London cabs, Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White

Abstract

For all its industrial and technological heat, Victorian Britain remained a largely horse-drawn society. Focusing on the use of horse-drawn vehicles in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel The Woman in White, this essay explores representations of city space, intra-urban mobility, connectivity and public transport in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Cabs, I argue, represent intriguing and paradoxical spaces, poised between public and private, continually on the move in the static city. I ask how literary figurations of horse cabs focus and negotiate anxieties associated with travel within Victorian cities. I also suggest that cabs – vehicles for the fast and disreputable – articulate new ways of occupying space.