Abstract
In his influential study, The Culture of Time and Space (1983), Stephen Kern describes the period from 1880 to 1918 as one in which the relationship of time to space was radically transformed by new technologies, by scientific discoveries, and by the increasing rationalization of social life as a symptom of economic change and bureaucratic con-trol.1 E. M. Forster evokes this new spatio-temporal awareness via his description of London in Howards End (1910):
The city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux … This famous building had risen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall was transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky.2
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Notes
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910 (London: Penguin, 1992), 115.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 1939, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1992), 152–96, 171.
Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006).
Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 28.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’, 1893, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: 1885–1926 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927), 173, lines 9–12.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’, 1909, in Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1954), 109–46, 119.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 1829, in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 61–85, 65.
Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, 1886 (n.p.: Prime Classics Library, 2004), 121.
Percy Greg, Across the Zodiac, 1880 (n. p.: Aegypan Press, 2010), 18.
H. G. Wells, ‘Introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories’, 1911, in Complete Short Story Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 2011), 951–5, 952.
Angelique Richardson, ‘Introduction’, Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914 (London: Penguin, 2005), xxxi–lxxxi, xlv.
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 1925 (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 37.
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1898, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), 7.
H. G. Wells, Anticipations, 2nd ed. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1914), 29.
H. G. Wells, ‘The New Accelerator’, 1901, in Complete Short Story Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 2011), 531–42, 537.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), 4.
Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 3: 1900–1910, ed. Thomas Pinney (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 150.
George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution, 1893, (n.p.: Dodo Press, 2010), 94.
H. G. Wells, ‘The Land Ironclads’, 1903, in Complete Short Story Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 2011), 656–74, 656–7.
Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber, 2000).
George Griffith, A Honeymoon in Space, 1901 (n.p.: Aegypan Press, 2010), 71.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘As Easy as A. B. C.’ 1912, in A Diversity of Creatures, ed. Paul Driver (London: Penguin, 1987), 29–56, 42.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘With the Night Mail’, 1905, in Actions and Reactions (London: Macmillan, 1909), 109–67, 136.
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March-Russell, P. (2015). ‘Into the interstices of time’. In: Gavin, A.E., Humphries, A.F. (eds) Transport in British Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499042_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499042_11
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