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 of the way he has kept his reader hostage to the physicality of the book, and thereby kept her from other kinds of exploration: “What a tract of country I have run!…and how many cities have I seen, during the time you have been reading, and reflecting, Madam, upon this story!” (460). This jibe draws attention to Sterne’s prowess as manipulator of the book as printed product. But it also works, like many of the analogies with coach travel in earlier novels, to emphasize the way the physical vehicle of the book prevents readers’ contact with the scenes they experience. Approaching his marbled page, Sterne reminds readers of the black page they encountered in the first volume of his novel and warns against “deep” reading on this new occasion of physical interruption:
You had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading … you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths, which still mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. (204)
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