Ghost Speed: The Strange Matter of Phantom Vehicles

Abstract

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.