New publication: essay in Transport in British Fiction, 1840-1940

A new collection on Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940 has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries, the book explores how various travel technologies shaped British fiction across the period. My essay “‘A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods’: Bodies in Transit in the mid-nineteenth Century Railway Journey” looks at representations of railway travellers as “parcelled up” in layers of clothing and “enveloped in railway rugs”. I focus on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861-2) and the image of Robert Audley wrapped up like “a perambulating mass of woollen goods”, to explore the parcelled-up body as a site that articulates Victorian cultural anxieties about the position of the human subject in the new spaces of mobile modernity.