‘It’s all one’? Continental Connections

  • Charlotte Mathieson
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture book series (PNWC)

Abstract

While travel within Britain was changing throughout the nineteenth century, destinations abroad were becoming increasingly accessible to British travellers. By the mid-nineteenth century, Europe was well established as a popular destination for British travellers and pan-continental connections extended throughout various facets of cultural life. For many Britons, continental networks were valued as a positive source of vitality, but a long-standing Europhobia prevailed. These competing impulses emerge in literary representations of journeys to the continent through themes of national and continental identity, and underpinning these discussions are ideas about the changing structures of space which emerge through the mobile networks of literary narratives. This chapter starts by tracing a brief history of European travel to identify the core issues of space and mobility at stake in the mid-century period, and then considers two novels that shift between a discourse of connection and closure: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57). The negotiation of national and cosmopolitan identities are familiar themes in critical discussion of these novels, but more often overlooked is how Dickens’s and Brontë’s representations demonstrate acute attention to space and the mobile body which, I will show, lend new perspectives to these debates.

Keywords

National Identity European Identity European Landscape Continental Landmass Representational Mode 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Charlotte Mathieson 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Charlotte Mathieson
    • 1
  1. 1.Institute of Advanced StudyUniversity of WarwickUK

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