Modernity and Mobility: Re-reading Wordsworth and De Quincey

Abstract

In the above quote, Foucault’s description of a train as a heterotopia is a crucial pointer to the significant dimensions that our experience of mobility can add to our definitions of space and time. Movement is widely discussed today across several fields as almost a primary ontological feature of the modern subject. Yet, the unmistakable relation between literary-aesthetic formulations of space-time and the phenomenology of mobile life has remained relatively underexplored. In view of this gap, this article studies William Wordsworth’s “Two Letters” on the Kendal and Windermere Railway and Thomas de Quincey’s essay “The English Mail Coach” for their anxious reflections on the ways in which mechanized mobility disrupts perceptions of locality and constitutes abstractions such as those of nation, history, demography, economic status, and popular taste. As Michael Freeman notes, such changes can often lend shape to the very concept of culture, as it did with the introduction of the railways (18). I show that Wordsworth and De Quincey expressed anxiety about such changes because they saw them as precursors to signal shifts in perceptions of centrality. In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx described the nineteenth-century revolutionary technologies of transport and communication as agents of “the annihilation of space by time.” However, considering that the idea of space can be extended to include experiential domains such as memory, imagination, and personal identity, Marx’s claim seems to be about the annihilation of distance rather than of space – actual or connotative. Wordsworth’s anxiety about the violation of the spatial integrity and sanctity of the Lake District landscape seems to be related to this destruction of distances, since such destruction would