Studi di Anglistica
collana diretta da
Leo Marchetti e Francesco Marroni
A10
129/3
3
Volume pubblicato con il contributo
del Dipartimento di Scienze Linguistiche e Letterarie
Università degli Studi “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti–Pescara
La letteratura vittoriana
e i mezzi di trasporto:
dalla nave all’astronave
a cura di
Mariaconcetta Costantini
Renzo D’Agnillo
Francesco Marroni
ARACNE
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I edizione: maggio 2006
Indice
Prefazione
9
Preface
11
Mirella Billi
The Romance of the Coach
13
Richard Ambrosini
Il viaggio di Marlow in Heart of Darkness: una rilettura
33
Mariaconcetta Costantini
Haunting on Board: The Gothic Vessels of Wilkie Collins
45
Anthony Dunn
Representations of Cultural Space in Henry James’s Italian Hours
65
Leo Marchetti
Il treno e l’astronave: dalle ‘junctions’ di Dracula ai ‘cilindri’
di Horsell Common
81
Roger Ebbatson
Fair Ships: A Victorian Poetic Chronotope
91
Enrico Reggiani
“Worshipping our railroads”. Victorian Catholic Writers and
the Railway as a “Cultural Metaphor”
111
Michela Vanon Alliata
In viaggio verso la terra promessa: The Amateur Emigrant
di R. L. Stevenson
133
Mary Patricia Kane
Mysterious Transports: Temporal Perception in the Short Fiction
of Vernon Lee
151
Emanuela Ettorre
Dai bassifondi londinesi ai mari della classicità: George Gissing
e le voci dell’inquietudine
167
Miriam Sette
Muoversi malinconicamente. George Eliot, Middlemarch e la
lipemania viatoria
177
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Towers and Trains: Topologies of Dispossession in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy
187
Chiara Magni
Sull’acqua con Lewis Carroll: da Alice a The Hunting of the Snark
199
Eleonora Sasso
William Morris’s Archaeologic Journey: Inside and Outside
Imaginary Homelands
209
Raffaella Teofili
She wants to ride her Bicycle: l’incursione della New Woman
nell’iconografia maschile
221
Massimo Verzella
A Car Ride to the End of the World: The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
235
Carla Fusco
New Grub Street: Gissing, the Intellectual, and the Hectic
Response to Means of Transport
245
Michele Russo
La scrittura come viaggio metaforico in New Grub Street e
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft di George Gissing
253
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
The Signalman di Charles Dickens: simulacri e incubi
261
Michela Marroni
Medievalismo e nostalgia vittoriana: John Ruskin e i viaggi
dell’immaginazione
273
Raffaella Antinucci
“Omnibus Trips”: The Victorians and the New Culture
283
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Viaggio per acqua nell’Africa equatoriale: Mary Kingsley
“floating into heaven”?
293
Silvia Antosa
Transport and a Society in Transition in the Fiction of
George Eliot
307
Tania Zulli
“Mapping the Unknown”: Rider Haggard Between Realism
and Imagination
317
Raffaella B. Sciarra
Travels with a Donkey di R. L. Stevenson: sul dorso di un asino
in piena rivoluzione industriale
325
Paola Evangelista
“Voyagers by land and sea”: figure itineranti nella poesia
di Emily Brontë
337
Elio Di Piazza
Velieri e piroscafi in The Mirror of the Sea di Conrad
349
Alan Shelston
Opportunity and Anxiety: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Development
of the Railway System
363
Renzo D’Agnillo
The Restlessness of a Victorian Pedestrian. Matthew Arnold’s
Walking Poems: Resignation, The Grande Chartreuse and Thyrsis
373
Francesca Saggini
Transporting Scenes: Motion and Sensation on the Victorian Stage 387
Nicoletta Vallorani
“Impervious to gravitation”. H. G. Wells Between the Earth and
the Moon
407
Mario Faraone
“A Stamp for a Penny” and a Pillar Box: Anthony Trollope
ufficiale postale, in viaggio tra lavoro, conoscenza e scrittura
421
Prefazione
Questo volume raccoglie gli Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale
