Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Ruth Livesey (review)

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.Analogous to how stage coach clocks gained or lost time as the coach journeyed 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.Without directly engaging with such scholarship, Livesey's utterly convincing account of how material infrastructures can give rise to locally-grounded formulations of large-scale imagined collectivities (nation, Empire) might have significant bearing on how we think about the history of the British state, both at home and abroad, and Britain's ecological history, particularly regarding global circuits of energy.