The Glory of Motion: Re-Reading Movement in Thomas De Quincey and Adam Smith

Abstract

This article reads Thomas De Quincey's “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” in light of its author's lifelong interest in figures and images of motion. It specifically analyzes that this interest is rooted in an attempt to construct an aesthetic ideology, to create an English nation on the basis of the aesthetic principle of sympathy. The paper demonstrates that “The Glory of Motion” is atypically regressive with regard to De Quincey's earlier work on these questions, and it accounts for this fact by arguing that the essay functions as a critical re-reading. It traces the grounds for this re-reading to De Quincey's work on political-economic figures of motion and their strong dependence on Adam Smith's theories of circulation, which evince moments of re-reading similar in structure to that of De Quincey's. A final movement in the argument leads to Paul de Man's work on metaphor and rhetorical movement, and argues that De Quincey's and Smith's re-readings find their cause in a prescient, proto-theoretical awareness of the potentially dehumanizing effects of figures, and that they are countering these effects by gesturing at an alternative, materially determined concept of motion.