di Studi Vittoriani “La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave”, svoltosi presso la Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere di Pescara dal 2 al 4 dicembre 2004. L’iniziativa rientra
nell’ambito delle attività del C.U.S.V.E. (Centro Universitario di Studi
Vittoriani ed Edoardiani) che, oltre ad essere l’autorità scientifica che
pubblica dal 1995 la Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, è anche e soprattutto
la sede di ricerca, formazione e confronto di una nutrita schiera di
giovani vittorianisti che si riconoscono nelle linee euristicoprogrammatiche del C.U.S.V.E. Come si noterà dall’elenco dei contributi, il convegno ha dato ampio rilievo ai dottorandi e ai dottori di ricerca nello spirito di incoraggiamento e di apertura verso le loro idee,
i loro metodi e le loro proposte. Inutile aggiungere che, insieme ai
giovani, hanno partecipato molti studiosi italiani e stranieri i cui interventi, oltre ad avere arricchito di originali e interessanti osservazioni il
tema proposto, hanno contribuito in modo significativo alla riuscita di
tutt’e cinque le sessioni. In ordine al titolo del convegno, i curatori desiderano sottolineare che si è cercato di dare un’accezione molto ampia del concetto di mezzo di trasporto, senza innalzare barriere
all’interpretazione data da ogni singolo relatore. Di qui una molteplicità di traiettorie – dalla navigazione a vela all’astronave, ma anche dalla semplice passeggiata al viaggio in bicicletta, dall’escursione in sella
a un asino al viaggio in treno, dalla carrozza settecentesca al viaggio
sulla luna. Al tempo stesso va detto che, nel complesso, la precisa prospettiva tematica fornita ai relatori ha fatto sì che – come speriamo
emerga con chiarezza da questo volume – ogni seduta fosse animata
da un vivo e vivace dibattito intorno al significato dei mezzi di trasporto nello sviluppo dell’immaginazione letteraria dell’Ottocento inglese.
I convegni del C.U.S.V.E. hanno una loro storia. Il primo risale al
novembre 1994 (“Ipotesi sulla letteratura vittoriana”), quando, non
senza spirito pionieristico, veniva auspicata una maggiore e più approfondita rivisitazione del canone della letteratura vittoriana, in un’ottica
che, polemicamente, mirava a recuperare i “margini” del discorso letterario, contro chi invece ancora si affidava al valore assoluto della
cosiddetta “grande tradizione”. Nel secondo convegno, svoltosi
nell’aprile 1997, per delineare l’ambito tematico fu deciso di adottare
il titolo di una poesia di Thomas Hardy: “Before Life and After. Poesia
e narrativa nell’epoca vittoriana” (ora, con lo stesso titolo, negli Atti
10
Prefazione
del Convegno, a cura di Emanuela Ettorre, Andrea Mariani e Francesco Marroni, Pescara, Edizioni Tracce, 2000). Il terzo convegno, che
ebbe luogo nel novembre 2000, fu incentrato sulla scrittura epistolare
e comunque sulla funzione della lettera come testo funzionale
all’intreccio: “Letters: Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in
Victorian Art and Literature”. Infine, vorremmo ricordare che il
C.U.S.V.E. ha organizzato nel marzo 2003 un Seminario
dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (A. I. A.), i cui contributi sono
stati raccolti in un fascicolo della Rivista di Studi Vittoriani (VIII, 16,
luglio 2003). Il quarto convegno rientrava in questo percorso che, noi
tutti lo speriamo, continuerà nei prossimi anni con la stessa vivacità e
lo stesso entusiasmo.
Prima di chiudere questa breve prefazione, i Curatori desiderano
ringraziare il prof. Andrea Mariani, Direttore del Dipartimento di
Scienze Linguistiche e Letterarie, che, in modo convinto, ha sostenuto
economicamente l’iniziativa, fornendo sempre utili consigli per la riuscita del convegno. Un ringraziamento anche alla prof. Marilena
Giammarco che, quale presidente della Fondazione Giammarco, ha
risposto prontamente, e con la solita generosità, alla nostra richiesta di
un sostegno economico. Un sentito grazie anche a tutti i colleghi che,
quali membri del C.U.S.V.E., hanno fatto il possibile per il successo
dell’iniziativa.
