Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture 3031170199, 9783031170195

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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture Edited by Sandra Dinter Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture Series Editors Marian Aguiar Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Charlotte Mathieson University of Surrey Guildford, UK Lynne Pearce English Literature & Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds – ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/ or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds  – i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.

Sandra Dinter  •  Sarah Schäfer-Althaus Editors

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-­ Century British Literature, History, and Culture

Editors Sandra Dinter University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus University of Koblenz Koblenz, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-17019-5    ISBN 978-3-031-17020-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Chapters ‘Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction’, ‘Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, ‘Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss’, ‘White Fluff/ Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence’ and ‘From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire’ are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ParkerDeen/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The initial idea for this volume was born amid lively discussions at the conference “Locating Intersections of Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, held back in October 2019 in the beautiful historic library of the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-­ Nuremberg (FAU). Little did we know that, for the time being, it would be our last chance to welcome colleagues from Europe and the USA to Germany in person, to listen to their presentations, and to enjoy food, drinks, and even songs together at the conference dinner. This gathering would have been impossible without the generous funding of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Dean’s Office of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology at FAU, for which we are very grateful. Many thanks go too to Doris Feldmann for her support and interest in the project from its early stages, and to our former student assistants, Margret Gareis and Nicolas Löw, for helping us with the preparations for this event. We are especially obliged to Charlotte Mathieson, who, during one of the coffee breaks, encouraged us to turn our ideas into a proposal for an edited collection in the Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture series. We would like to thank her and her co-series editors Marian Aguiar and Lynne Pearce for the opportunity to publish our book as part of the series. Our contributors, whose insights into medicine and mobility in the nineteenth century form the heart of this volume, have been brilliant to work with, and we would like to thank them for their time, commitment, and patience. Special thanks, moreover, go to Allie Troyanos, Paul Smith Jesudas, Brian Halm, and Immy Higgins at Palgrave Macmillan for all their work in producing this book. We would also like to acknowledge the v

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excellent feedback we received from our anonymous reviewer. We are grateful to our editorial assistant, Marie Kluge, for her invaluable help in preparing the manuscript. When we planned our collaboration back in the summer of 2018, we were blissfully unaware of the extent to which medicine and mobility would not only keep us preoccupied as the themes of our volume but also infiltrate our daily lives. First, two uncannily timed medical incidents immobilised both of us simultaneously for several weeks, turning us into the protagonists of two twenty-first-century medical case reports in need of rest cures. If this did not remind us enough of the vulnerability of our own bodies, the subsequent outbreak of the coronavirus certainly did. The pandemic showed us more dramatically than ever before that as mobile matter not only can disease bring even the most globalised world to a sudden standstill but also that there are undeniable parallels between the debates on medicine, mobility, and the body of the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. June 2022 Sandra Dinter Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

Contents

1 Medicine  and Mobility in Nineteenth-­Century British Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction  1 Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus Part I Travel and Health  27 2 Doctors’  Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century 29 Sally Shuttleworth 3 Watering  Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel 53 Pamela K. Gilbert 4 Embodied  Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles 75 Natasha Anderson 5 (Mental)  Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age 97 Heidi Lucja Liedke

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Part II Pathologising Mobilities 119 6 Upright  Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss121 Monika Class 7 The  Mobility of Water: Aquatic Transformation and Disease in Victorian Literature145 Ursula Kluwick 8 A  “Feverish Restlessness”: Dance as Decadent Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry165 Stefanie John 9 The  Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-­ Nineteenth-­Century Lancashire187 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland Part III Mobilities and Medical Regimens 211 10 Exposure,  Friction, and “Peculiar Feelings”: Mobile Skin in Victorian Medicine and Literature213 Ariane de Waal 11 White  Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence235 Monika Pietrzak-Franger 12 From  Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire259 Markku Hokkanen Index281

Notes on Contributors

Natasha Anderson  is Doctoral Research Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz examining “The Body and the Book: Visceral Reading Experiences in the Victorian Novel” as part of the project “The Visceral Novel Reader,” funded by the German Research Foundation. She earned her MA in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and attained her BA in English and History at the University of Stuttgart. She spent a year abroad at Marymount University in Virginia and represented Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in the Institute for World Literature 2019 at Harvard University. Most recently, she co-organised two virtual international workshops, published an article in the online Journal of European Periodical Studies, and presented at conferences in Germany, Greece, and Ireland as well as virtually in Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. Monika Class  is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Lund University and Principal Investigator of “The Visceral Novel Reader”, funded by the German Research Foundation, which is the title of an article (Literature and Medicine 34.2, 2016) and her second monograph in progress. She acted as Junior Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and as Postdoctoral Researcher at Konstanz University and King’s College London’s Centre for Medical Humanities. Her publications include, as author, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817 (2012); as editor, Nineteenth Century Literature and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Routledge, forth. 2023), the special issues “Medical Case Histories as Genre: New Approaches” in Literature and Medicine (2014), and ix

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“Trace: Embodied Approaches to the English Novel” in English Studies (forth. 2023); and as co-editor, Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780–1860 (2009). Catherine Cox  is Associate Professor at the School of History, University College Dublin, and was co-Principal Investigator with Hilary Marland on a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850–2000”. They have published several joint articles on mental disorder in prisons and migration and mental health, and their book Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840–1900 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. She has published on psychology and juvenile custodial institutions in the twentieth century and on the history of psychiatry and medical practices in nineteenth-century Ireland. Ariane de Waal  is Lecturer at University of Leipzig. Her research focuses on British literature and culture of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Her book on post-9/11 theatre, Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama, was published by De Gruyter in 2017. She is currently working on a monograph that investigates the epistemological intersections of dermatology and the Victorian realist novel. She is the author of the article “Looking Both Ways: Middlemarch, True Skin, and the Dermatological Gaze” (Victorian Network, 2020) and co-­ editor of the special issue “Victorian Materialisms” (with Ursula Kluwick, European Journal of English Studies, 2022). Sandra Dinter  is Junior Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg. After writing her first monograph, Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel (2019), her research now focuses on mobility, space, and gender in Victorian literature and culture. Currently, she is working on another monograph on representations of women walkers in the nineteenth century. Her work has appeared in the journals Neo-Victorian Studies, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Anglia, and English Studies. Pamela K. Gilbert  is Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida. She has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, popular culture, the body, and the history of medicine. Her most recent monograph is Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (2019). Other books include Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels

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(1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), The Citizen’s Body (2007), and Cholera and Nation (2008). Her collections include Imagined Londons (2002), Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011), and the co-edited Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015). Markku  Hokkanen  is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Oulu. His previous publications on medicine and colonialism include the monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–1960 (2017) and the co-edited collection Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge (with Kalle Kananoja, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently leading an Academy of Finland-funded research project on histories of healers, politics, and development in sub-Saharan Africa (2019–2023). Stefanie John  is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Technical University of Braunschweig. Her research interests include poetry from the Romantic period to the present, literary form and influence, and intersections of literature and material culture. Her first monograph Post-­ Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry was published with Routledge in 2021. She is currently working on a project on textile objects in late Victorian British literature. Ursula Kluwick  is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature at the University of Bern and Senior Researcher in the Project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century” (Swiss National Science Foundation). Among her main research interests are the Victorian period; the Environmental, especially the Blue, Humanities, postcolonial literatures; and non-­ realist forms of writing. Her books include the monograph Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2011) and the co-edited collection The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (with Virginia Richter, 2015). She has co-edited the special issue “Victorian Materialisms” (with Ariane de Waal, European Journal of English Studies, 2022) and is currently preparing her monograph on Victorian water writing for publication. Heidi  Lucja  Liedke is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). She was awarded her venia legendi for British literary and cultural studies in 2021. From 2018 to 2020, she was Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include Victorian travel writing and idling, contemporary British performance and live

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t­heatre broadcasting, and new forms of criticism. Recent publications with a focus on Victorian topics include a monograph on the cultural history of sloths (with Tobias Keiling, Faultiere. Ein Portrait, Matthes & Seitz, 2021) and a chapter on Victorian panoramas in Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Hilary  Marland  is based at the Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick. She was co-Principal Investigator with Catherine Cox on a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850–2000” and currently leads a Wellcome Trust-funded project on postnatal mental illness in twentieth-century Britain. Together with Catherine Cox, she has published several articles on mental disorder in prisons and migration and mental health, and their book Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840–1900 appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her other research interests include the history of childbirth, girl’s health, and household medicine in the nineteenth century. Monika  Pietrzak-Franger  is Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna. Her areas of research range from adaptation and transmediality to (neo-)Victorian studies and Medical Humanities. Her publications include, as author, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); as editor, Women, Beauty, and Fashion (2014); and as co-editor, Reflecting on Darwin (2014), Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900 (2020), Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022), and Literature and Medicine (Cambridge University Press, forth. 2023), as well as of special issues on “Disease, Communication, and the Ethics of (In)visibility” (2014), “Neo-­ Victorianism and Globalisation” (2015), and “Transforming Medical Humanities” (forth. 2023). Currently, she is co-leading the interuniversity cluster “Post-COVID-19 Care” and working on visiodemics and viral theatre. Sarah Schäfer-Althaus  is Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz. Her research centres on women, gender, and sexuality studies with a focus on body theory, medical humanities, and the history of childbirth. She is author of The Gendered Body: Female Sanctity,

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Gender Hybridity and the Body in Women’s Hagiography (2017) and co-­ editor of Transient Bodies in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2020), both published with Universitätsverlag Winter, and Traveling Bodies (Routledge, forth. 2023). Sally  Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She has published extensively on the interrelations of medicine, science, and culture and, between 2014 and 2019, ran the large ERC research project “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives” (https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/). Her most recent books are the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019) and the co-edited volume Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (2020).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

“Sobraon”. From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage from London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library “Our Voyage”. Title page of Sobraon Gossip (1875). Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-441576471 “Dear little ‘Bonnie’. ‘Sobraon.’” From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage from London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library Harold John Graham, “On the Sobraon”, October 1881. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-139421279

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CHAPTER 1

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-­Century British Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

On a bustling Monday morning, Mary Barton, the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s eponymous 1848 novel, leaves her home in Manchester to set out for Liverpool, hoping to find the sailor Will Wilson to testify in favour of her lover, Jem Wilson. Accused of murder, Jem is awaiting his court trial, which is to take place the following day. Will’s alibi is his only hope of escaping the death penalty. In her quest, Mary makes use of various modes of transport. First, she boards a train. The narrator notes that “[c]ommon as railroads are now in places as a means of transit, and especially in Manchester, Mary had never been on one before; and she felt

S. Dinter (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Schäfer-Althaus University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_1

