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  • Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen by Chris Ewers
  • Leah Orr
EWERS, CHRIS. Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2018. pp. xiii + 219. $99.00 hardback; $24.99 e-book.

Critics of eighteenth-century fiction have long called attention to the ways that novels in this period interacted with their cultural moment, from Ian Watt’s grand narrative of the rise of the middle-class reader spawning the novel, to the more nuanced approaches of recent critics like Christopher R. Miller, Chloe Wigston Smith, and Linda Zionkowski, among others. Chris Ewers’s Mobility in the English Novel [End Page 603] from Defoe to Austen contributes to this tradition with a new approach that reminds us of the importance of people’s ability to move across space and time to our thinking about fiction. In looking at the era after epic tales of global wandering and before the railway, Ewers is shedding new light on a period of transport history that has been relatively neglected by literary critics.

The book is arranged into roughly chronological chapters that each focus on a different aspect of transit and a major work or author of eighteenth-century fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Fielding, Smollett, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, and Northanger Abbey. The main historical thread is a narrative that Ewers weaves throughout the book about the increase in coach travel and its consequences over the course of the eighteenth century, from the building of a turnpike network to the focus on speed of travel to the increased marginalization of walking as a form of long-distance transportation. Ultimately, Ewers argues, this helped to shape the novel form because “the master trope for explaining the reading process was that a reader journeyed through the pages of a book” (4).

The historical information that Ewers provides leads to new readings of familiar texts. In his discussion of Robinson Crusoe, he points out that the different modes of travel (by sea and by land) offer different balances of realism and fantasy. The geography of the country changed as new roads were built, and as Ewers argues about Tom Jones and the “Man on the Hill” episode, “By making the landscape harder to traverse, the alternation between hills and country lanes alter the way time is ordered and experienced compared to the country and city sections” (74). Some of his arguments help to explain the trends of literary history: for example, ramble novels (such as Roderick Random) were popular in mid-century Britain, “but by 1770 [had] been marginalised by the dominance of a faster, more efficient, destination-based transport system” (82). Others illuminate aspects of the reading experience, such as the examination of the difference between speed and pacing in Tristram Shandy’s representation of travel, the passage of time, and the amount of time the reader takes to read the novel. As Ewers explains, “Instead of a reading norm, there is a shuttling between moments of rapid relation and passages where the narrative slows to the point of stasis” (119). The concept of reading speed, like physical speed, being a matter of personal perception reflects eighteenth-century reports of travel experiences and shows how the metaphor of reading as a journey becomes literal in the relativity of time. In his analysis of Northanger Abbey, Ewers analyzes the ways that mobility was a sign of class and power, so that “[c]oaches enabled some women to move with relative freedom, with the elite able to use their rank and wealth to arrange a freer type of mobility” (166). While most of the book is focused on the changes that increased mobility, Ewers is careful to remind the reader that not everyone benefited from the turnpike system and other innovations, and for the poor the rapid building of roads often hampered mobility.

This book is strongest in its readings of individual texts and authors: Ewers makes an interesting case that closer attention to the realities of transport can lead us to a better understanding of the authorial choices made in fiction, and he makes new points about some very well-studied novels. But the book...

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