Knowing Books. Christina Lupton
settles himself in his stirrups, and when fair road and season offer, puts on perhaps to a round trot.” This rider is obedient, like Goodall’s and Smythies’s, to external conditions: he “favours his Palfry, and is sure not to bring him puffing, into a heat, into his last inn” (3:2).
In Capt. Greenland, Goodall uses this analogy to dramatize the way his reader gets stuck with a stretch of tedious narrative. One episode describes Silvius, Shebbeare’s well-meaning hero, traveling by stagecoach to London. For company he has a host of characters suggestive of those Sterne will reinvent later in the decade: a captain log-line, who cannot speak except in nautical terms, a Methodist midwife and her daughter, and a reverend who spends most of the journey asleep. Despite this company, readers are told from the outset that the journey will be uneventful. Abusing the “learned biographers” who would have used “such a coachful of good-natured people to have them robbed or assaulted,” Goodall’s narrator announces that the only interruptions to the passage will be his own interventions (1:168). This creates an image of the reader’s entrapment that is premised on her being like the stage coach traveler, a victim to random fellow passages. Although the narrator announces “that it may possibly be as amusing to our Readers to now and again to pass an intervening minute in conversation with us, as in the continual Prosecution of the direct Narrative of this History,” his sourness and self-confidence as a character emphasize the reader’s sense of being trapped in a small, inhospitable circle of company (2:108).
Clearly, readers of fiction do not automatically experience either the kind of enthrallment to a journey or the sense of captivity to technology that these narrators dramatize. As we have seen, readers know quite well that they can close a book at any time, or skip pages to come more quickly to its highlights. But, by being compared to paying coach-passengers, readers of self-conscious novels are primed to entertain their concession to the demands of print technology as a necessary condition of being moved by narrative. The authorial intrusions that bring the presence of mediation into view through this trope help create a stance for the reader that is like that of the passenger: aware of herself turning the pages, she feels bound to the course of action followed by the characters and events represented there. Although one can burn a book, or tear it up, scenes focusing on the reader’s desire for narrative movement make it appear as difficult to really get at a story as to change the route taken by a stagecoach. Emphasising the physicality of the book, and the fiction of a narrator as little responsible for the course events in his plot as the driver of the stagecoach for the route his coach must follow, novelists downplay the interactive and elective elements of reading and writing in order to promote the book as a medium that makes content unreachable.
Eighteenth-century coach travel worked well as an analogy for those who wanted to imagine printed objects in this way, as things over which customers had limited control. There is a widespread sense among cultural and literary historians that the history of transport, like the history of the novel, involved an outward expansion of spatial and imaginative horizons.37 Fielding and others before him celebrated this connection by likening the novel in a positive light to the forward-moving journey. But eighteenth-century descriptions of how it felt to travel inside “a tedious, tiresome, dull, jolting Vehicle,” as one character from a dramatic satire describes a stagecoach, outnumbered accounts emphasizing the pleasures of transport.38 Coach travelers could easily appear effeminate and restricted in outlook. Cowper’s “The Task” addresses “ye who, bourne about / In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue / But that of idleness, and taste no scenes / But such as art contrives.”39 Real travelers’ reports also frequently describe coaches as scenes of artificial confinement, boredom, and forced company. One English traveler in France describes his captivity in a “ponderous machine”; another traveling through England describes how “the coach was for three days a perfect jail to us.”40 Daniel Bourn, identifying boredom and a lack of view as the traveler’s main problems, recommends milestones as “an entertaining piece of garnish and road furniture, that by measuring the way make the hours pass with pleasure, and thereby much alleviate the irksomeness of a long stage.”41
Coach travel also produced for many the feeling of really losing control over what they did and said. James Murray diagnoses sleep as an inevitable condition of travel and recommends ways to fight its onset:
After a person in perfect health has traveled two stages in a stagecoach, even suppose he should take a nap, he will find himself disposed for his breakfast at the end of the second stage.—This is necessary for the purpose of keeping the spirits strong, to beat off sleep from his quarters;—if a traveller desire to keep awake, he must take his breakfast to strengthen his spirits.42
Sylvia Hughes describes her father moved artificially by the motion of the coach from a state of reverie to a state in which “the Jumbling on the Stones made him open his Mouth and address himself to the Ladies,” and The Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London (1773) describes passengers “jolted into good humour by the motion of the coach.”43 This loss of control over one’s body was made worse by a driver’s determining the pace and shape of a journey. Those who hired private carriages frequently relayed in writing how vulnerable they felt to the men Murray portrayed as petty tyrants, “vociferous hostler(s)” and “little arbitrary Bashaw(s).”44 Although better off travelers were able to navigate the public road system by way of private vehicles, the power of the coachmen and innkeepers who kept it running could make even their power seem negligible.
Fielding’s and Sterne’s accounts of travel both describe their lack of control as passengers over the technology of the road, and include tirades against the men who convey them along it. The feeling of bodily disempowerment and the feeling of vulnerability to a driver are captured most acutely in Fielding’s account of being transported as an invalid to Portugal. His Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) depicts the perspective of a conscious person deprived of volition. As his dropsical, dying body is hauled between boats and carriages, he makes the unfavorable comparison between his flesh and his luggage. In the conveyance of goods and people from one place to another, he argues, one general principle prevails:
as the goods to be conveyed are usually larger, so they are to be chiefly considered in the conveyance; the owner being indeed little more than an appendage to his trunk, or box, or bale, or at best a small part of his baggage, very little care is to be taken in stowing or packing them up with convenience to himself.45
In the 1760s Sterne describes himself in similar terms as no more than an object while on the road in France, and he writes in his letters that he has been “conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto and company—lying in the bottom of my chaise most of the rout [sic], upon a large pillow which I had the prevoyance to purchase before I set out.”46 On this same journey he describes himself “toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed and carbonated on one side or another” like a piece of meat in the heat of the carriage.47
These reports demonstrate that coach travel served as an occasion for passengers to note their own powerlessness. In the scenes Sterne and Fielding describe, it can even be said that this physical powerlessness, actively observed, becomes its own source of entertainment. But what finally happens in texts where such a posture is taken up as a description of fiction reading involves a complicated transference of a practical experience into the realm of imaginative transport. Coaches can be used only by a sleight of hand to represent the kinds of transport that discourse provides. Evidence provided by the technology of coach travel that humans were prey to the machines that moved them must be made to fit the image of books controlling minds and bodies, and the coachman must be worked into a caricature of the professional author in the system of print entertainment. Thus, although there is a strong ethnographic element to Fielding’s and Sterne’s descriptions of travel, there is also a literary one. Writers keen to explore the reader’s submission to the mechanical nature of print mediation put their experience of the real hardships of traveling to work as an analogy that is far from obvious.
Fielding’s and Sterne’s disposition as travelers who report with glee on their powerlessness illuminates some of the better-known junctures at which self-conscious writers play up the human vulnerability to the technology of print. Take Tristram’s boast