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bewildered by the hurry, the noise of people, and bells, and horns; the whiz and the scream of the arriving trains” (Gaskell 2006, 273), evoking an overwhelming visceral experience of modernity. In Liverpool, Mary moves in more familiar ways, making her way through the streets on foot, but this causes her even more distress. She briefly “stop[s] to regain her breath, and to gather strength, for her limbs trembled, and her heart beat violently” (275) and then feels how her chest “tightened, and her head [was] throbbing, from the rate at which they were walking” (279). Shortly thereafter, Mary hires a small boat to chase after Will on the John Cropper. To Mary, who has never been on a boat before, the harbour, with its “puffs and clouds of smoke from the countless steamers”, constitutes another “new world of sight and sound” (281). The further she advances, the more her constitution deteriorates. Mary feels “despair […] creeping over her”, and “every minute her mind became more cloudy” (289), until she is “sitting motionless” (290) on the boat. Taken in by one of the sailors once back on shore, Mary collapses on the floor. In a distinctly Victorian fashion, the boatman and his wife attempt to nurse her back to health: they burn feathers, give her “Golden Wasser”,1 and place her in a chair (302). Mary briefly regains her strength when she testifies in court but then falls ill with a fever. Her accelerated journey ends with weeks of stasis in a sickroom. As this episode suggests, medicine and mobility are significant and meaningful concepts in Mary Barton. Referring to Gaskell’s depictions of illness, substance abuse, medical treatments, and death, Meegan Kennedy, for instance, notes that “Mary Barton provides a good example of how ailments can pile up in a Victorian novel” (2013, 464). Highlighting characters’ movements in and beyond Manchester, Alan Shelston, in turn, proposes that it “is a novel full of journeys” (2006, 95). While these are two pertinent approaches to Gaskell’s novel, they have not informed each other. Mary Barton has mostly been read as a work that is either concerned with medicine or with mobility, which is remarkable given how evidently Mary’s motions and health are linked. Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, in contrast, proposes that new insights can be gained by analysing the cultural and literary histories of medicine and mobility as entangled processes whose discourses and practices constituted, influenced, and transformed each other. With this bidirectional perspective, this collection of essays makes a methodological and interdisciplinary intervention. It initiates a dialogue between mobility studies and the

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medical humanities, two emerging fields that have rarely been discussed in relation to one another. Presenting case studies of novels, poetry, travel narratives, diaries, ship magazines, skin care manuals, asylum records, press reports, and various other sources, the contributions in this volume identify and discuss diverse literary, historical, and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which medicine and mobility intersected in nineteenth-­ century Britain, its empire, and beyond, whereby they illustrate how the paradigms of mobility studies and the medical humanities can complement each other. Setting the scene, this introduction charts the major historical and cultural transformations of medicine and mobility and their entanglements in nineteenth-century Britain and surveys current positions and crossovers in mobility studies and the medical humanities.

Historical Coordinates: Medicine, Mobility, and Their Entanglements in Nineteenth-Century Britain Britain witnessed a pervasive professionalisation, institutionalisation, and commercialisation of medical practice and research in the nineteenth century. Surveying the period’s impressive scope and range of medical innovations, Lawrence Rothfield notes that “[i]n the course of Victoria’s lifetime (1819–1901), smallpox vaccination was made compulsory; the postmortem autopsy became routine; anatomy and pathology were established as standard elements of a medical school education; inhalation anaesthesia was introduced; physicians discovered that at least some diseases were transmitted not by atmosphere-corrupting poison seeping from decomposing organic matter but by germs; antiseptic surgery began to be practiced; preventive and occupational medicine as well as public health and sanitary medicine were founded. The general practitioner appeared, along with the professional nurse and a range of specialists in fields such as psychiatry, neurology, sexology, and obstetrics” (2014, 175).2 With the expansion of the British Empire, medicine extended its territorial boundaries, leading to the formation of the International Red Cross in 1864 and the establishment of tropical medicine as a new branch of medicine (Porter 2011b, 163). As medical knowledge and practice became more sophisticated, and technological developments such as the stethoscope (1816) and the discovery of X-rays (1895) enhanced medical examination

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methods, medical care became more accessible to all social classes, marking the nineteenth century as an “age of improvement” (Porter 1999, 348). Despite these advancements, it would be inaccurate to give an exclusively progressivist account of the period’s health and medical practices. Poor sanitation remained a major concern, particularly in the crowded streets of the growing metropolises, significantly increasing the spread of infectious diseases (Allen 2008, 1–23). Between the 1830s and 1860s, the cholera epidemics, for instance, “generated terror and panic” among the population due to a lack of effective remedies and its “frighteningly rapid course: victims could be well in the morning and dead by nightfall” (Brunton 2019, 16; see also Gilbert 2009; Wilson Carpenter 2010, 34–53). New scientific concepts did not gain authority immediately but emerged “alongside other and older systems of medicine” (Brunton 2019, 3). The older miasma model of disease, for example, remained influential despite the growing authority of germ theory. Understandings of disease transmission linked to heredity, (immoral) behaviours, and environmental factors were equally enduring, as William Buchan’s popular health guide Domestic Medicine (1848 [1769]) demonstrates; Buchan lists exposure to “unwholesome air” (152), “frequent and excessive debaucheries”, and “violent passions” (153) as possible causes for tuberculosis (phthisis).3 As effective medicines were rare, traditional therapies persisted, and doctors continued to advise bloodletting, moderate exercise, “taking the waters”, or a “change of air” for various diseases and ailments, including tuberculosis and other pulmonary and respiratory illnesses, as well as nervous disorders and sedentary behaviours (Buchan 1848; see also Porter 1999, 674). The institutionalisation of medical practice began in the mid-nineteenth century. Doctors, nurses, and other health officials were now licensed and publicly registered, and patients were documented and classified.4 This bureaucratisation forged new power structures, sometimes with severe consequences for individuals, including “women, the poor, those with distinctive sexual habits or emotional makeups or cognitive capacities – whose difference could be defined as pathology in need of monitoring, therapy, regulation: in need, in short, of discipline” (Rothfield 2014, 176). Diseases were often moralised, stigmatising groups and individuals, which led to the strict isolation and control of “patients” in hospitals, sanatoriums, mental asylums, and their homes.5 The cholera outbreaks were, for example, “blamed […] on the low morals and drunkenness of the poor”; other ailments were considered exclusively female (Porter 2011a, 90). As the representation of Mary Barton’s frailty, anxieties, and melodramatic

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breakdown indicates, being a woman was considered “inherently pathological”, resulting in many “sexual atrocities committed on female patients in the name of medicine” (90), among them ovariotomy and even clitoridectomy to cure alleged “female conditions” like hysteria and nymphomania (Laqueur 1992, 176; see also Porter 1999, 364). This medicalisation installed an authoritative system of “medico-moral policing” and “medical surveillance” of the social body (Rothfield 2014, 178). With the rise of consumerism and market society, the self-monitoring of British citizens’ physical and mental constitutions became a matter of civic responsibility. Along with new systems of knowledge production and dissemination, the severe contagions of the period made people aware of the numerous health hazards that could affect their bodies (Haley 1978, 5–6). It is no surprise then that “[n]o topic more occupied the Victorian mind than Health” (3). Good health was promoted as achievable for, and thus controllable by, the individual through sensible behaviour and consumerism, and people began to invest more time and money in their health and well-being. As Bruce Haley resumes, “[i]n the name of Health, Victorians flocked to the seaside, tramped about in the Alps or Cotswolds, dieted, took pills, sweated themselves in Turkish baths, adopted this ‘system’ of medicine or that” (3). By the end of the century, “health became something that could be built up by pursuing a range of activities, to reach a state of vigour and overflowing vitality” (Brunton 2019, 47). When holistic health emerged as a new ideal, if not norm, medical regimens— including homoeopathy, gymnastics, and skincare routines—enjoyed unprecedented popularity, as several contributions in this volume confirm. As well as playing host to these transformations in medicine, the nineteenth century in Britain is also remembered as the age of the transport revolution, generating a range of new mobile practices. The perfection of the steam engine, for example, initiated the shift from a maritime industry of sailing ships to that of steamships. “For the first time [in British history]”, David M. Williams and John Armstrong assert, “vessels were not at the mercy of wind or tide and this, together with the ability to make or leave port at will, permitted scheduled services” (2012, 43). Itself a product of capitalism and industrialisation, steamship technology in turn facilitated these systems by making global trade and transport more efficient and profitable. On land, steam engine technology initiated “huge historic shifts away from travelling by feet (and indeed by horse), to travelling by train, bus and coach” (Urry 2007, 90). From the opening of the first railway connection between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830—the same

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line Mary Barton uses to find Will Wilson—to the peak of the railway system in 1913 when “1.5 billion passengers travelled every year on 20,000 miles of track, [and] railways carted almost three quarters of the goods that circulated in the economy” (Steinbach 2017, 102), Britain witnessed a rapid expansion of local and national railway lines and networks. Mobility scholars have discussed the complex social and cultural effects of this tremendous national endeavour.6 The most fundamental impact of the railway was that “[t]he populace generally became much more mobile, and they also journeyed over far greater distances: railways both contracted and expanded space” (Freeman 1999, 86). Charlotte Mathieson suggests that, in conjunction with the previous improvement of national road and canal networks, this new infrastructure was essential to nation-building by enabling larger sections of society to “experience themselves as part of a more connected nation” (2015, 7; see also Urry 2007, 91–92). This principle also applied to Britain as a colonial power. New modes of travel and transport recalibrated Britain’s geopolitical position in the world. Nineteenth-century colonialism “was both a product and a driver of these new technologies [of mobility]. The intensification of colonial and imperial conflicts and the changing nature of ideas about race and governance meant that Europeans were both more likely to encounter the world beyond Europe themselves and […] to consume representations of that world” (Hill 2016, 2). The expansion of transport networks shaped the nation’s concepts of self and other. At the same time, it served as a distinct mechanism of colonial oppression and exploitation. As David Lambert and Peter Merriman remind us, “imperial migration was not only a matter of voluntary population movements” but also meant that millions of “African men, women and children [were] forcibly transported to European colonies” (2020, 4). Although poverty persisted in Britain, the transport revolution attenuated social inequality as new modes of mobility “allowed people of all classes to travel across the country more rapidly and less expensively than ever before” (Byerly 2013, 289). Again, Mary Barton’s journey is a case in point. As a working-class woman, Mary experiences the democratising effects of the transport revolution first-hand—her geographical scope increases tremendously due to the option of travelling by train and boat. Yet her inability to cope with these new possibilities also points to the anxieties and ambiguities caused by this social shift. Nonetheless, one long-­ term result of this process was that “[n]ew forms and purposes for

