I’m delighted to have an essay in the edited collection Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–193Oedited by Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak, and Rebecca Spence, which has just been published with Palgrave Macmillan. My chapter examines the relationship between mobility and materiality in a text of the Great Exhibition year, more on which in the abstract below. I’m very proud to be part of this fantastic collection and grateful to the editors for their work throughout the process.
Mobile materiality: the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the mobile-material relations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys
This chapter examines a novel of the mid-nineteenth century that anticipates fundamental questions about the relationship between materiality and mobility, Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys. Written in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the novel resonates with contemporary concerns about the materiality of mobility, the mobility of material culture, and the status of the human in a world overrun by objects on the move. In so doing, it provides ways of rethinking the relationship between mobility and materiality in the nineteenth century, and in turn, allows us to reconceptualise the theoretical connections between mobility and materiality today.
Dr Charlotte Mathieson 