Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel

From 1830 onwards railway infrastructure and novel infrastructure worked together to set nineteenth-century British society moving in new directions. At the same time they introduced new periods of relative stasis into everyday life - whether waiting for a train or for the next instalment of a serial - that were keenly felt. Here Nicola Kirkby maps out the plot mechanisms that drive canonical nineteenth-century fiction by authors including Charles Dickens Elizabeth Gaskell Anthony Trollope George Eliot Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster. Her cross-disciplinary approach as enjoyable to follow as it is thorough draws logistical challenges of multiplot serial and collaborative fiction into dialogue with large-scale public infrastructure. If stations termini tracks and tunnels reshaped the way that people moved and met both on and off the rails in the nineteenth century Kirkby asks then what new mechanisms did these spaces of encounter entanglement and disconnection offer the novel?