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journeying were emerging” (Mathieson 2015, 3). Domestic tourism in particular—available only to a privileged few prior to the railway—now became an option for more Britons. Susie L.  Steinbach maintains that “[r]ailways stimulated the growth of seaside resorts, first by making the journey to the coast cheaper, faster, and more comfortable for those already taking it, and later by making the seaside accessible for working-­ class holidaymakers” (2017, 155). In this manner, mobility also attained new cultural connotations, more often than previously signifying recreation, pleasure, and freedom, particularly for the middle classes (Mathieson 2015, 89). These effects intensified as more new modes of transport appeared. The 1890s alone witnessed “the completion of the first ever deep-level Tube-railway” in London (Ashford 2013, 2), the first Britishbuilt motor car (Bagwell 1988, 187), and the commercial success of the safety bicycle. As Lena Wånggren notes, cycling in particular made it possible that “women could travel further without chaperones and advocate the less restricting rational dress” (2015, 125). New forms of mobility were thus integral to the restructuring of British society in terms of class and gender. As these two overviews indicate, the cultural histories of nineteenth-­ century medicine and mobility developed analogously. In both realms, Britain entered capitalist modernity. New forms of technology transformed or eradicated older mobile and medical practices, making transport and medical services more accessible. Yet with new mentalities and possibilities came new cultural anxieties and forms of control, marking both “revolutions” as inherently ambiguous processes. Moreover, the more medicine and mobility developed individually, the more the two fields merged, symbiotically influencing, conditioning, and modifying each other—a development also mirrored in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Most significantly, mobility took on a crucial role in medicine as an epistemological entity, shaping the basic scientific understandings of disease and hygiene. With the transition from miasma to germ theory and the realisation that poor sanitation was the main cause of epidemics, medical authorities gradually discerned that infectious “[d]isease (and its cultural construct, illness) is a mobile entity” (Hokkanen 2017, 8). By the second half of the nineteenth century, “[p]eople were increasingly seen as carriers of disease, and new methods were designed to prevent them from spreading infection” (Cole et  al. 2015, 50–51), leading, for example, to the construction of modern sewer systems and the adoption of antisepsis principles. At the same time, people began to notice that due to Britain’s vast

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shipping routes diseases could easily travel the globe and that movements of people and commodities had medical consequences. Cholera, in particular, was understood as a disease connected to “global traffic. The idea that something invisible to the naked eye could spread around the world and was more potent than humans, states, and empires shook the sense of security of Western powers and exposed their vulnerability” (Huber 2020, 395). Simultaneously, new modes of transport and infrastructure transformed the provision of medical care and the production of medical knowledge, affecting especially the mobilities of patients and doctors. In the 1880s, for example, local authorities installed an ambulance network with horse-­ drawn vehicles in London to transport patients discreetly, safely, and quickly to municipal hospitals, which improved their chances of survival. The first motor ambulances and aero-ambulances followed around the turn of the century (Corbett Bell 2009, 23–29, 146–166). Travelling family doctors and surgeons were thus slowly replaced by travelling patients. Similar synergies evolved in colonial contexts. As Markku Hokkanen emphasises, “Western medicine […] developed alongside and in interaction with religious and folk conceptions of illness, morality and health” (2017, 6). In Southern Africa, for instance, British explorers and colonisers were exposed to indigenous medical practices and brought along their own medical conventions, which forged reciprocal networks of medical knowledge and practice within complex imperial power structures (16–17). Medicine and mobility became entangled not only in professional medical research and practice but also in the wider public sphere. Publications like James Johnson’s Change of Air or the Pursuit of Health and Recreation (1832) promoted the concept of “travel for health”, claiming that such mobility would alleviate the suffering of the middle class caused by “the over-strenuous labour or exertion of the intellectual capacities, rather than of the corporeal powers, conducted in anxiety of mind and bad air” (2). In a similar vein, Buchan advises his readers that “[i]f the patient has it in his power, he ought to travel either by sea or land. A voyage or a long journey, especially towards a warmer climate, will be of more service than any medicine” (1848, 325). In the second half of the nineteenth century, steamships and the railway drove medical and recreational tourism. Seaside resorts like Bournemouth and Blackpool became popular (Hassan 2003, 39–42). At the same time, spa towns in Britain and continental Europe like Bath or Baden-Baden continued to offer specialised treatments like

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hydrotherapy (water cures) and galvanism (electric therapy), combined with socialising and other pastimes to divert the mind (Porter 1999, 267). While travelling and a change of scenery were deemed healthy in themselves (Andrews 2000, 45), medical experts often recommended additional physical exercise. In The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases (1829), James Clark reminds his readers that “the beneficial influence of travelling, or of sailing, and of climate, requires to be aided by such a regimen and mode of living and by such remedial measures, as would have been requisite in his case, had he remained in his own country” (2021, 132, see also Buchan 1848, 305). However, despite the century’s focus on corporeal exercise and mobility, stasis remained a popular therapeutic measure. An infamous example is the rest cure, which prescribed extended periods of physical inactivity, often targeting women. The rest cure was one of many intrusive control mechanisms regulating women’s supposedly frail bodies and minds: “Under the paternalistic, authoritarian control of a male physician, the Victorian woman regressed physically and emotionally. Isolated from her family and children and her usual responsibilities, she was put to bed and taught complete submission; even her arms and legs were moved for her” (Bassuk 1986, 146). Accordingly, this collection acknowledges the dialectics and synchronicities of mobility and immobility in medical contexts, demonstrating how both states often compete, as the alternatingly mobile and immobile Mary Barton suggests. Furthermore, the century’s new modes of transport became objects of the medical gaze and were either pathologised as potential health hazards or championed as healthy activities. A notorious medical diagnosis of the time was “railway spine” or “railway shock”, the “traumatization of a victim without discernible injury” after a railway accident (Matus 2009, 87), which caused countless pleas for compensation in British courts from the 1840s onward (Harrington 2003, 212). The idea that new forms of mobility threatened people’s health also informs the narrator’s account of Mary Barton’s excursion to Manchester, which links it, if not causally then at least chronologically, to illness and medical interventions. Recognising the novel’s interplay of medicine and mobility, Mathieson explains that it “shows the latent uncertainty around the vulnerability of the travelling body that would give rise to more substantial attention throughout the 1850s” (2015, 61). Such medical perceptions were subject to change and debate, as the example of the bicycle shows. Although the bicycle was met with similar medical scepticism as railway travel, especially when ridden by

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women, various medical experts advocated cycling. An article in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts from 1886, for example, praises the bicycle because “[i]n the gentle swinging motion above the wheel there is nothing to disturb the muscular or nervous system once accustomed to it; indeed it is the experience of most cyclists that the motion is at first tranquilising to the nerves and eventually becomes a refreshing stimulus” (“Cycling as a Health Product” 1886, 558). This belief in the physical and mental stimulation of health through mobility led to the invention of new gadgets in the health industry, most famously Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle, an exercise machine designed for “all ages, and both sexes”, which imitated “the various paces of the horse” to ease, prevent, and cure a variety of nervous and physical ailments (“Don’t Ride Horses” 1894, n. pag.). The example of Vigor’s saddle “manifest[s] how intimately contemporary medicalisation and commercialisation of transport and exercise were entering into people’s lives” (Andrews 2000, 66). Finally, the translation of medical discourse into functional material objects is also reflected in the century’s increasing effort to mobilise the impaired. The “bath chair” became a popular medical device in the Victorian era to enhance the mobility of “injured, sick, or disabled persons” (Woods and Watson 2015, n. pag.). Moreover, thanks to antiseptic surgery and anaesthetics, by the mid-nineteenth century, more people survived amputations, and alongside wheelchairs, “prosthetic devices began to saturate the marketplace and occupy a greater place in the social consciousness than ever before” (Sweet 2022, 128; see also 12). Wheelchairs and, later on, real-life prosthetics contributed to more social inclusion; however, it must be noted that for most invalids “independent mobility […] remained limited to the confines of indoor environments” (Woods and Watson 2015, n. pag.). Like other medical and mobile innovations, the effects of such new technologies were manifold and ambivalent. On the one hand, real-life prosthetics reduced the stigmatisation and marginalisation of the amputee by simulating “physical completeness” (Sweet 2022, 38). On the other hand, artificial limbs “came to the fore as devices that could supposedly standardize aberrant bodies, making them aesthetically acceptable and useful”, thus buttressing the century’s increasingly dominant cultural ideology of “physical normalcy” (38). In a manner comparable to that of the new health imperative, medical mobility devices thus enforced Britons’ individual responsibility for their bodily constitutions.

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This overview has shown that entanglements of medicine and mobility in the nineteenth century were diverse and far-reaching. Originally evolving in scientific discourse, their intersections soon affected everyday practices, raising awareness of diseases and potential health hazards and thereby producing new anxieties and ideologies. The following section maps this volume’s theoretical contexts: mobility studies and the medical humanities.

Theoretical Cornerstones: Mobility Studies and the Medical Humanities Mobility studies and the medical humanities define themselves primarily through their objects of research: mobility and medicine. This thematic orientation might suggest that they have little in common, yet the opposite is true. Having emerged out of established disciplines, the fields are connected by similar academic histories; mobility studies evolved out of geography, sociology, and transport history (Adey 2017, 23–26), while the medical humanities have their origins in the history of science and in bioethics (Hurwitz 2013, 672; Bleakley 2020, 5). Since the early 2000s, both fields have gained ground and now constitute vibrant inter- and transdisciplinary realms with their own journals, companions, book series, research centres, and associations. Even more importantly, mobility studies and the medical humanities share scholarly paradigms and modes of critical enquiry. When Mimi Sheller and John Urry proclaimed a new mobilities paradigm in 2006, they sought to challenge “the ways in which much social science research has been ‘a-mobile’” because they saw at the core of this research a sedentarist logic that “treats as normal stability, meaning, and place, and treats as abnormal distance, change, and placelessness” (208). As a result of the new paradigm, mobilities have been studied in ways that mean they no longer “appear as […] functional tasks to simply overcome spatial detachment” but instead are “acknowledged as part of the energetic buzz of the everyday […] and seen as a set of highly meaningful social practices that make up social, cultural and political life” (Adey et al. 2014, 3). In this context, Tim Cresswell’s notion of the production of mobilities has been influential. Cresswell differentiates between “movement” as a neutral form of material “displacement—the act of moving between locations” (2006, 2) and “mobility” as “socially produced motion” (3), that is, its cultural, social, and political dimensions and

