EBOOK Charles Dickens's Networks:Public Transport and the Novel

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first        novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles        Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport        network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens's        work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam        ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seeminglyfar distances seem        ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the        separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized,        'standard' time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonathan Grossman examines the        history of public transport's systematic networking of peopleand how this        revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of        the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing        on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, he looks first at a key historical        moment in the networked community's coming together, then at a subsequent        recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised        view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which        passengerscame to imagine their journeying in the network.