of self-conscious novels make on the present in which they are read; on the “now” in which this very moment can be invoked through the sentient presence of the paper (364). By making his model of a paper self an improved one, where circulation and misappropriation are anticipated, and into which self-consciousness is built, Tristram continues in the tradition of the self-conscious, mid-century narrators who may revile the commercial transactions propelling them toward uncreative situations, but who count on the impression of their novels coming to life in the reader’s hands.
Novels as Coaches
In the last decades, eighteenth-century culture has been described as experimenting with the simulation of life in forms that included automata, popular displays of lifelike machines and clockwork mechanisms, newly complicated networks of commerce, and expedited forms of transport.36 It is tempting to assume that books were simply part of this setting: axes of material autonomy generated as technological developments pointed generally but objectively in the direction of a material world straying away from control and understanding. But the novels I have discussed so far belong more convincingly to another history—that of an imaginative investment in the artificial intelligence of the medium of entertainment. They complicate the idea of authors registering at the level of their thematic concern the developments of material culture, and show instead the specific ways novels refract and work this interest into their formal and material properties. Books that are strenuously aligned with the material world under these conditions conceal, as Latour argues of many of the phenomena on which we bestow objectivity, their real intractability from the field of human creation.
I have already suggested some of the cases in which narrative intrusions were used to propagate the effect of books being beyond human control. I turn now to a different source of evidence for the ways the authors of novels cultivated the fiction of books being more powerful than the people who made them: the analogy between reading and coach travel that was built up after the publication of Joseph Andrews. This analogy was used by novelists to suggest that certain episodes of fictional action involved a reader’s surrender to an objectively given technology. Novels delivered experience, they proposed, in the same way that journeys did, as a compound of scenery, company, and physical progress and limitation. During the 1750s and ’60s, Goodall, Shebbeare, Toldervy, and Sterne, along with Susan Smythies, who perfected this ruse of the novel as journey in The Stage-Coach (1753), delight in imagining their readers as passengers in claustrophobic narrative machines that consist of paper and pages as well as generic conventions. They set up thematic excursions within their novels that use this comparison to emphasize the objective technology of a book. Toldervy, for instance, compares the pacing of his novel to the pacing of a horse, suggesting that drivers and passengers are in a similar position of having to obey the limits of technology. His narrator becomes a horseman who must manage his steed carefully by reining in the story, as if it were likely to run out of steam: “not presently upon the spur, or in his full career, but leisurely out of the stables [he] 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
