Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel

ISBN-13: 9780199682164 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 272 str.

JonathanH Grossman

Opis

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens's work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, 'standard' time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonathan Grossman examines the history of public transport's systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, he looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community's coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.

Recenzje

What stands out about Charles Dickensâs Networks is the clever and convincing manner in which historical and theoretical insights concerning the Victorian transport system are used to illuminate particular episodes, generic features, and textual strategies from Dickens's fiction ... in developing such a compelling and nuanced account of the way in which the public transport revolution both impacted upon and was mediated by Dickens's fiction, this study opens up spatio-temporal dimensions of Victorian society and culture in a manner that deserves and will reward further work.

O autorze

Jonathan H. Grossman is Associate Professor of English at UCLA. He is also the author of The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (2002).