Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret

Abstract

essay reads Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audky's Secret through the 'railway of the 1860s in order to situate Victorian anxieties about railway travel within the context of competing social discourses about the fatigued and nervous modern body. Published in serial parts from 1861 to 1862, the novel charts the coming of age of Robert Audley, a young barrister who undergoes a transformation from a handsome, lazy, care-for-nothing young man into a hard-working professional representing the of (32, 401 ) during his investigation into the disappearance of George Talboys his best friend, and husband of the thought-to-be-dead Helen Talboys, also known as Lady Audley. The novel was widely criticized throughout the 1860s for its sensational narrative of Lady Audley 's acts of bigamy, identity theft, arson, and attempted murder. Braddon gained an instant reputation in a literary marketplace that increasingly demanded that readers of popular fiction feel the pace of life in the railway age with every turn of a page. The more suspenseful the novel, the more it affected the reader s body primarily the heart rate and the nervous system and the more it became a literary sensation in the many bookstalls of Britain's network of railway stations. Braddon s novels were frequently issued as cheap railway yellow-backs, situating narratives such as LadyAudky's Secret within a social process realized primarily to accommodate the kinetics of the railway traveller's body.1 While my reading of Lady Audley s Secret engages with the social context of this reading/railway time complex, I am primarily interested in how the novel reveals the inherent contradictions in contemporary dialogues about railway travel. The railway opened up the countryside through a perceived democratization of tourism and travel, a point often raised by proponents of the railway industry. Whether riding the rails for business or for pleasure, travellers experienced a new mobility that had implications in numerous facets of social life. Yet the resulting fatigue of excessive railway travel haunted bodies, a reminder of the somatic consequences of industrial expansion. Although thoroughly conventional in its detective narrative of Robert's eventual immobilization of Lady Audley, Braddon's novel remains profoundly elusive about its conceptu-