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manifestations. Accordingly, mobility studies go beyond mobility as an empirical fact, scrutinising how it “is invested with particular values, and [how] those values come to matter” (Adey 2017, 34; see also 66). This constructivist perspective acknowledges that “unequal relations of power shape, and are shaped[,] through mobility” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016, 5), be it with respect to race, gender, sexuality, class, age, or (dis-)ability, implying that as a social phenomenon, mobility is far from universal. Given this emphasis on the contingent cultural meanings of and accesses to mobility, it comes as no surprise that mobility studies have become a vibrant field of enquiry in the humanities too, especially in literary and cultural studies and history, the disciplines represented in this volume. As Merriman and Lynne Pearce outline, in the humanities, a distinct focus has been the “concern with tracing the historical emergence, transformation and significance of practices, sensations, spaces and experiences of movement and mobility” (2017, 499). The humanities have embraced a deliberately broad and inclusive notion of mobility, which “encompasses a wide range of movements, from the largescale technologies of global travel, to transnational interconnections, to everyday local mobilities— including journeys by foot, road, rail, air, and sea, at local, regional, national and transnational levels” (Aguiar et al. 2019, 2). The principles of the production, historicity, and inclusivity of mobilities also inform our volume, which examines a wide range of mobilities—including walking, horse riding, and railway and steamship travel—and their contingent literary, historical, and cultural meanings while always also considering the discursive and material circumstances in which they evolved. Just like mobility studies, the medical humanities have undergone epistemological shifts. Coined by George Sarton in the late 1940s, the term “medical humanities” “stems from a desire to situate the significance of medicine as a product of culture” (Hurwitz 2013, 672). Although Sarton envisioned the medical humanities as concentrating “on the task of understanding science and medicine in all cultures and all periods through a disciplined study of its working methods, assumptions, language, literature and philosophy” (672), medical humanities initially reflected upon medical practices and their ethical implications in educational contexts (672). Its core focus was “the human side of medicine”, i.e. “the nature, importance and role of human experience on the part of the patients and practitioners alike, including their experience of the patient-practitioner relationship” (Arnott et al. 2001, 104–105; see also Whitehead and Woods 2016, 3–4). As a counterpoint to the empirical orientation of medicine,

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the medical humanities originally foregrounded the doctor’s responsibility and, conversely, the patient’s dignity, vulnerability, and subjectivity. The first wave of medical humanities research was thus more exclusive than inclusive in its undertaking, working along traditional disciplinary frameworks and focusing on individuals and their relationships in a humanist tradition. While this early ethical impetus has its own raison d’être and continues to be influential, it was recently criticised for neglecting the contingent cultural and historical dimensions of medicine and the decisive factors of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Encouraging inter- and transdisciplinary exchange, the second wave of medical humanities research recognises the “intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences” (Whitehead and Woods 2016, 1). As such, “critical medical humanities”7 “follow social constructionist orthodoxy in promoting multiple, complex and sophisticated examples of how science ‘facts’ are historically and socially produced, manipulated and framed” (Bleakley 2020, 14). This inclusion of historical and cultural dimensions is another productive vantage point for this collection because it stresses that just as culture informs discourses on health and illness, medicine and its practices and proposed cures are also socially constructed “products of a particular time and space” (Brunton 2019, 4). In tune with Cresswell’s notion of the production of mobilities, medical humanities conceive of medicine, health, and illness as empirical phenomena invested with cultural meanings that need to be critically unpacked. Combining these paradigms of mobility studies and medical humanities allows us to untangle the complex meanings of journeys like that of Mary Barton in Gaskell’s novel, which pathologises the heroine’s mobility, sanctions it with illness, and presents her time of stasis in the sickroom as a rite of passage, preparing her physically and ideologically for her future domestic role as Jem’s wife.8

Dissecting Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-­Century Britain: The Contributions The proliferation of the medical humanities and mobility studies has led to a growing number of studies on representations of medicine and mobility in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. Complementing earlier works by Rothfield (1992), Miriam Bailin (1994), and Athena Vrettos

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(1995), further comprehensive studies of illness and medicine in Romantic and Victorian literature and culture followed in the 2000s by Janis McLarren Caldwell (2004), Kennedy (2010), and most recently by Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham (2021), for example. Scholars have also examined the literary, historical, and cultural dimensions of individual illnesses, including cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, and malaria,9 as well as a range of medical phenomena like pain, contagion, hygiene and sanitary movements, and anatomy,10 to name but a few examples. Scholarship on mobilities in nineteenth-century Britain has been equally vibrant. Following seminal studies on travel, tourism, and transport,11 literary critics and cultural historians began working with the contentions of the new mobilities paradigm in the late 2000s. Mathieson (2015), Ruth Livesey (2016), and Chris Ewers (2018) have delivered readings of mobilities, including walking, seafaring, carriage and stage coach rides, and railway travel, in early and mid-nineteenth-century British literature. Focusing on women’s empowering yet precarious movements, Wendy Parkins (2009) and Ingrid Horrocks (2017) have devoted attention to the ways in which mobilities intersect with gender, while Alistair Robinson (2022) has stressed the impact of social class and economic capital on mobilities. This body of criticism demonstrates how productive mobility studies and the medical humanities have each been individually. A rare exception that interwove the two perspectives prior to Sheller and Urry’s famous essay was Richard Wrigley and George Revill’s edited collection Pathologies of Travel (2000), which discusses the medicalisation of travel against the backdrop of the transport revolution. Most other research to date has centred either on the intersections of medicine and mobility in colonial contexts and colonial contact zones12 or on domestic travel for health, medical tourism, spa culture, and the cultural construction of physical exercise and health, as well as disability, (im-)mobility, and protheses.13 The case studies and close readings in our collection complement and expand upon existing research with new perspectives and insights on the entanglements of medicine and mobility in British literature, history, and culture. The volume opens with a section on “Travel and Health”, which assembles contributions on domestic and international medical tourism in the nineteenth century, ranging from stays at spas and seaside resorts to transnational journeys to America and Australia. Its four chapters explore nexuses of travel, (im-)mobility, illness, and health in a variety of texts and revisit the century’s growing emphasis on the benefits of slow and mindful

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travel to escape, prevent, or cure a variety of ailments associated with modernity. They also register the ambiguities resulting from the institutionalisation and commodification of medical tourism, including xenophobia, the power of medical authorities, and the limitations of travellers’ agency and scopes of mobility. The section starts with Sally Shuttleworth’s contribution “Doctor’s Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century”, which investigates how the ocean was used as a health resort. Invalids suffering from consumption, nervous disorders, and the pressures of modern life were encouraged by their doctors to go on lengthy sea travels prophylactically and as a cure for existing ailments. Focusing on first-hand accounts, diaries, and ship-board newspapers from the most famous of the “Doctor’s Ships”, the Sobraon, a luxury clipper which sailed from Britain to Australia between 1866 and 1891, Shuttleworth explores life within this floating community of invalids, thereby honing in on slow travel, a form of mobility that has rarely been discussed in nineteenth-century studies, where the focus still lies on the acceleration of mobility in the wake of the transport revolution. Moving on to spa and seaside tourism, Pamela K. Gilbert’s “Watering Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel” examines another popular mode of medical mobility. While many Victorians visited spas and seaside resorts for health benefits, “taking the waters” made their bodies vulnerable to external harm. Offering plenty of opportunities for gambling and flirtation, spa towns were often imagined as dubious places, a view which perpetuated xenophobia and antisemitism. Gilbert’s chapter shows how these dynamics pervade the Victorian novel. After an analysis of sensationalist representations of spas and seaside resorts in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Ouida’s Moths, Gilbert considers how George Eliot and Guy de Maupassant critique the xenophobic association of spas with Jewishness in their novels Daniel Deronda and Mont-Oriol. In the following chapter, “Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, Natasha Anderson draws attention to Isabel Archer’s and Tess Durbeyfield’s travels, reconstructing striking parallels between Isabel’s transnational and Tess’s local mobilities, which both operate as complex nexuses of health and illness and agency and dependency. Even if the two protagonists may not seem to have much in common at first sight, their motions, Anderson argues, connect as they are similarly determined

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and limited by their relatives’ illnesses, their children’s premature deaths, and their own mortality. Anderson’s close readings of Hardy’s and James’s novels—which could also be compared with the episode in Gaskell’s Mary Barton—outline how gender, medicine, and mobility were conflated in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Like Shuttleworth, Heidi Lucja Liedke examines the contexts and representations of an alternative slow form of mobility discovered, practiced, and represented by British writers of the nineteenth century: idling. Her chapter, “(Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age”, discusses Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea concerning their varying attitudes towards idling and its potential effects on mental and physical health. While all four authors recognise idling as a form of self-care, their writings differ in objective and tone. Whereas Shelley employs idling as a mode of social critique, Collins and Dickens present a humorous account of idling that nonetheless acknowledges the necessity of rest at a time when discourses of efficiency were gaining authority in the wake of industrialisation. Gissing, in turn, embraces idling as allowing him to reach a state of mental peace. The second section, “Pathologising Mobilities”, centres on the social norms placed on the (gendered) body and its posture, mobility, and stasis in the nineteenth century. The chapters explore narrative and poetic representations as well as medical documentations of health and disease in the context of orthopaedics, health and sanitary reforms, discourses of decadence, and expanding asylum systems. While all of the chapters emphasise how medical discourse pathologises and regulates certain motions, thereby frequently producing “deviant” mobilities, they also accentuate subversive moments of bodily resistance. These contributions show that although the body is a vulnerable and fragile construct, constantly juggling between losing and (re-)gaining control, it has the potential to disrupt disciplinary power. The first chapter, Monika Class’s “Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss”, is concerned with George Eliot’s complex narrative engagement with gendered norms of bodily movement and posture. Analysing the ways in which the protagonists Tom and Maggie Tulliver hold and move their bodies when they row, walk, or run as children and young adults, Class demonstrates that Eliot’s novel represents and occasionally affirms the disciplinary effects of these

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norms yet also questions them, particularly by showcasing how Maggie’s “deviant” mobilities defy hegemonic femininity and Tom’s posture perpetuates masculine violence. Focusing on the mobility of matter in the context of nineteenth-­century sanitary reforms, the next contribution, “The Mobility of Water: Aquatic Transformation and Disease in Victorian Literature” by Ursula Kluwick, discusses the roles of water in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Kluwick contrasts the novels’ approaches to the mobility of aquatic matter and disease aetiology. Whereas Collins’s novel links disease to nineteenth-century miasmatic discourse, Jerome presents a vision of disease which draws on germ theory. In her analysis, Kluwick uses new materialism and the blue humanities to theorise disease and water as mobile matters, claiming that Victorian writers considered water’s inherent mobility and transformability as uncanny and potentially harmful to the human body. Following on from Kluwick, Stefanie John provides an insight into poetic renditions of dance as an erratic and anti-progressive form of mobility in her contribution “A ‘Feverish Restlessness’: Dance as Decadent Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry”. John outlines the pathological terminology of fin-de-siècle critics such as Max Nordau and Arthur Symons and introduces dance as a form of mobility and trope of “Decadence”. Analysing selected poems by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Michael Field, she explores the nexus of mobility, the maladie fin de siècle, and health as depicted in these poems in both content and form. With their interplay of agitation, paralysis, and circularity, as John argues, these dance poems challenge Victorian paradigms of acceleration, regularisation, and progress. Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland’s contribution takes us to North West England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bringing together medicine and mobility in the form of mental health and migration, “The Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Lancashire” traces how mentally disturbed Irish migrants entered and moved through the asylum system in Lancashire and how their movements were documented and often pathologised across official papers, press reports, and asylum and prison records. Demonstrating how discursive constructions of mobilities informed specific medical practices, Cox and Marland suggest that negative stereotypes of Irish poverty and rootlessness determined medical diagnoses and treatments for patients in the asylums.

