
In this vein, Gillooly (2007) notes that in Exhibition rhetoric objects were taken as synecdoches of nations, with an accompanying personification of things in descriptions.
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- 7.
On the embeddedness of the Great Exhibition within networks of capitalist globalisation, see Young (2009, 201).
- 8.
An estimated 58,000 visitors came to Britain in 1851, nearly double that of the previous year: see Cole (1853, 436). Cole’s figures are derived from the “list of aliens” in the Home Office, prepared under the Alien Act, which required the commander of every ship to deliver on arrival of the vessel at an English port a list of all foreigners (436).
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In total, an estimated four million people travelled by railway to the Exhibition; see Rae (1987, 229–30).
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See Freeman (1999, 140–47).
- 13.
Cf., for example, John Tenniel, “An allegory of the Great Industrial Meeting of All Nations”, 1851.
- 14.
The Exhibition Catalogue lists many references to fossils and other petrified items in the Raw Materials, Mining and Mineral Products sections.
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Mathieson, C. (2019). Mobile Materiality: The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Mobile-Material Relations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_7
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