Dickens’s National Novel

Bleak House is a novel saturated with figures of unsettlement, in which characters uprooted by their social conditions operate within a plot animated by unsettlement, in an affective world dominated by feelings of pity and sympathy for those who have been displaced. Thresholds recur in the novel as privileged sites of heightened emotion. The novel’s preoccupation with unsettlement is best understood in the context of mid-century bourgeois aspirations to reimagine the nation as a place in which all citizens might enjoy freedom of movement. In framing this vision, Dickens draws on two contemporary discourses, one drawn from emigration, especially Caroline Chisholm’s popular ‘family emigration’ schemes; the other from public discussions about the law of settlement in the context of the New Poor Law. The latter were attempts to regulate where the poor could live, in the context of the bureaucratic reorganization of national geography that occurred at this time. Throughout, however, the novel displays profound ambivalence about Britain’s engagement with the wider world, expressed most clearly through its antagonism to overseas philanthropy, which it sees as a misdirection of national feeling. The novel’s vision of the nation, underpinned by its commitment to mobility and an ideology of freedom of movement within, but not beyond, the nation, produces its particular formal features and thematic emphases on mobility and movement, and its preoccupation with thresholds—doorsteps, entrances, and finally national borders—as places at which political decisions about inclusion and exclusion are made.

Walter Scott’s Long-Distance Fiction

Innovations in novelistic form that appear at the end of the Napoleonic Wars do so in the context of a national discussion about colonial emigration, and an uprooting and dispersing of British people on a profound scale, that provoked a reimagining of global space. Poverty, unemployment, and security, both domestically and in the colonies, were concerns about which emigration was proposed as a possible solution. This helps to explain two influential formal innovations made by Walter Scott in Guy Mannering (1815). The first is the invention of a new geographical imaginary. The novel is distinctive for its international backstory that takes place in India outside the main temporal and geographical frames of the novel, as well as a mode of calibrating distance in relation to details of size and scale, and through manipulating levels of readerly attention. The second innovation is its eccentric character, the gypsy, Meg Merrilies, who specifically derives from these spatial concerns. Her character is especially topical as it draws on contemporary beliefs about gypsies, a displaced people thought to have originated in India, but who are also identified with Scottish peasants displaced during the Highland Clearances, and other indigenous displaced people. Through the character of Meg, the novel examines contemporary questions about property, place, and belonging, as well as race and indigeneity. Meg’s persistence in print culture through the next several decades, reimagined in theatrical renditions, poems, print commodities, and travel writings, turns her into a celebrity character, and constituent element of a migratory British culture.

Conclusion

Conrad’s 1901 short story ‘Amy Foster’ has influenced postcolonial and human rights critics who link it to post-1945 forms of migration. But the story also reveals its indebtedness to the nineteenth-century novel. Published first in a weekly magazine, surrounded by advertisements for colonial commodities and articles about imperial military campaigns, the story draws attention to many of the same issues, and uses the same techniques, as the fictions explored in earlier chapters of the book. That the story also resonates with the conditions of exile faced by refugees in more recent times suggests that the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century novel lies in the way in which it established, and also interrogated, paradigmatic and persistent assumptions about the relationship between human mobility and freedom. While it bears traces of the colonial regimes in which it was produced, another important legacy of the nineteenth-century novel is that it presents us with an analytical frame in which to understand and interrogate the types and patterns of human mobility on which these were built.

Introduction

The increased extent and rapidity of migration was a world-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century and forms the context of a dynamic period in the history of the English novel. Although British literature often seems unwilling to represent migration, nevertheless the form of the novel in this period is shaped in the context of the frenetic transcontinental movement of people. The common denominator of migration and fiction in this period is print, which, in this period, through new technologies was cheaper and more easily produced. Print helped to stimulate and sustain migration through the production of information for emigrants. Moreover, the development of printing presses in settler colonies stimulated important new readerships especially for fiction, which flourished as a consequence. Fictions in this period show the impact of increased human mobility in both their themes, and their formal attributes. They interrogate questions that are provoked by colonization and mass mobility, regarding community, freedom, democracy, and displacement; and they develop an aesthetic that is characterized by an emphasis on contiguity, and adjacent relations.

John Galt’s ‘Whole Art of Colonization’

The Scottish novelist John Galt provides the clearest example of a writer in whose works fiction, literary technique, and settler colonization overlap. Famous for his regional novels about communities on Scotland’s western seaboard, he also had careers as parliamentary lobbyist, entrepreneur, and colonist in Upper Canada. In the 1820s, he spent a period working for the Canada Land Company, a colonization company he helped to establish in London, and through which he travelled to Canada to participate in the development of colonial settlements, including the city of Guelph. This provided copious material for writings in the final years of his life. Although Galt, and subsequently critics and biographers, have tended to represent the two periods of his life separately, they both are part of a single colonial project, connected by the extensive print networks of which he was a part. The connections are evident principally in his preoccupation with voice and dialect, sound and hearing. In the Scottish works he emphasizes phonological aspects of Scottish regional voices, and ways in which literature trains the ear. Sound operates as a mode of organizing and producing space. In the Canadian works, he explores the themes of sound and acoustic management in the context of colonial space. Together his works present an archive of colonial sound management, and an exploration of the auditory elements of his colonial project.

