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‘The Annihilation of Space and Time’: the Coming of the Railway ‘The Annihilation of Space and Time’: the Coming of the Railway
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Full Speed Ahead: Steamships and Steam Launches Full Speed Ahead: Steamships and Steam Launches
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Declaration of Independence: the Bicycle Craze Declaration of Independence: the Bicycle Craze
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Above The Fray: Hot-Air Balloons Above The Fray: Hot-Air Balloons
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Suggested Reading Suggested Reading
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14 Technologies of Travel and the Victorian Novel
Get accessAlison Byerly holds an interdisciplinary appointment as College Professor at Middlebury College. She is the author of two books, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge, 1998), and Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (U of Michigan, 2012). Are We There Yet? connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with both the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction, and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. She has published a number of articles on Victorian media and technology, and also on contemporary technology and its role in higher education and culture.
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
The development of new technologies of travel in the nineteenth century dramatically increased the mobility of people of all classes. The rapid expansion of railway networks throughout Britain, the introduction of steamship routes across the Atlantic, the independence offered to individual commuters by bicycles, and the new vistas opened up through the aerial perspective seen for the first time from hot-air balloons: all of these developments had an effect on the evolution of the realist novel. This essay examines each of these technologies through the lens of novelists’ representations of travelers and travel. The railway appears in novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon as an emblem of modernity, energy, and control. Boat travel, by contrast, is used in the novels of William Thackeray, Jerome K. Jerome, and others to evoke a more leisured form of travel that is already disappearing. In the late-century works of George Gissing, Jerome, and Doyle, the bicycle is a source of individual agency and mobility that opens up new possibilities for the “New Woman” of the period. And finally, a look at the landscape descriptions generated by the craze for hot-air balloon travel leads to a discussion of the way in which panoramas, stereoscopes, and other representations of place allowed the Victorians to supplement and recreate their travels with a kind of virtual travel across the landscapes of the imagination.
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