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“Mobilities and Medical Regimens”, the third and final section of the volume, examines how different kinds of mobility in the Victorian era became medically relevant practices that required travellers to actively anticipate, monitor, and manage the medical implications and alleged health risks for their own bodies caused by their travels, be it by adopting or avoiding specific behaviours, purchasing consumer products, or moving in distinct ways. The section’s three contributions discuss how these regimens unfolded in Britain and its colonies. The chapter “Exposure, Friction, and ‘Peculiar Feelings’: Mobile Skin in Victorian Medicine and Literature” by Ariane de Waal gives an insight into the various ways the emerging discipline of dermatology involved conceptions of mobility. De Waal suggests that with its ability for constant renewal and perspiration, skin was understood as moving matter by the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, medical experts warned against certain forms of transport such as railway travel, walking, and horseback riding because of their supposedly damaging effects on the skin. Bringing together medical and literary writings, she illustrates that such ideas also pervade the Victorian novel, which alternatingly reproduces and undercuts the dermatological discourses of the age, especially in its representations of mobile women. Sharing de Waal’s emphasis on materiality, Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s chapter “White Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Geographies of Dependence” scrutinises a prescriptive regime for Victorians to ensure their health during travels in the “tropics” in Africa. Pietrzak-Franger documents the material and symbolic roles assumed by commodities transported globally in the nineteenth century. Focusing on tropical clothing, Pietrzak-Franger uncovers a hitherto often neglected dimension of health commodity culture; while tropical clothing was usually purchased to ensure travellers’ health, comfort, and national superiority abroad, its domestic sites of production, cotton factories in Manchester, for example, often posed health hazards to workers. Approaching health commodity culture with respect to its consumption and production against the backdrop of imperialism, Pietrzak-Franger reminds us how the very same textile materials could simultaneously prevent and cause illnesses. The volume closes with Markku Hokkanen’s “From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire”. Discussing the writings of British explorers like David Livingstone, Horace Waller, John Buchanan, and Mary Kingsley in travel

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books, health advice pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and personal correspondence, Hokkanen reconstructs how medicine and mobility became conceptually and materially entangled in colonial contexts and, in turn, informed Western representations of Africa and the British colonisers. He examines how the notion of physical exercise as a therapeutic and prophylactic measure for explorers in a fever-stricken Africa went hand in hand with the idealised image of the enduring, heroic, and risk-taking coloniser during the phase of early settlement and colonisation, which, however, gave way to an ideal of the coloniser as more controlled, disciplined, and careful towards the end of the century. While the literary, historical, and cultural intersections of medicine and mobility, in nineteenth-century Britain discussed in this volume cover a broad spectrum of texts, genres, and phenomena, it does not offer a complete survey. Nexuses such as that of war, mobility, and medicine, including the mobility and mobilisation of doctors and nurses, patient care, and hygienic precautions on the battlefield or the concept of sacrificing one’s health for the empire, could not be considered. Disability and aging studies constitute another promising avenue for future interdisciplinary research on the interconnectedness of medicine and mobility with respect to literary and cultural representations of geriatrics, the lack of mental and physical mobility caused by old age, mental and physical disabilities, and forms of concomitant (temporary) paralysis and immobility. Recognising that more research into the intersections between medicine and mobility remains to be done, we hope that this collection will inspire scholars to investigate the fields’ reciprocities not only in the nineteenth century but also in other historical periods and cultural contexts.

Notes 1. “Golden Wasser” is a root and herbal liqueur. The name comes from the flakes of gold leaf suspended in it (Gaskell 2006, 435). 2. This introduction lists only some of the major medical innovations and developments of the nineteenth century. More extensive surveys have, for instance, been provided by Porter (1999, 2004) and Bynum (2008). For medical histories of Britain since the eighteenth century, see Porter (1995, 2001), Lane (2001), Wilson Carpenter (2010), and Brunton (2019). 3. Published between the 1770s and 1870s, Buchan’s work went through more than 140 editions. According to Charles E.  Rosenberg, no other

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“health guide before the twentieth century enjoyed a greater popularity” (1983, 22; see also Brunton 2019, 49). 4. The British Medical Association (BMA), for example, was established in 1832; the General Medical Council (GMC) was formed in 1858 (Porter 1999, 355–356). 5. For more on nineteenth-century British asylums and sanatoria, patients, and therapeutic measures, see, for example, Shepherd (2016), Taylor (2017), and Burtinshaw and Burt (2017). 6. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to include all ramifications of the expansion of the railway and related transport technologies in nineteenth-­century Britain. For a succinct summary of these effects, see Thomas (2014, 215–216). 7. For recent discussions on what constitutes the “critical” medical humanities, see, for example, Bleakley (2014, 2020), Viney et  al. (2015), and Atkinson et al. (2015). 8. The illness even infantilises Mary. Upon her recovery, her “mind was in the tender state of a lately-born infant” (Gaskell 2006, 302). For a discussion of the entanglements of fever and gender in nineteenth-century literature, see Brunton (2019, 41). 9. See, for example, the works by Gilbert (2009), Shuttleton (2012), Byrne (2011), Pietrzak-Franger (2017), and Howell (2014). 10. For recent scholarship, see Christensen (2005), Allen (2008), Ablow (2017), Gasperini (2019), Nixon (2020), and Chen (2020). 11. Among these early studies are, for instance, Bagwell (1988), Schivelbusch (1977), Wallace (1993), Buzard (1993), Freeman (1999), and Carter (2001). 12. See, for example, the works by Hassan (2011), Foxhall (2012), Howell (2014), and Hokkanen (2017). 13. See, for example, Vertinsky (1990), Hassan (2003), Wood (2012), Marland (2013), and Sweet (2022).

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. 2017. Victorian Pain. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Adey, Peter. 2017. Mobility. 2nd ed. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Adey, Peter et al. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey et al., 1–20. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Aguiar, Marian, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce. 2019. “Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture.” In Mobilities, Literature, Culture, edited by Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce, 1–31. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­27072-­8_1.

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Bynum, Walter. 2008. The History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byrne, Katherine. 2011. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carter, Ian. 2001. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chen, Chung-jen. 2020. Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Christensen, Allan Conrad. 2005. Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our Feverish Contact’. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Clark, James. 2021 [1829]. “The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases, More Particularly of the Chest and Digestive Organs.” In Travel and Tourism in Britain, 1700–1914. Spa Tourism, edited by Allan Brodie, 20–36 and 167–178. London: Routledge. Cole, Thomas R., Nathan S.  Carlin, and Ronald A.  Carson. 2015. Medical Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett Bell, Ryan. 2009. The Ambulance: A History. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. “Cycling as a Health Product.”1886. Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts, Aug. 23: 558–559. “Don’t Ride Horses. Ride the Hercules Horse-Action Saddle … Vigor & Co. 21 Baker Street, Portman Square, London, W.” 1894. London: Dalziel and Co., Camden Press, N.W. Ewers, Chris. 2018. Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell & Brewer. Foxhall, Katherine. 2012. Health, Medicine, and the Sea: Australian Voyages, c. 1815–60. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Freeman, Michael. 1999. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 2006 [1848]. Mary Barton. Edited by Shirley Foster. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gasperini, Anna. 2019. Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act. Cham: Palgrave. Gilbert, Pamela. 2009. Cholera and the Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England. New York: SUNY. Harrington, Ralph. 2003. “On the Tracks of Trauma: Railway Spine Reconsidered.” The Journal for the Society for the Social History of Medicine 16 (2): 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/16.2.209. Haley, Bruce. 1978. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

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Hassan, John. 2003. The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hassan, Narin. 2011. Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Hill, Kate. 2016. “Introduction: Narratives of Travel, Narrative that Travel.” In Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects, edited by Kate Hill, 1–10. Farnham: Ashgate. Hokkanen, Markku. 2017. Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Horrocks, Ingrid. 2017. Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howell, Jessica. 2014. Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Huber, Valeska. 2020. “Pandemics and the Politics of Difference: Rewriting the History of Internationalism through Nineteenth-Century Cholera.” Journal of Global History 15 (3): 394–407. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1740022820000236. Hurwitz, Brian. 2013. “Medical Humanities: Lineage, Excursionary Sketch and Rationale.” Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (11): 672–674. https://doi. org/10.1136/medethics-­2013-­101815. Johnson, James. 1832. Change of Air or the Pursuit of Health and Recreation. 3rd ed. London: S. Highley. Kennedy, Meegan. 2010. Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medicine and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Kennedy, Meegan. 2013. “The Victorian Novel and Medicine.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, 459–482. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lambert, David, and Peter Merriman, eds. 2020. Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lane, Joan. 2001. A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750–1950. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Laqueur, Thomas. 1992. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawlor, Clark, and Andrew Mangham, eds. 2021. Literature and Medicine: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livesey, Ruth. 2016. Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marland, Hilary. 2013. Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mathieson, Charlotte. 2015. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Matus, Jill. 2009. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLarren Caldwell, Janis. 2004. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain. From Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. “Mobility and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017. 1330853. Nicholson, Judith A., and Mimi Sheller. 2016. “Race and the Politics of Mobility— Introduction.” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 6 (1). 4–11. https://doi.org/10.3167/TRANS.2016.060102. Nixon, Kari. 2020. Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature. Albany: The State University of New York Press. Parkins, Wendy. 2009. Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. 2017. Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, Roy. 1995. Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, Roy. 1999 [1997]. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. New York and London: Norton. Porter, Roy. 2001. Bodies Politic. Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900. London: Reaktion Books. Porter, Roy. 2004. Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine. New  York and London: Norton. Porter, Roy. 2011a [2006]. “What Is Disease?” In The Cambridge History of Medicine, edited by Roy Porter, 71–102. New York: Cambridge University Press. Porter, Roy. 2011b [2006]. “Medical Science.” In The Cambridge History of Medicine, edited by Roy Porter, 136–175. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Alistair. 2022. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenberg, Charles E. 1983. “Medical Text and Social Context: Explaining William Buchan’s ‘Domestic Medicine’.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 (1): 22–42. Rothfield, Lawrence. 1992. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Rothfield, Lawrence. 2014. “Medical.” In A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 172–185. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1977. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: University of California Press. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Shelston, Alan. 2006. “Opportunity and Anxiety: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Development of the Railway System.” The Gaskell Society Journal 20: 91–101. Shepherd, Anna. 2016 [2014]. Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-­ Century England. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Shuttleton, David. 2012. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinbach, Susie L. 2017. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Sweet, Ryan. 2022. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Peter. 2014. “Railways.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey et al., 214–224. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Taylor, Steven J. 2017. Child Insanity in England, 1845–1907. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Vertinsky, Patricia Anne. 1990. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester and New  York: Manchester University Press. Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods. 2015. “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks.” Medical Humanities 41 (1): 2–7. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-­2015-­010692. Vrettos, Athena. 1995. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wallace, Anne D. 1993. Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wånggren, Lena. 2015. “The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle.” In Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries, 123–135. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, 1–34. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, David M., and John Armstrong. 2012. “An Appraisal of the Progress of the Steamship in the Nineteenth Century.” In The World’s Key Industry: History

