For all its industrial and technological heat, Victorian Britain remained a largely horsedrawn society. Focusing on the use of horse-drawn vehicles in Wilkie Collins' 1860 novel The Woman in White, this essay explores representations of city space, intra-urban mobility, connectivity and public transport in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Cabs, I argue, represent intriguing and paradoxical spaces, poised between public and private, continually on the move in the static city. I ask how literary figurations of horse cabs focus and negotiate anxieties associated with travel within Victorian cities. I also suggest that cabs - vehicles for the fast and disreputable - articulate new ways of occupying space.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Michael John Law;
(2014)
The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London
(/isis/citation/CBB746206701/)
Article
Mary Anne Garry;
(June 2016)
Sedan Chairmen in Eighteenth-Century London
(/isis/citation/CBB226462816/)
Book
William, Rosen;
(2010)
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention
(/isis/citation/CBB001320959/)
Article
Kok, Su Mei;
(2013)
“How Many Arts from Such a Labour Flow”: Thomas Middleton and London's New River
(/isis/citation/CBB001200319/)
Chapter
Nanny Kim;
(2011)
Cultural Attitudes and Horse Technologies: A View on Chariots and Stirrups from the Eastern End of the Eurasian Continent
(/isis/citation/CBB967618399/)
Article
Edgerton, David;
(2007)
Creole Technologies and Global Histories: Rethinking How Things Travel in Space and Time
(/isis/citation/CBB000931385/)
Book
Edwards, Peter;
(2007)
Horse and Man in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB001201097/)
Book
Kauz, Ralph;
Ptak, Roderich;
Schottenhammer, Angela;
Fragner, Bert G.;
(2009)
Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur. [Horses in Asia: History, Trade and Culture]
(/isis/citation/CBB001500517/)
Book
Nadot, Sébastien;
(2012)
Le Spectacle des joutes, sports et courtoisie à la fin du Moyen Âge
(/isis/citation/CBB001201995/)
Article
Bryan Alkemeyer;
(2016)
The Natural History of the Houyhnhnms: Noble Horses in Gulliver’s Travels
(/isis/citation/CBB337535694/)
Article
Jennifer Clark;
(2015)
London Transport Museum's wartime centennial tribute
(/isis/citation/CBB102430059/)
Book
Oldenziel, Ruth;
(2013)
Consumers, Tinkerers, Rebels: The People Who Shaped Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB001551978/)
Article
Mom, Gijs;
(2014)
Orchestrating Automobile Technology: Comfort, Mobility Culture, and the Construction of the “Family Touring Car,” 1917--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB001421260/)
Article
Mackintosh, Will B.;
(2014)
Mechanical Aesthetics: Picturesque Tourism and the Transportation Revolution in Pennsylvania
(/isis/citation/CBB001450303/)
Article
Junichi Hasegawa;
(December 2015)
Tokyo's Elevated Expressway in the 1950s: Protest and Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB222015857/)
Book
Christopher Kopper;
Massimo Moraglio;
(2014)
The Organization of Transport: A History of Users, Industry, and Public Policy
(/isis/citation/CBB396016399/)
Book
Steel, Frances;
(2011)
Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB001200612/)
Article
Williams, James C.;
(1977)
The trolley: Technology and values in retrospect
(/isis/citation/CBB001181497/)
Article
Susan Major;
(June 2015)
Railway Excursion Agents in Britain, 1840-60
(/isis/citation/CBB886393881/)
Article
Jim Bennett;
Rebekah Higgitt;
(2019)
London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice
(/isis/citation/CBB633262112/)
Be the first to comment!