Abstract
In this chapter, journeys to India, China, America, the West Indies and Australia open up a greater expanse of the world beyond Britain in the Victorian novel. Throughout these travels the contraction of global space again comes to the forefront of concern through narrative structures and techniques that delineate the implications of a collapsing global world. In the first half of this chapter, a history of global travel in the nineteenth century sets the scene for the range and types of journeys that occur in the Victorian novel, and I explore Britain’s changing consciousness of global space through discussion of Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48), an indicative exemplification of Britain’s conceptualisation of ‘the world’. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), discussed in part two, global-scale collapse is figured as a structural device in the narrative, its representational modes working to expand and contract space.
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Notes
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1846–48), ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 46; subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.
For figures on the time taken on the Atlantic crossing, see Philip Bagwell and G. E. Mingay, Britain and America, 1850–1939: A Study of Economic Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 117. Wider discussion of the development of transport links between Britain and America is given by
George Rogers Taylor in The Transportation Revolution 1815–1860, vol. IV (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951), pp. 104–31. Figures for Middle East journey times are given in
Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel 1750 to 1915 (London: Aurum Press, 1998), pp. 232–35.
On the speed and conditions of Australian voyages see chapter 1 of Robin Haines, Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days (1873), trans. William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Cook ran his first tour of the Nile in 1869, and by 1877 tours were well established in the Middle East: see John Pudney, The Thomas Cook Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1953).
Isabel Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land. From my Private Journal (London: Kegan and Paul, 1879), p. 316.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Lovels of Arden (1864; London: J. and R. Maxwell, c1890), pp. 390, 389;
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (1862–63), ed. P. D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 6.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 140.
On the practice of transportation, see Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Vintage, 2003). Dickens was involved in debates around transportation, including writing to the Home Secretary in 1840 to stop the practice (see Hughes, The Fatal Shore, p. 584–85) and exploring the issue again in the narrative of the convict Magwitch’s return in Great Expectations (1860–61).
Brian Cheadle, ‘Despatched to the Periphery: The Changing Play of Centre and Periphery in Dickens’s Work’, in Anny Sadrin, ed., Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, pp. 100–12 (Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999). Grace Moore similarly asserts that the Indian subcontinent is ‘figured as a waste ground for those who cannot succeed at home’, becoming ‘a useful repository to contain a number of social problems’; see Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 96, 7. Karl de Schweinitz also argues that ‘at the most the colonies in [British imperial] literature were far off-stage, a distant world to which the dramatis personae could be banished if it were convenient for the development of the novel’: see The Rise and Fall of British India; Imperialism as Inequality (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 34n.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853), ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 78;
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 611;
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–53), ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 86;
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1 Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62), ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 222, 392;
Braddon, Aurora Floyd, p. 456; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57), ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 416;
Braddon, The Lovels of Arden, p. 214. On reading objects in the novel, see for example Gill Frith, ‘Playing with Shawls: George Eliot’s Use of Corinne in The Mill on the Floss’, in John Rignall, ed., George Eliot and Europe, pp. 225–39 (Aldershot: Ashgate/Scolar Press, 1997);
On the formation of a Euroimperialist planetary consciousness, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992; London: Routledge, 2008).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 73.
James Buzard identifies the impulse to ‘shore up’ the ‘British nation (in fiction) from the worldwide network of dependencies in which that nation (in fact) was entangled’: see ‘“Then on the shore of the Wide World”: The Victorian Nation and its Others’, in Herbert Tucker, ed., A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, pp. 438–55 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), p. 453. On English identity in the context of Empire, see also Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
and Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 272.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and Cousin Phillis (1851–53, 1864), ed. Peter Keating (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 39; subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.
Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 86.
Boris Knezevic, ‘An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’, Victorian Studies 41.3 (1998): 405–27; p. 405.
John Plotz, ‘The Semi-Detached Provincial Novel’, Victorian Studies 53.3 (2011): 405–16; p. 407.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 85.
See Suzanne Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011) on the wider domestication of the idea of India through the presence and use of Indian commodities in the Victorian domestic novel.
Bruce Haley notes that foreign contagious diseases were perceived as much more threatening than ‘home-bred’ illnesses: cholera, in its ‘insidious march over whole continents,’ was something ‘outlandish, unknown, monstrous’: Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 6.
Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: From an Antique Land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 174.
Jo Robertson, ‘Anxieties of Imperial Decay: Three Journeys in India’, in Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston, eds, In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire, pp. 103–23 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 104.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 166.
Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 6, 3.
Warwick Anderson, ‘Travelling white’, in Katherine Ellinghaus, Leigh Boucher, and Jane Carey, eds, Re-Orienting Whiteness, pp. 65–72 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 68.
Ryan Johnson, ‘European Cloth and “tropical” Skin: Clothing Material and British Ideas of Health and Hygiene in Tropical Climates’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83.3 (2009): 530–60.
Simon Carter, Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 17–19. Victorian fears about sun exposure and the nerves developed from a historical association between sunstroke and mental disorder dating back to antiquity, which became more nuanced as medical understandings of climate and mental health developed;
see Jonathan Andrews, ‘Letting Madness Range: Travel and Mental Disorder, c. 1700–1900’, in Richard Wrigley and George Revill, eds, Pathologies of Travel, pp. 25–88 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). On the associations between illness and climate in tropical environments and colonial insecurities see also
Dane Kennedy, ‘The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics’, in John M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World, pp. 118–40 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990);
and Warwick Anderson, ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1343–70.
For a more detailed reading of this structural pattern, see Patricia Wolfe, ‘Structure and Movement in Cranford’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.3 (1968): 161–76.
See Wolfe , ‘Structure and Movement in Cranford’; and Alyson J. Kiesel, ‘Meaning and Misinterpretation in Cranford’, English Literary History 71.4 (2004): 1001–17.
William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 65.
Helena Michie, ‘Under Victorian Skins: The Bodies Beneath’, in Herbert Tucker, ed., A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, pp. 407–24 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 33.
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© 2015 Charlotte Mathieson
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Mathieson, C. (2015). ‘The distance is quite imaginary’: Travelling beyond Europe. In: Mobility in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545473_5
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