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Travel and Health

CHAPTER 2

Doctors’ Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century Sally Shuttleworth

In 1925, various newspapers lamented the “passing” of the famous clipper ship, the Sobraon.1 Built in Aberdeen in 1866, one of the fastest and largest “composite ships” of teak on an iron frame ever made, she had sailed annually between London and Australia until 1891. Known also as “The Doctors’ Ship”, her celebrity status was due in part to the fact that she specialised in carrying one particular category of passengers: invalids (“‘Doctors’ Ship” 1925). In the field of mobility studies, there has been considerable work on emigrant voyages, but little on the intersecting area of voyages for health. Some of the Sobraon’s passengers from London to Sydney, or Melbourne, were indeed migrating to Australia on doctor’s orders, in quest of a more suitable climate for their health. Others, however, were also following medical advice and undertaking the 3-month voyage simply for the therapeutic qualities of the voyage itself. They would spend the minimum time possible in Australia and return to England on the ship’s homeward trip. In this S. Shuttleworth (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_2

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chapter, I explore the medical and cultural debates in the last decades of the nineteenth century around the benefits for health of lengthy sea voyages. Invalids, even when potentially infectious, were not enjoined to isolate at home but to travel to the other side of the earth in quest of a cure. Taking the Sobraon as my primary case study, I also examine diaries, ship-board newspapers, and other first-hand accounts of voyages in order to build a detailed picture of life within these floating worlds of invalids (see Fig. 2.1).2

Fig. 2.1  “Sobraon”. From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage from London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library

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The value of sea travel for health had been recognised from classical times but appears to have faded generally from medical practice until the eighteenth century, when interest in sea bathing developed and several works were published on the therapeutic value of taking a sea voyage (Gilchrist 1756, 1771; Sutherland 1763). As Jan Golinski and others have noted, the eighteenth century witnessed a huge rise of interest in the impact of climate on health, with the rapid development of spa culture3 and also the Grand Tour, which often had an element of travel for health (2007; see also Janković 2000, 2010). The foundations of what came to be known as medical climatology were laid by James Clark in the 1820s and 1830s, with the first detailed meteorological studies of principal continental resorts (Clark 1820, 1830, 1835). By the 1860s, there were an almost bewildering number of guides published, with resorts vying with each other to produce the most attractive climatological statistics, and assurances about sanitary conditions, in order to attract customers. The idea that consumption could be best handled by a winter abroad, or in an English seaside resort which could boast a mild climate, had firmly taken hold, and the next major work in the field, Robert E. Scoresby-Jackson’s encyclopaedic Medical Climatology (1862), adopted this belief as its fundamental premise.

The Ocean as a Health Resort In the massive emerging literature on travel for health, sea voyages seemed to be more of a means to an end, rather than a destination in themselves. Such thinking was challenged, however, with the publication of William Wilson’s The Ocean as a Health Resort (1880), which, as its title proclaims, transformed the voyage into a form of floating resort. Medical publication was in fact trailing behind practice since, as Wilson notes, it would have been unusual, 10 to 15 years before, to encounter anyone taking a voyage solely for health, but “now the favourite passenger-ships, especially in the autumn, are half-filled with invalids of every kind and degree, who are looking forward hopefully to testing the restorative influences of the ocean climate” (2). The kind of voyage he has in mind is not that endured, below deck, by the passengers in emigrant ships, crammed together with little concern for their welfare. He is thinking, rather, of luxurious sailing ships, with their spacious cabins opening out onto the deck, and solicitous attention given to individual passengers’ desires and needs. Wilson, whose letters after his name on the title page, LRCP, MRCSE, loudly proclaim

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his medical credentials, informs his readers that he had taken more than one voyage to the “Australian colonies” (iii). His book is a guide for “Tourists and Invalids” as to which voyages are best for which health conditions, and all the practical aspects to be considered in preparing for a trip, including what furniture to take, since sailing ships expected passengers to bring their own mattress, table and chairs, carpet, etc.4 Wilson’s focus is primarily on the voyage to Australia, and in a sailing ship. Steamers will soon take over from sail, he observes, but they will never overcome the disadvantage of “too rapid transition from one kind of climate to another” (v), a verdict echoed in the British Medical Journal (“Winter Holidays and Foreign Health Resorts” 1880, 552). The same arguments had been made against railways, and throughout the health travel literature, there is an emphasis on the need for gradual transition between meteorological zones so that the body has time to gently acclimatise. The advantage of the Australian route by sail was precisely its length— around 3 months as opposed to the 45 days which could be achieved by a steamer travelling via the Suez Canal. In the ensuing medical debates, the relative merits of sail versus steam were discussed, with many medical commentators singing the praises of steam (e.g. freedom from unbearable monotony and also refrigeration which could improve the quality of diet). For the supporters of sail, however, many of whom had served as ship’s surgeons on the Sobraon, this monotony was precisely the point. Threatened with extinction by the increasing speed and amenities offered by the steamer, owners of sailing ships had set out to create a new market: not just emigration to far-flung colonies but ships catering explicitly for the well-heeled invalid, desirous of undertaking the longest possible voyage. An editorial in The Lancet, for example, noted the regular announcements in the press of “‘invalid ships’ advertised to sail the summer seas, and fitted up with every requisite to secure the comfort of the weak and ailing” (“The Ocean Voyage as Restorative” 1886, 19). The Sobraon was the most famous of these ships, and its captain, James Aberdour Elmslie (1827–1908), who was in command from her second voyage in 1867 until the end of her voyaging life in 1891, formed part of this marketing, featuring in all the advertisements. It would seem travellers also received a “souvenir” of the voyage with his photograph, which they could then forward to friends and family, thus extending publicity for the ship and the cult of the captain.5 Wilson’s book had been preceded by a series of medical papers in The Practitioner, 1876–1877, by Dr. C.  B. Faber, exploring the advantages

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and disadvantages of the voyage to Australia for patients, particularly those suffering from consumption and nervous disorders. Faber notes that sea voyages as a remedy for consumption were becoming more and more popular: his own ship (which was not the Sobraon) was so full of invalids, “it resembled a regular hospital ship for consumptive patients” (Part I, 2).6 He follows the standard practice of health resort literature of warning of the dangers of sending patients when it was too late, so that instead of departing life surrounded by family and amidst the comforts of their own home, they die “many thousand miles away on the solitary ocean, in the small, cheerless cabin of a ship” (Part I, 2). Of the passengers on the outward voyage, 26 (largely male) had consumption, and three died on the outward voyage, unable to cope with the heat of the tropics (Part V, 14, 24). He recounts how he resorted to heroic measures to save another, conducting a blood transfusion from “the carotid of a lamb into a vein of his forearm” (he does not record whether the lamb then graced the dinner table) (Part V, 22). Although Faber celebrated the transparency of air and intensity of light to be found on sea voyages, he overturned assumptions regarding the purity of air to be enjoyed on sailing ships. Considering the “physical and social condition of that floating microcosm, a ship on high ocean”, he highlights the lack of ventilation and the noise and offensive smells on deck, where a small steam engine was running to provide distilled water and livestock, including sheep, pigs, and a cow, were assembled, creating “veritable hot-beds of bacteria, micrococci and other productions so famous of late for their (alleged) disease-producing properties” (Part II, 3). Faber is firmly in the oppositional camp regarding the new germ theories but nonetheless draws upon its intimidating language to heighten his readers’ sense of the perils of a sailing voyage. His verdict is that such voyages are positive for nervous patients but less so for consumptive ones. Wilson, who was writing for the general public, was far more positive as to the benefits to be derived. Like Faber, he focuses on consumptive patients but also the wider categories of nervous disorders, and debility, which encompass “the professional man, or man of business who has broken down through over-work”, anyone convalescing from a major operation or illness, and a lad “who has outgrown his strength” (1880, 8). One can see here the ways in which the rising discourse of “overwork” in business and professional life is deployed in support of such voyages. A subsequent article by Dr. James Lindsay in the popular Chambers’s Journal offers a romanticised endorsement of Wilson’s arguments, envisioning the

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peace of a sailing ship, with just the faint “sough” of the sails, “all else silence and the majesty of silent motion” (1885, 577). The overworked professional or business man is offered 3 months without intercourse with the outer world: “There is no morning newspaper, no postman’s knock, no telegrams, no daily confinement in close offices, courts or consulting rooms […]. The strain of life is withdrawn” (578). He is keen to point out, however, that such “luxurious indulgence”, which in other circumstances would be “contemptible”, is for the upstanding English professional man, entirely appropriate, since it allows nature to silently set to work, building up once more the “broken cells” and the “disordered machinery of life” (579). Yoking overwork with air pollution, Lindsay goes on to argue that “half the diseases of modern life […] are due to contamination of the air we breathe” and for these diseases, the pure air of the ocean offers a “natural disinfectant” (579). The British Medical Journal enthusiastically endorsed Lindsay’s arguments in an article of the same name (“The Ocean as a Health Restorer” 1885), while contributions from America showed how firmly the idea of a lengthy voyage as a cure for the ills of modern life had taken hold. With regard to consumption, many young people were sent to health resorts merely as a precaution, before the onset of obvious illness. Long after Robert Koch had isolated the tubercle bacillus in 1882, there were still concerns about a hereditary predisposition to the disease, and families who had lost members to tuberculosis, or where a child showed signs of being “delicate”, were encouraged to send them to health resorts as “prophylactic” cases to ward off future danger and strengthen their systems. This practice was now extended to the voyage, and whole families might undertake the round trip to Australia for the sake of a child, or, increasingly, young men were sent off with companions. Robert H. Otter, for example, set off to Australia in 1872 accompanied by his brother and cousin, having been advised by his doctor to take a long sea voyage in a sailing ship “on account of threatening mischief in the lungs” (1882, 1).7 His lively account of his voyage and subsequent travels in Australia and other destinations is offered as a guide for other travellers for health and confirms some of the general anxieties about the qualities of ships’ surgeons. At the beginning of the voyage, an elderly gentleman at dinner, who was clearly far gone with consumption, turned out to be the advertised “experienced surgeon”, who was to look after the invalids on the voyage.8 Otter led the call for him to be put ashore in Falmouth. Unfortunately, his replacement turned out to be “far from sober” and utterly useless on the voyage (4–5).

