Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation published today

I’m delighted to say that my monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation is published today by Palgrave Macmillan.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores the role of mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Focusing on representations of bodies on the move, it reveals how journeys serve to create the place of the nation and understand its relationship to a global landscape that was being restructured by new modes of mobility. Looking at journeys by rail, stagecoach, and on foot, undertaken by travellers and tourists, governesses and dairymaids, sailors and factory girls, and many more figures in between, this book reveals a rich and varied canvas of mobile practices and argues that these are central to understanding the idea of the nation, and its connections to the rest of the world, in the Victorian novel.

A sample chapter is available on the publishers website, where you can also order a copy for your university, and I’ve put a detailed chapter breakdown on this blog.