I Curatori
Pescara, febbraio 2006
Preface
The essays collected in this volume were delivered at the IV
International Conference of Victorian Studies “Victorian Literature
and Means of Transport: From Ship to Spaceship”, held at the
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures in Pescara from 2-4
December 2004 and organized by the C.U.S.V.E. (University Centre
of Victorian and Edwardian Studies). Since 1995 the centre has been
the scientific body behind the Victorian literary journal Rivista di
Studi Vittoriani. But it is also, and above all, a centre for research
offering the numerous young Victorian scholars who identify with its
heuristic-programmatic lines abundant opportunity to broaden their
academic experiences and engage in lively debates. As can be seen
from the list of contributors, the conference reserved considerable
space for M.A. and PhD students to put across and explore their own
ideas, methods and perspectives. Needless to say, besides these young
academicians, the volume also includes contributions from numerous
other English and Italian scholars who not only offered original and
stimulating ideas, but also greatly contributed to the success of the
conference by participating enthusiastically in all five sessions. As far
as the conference theme is concerned, we wish to emphasize that a
very broad interpretation of the concept of means of transport was
intended from the outset and that any restrictions towards individual
interpretations were deliberately avoided. As a result, the volume
contains a multiplicity of forms of travel – from sailing in a yacht to
traveling in a spacecraft, from simply journeying on foot to riding a
bicycle, from wandering on a donkey to travelling aboard a train and
from being driven in an eighteenth-century carriage to flying to the
moon in a spacecraft. At the same time, the fact that contributors were
requested to focus on a specific theme guaranteed that every session
would be animated by a lively debate around the significance of
means of transport in the nineteenth-century English literary
imagination, a factor that we hope is clearly reflected in the contents
of this volume.
There is a story behind every C.U.S.V.E. conference. The first,
(“Suggestions on Victorian Literature”), which dates back to
November 1994, expressed, in a somewhat pioneering spirit, the hope
for greater and more profound revisions of the Victorian literary
canon in a perspective whose then polemical aim was to recover the
12
Preface
‘margins’ of literary discourse against those who still believed in the
absolute values of the so-called “great tradition”. The title of the
second conference, which was held in April 1997, was taken from a
poem by Thomas Hardy: “Before Life and After. Poetry and
Narrative in the Victorian Period” (the proceedings of the conference
were published under the same title and edited by Emanuela Ettorre,
Andrea Mariani and Francesco Marroni, Pescara, Edizioni Tracce,
2000). The third conference, which was held in November 2000, was
centred around letter-writing and the functional roles of letters in
narrative plots: “Letters: Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in
Victorian Art and Literature”. Finally, we would like to recall here
that the C.U.S.V.E. also organised a seminar for the Italian
Association of English Studies in March 2003, the proceedings of
which were published in a special issue of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani
(VIII, 16, July, 2003). The fourth conference followed along the same
lines which, we all hope, will continue in the same dynamic and
enthusiastic spirit for the years to come.
Before concluding this brief preface, the editors wish to thank
Professor Andrea Mariani, Director of the Linguistic and Literary
Sciences Department, who, without hesitation, financially supported
our project as well as offering useful advice which helped to make the
conference such a success. Our thanks also goes to Professor
Marilena Giammarco, who, as President of the Giammarco
Foundation, responded with immediate generosity to our request for
financial aid. Finally, our sincere thanks goes to all those colleagues
who, as members of the C.U.S.V.E., did their utmost to contribute to
the success of the conference.
The Editors
Pescara, February 2006
Mirella Billi
The Romance of the Coach
The life of the English Coach is but a short-lived romance in the
pages of civilization. Its heyday spanned just a couple of generations
and then its glory was gone, though perhaps not completely the
romance – in every sense, including adventure and love – connected
with it, and now revived by costume movies, and even in such
traffic-ridden cities such as New York by indeed romantic, though
slightly ludicrous, rides for lovers and nostalgic tourists.
Coaches were originally, in the sixteenth century, with their wide
wheels and lack of springs, a mockery of any form of comfort and
elegance, and because of these disadvantages, to be used only in
cases of the direst need. But a revolution, one of the many in
transport, took place when a John Macadam had the idea of covering
roads, which had sunk into a miry mess of ruin and decay after the
monasteries – responsible for building and maintaining them since
after the crusades – were dissolved, with small pieces of granite
broken roughly to the same size so that they would weld themselves
together with mud, earth and clay. Coaches then could run on a
surface which was strong and long-lasting. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century the new roads had begun to span the country and
within a few years it was possible for the first great coaches owners
to put a light, fast coach, over the main roads of England.
