Abstract
This chapter proposes a reading of Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857), and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) with a focus on how these texts problematise and play with intersections of mobility and (mental) health. It suggests that—even though from three different points of the Victorian period—they are unified in their presentation of idling as a transgressive practice that subverts contemporary discourses surrounding (mental) health and enables the traveller-narrator to achieve a state of mental peace and self-care. Heidi Liedke focuses on a slow and mindful form of mobility, namely, idling, which has received little attention in mobility studies. The chapter demonstrates how idling can enable the author-traveller to critique the stifling Victorian “institutions of leisure” (Shelley), set into motion ironic reflections on the necessity of rest and mindfulness (Collins and Dickens), or reach a state of mind that transcends the author’s melancholy and bodily present (Gissing). It argues that taken together the three texts offer valuable comments on the recuperative potential of idling as a means to find a state of mind that may have gotten lost.
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Liedke, H.L. (2023). (Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age. In: Dinter, S., Schäfer-Althaus, S. (eds) Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_5
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