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In the medical periodicals of the time, there was much discussion about the need for regulation regarding the provision of a qualified surgeon on passenger ships, and by the 1890s, requirements were put in place to ensure surgeons had at least some experience in a leading hospital before putting to sea (“Professional Sketches: The Ship-Doctor” 1874; Doyle 1890a). Thomas Dutton, who had started his own career as a “useless” ship’s surgeon, divided the species into four classes: just qualified and useless, idle and drunken, chronic invalids who go back and forth for their health, or, more rarely, medical practitioners of undoubted ability “who are forced to take a sea-trip for general debility, brought on by over-study and mental fatigue” (1891, 59). The latter, he observes, are most disliked by ships’ captains as they are too conscientious in pointing out the sanitary defects of the ships (59). From the contributions to the columns of the medical press, it would seem there were a fair few in the latter category, who took on an occasional voyage for the sake of their own health. Thus, the distinguished physician Lauriston E. Shaw, who had taken a voyage as Medical Officer with the Sobraon for the sake of his own health, wrote to the British Medical Journal recording his gratitude for his return to robust health and noting that even “unpromising” cases had made remarkable improvements over the voyage (1889, 564). One area of medical agreement concerned the cruelty of sending an invalid to sea in an advanced stage of consumption, and indeed the accounts from passengers and ship’s surgeons bear out these concerns. Doctors were divided, however, as to the relative merits of sail versus steam, which became ever more pressing as the days of sail looked numbered. Doyle, a Medical Officer on the Sobraon, gave a glowing account of the voyage, stressing that the ship, unusually, chartered its course for the comfort of its passengers rather than for the swiftest route (1890a, 226, 1890b, 558).9 The advantages of sail, he argues, are those of roomy cabins, no stops at ports to destroy the peace, and no “smell and rattle of the engines” of the steamer (1890a, 227). He appears to have been unlucky in his cases, however, in that four died shortly after landing in Melbourne. Doyle joins in the chorus of doctors warning fellow practitioners not to send these “last chance” cases to sea, so that they die in Australia, “far from home and friends, regretting with their dying breath that they ever left their own firesides on the advice of their medical attendants” (227). For the rest of his patients, however, including consumptives and nervous disorders, he records excellent results. The article stimulated extensive correspondence, with supporters of steam favouring the shorter voyage,

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while John Keyworth, who had also served as medical officer on the Sobraon, weighed in on behalf of sail and their ship.10 Feelings, and loyalties, it seems, ran very high.

A Doctor’s Narrative: Francis Workman Amidst all this support for the Sobraon, however, there was one dissenting voice: a report on his voyage as Medical Officer on the Sobraon in 1883 by Dr. Francis Workman. Produced as a pamphlet and read out at the Reading Pathological Society where Workman had been Honorary Secretary for 20 years, the report, which takes its title from Wilson’s work, did not have wide circulation but is certainly one of the most detailed and graphic accounts of the life of a medical officer on a so-called Hospital Ship (Workman 1884, 1). Workman had developed symptoms of phthisis and was emigrating with his wife and child to Australia (Thomas and Gandevia 1959, 6). His version of The Ocean as a Health Resort is written for his fellow physicians and focuses therefore almost entirely on the medical aspect, although he does acknowledge that he enjoyed the voyage immensely (Workman 1884, 3). Nonetheless, he expresses his surprise that a ship like the Sobraon did not have more than a basic medical chest and that there was nowhere where he could see patients in private, let alone perform surgery (4). Three quarters of the passengers were patients (an unusually high percentage it would seem), with a range of complaints, from the last stage of phthisis to mild dyspepsia. Workman’s difficulties began before they even reached Plymouth when a male passenger, who had managed to “pass muster” and evade detection, was found to be at death’s door. The captain was powerless to take action, and the ship’s agent at Plymouth also refused, citing a previous case of “breach of contract” brought against the shipping line for removing a patient (5). Workman nonetheless prevailed on the man to go ashore voluntarily and records that he later heard that he died within the week. Taking a sailing ship to Australia, he argues, is a “novel course of treatment” lasting three months, and from which there could be no withdrawing as the ship, unlike a steamer, would not touch land again until reaching Melbourne: “Australia or death is the word” (1). Patients, he observes, are ill-prepared for what is to come. His caseload certainly seems heavier than that on other voyages of the Sobraon: his deaths included a young tubercular artist who became delirious in the final stages; a sufferer from cerebro-spinal sclerosis who suffered agonies on the voyage, only to die a week

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after arrival; a woman, apparently in good health, who was travelling out to nurse a “phthisical husband” (7); and a man desperate to avoid another English winter who died of consumption just a few days before reaching Australia. Rather dramatically, there was also a highly gymnastic somnambulist from a very religious family who roamed the ship at night; a young man with a nervous disorder prone to “demoniac laughter” (5); and a suicide, the only case of a passenger overboard in the ship’s history. The suicide was an 18-year-old girl, “daughter of an eccentric bibulous mother”, who threw herself overboard at night, possibly due to “misplaced affections” (7).11 The sea, he comments dryly, “is a dangerous place to send romantic, impulsive ladies” (8). Sailing ships were often depicted as social microcosms, but in Workman’s case, it would appear the more direct analogy is a sensation novel. One can see him reaching for psychological and hereditarian explanations—the overly religious family or the eccentric and alcoholic mother—as he crafts his narrative. External evidence would suggest, however, that he is not guilty of either fabricating or appropriating stories from other voyages and that these events did all occur on his watch. In a summary of his time serving on the Sobraon, Captain Elmslie’s son, Archibald, records this suicide as their only one and two cases of somnambulism, the other being a Church of England clergyman who rose in the midst of the night to say morning prayers in the saloon and entered a state of desperate rage and despair when they tried to lock him in at night. Another tale, which illustrates the extraordinary mental suffering which could be attached to these voyages, concerns a woman accompanying a 21-year-old son, who was in the final stages of consumption and who died 3 weeks into the voyage. The distraught mother accused the doctor of poisoning him; since this was a public accusation, the doctor requested permission from the captain to do a postmortem. He agreed, and the postmortem was carried out with the assistance of two other doctors who happened to be travelling on the ship (presumably for their health). The mother had to be forcibly removed from protecting the body against this violation and, at the brief funeral that followed, had to be prevented from throwing herself overboard after her son. For the rest of the voyage, she was kept under watch to ensure she did not commit suicide (Elmslie 1912, n. pag.). Despite all the advertisements promising complete rest and peace during the voyage, and a cure for the ills of modern life, these trips all had their elements of tragedy, which needed to be negotiated, not only by the afflicted but also by the crew and fellow passengers in this tightly enclosed world.

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Life On-Board the Sobraon: Passenger Narratives As a doctor, dealing with the health problems of all on board, Workman’s experience of the voyage clearly differed from that of passengers more aloof from such difficulties. Published accounts, and manuscript letters and personal diaries of voyages by passengers on the Sobraon, or other invalid ships, offer quite a range of responses, although there are few, for obvious reasons, written by those who were very ill.12 Designed as a luxury ship, the Sobraon boasted a lengthy saloon of over 100  feet and could carry around 90 first-class passengers and 40 second class, as well as extensive cargo, although by the end numbers were dropping (Bax 1954, 185). Prices were about the same as for a steamer voyage, which, although it took half the time, had much smaller cabins with multiple, cramped berths.13 Unusually, there was a remarkably stable crew during the Sobraon’s life as an invalid ship, with two of Elmslie’s sons also serving under him. Elmslie’s second wife and some of his numerous young children accompanied him on various voyages, with two of his babies actually born mid-voyage. Charles Yates Fell, a non-invalid on his way to New Zealand with his new wife, was full of praise for Captain Elmslie, writing in his diary on 23 December 1869 that “his kindness to both of us has been more than I can ever sufficiently thank him for or repay” (1869–1883, n. pag.).14 Despite the sickness of his wife, and unusually severe weather, he remained positive about the voyage. Although he initially held himself apart from the various entertainments, including the launch of the ship’s newspaper, the “Sobraon Chronicle”, by the end, he had become an enthusiastic performer in the plays produced by the first-class passengers. Another interesting Sobraon diary is that of Edith Gedge, who sailed, unaccompanied, to Australia in 1888, aged around 29. She threw herself into all the activities, leading the choir, playing women’s cricket (they had married versus singles matches), and joining a Shakespeare reading group (they got through 11 plays on the voyage). She also persuaded the doctor to give the women “Ambulance” lectures, with both men and women then having great fun practicing bandaging each other. Gedge even manages to sound enthusiastic about the major storm they encountered, which raged for 3 days, leaving no dry clothes or places to sleep: there is a wonderful description of the promiscuous association of the passengers’ clothing on deck, when they later attempt to dry it all. Gedge turns her diary into a communal document, with friends all entering their observations on the storm. The clearly very talented Mr. Rivington produces a lengthy

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parody of a well-known song “The Wonderful Musician”, complete with explanatory notes (and sung to great applause at the subsequent concert), which records in verse the various events and personal calamities during the storm (1888–1889, Dec. 13, 53–59).15 In the course of the diary, Gedge records the failure of invalids to improve due to the damp, raw air, instead of the promised “dry, cold and bracing” weather (Dec. 16, 60) they had been led to expect. It comes as a shock, however, at the end of the diary when she offers general remarks on the voyage “from a health point of view” (Dec. 29, 65) and reveals herself as an invalid. On arrival in Australia, she visits a recommended doctor in Melbourne, who gives her a good report on her health but prescribes travel to Hobart for the next 2 months, followed by the interior of Victoria or New South Wales, so that she could avoid a second English winter. In her notes for invalids, she is almost unremittingly negative: no one who was seriously ill should be sent. All who embarked as invalids were “perceptibly worse” on arrival (66). She lists poor food, damp, and lack of fires, no matter how cold it was; want of ventilation in the cabins; sailors tramping overhead at night; and problems with regard to neighbouring passengers: “[O]ne poor man who came for complete rest had broken nights for six weeks owing to a miserable child who cried for hours” and was not attended to by its parents (66). It is as if an entirely different personality, the “invalid”, has written these notes, which seem so at variance with the rest of the diary (although the notes are fully in accord with some of the medical literature). Gedge took the doctor’s advice and sailed almost immediately to Hobart in Tasmania, where she found a large number of the ship’s company had also followed similar medical instructions.

