The Living Transport Machine

Abstract

At the outset of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), Dorothea Brooke declares: ‘“I mean to give up riding. I shall not ride any more”’.¹ Set in the First Reform era (1829–32), Middlemarch’s representation of transport and transportation takes a retrospective look at the moment in nineteenth-century England when debate around the relative value of organic versus machine power was at its height. When Dorothea renounces horseback riding in an extravagant surrender to her own peculiar brand of asceticism, she transforms the horse from a mode of transportation into a vehicle of communication replete with symbolic significance that resonates with tensions of class and gender. At the same time, Dorothea’s denial of riding points to the tarnish on the ‘aura’ of the animal that was once a fundamental presence in local relations. That denial is thus first and foremost a reminder of the lingering presence in the nineteenth century of the traditional relationship in Greek thought between technē (art and craft) and poiēsis (making and creating) as well as of the tensions that were developing in the industrial era within the very concept of technology. Nowhere is this technological uncertainty more evident than in late nineteenth-century fictional representations of, and responses to, transport.