At this moment the romance of speed was born and the next
twenty years brought coaching to a perfection which nobody would
have imagined half century before. Coaching became one of the most
organized businesses of the time. By 1838 there were nearly 200
services, all starting – with the exception of the West country – from
the new General Post-Office built in 1829 at Cheapside. Stage
coaches would leave London in the morning at 8 o’clock and before
dark that night would be in Bristol: fresh horses were changed every
ten miles, and there were three stops for food and drink.
Also the mail coaches carried passengers, who had to be
punctual, as nothing should stop or delay the mail service, but most
people travelled by stage coaches, which would carry a dozen or
more people, the outside ones paying about half fares than the inside
travellers. And if on a fine day this was wonderful for the cheaper
14
Mirella Billi
fares, in the depths of winter two or three stages could find them half
frozen in rain or sleet, and, any time there was a steep hill, off they
would have to get and trudge up alongside the horses.
Stage coaches, even inside, were not probably awfully
comfortable, and certainly not very quiet. In Everyday and Table
Book1 by William Hone, 1838, the author of the article on “StageCoach Adventures” gives this description of the inside of one of
them:
Crammed full of passengers; three fat, fusty, old men – a young mother and
sick child – a cross old maid – a poll parrot – a bag of red herrings – doublebarrelled gun (which you are afraid is loaded) – and a snarling lapdog, in
addition to yourself – awaking out of a sound nap, with the cramp in one leg,
and the other in a lady’s bandbox – pay the damage (five or four shillings)
for “gallantry’s sake” – getting out in the dark at the half-way house, in a
hurry stepping into the return coach, and finding yourself the next morning at
the spot you had started from the evening before – not a breath of air –
asthmatic old man, and a child with the measles – windows closed in
consequence – unpleasant smell – pretend sleep, and pinch the child –mistake
– pinch the dog, and get bit – execrate the child in return – pay the coachman
and drop a piece of gold in the straw – not to be found – fell through a
crevice – coachman says “he’ll find it” – can’t – get out yourself – gone –
picked up by the ostler!
In the description that follows, the outside proves even worse, with
disastrous results:
Drunken coachman – horse sprawling – wheel off – pole braking downhill –
axle tree splitting – coach overturning – winter, and buried in snow – sore
throat – inflammation – doctor – warm bath – fever – DIE2.
Stage coaches, of course, could be also quite pleasant places to travel
on, such as the Independent Tally Ho, which went at such speed as
nearly fifteen miles per hour over a long haul and is favourably
mentioned by George Eliot, who was by no means the only writer to
think highly of coaching days. Dickens frequently describes journeys
by coach, as he does in The Pickwick Papers and in The Old
Curiosity Shop. In this passage he describes the pleasures of the stage
wagon:
1
2
Everyday and Table Book, December 1838, p. 15.
Ibid.
The Romance of the Coach
15
What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie inside that
slowly-moving mountain. Listening to the tinkling of the horses’ bells, the
occasional smacking of the carter’s whip, the smooth rolling of the great
broad wheels, the rattle of the harness, the cheery good-nights of the passing
travellers, all made pleasantly indistinct by the thick awning, which seemed
made for the lazy listening under, till one fell asleep!3
Songs were composed for coaches, such as the one written in 1834
by R. E. Egerton Warburton (1803-91) for the Tantivy, a coach
service between London and Birmingham, starting in 1832, and
covering the distance in 12 hours. The song reflects the great vogue
for coach driving among fashionable young men at a time when “the
education of young blood was not complete until a young man had
acquired the art of four-in-hand driving”4. A real gentleman was one
who flang away his money in tips, and many young Oxonians or
young Cantabs gave professional coachmen plenty of money to drive
a coach in their place. Of course, passengers were not at all
enthusiastic about the driving of these undergraduates: the speed was
too high, the coach rocked violently, while the “outsides” held on
like frightened men, and the “insides” prayed for a safe arrival! Once
graduated, these young men, generally of good means, bought private
carriages like landaus, phaetons, tub-bottom chaises, wiskey
carriages, which were the favourite ones, as, in them, only two
persons could sit!
Such carriages were probably the ones used by bold young men
in Austen’s novels, such as Thorpe running away at a dangerously
high speed with a terrified Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey,
or Willoughby trying to abduct – and consequently to compromise
Marianne’s reputation, if not her “virtue” – in Sense and Sensibility,
and certainly the ones driven by the Regency bucks who all thought,
starting from the Prince Regent, that driving horses was a sport and
an art, and an excellent help for seducers and libertines.