George Eliot’s Provincial Novels

The formal innovations in George Eliot’s late work Daniel Deronda transform the style and shape of the provincial novel, the genre she perfected in earlier works. These changes reflect a new way of thinking about mobility and space which derives from the conditions of late nineteenth-century imperialism and the ideology of ‘Greater Britain’. Emigration is central to this. The population of Britons settled in overseas colonies over the century by now constitutes a significant world-wide economic and political force. Concerted political and cultural efforts to consolidate this dispersed group were part of imperialist efforts to exert British domination across the globe. In the novel, white settler emigration is evident in the background, but the spotlight falls instead on Daniel’s Jewish emigration to Palestine. Developing a comparative method borrowed from contemporary historian Henry Maine, Eliot compares different styles of emigration, and in this strikingly anti-semitic work exposes the racism and oppressive power dynamics implicit in white settler ideology. Daniel Deronda’s complex engagement with Jewish theology transforms emigration into a reparative and utopian vision of world renewal. In the novel, Eliot revises formal components of her earlier provincial novels that relied on an underlying rhythm of movement and stasis, by introducing a new kinetic imaginary that emphasizes movement, exile, and dispersal. Eliot’s utopian vision, however, is short lived, and under pressure of the contradictions of a critique of imperialism that repeats many of its own structures, in her final work her formal innovations collapse into a series of mere character studies, and her political ideals slump into cynicism.

‘Infinite Kindness’

A new kind of topographical writing about English village life in the 1820s established conventions for writing about provincialism that would be widely adopted in Anglophone writing throughout the century. Invented by the writer Mary Russell Mitford as a response to her financial precarity, it consisted of short, inconsequential narratives about places and characters in her own village, linked by a female narrative voice distinctive for its intimate mode of address. Despite appearing to be nostalgic in its representation of village life, this style of writing constituted a complex and significant response to global modernity and the kinds of mobility that it brought. It introduced a mode of long-distance intimacy which appealed to readers and writers who had made transoceanic journeys, and represented a way of inhabiting village space as though it were a new settlement. Published serially in a magazine, the stories were frequently reprinted. They were pirated in America, where Mitford nurtured an enthusiastic following through developing a personal network of correspondents. Her relationship with the American publisher J. T. Fields, was mutually beneficial in developing lucrative new readerships for her work, and in helping to consolidate Ticknor and Fields’s position at the forefront of the American book trade. Mitford’s village provided a frame in which to imagine transatlantic literary culture. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, the idea of the literary village transformed from being a place of fugitive living to a conservative and conserving idea of transatlantic accord in the context of settler colonialism.

Transported!

A shared interest in the practice of colonization as a form of predation and capture provides a surprising link between Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s writings about systematic colonization and Charlotte Brontë’s whimsical juvenile writings. Both present their ideas in fictional form, and their colonies as imaginative constructs. Wakefield’s theory, which was influential in shaping British colonial policy, involved transporting working-class families to Australia to establish a labour force within new settlements. To reinforce the difference between his scheme and that of chattel slavery, he emphasized the freedom of his workers. Yet his scheme entailed significant restraints of their personal liberties: their freedom of movement, association, and right to own property, as well as the requirement to marry and have children. Similar preoccupations are evident in an earlier episode in Wakefield’s biography, in which he kidnapped a young woman in order to marry her for her family’s wealth and prestige. Brontë, who was roughly the same age as Wakefield’s young victim, explores these themes explicitly in her own teenage accounts of a colony in Africa, Glass Town. Co-authored with her siblings, this intricate saga of conquest and settlement by a group of European explorers presents a juvenile commentary on contemporary colonial practices. It reveals the coercive violence within the colony, as well as the submerged erotic elements within it. It also shows the ways this same violence underpins fictional narratives, especially the marriage plots that Brontë develops in her mature works.

The Political Picaresque

At the end of the 1840s, authored by Chartist Thomas Martin Wheeler, a new form of fiction—the ‘political picaresque’—deliberately eschewed the conventions of the bourgeois novel, especially the marriage plot, and its linking of marriage and inheritance with the appropriation of land. Wheeler’s formal innovations responded to the conditions of a time in which emigration, land reform, globalization, and the rise of nationalisms across Europe stirred people’s feelings in contrary ways. For Chartists, land ownership was tied to a history of encroachment which had impoverished working people since medieval times. In the 1840s, these long-standing concerns were exacerbated by colonial emigration schemes that targeted working-class people for removal abroad. As it aimed to rehouse thousands of working-class people in new colonies in Britain rather than overseas, the Chartist Land Plan was a radical response to these conditions. Beset with problems, the Land Plan collapsed at the same moment at which the Chartist movement failed to achieve its political aims. In this context, Wheeler uses the novel as a fictional form in which to reimagine a democratic future. He narrativizes the transitory relationships between people and places that exist in situations of profound precarity, and creates a distinctive kinetic and spatial ecology within his text, central to which is a distinctive use of the term ‘occupation’ to encapsulate the inhabitation, rather than appropriation, of land. Although Wheeler’s new genre was short-lived, it represents a significant attempt to recast the novel as a mode in which to imagine alternative futures.