Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Ruth Livesey (review)
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Ruth Livesey's new book provides a timely framework for understanding the novel's role in forging national cohesion through intensely-felt local belonging. Much like our post-Brexit present, the nineteenth-century world Livesey describes was unevenly mobile, and attachments to the local strained yet supported the politics of nationality. Arguing that the nineteenth century's "'just' past narratives"—fictions set roughly a generation before their composition—drew upon the widely-circulating figure of the stage coach to imagine a form of the nation "knitted together by the affect of strongly felt local belonging" (2), Livesey focuses on what Benedict Anderson's national imagined community missed all along—the uneven, temporally heterogeneous force of the local constructing national identity.
Livesey contributes to a growing subfield of Victorian studies interested in the power of locality in shaping national and global orders. She starts from the premise, first developed by Ian Baucom, that the British nation "grows out of locality" (12). Since Baucom attuned scholars to how nineteenth-century British national identity often resided in place, a cultural formation enabling a portable model of subject formation deployable across the Empire, Victorian studies has tended to extend Baucom's insights to the British globe. In attending to stage coach networks of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Livesey, like both John Plotz and James Buzard, returns mobile locality to the shores of the United Kingdom. In the stage coach network's halts, bypasses, and accidents, Livesey locates a narrative principle for the Victorian novel's oft-noted yet under-theorized "just" past settings. Reminding us that the Victorians understood nostalgia as a form of homesickness, rather than a longing for a lost past, she argues that the stage coach imaginary offered readers a "prosthetic replacement" (6) for local belonging in an increasingly mobile world. Using Walter Scott as her starting point, Livesey tracks the rise of the stage coach as a Whiggish figure for national cohesion and progress. This rise was belied by both the material infrastructure of stage coaching—a decentralized network of inns, fingerposts, broken coaches, exhausted horses—and the criticism of canonical novelists, radicals, and illustrators. Livesey pursues the permutations of this contestation over a local-nation across 1820s journalism, 1830s visual culture, Charles Dickens's early novels, Charlotte Brontë's Yorkshire, George Eliot's Midlands, and, in a coda, Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Through Livesey's deft readings of these well-thumbed pages emerges a convincing argument for how the stage coach provided both a figure for national communication across semi-autonomous localities and an analogy for the form of the novel itself.
Livesey argues that Scott's "just" past fictions modeled a fusion of locality and mobility that would prove a powerful anodyne for an ever-in-motion global Britain. In chapter one, Livesey teases out how Scott's novels cohere through "a series of halts, stages, and contiguous anchoring points" (43), a formal pattern analogous to the stage coach network of Scotland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Scott's formal patterning of movement and stasis, nation and locality, served Victorian novelists as a model for challenging the growing Whiggish consensus that new transportation infrastructures like the stage and rail networks offered a frictionless means for connecting the United Kingdom's scattered parts into a national whole (46). Analogous to how stage coach clocks gained or lost time as the coach journeyed [End Page 288] along, The Pickwick Papers' temporality is marked by "recursive rapid journeys punctuated by halts" (91), a formal pattern that echoes the fully-realized stage coach network of the 1830s and, this reader must add, that decade's emerging forms of serial publication. In perhaps her most intriguing chapter, Livesey rereads Jane Eyre's self-assertions as instances of Tory Yorkshire independence, arguing that such moments function as momentary halts along a journey preserving regional identity while threading such identity into a...
