Abstract
Abstract The Conclusion contrasts late works by Dickens, ‘An Old Stage Coaching House’ (1863) and his portmanteau Christmas Book, Mugby Junction (1866), with Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887). The strong and conscious regionalism of Hardy’s fiction differs from the portable locality of the ‘just’ past in the earlier Victorian novels examined in the previous chapters. Hardy teased readers’ desire to locate the ‘real’ places in which his novels are set, especially with his authorization of the Wessex map in editions of his novels from 1895 onwards. The map, I suggest, externalizes the imaginative process of moving through the local into a national frame which is implicit in the novels studied earlier in this book. Dickens’s Barbox tales, by contrast, mark the emergence of the idea of a railway as a network in which identity and community arise from crossing points and junctions.
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