Abstract
Helen Hamilton’s 1913 article ‘Concerning the ’bus’, describes omnibus transport in terms of pursuing journalistic copy and literary subjects. Hamilton writes from the perspective of an urban traveller, using the omnibus to view the city in search of ‘humanity … tragi-comedy, a compound of bathos and pathos’.2 Like Hamilton, many fin-de-siècle authors and journalists wrote of omnibuses and omnibus travel, and humorous and satirical articles about omnibuses regularly appeared in newspapers and magazines. Other writers depicted the omnibus in more serious tones especially when writing about the social inequalities faced by women. Fictionalized observations and factual journalistic essays communicated the importance of omnibus travel in relation to issues of urbanity, mobility, class, and gender.
Until today I have been disgruntled — in a literary sense — because I have never had anything to say on the subject of ’buses. And until one has contributed something thereon to literature, how can one claim to be considered a writer of any standing? For literature is, so to speak, full of ’buses and buses full, not to say overfull of human beings. Buses should, then, inspire writers. (Helen Hamilton, ‘Concerning the ’bus’, 1913)1
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Notes
Helen Hamilton, ‘Concerning the ‘bus,’ Queen Magazine 29 (March 1913): 551–7, 556.
Wendy Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 81.
Fred T. Jane, ‘The Romance of a London Omnibus’, English Illustrated Magazine 127 (April 1894): 691–9, 691.
Erica Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 125.
Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1994), 97.
Margaret Beetham, ‘Women and the Consumption of Print’, in Womenand Literature in Britain, 1800–1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55–77, 59.
Richard Le Gallienne, ‘A Literary Omnibus’, The Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 314–16, 315.
Masha Belenky, ‘From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 35.2 (2007): 408–21, 408.
Gilbert H. Page [D’Arcy, Ella], ‘The Smile’, The Argosy 117 (October 1891): 348–51, 348.
L. Quiller-Couch, ‘Higher Up’, The Idler 10 (January 1897): 776–83, 780.
Angela Dickens, ‘An Idyll of an Omnibus’, The Pall Mall Magazine 125 (September 1896): 45–51, 45. Republished in Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 410–22.
W. L. Alden, ‘Life’s Little Worries: Omnibuses’, Pearson’s Magazine 5 (January–June 1898): 560–1, 560.
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.
See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997);
Deborah L. Parsons Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aesthetics: Passengers of Modernity (London: Palgrave, 2006).
Amy Levy, ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: Fisher T. Unwin, 1889).
Maud Morin, ‘To Moderna — who is Waiting for a ‘Bus’, The Pall Mall Magazine 44.196 (1909): 319.
Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia, 1895, ed. Helen Small (London: Everyman Edition, 1995), 69.
Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop, 1888, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Toronto: Broadview Editions, 2003);
Netta Syrett, Nobody’s Fault (London: John Lane, 1896), 113–15;
Ellen Williams, Anna Marsden’s Experiment (London: Greening and Co., 1899).
Netta Syrett, ‘The Royal Blue’, Longman’s Magazine 19 (1892): 436–70, 436.
Syrett explains in her autobiography The Sheltering Tree (1939) that she boarded ‘the Royal Blue … an omnibus bound for Langham Place’ (Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939, 71). Although Syrett’s school was not in Langham Place, this area of London as the site of feminist campaigns in the 1860s, and, as Sheila Herstein points out, the one-time headquarters of the radical magazine The English Woman’s Journal (Sheila Herstein, ‘The Langham Place Circle and Feminist Periodicals of the 1860s’, Victorian Periodical Review 26. 1 (1993): 24–27, 26), would have held for Syrett associations with women’s reform, advancement, and urban lives.
Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172.
Netta Syrett, ‘The Last Journey’, The Venture 2 (1905): 42–52, reprinted in Netta Syrett, Women and Circumstance (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), 331–49, 331.
Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women as Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London, 1850–1900’, Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 3–12, 3.
Michelle Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 157.
Evelyn Sharp, ‘The Woman at the Gate’, Rebel Women (London: A.C. Field, 1910): 7–19, 7.
Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991), 10.
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© 2015 Lorna Shelley
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Shelley, L. (2015). ‘Buses should … inspire writers’. 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_9
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