Introduction: Mobility and the eighteenth-century novel

Summary

Infrastructure and the structure of the novel

The novel form that develops in Britain in the eighteenth century is deeply connected to mobility. The journey motif had long been an organising principle for extended prose narratives, with so many of the texts regarded as precursors to the novel tradition, such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) explicitly linked to travel. As the prose form developed, the journey became a powerful trope for understanding how novels functioned, differentiating them from other literary forms. However, mobility was far more than a trope; in a period defined by Britain's first great transport revolution, the way people started to move through the nation shaped novels, altering the mapping of stories, modifying genres, and changing the way language was used. The novel emerged partly in response to the need to understand a society on the move in ways that were unthinkable to writers of an earlier generation. In the process, the changing dynamics of mobility helped to determine its narratives in profound ways.

The novel in Britain developed during a juncture point in the nation's history, when the balance between the two essential social divisions of space – pathways and settlements – started to tip irresistibly towards the former as roads, canals, and communication networks criss-crossed the landscape. Britain in the long eighteenth century was increasingly characterised by the ethos of circulation and an investment in connective systems, which contested an older social order based on stasis. Rosalind Williams argues that

The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements. In the city, the central element in modern urban organization is the street or highway, as opposed to the square, market, forum, or particular buildings.

Modernity perhaps most reveals itself in this reversal, where rapid transport and information flows create a fractured experience, and this can be traced to the transport revolution, circa 1700–1830, which turned Britain into a nation in motion. Mobility saturated all areas of life, with Sara Landreth observing that ‘writers attempted to answer some of their most pressing questions in terms of motion. Motion was everywhere in Enlightenment texts: not just in treatises about physics, but also in sermons, periodicals, encyclopaedias, and epistolary novels.’