Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-18T22:38:11.326Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ghost Speed: The Strange Matter of Phantom Vehicles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2022

Aviva Briefel Open the ORCID record for Aviva Briefel [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 2022 , pp. 693 - 720
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bandyopadhyay, Debashis. “The Past Unearthed: New Reading of Ruskin Bond's Supernatural Tales.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2005): 53–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Bill. Other Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulliet, Richard W. The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cadwallader, Jen. “Death by Train: Spectral Technology and Dickens's Mugby Junction.” In Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, edited by Gavin, Adrienne E. and Humphries, Andrew F., 57–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carnsew, R. “Haunted Roads.” Temple Bar, April 1903, 465–71.Google Scholar
Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Cohen, William A. Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie W. “The Last Stage Coachman.” Illuminated Magazine, August 1843, 209–11.Google Scholar
Crowell, Eugene. The Spirit World: Its Inhabitants, Nature, and Philosophy. Boston: Colby & Rich, 1879.Google Scholar
Daly, Nicholas. “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses.” ELH 66, no. 2 (1999): 461–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
“A Day at a Coach Factory.” Penny Magazine, December 25, 1841, 501–8.Google Scholar
De Quincey, Thomas. The English Mail-Coach. 1849. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, edited by Faflak, Joel, 231–83. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. 1837. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. 1843. Edited by Richard Kelly. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Edwards, Amelia. “The Phantom Coach.” 1864. In Classic Ghost Stories, edited by Bowers, Bill, 207–28. Guilford: Lyons Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Grossman, Jonathan H. Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 1891. New York: Penguin, 1998.Google Scholar
Hart, Harold W. “The Sedan Chair as a Means of Public Conveyance.” Journal of Transport History 5, no. 4 (1962): 205–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Hofstadter, Albert, 163–86. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.Google Scholar
Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Kanwar, Pamela. Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Ketabgian, Tamara. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Gallery Books, 1983.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Phantom Rickshaw.” 1885. In Classic Ghost Stories, edited by Bowers, Bill, 105–40. Guilford: Lyons Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Leslie-McCarthy, Sage. “Spectral Traffic.” In Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance, edited by Thomas, Sue, 273–83. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.Google Scholar
Livesey, Ruth. Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacMichael, J. Holden. “Memoirs of the Sedan Chair.” Gentleman's Magazine, October 1904, 402–13.Google Scholar
Marryat, Frederick. The Phantom Ship. 1839. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Translated by Fowkes, Ben. 2 vols. New York: Penguin, 1990.Google Scholar
Mathieson, Charlotte. “‘A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods’: Travelling Bodies in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Railway Journey.” In Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, edited by Gavin, Adrienne E. and Humphries, Andrew F., 44–56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Google Scholar
McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Nayder, Lillian. Wilkie Collins. New York: Twayne, 1997.Google Scholar
Otis, Laura. “Banned Emotions: Figuring the Feelings of Unwanted People.” Configurations 24, no. 3 (2016): 303–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
P. “De Mortuis.” Temple Bar, June 1864, 387–96.Google Scholar
“Plain Tales from the Hills.” Edinburgh Review, July 1891, 132–51.Google Scholar
Roberts, Edwin F. “The Phantom Car.” Reynold's Miscellany, September 28, 1850, 155–58.Google Scholar
[Sala, George]. “Poetry on the Railway.” Household Words, June 2, 1855, 414–18.Google Scholar
Scheick, William J. “Hesitation in Kipling's ‘The Phantom Rickshaw.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 29, no. 1 (1986): 48–53.Google Scholar
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Smajić, Srdjan. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Matthew Wilson. “Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination.” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (2012): 497–522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Some English Ghosts.” Chambers's Journal, November 16, 1895, 721–23.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
“The Tale of the Wronged Lady.” BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/devon/discovering/legends/lady_howard.shtml (accessed July 6, 2020).Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. “‘Dying Is an Art, Like Everything Else.’” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 305–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Howard, Richard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953.Google Scholar
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007.Google Scholar
Westwood, Jennifer, and Simpson, Jacqueline. The Penguin Book of Ghosts. London: Penguin, 2008.Google Scholar