Some carriages had the advantage of not needing a coachman
(that is an indiscreet or sort of playing-gooseberry presence), and to
be easily driven to secret or hidden places or recesses well-known to
the young man with some purpose in mind. Some coaches could be
very private places indeed, and were not only owned and used by
families, obviously the wealthier ones, for moving comfortably in
3
4
C. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. 63.
R. C. Anderson, Quicksilver, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. 51.
16
Mirella Billi
town and into the country, but came to be constantly hired by people
instead of public transport, which, in cities, was generally the
omnibus.
If rich or richer travellers could hire a post-chaise, and gentlemen
often owned a private coach, the slang word for it being “drag”, a
hansom cab (a two-wheeled one-horse carriage named after his
designer, with a fixed hood and with the driver sitting on a high
outside seat at the rear, unable to see anything inside) became
extremely popular as much as a taxi now, particularly a London one,
and equally discreet and private. Such qualities made these carriages
a favourite site for intrigue and mystery in literary works.
A hansom cab is indeed at the centre of a mystery, connected
with a secret marriage and a very complex and to some extent
unpredictable story, in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, the bestseller
by the Australian writer Fergus Hume5, in the second half of the
century one of the most popular crime and sensation novels
published in the British-speaking world. The private carriage, in this
story set in Melbourne – though the city described is very similar to
London – is a sort of centripetal and centrifugal point in a web of
secrets and intrigues which slowly unravel in the narrative, starting
from the discovery of the body of an unidentified man in a hansom
cab; he is found unexpectedly dead, though he had got on it,
according to some witnesses, alone and alive. The man has actually
been murdered with a massive dose of chloroform pressed on his
mouth with a scarf not belonging to him.
Besides the hansom cab where the murder has been committed,
other private carriages seem to proliferate in the story, making not
only the discovery of the identity of the murdered man and the reason
of his untimely death very difficult, but revealing the presence and
the mysterious movements and activities of a series of characters
whose lives, apparently respectable, prove obscure and ambiguous.
They – a young gentleman in love with the daughter of a rich and
respectable man, the heir of a wealthy family, and an ambitious
young man, and also a (later redeemed) prostitute, who acts as a gobetween from secret rooms in a dilapidated building and an equally
secret gambling club for gentlemen – are all incessantly driven
around and across a dark and labyrinthine map of suburban streets
5
1886.
Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Melbourne, Kemp & Boyce,
The Romance of the Coach
17
and into the depths of frightful slums. The characters are always as
ambiguous and mysterious as their acts, and they seem to identify
themselves with the interchangeable and anonymous cabs with which
they carry on their secret lives. Like the carriages in which they
travel, they, in their elegant clothes, look all black and mysterious;
both wander in the darkness of the remotest parts of the city at night,
to carry on plots or to satisfy their vices. The hansom cab of the title,
besides being the means of transport which allows these characters to
wander and to play tricks unthinkable without its convenient
protection, seems to be the metaphor of a whole secret and forbidden
world – the real one for the characters in the story – quite different
from the apparently honest and serene one in the refined part of the
city, where they live, in their comfortable houses, during the day,
showing indisputable identities.
Two detectives inquire the case of the murder following different
and even divergent lines of investigation, one looking for obvious
facts, the other probing the souls of the people involved and
exploring their secret motives. Only at the end of the novel, after
false confessions, inexplicable silences, the disappearance and reappearance of documents and letters, the mystery, though not
completely and not for everybody, is solved quite unpredictably. The
murderer is the – up to this point – respectable and honoured
gentleman (providentially, also on the narrative level, where his
inconvenient presence might have created some problems to the
conventional happy ending, he will die of a heart attack!), who has
murdered his ex-rival, lover of his first wife, and now his
blackmailer, in order to hide the existence of his first and never
annulled marriage, and of the daughter born of it, and to protect the
adored daughter of a second – but obviously illegal – marriage from
being considered illegitimate and from being deprived of her place in
society and of her inheritance.
Nobody, in the novel, is what he or she appears: the gentleman is
not a gentleman, but a bigamist and a murderer; the young men hide
their real intentions and act dishonestly; the daughter of the
gentleman, though quite innocent, is not the heiress she is believed to
be; she will go on being a rich and respectable lady at the expense of
her sister, who has inevitably, in the slums where she has been
abandoned, become a prostitute, and whose redemption will never be
compensated by her proper place in society and by the money she
would be entitled to inherit.