Abstract
Thomas De Quincey's essay, 'The English Mail-Coach', is a unique and richly-textured meditation on the means and meanings of travel in the early nineteenth century. The opposition it sets up between pre-industrial and industrial forms of transport is inherently unstable, and its lament for the golden age of coach travel is complicated by the fact that De Quincey's mail-coach itself symbolizes the social and historical forces that brought about its demise. Exemplary of Romantic resistance to industrial culture, the essay's progressive withdrawal into purely intrapsychic self-transportation also offers a limit case of the Romantic internalization of the travel genre.
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