The Glory of Motion: De Quincey, Travel, and Romanticism

Abstract

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. ********** Thomas De Quincey may seem an unusual choice of subject for a collection of essays on nineteenth-century travel writing. Unlike his father, Thomas Quincey, who published a Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England in 1774, and unlike many of his equally or more famous Romantic contemporaries, he never produced a single work recognizably in the genre of travel, exploration, or topographical literature. Still more worryingly, perhaps, his actual travels, in the course of a long life (1785-1859), were extremely modest: with the exception of two trips to Ireland in 1800 and 1857, and a possible excursion to Boulogne in 1824, (1) he never set foot outside Britain. Other members of his family spread their wings impressively: his brother Richard, for example, ran away from school and went to sea, was captured by pirates off the coast of Peru, and eventually disappeared on a hunting expedition in Haiti; while his son Horace, who joined the army, died on active service in China. (2) As for other writers, compared with, say, William Wordsworth's Continental walking tour of 1790, the peregrinations of the Shelley circle in the Alps, or Mary Wollstonecraft's astonishing expedition to Scandinavia, De Quincey hardly seems an outstanding representative of an age of rapidly expanding recreational and aesthetic travel, in which travel writing was, according to one anonymous contemporary reviewer, next in popularity to novels. (3) Yet De Quincey does have undeniable claims to attention in any survey of the literature of travel in this period. This is not on the basis of the account of his first visit to Ireland contained in his autobiographical 'Sketches' of 1834, interesting though this is. Nor is the fascinating description of his wanderings on foot through North Wales in 1802 (having absconded from Manchester Grammar School), and his subsequent opiated night-walks through the streets of London, in his famous Confessions of 1821, the main plank of his case for inclusion. (4) It is rather his late essay, 'The English Mail-Coach', which stands out as a unique, richly textured, and deeply ambiguous meditation on the means and meanings of travel in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is the focus of the present essay. One of the best-known and most admired of his mature pieces, 'The English Mail-Coach' was first published as two separate papers in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in October and December 1849, and later amalgamated. I shall consider both the literal and metaphorical planes of expression in the essay before assessing its significance in relation to popular concepts of Romantic travel. Perhaps inevitably, literary criticism of De Quincey's essay tends to be drawn to the last of its four sections, the 'Dream-Fugue', as the section most accommodated to the psychological, rhetorical, and aesthetic perspectives generally of interest to scholars of English literature. It is historians who are more likely to address the earlier, more literal or factual sections, 'The Glory of Motion' and 'Going Down with Victory', usually within an investigation of developing technologies of transport and communication in the early industrial age. These sections, which introduce the mail-coach from a variety of autobiographical, narrative, and historical standpoints, are, however, fundamental to a consideration of De Quincey's peculiar intervention in the discourse of travel. …