Ship Newspapers It was standard practice on these voyages for passengers to form entertainment committees, and part of this remit was to produce a ship newspaper.16 From Fell’s reference to the “Sobraon Chronicle” in 1869, it is clear that this practice was established early on in the ship’s life and indeed continued to its end.17 These newspapers were produced in manuscript, often with illustrations, and some were subsequently printed on arrival, creating a lasting memento for the passengers. One such newspaper was the Sobraon Gossip (see Fig. 2.2), whose title page captures the humorous tone adopted by these works and also the sense of shared endeavour (the motto ‘hic patet ingeniis campus’ roughly translates as “Here the field lies open to all talents”).

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Fig. 2.2  “Our Voyage”. Title page of Sobraon Gossip (1875). Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-441576471

The role of these newspapers was not merely to pass the time but to produce a sense of community amongst the passengers, not, in this case, one of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” (1991) but rather one for individuals who found themselves living, in exceptionally close proximity, with a random assortment of fellow beings. The newspapers

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vary in quality but are generally written in a lightly comic vein, avoiding contentious areas such as politics and religion and focusing more on capturing life on board the ship, with accounts of the various entertainments devised, from concerts, plays, and lectures to the inevitable Christy minstrels.18 Some included poetry, short essays, and fiction written by passengers. Doctors would occasionally provide columns, as in other ship newspapers, but possibly only on the ships with low death rates. In the Sobraon Occasional, Dr. Turner ran a brief column, “What the Doctor Says”, which marked the death of a dog and the arrival of the captain’s baby while celebrating their arrival in Melbourne with the hyperbolic claim that “I have now not a single patient on board, and only two or three convalescents” (1876, 63). In a similar column in the Sobraon Mercury (1877), Dr. Boodle is faced with a death shortly after leaving Melbourne. He confines himself to a simple statement of death, leaving it to the editors of the magazine to produce a memorial page for Thomas McCarthy who, the readers are informed, had struggled with the disappointments of gold mining and had “over-strained his brain” (14)— another variety of the diseases of modern life. The problem of how to react to death without disrupting the determined light-heartedness of the publication, and the ship community, is graphically displayed by the juxtaposition of items: the memorial is followed by the lament of a piano, begging to be allowed 2 hours’ rest between 2 and 4 p.m. In his diary, Fell had noted the tremendous grief displayed by two sons at the burial of their father, a consumptive travelling to Australia for his health, only to find that a day or two later they were participating once again in the singing and games (1869–1883, Oct. 23–27, n. pag.). Confined within the ship, there was little choice but to conform, not only to the daily rituals of onboard life, but also to the unspoken code of emotional conduct. The editor of Homeward Bound had opened the first number with a perhaps ill-advised comic exhortation to readers to shake off their tendency to sleep, “death’s counterfeit”, since the latest physiology advised that “[e]xertion, recreation, amusement are essential to health. An idle, sleepy man or woman is a discredit to the race, and unusually liable to fall into disease” (Evans 1882, 7; emphases in original). Perhaps invalid passengers overexerted themselves in the cause of the ship’s amusements, since the last page (after the light-hearted farewell), is a poem, “In Memoriam”, to the six who died on the voyage, five men and one woman. From the content of the newspaper, it is clear that this is a ship with many invalids: there are short articles on “Davos in Winter” celebrating the

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tobogganing lifestyle for invalids (15–16), and “England’s Winter Home for Invalids”, extolling the therapeutic powers of Bournemouth (25). Both suggest a clientele who are habitués of health resorts and likely to follow their voyage home with further excursions in search of health. On a more light-hearted note, there were also births and babies to care for on the voyages. The Sobraon Occasional published a poem by Nemo in honour of the birth of Coral, the captain’s daughter, “a passenger who never left the shore”, simply entitled “December 4th, 1875” (1876, 48). As this illustration from an album from a 1884 voyage to Melbourne suggests, young children were thoughtfully integrated into the life of the ship (see Fig. 2.3), although the practice noted by Edith Gedge (1889, 11) of bundling a crying baby and hoisting it up the main yard arm so that it could be gently rocked to sleep by the winds sounds somewhat precarious (a log for another ship notes that a cot was lost overboard) (Clark 1990, 34).

Fig. 2.3  “Dear little ‘Bonnie’. ‘Sobraon.’” From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage from London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library

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In addition to the newspapers, there were also pictorial records of the voyages, both photographs and paintings. The Sobraon has a wonderful visual legacy in the paintings and drawing of Harold John Graham (1858–1929), emigrating to Australia for his health in 1881.19 These include the rite of passage performed on all ships, the throwing of the dead horse, records of theatrical performances, and a song performed to celebrate the Sobraon, which demanded vigorous participation by all (see Fig. 2.4). The song reinforced the passengers’ sense of exclusivity and the health benefits of the voyage. Passengers were clearly inventive in creating these songs; the Sobraon Occasional prints numerous ones, which it seems were then passed on to future passengers via the crew and incorporated into the voyage rituals, strengthening a sense of belonging to an ongoing community.

The Arrival of the Invalids As we saw with Edith Gedge, the arrival in Melbourne did not signal the end of travel for the invalid. Melbourne was almost universally decried as a place of dust, and invalids were urged to leave it as soon as possible, usually for Tasmania, a “second Devonshire” (Doyle 1890b, 588), or New Zealand (Otter 1882, 24). H. E. Foster, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of his voyage for health, went into great detail as to the miseries to be faced by an invalid arriving in Australia, where the lodgings were poor, pervaded by a “step-mother’s spirit”, and onward journeys to more favourable climates rough and exhausting (1884, 418). Guides generally specified that no more than 3 months should be spent in Australia, if the benefit of the voyage were not to be undone (Faber 1876–1877, Part V, 24; Wilson 1880, 151). Even those travelling solely for the benefit of the voyage had to come to terms with travel in Australia since the Sobraon generally spent at least 2 months stocking up for the voyage home and acquiring cargo: one unusual cargo, noted in the newspapers, was that of 20 kangaroos, ten emus, and large numbers of birds (“Miscellaneous Items” 1885, 7). The return date was thus uncertain, adding to an invalid’s difficulties, since the ship only sailed once it had sufficient cargo to render the voyage profitable. By the end of the century, attitudes to these arriving invalids had changed, as awareness that tuberculosis was an infectious disease took hold. The colonies that had sought to attract therapeutic migration now became anxious to restrict those suffering from tuberculosis, although

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Fig. 2.4  Harold John Graham, “On the Sobraon”, October 1881. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-139421279

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medical men themselves were often reluctant to endorse such rulings, since a high proportion had themselves emigrated to Australia and New Zealand for the sake of their health (Haines 1992; Bryder 1996).20 An article in the British Journal of Tuberculosis by the chief health officer for the Colony of New Zealand, J. Malcolm Mason, in 1907 drew attention to the actions being taken to combat “King Tubercle”, with placards at all stations warning of the dangers of infection and tuberculosis sufferers arriving by ship refused entry (283). The medical officer accuses British doctors of cruelty and inhumanity in sending such sufferers since they will then have to face an immediate return voyage. With measures that anticipate current practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was possible to gain entry if the individual had money and signed a bond to “reside in a sanatorium at their own expense” (286). Only the indigent, it would seem, were thus likely to be refused. Further evidence of the dramatic shift in attitudes to consumptives at the turn of the century is offered in A.  Vavasour Elder’s Ship-Surgeon’s Handbook in which he complains of “the active antitubercular crusade, now fully established in most civilised countries” so that the consumptive was looked upon “as a communal pariah”, replacing the “leper of olden days” (1911, 315). He proposes a system, to be adopted by all international shipping companies (and which has legacies in our current time), which would require passengers to obtain certificates in the week before they sailed, confirming that they were free of tuberculosis. Although Elder’s aim was to facilitate tubercular travel, his proposal forms part of the network of biopolitical thinking, which infused immigration policies in the early twentieth century that sought to control the movement of “undesirables” (Bashford 2004, 2006). It is little surprise that Elder concludes that “marine therapy” is best suited to “the overtired and overworked man, leading a busy city or professional life”, a respectable figure, in other words, who could pose no threat to any ports he might land (1911, 322). Opinion regarding the medical usefulness of the lengthy sea voyage had started to turn at the end of the nineteenth century, as the sanatorium movement got underway, and experts began to argue that fresh air and treatment within a controlled medical environment were more important than specific climatic conditions. An extended exchange of letters on “Ocean Voyages in Pulmonary Phthisis” in the British Medical Journal between 4 November 1899 and 13 January 1900, with contributions from various noted doctors including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,

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explored the issue with fierce arguments for and against. The overall verdict was that the voyages could be useful for prophylactic cases, but for those with evident tuberculosis, treatment in a British sanatorium, under strict medical control, would be far preferable. There were suggestions, however, that it would be possible to create “well-arranged medical ships”, which would be forms of “sea sanatoria” (Weber 1899, 1324; see also “The Therapeutic Value of Ocean Voyages” 1899, 1301–1302). In 1908, the journal returned to the idea with an editorial on “Ocean Sanatoriums”, looking at a proposal for a new charitable company which would create sailing ships as ocean sanatoriums for the treatment of tuberculosis which would sail not to Australia but in circuits around the Canaries, taking advantage of trade winds and the equable climate, but also staying within reach of a hospital if required (Bridges 1908, 1582). Each patient would have a large cabin opening onto the deck, which would serve as a veranda, and the ship would be run on strict sanatorium lines with a full medical staff. It is probable that the sheer costs of this enterprise undermined it from the start, and rather than a new beginning, it signalled the final decline of sailing ships as floating hospitals. Their legacy remains, however, in the growth of the cruise industry, which plays upon long-standing beliefs in the restorative qualities of an ocean voyage, no matter how large the floating city might be.

Conclusion: Slow Travel for Health Recent work in mobility studies has emphasised the space-time compression which took place in the nineteenth century, as new modes of fast travel and communication, from the train and steam ship to the telegraph and telephone, appeared to shrink global space (Mathieson 2015, 12; see also Aguiar et  al. 2019). As this chapter has shown, however, those in favour of the therapeutic qualities of a voyage by sail to Australia celebrated rather its stretching out of time and spatial extension. Not only would the voyage give many months of access to pure sea air, it would also offer a period of release from all the pressures of modernity: no trips ashore, no post, no telegrams, no news (wireless ship to shore communication was only made possible in 1899). The voyage offered idleness, time emptied out, but in a justified, and indeed necessary cause. Originally conceived as a cure for consumption, such voyages also took on, as if by association, the role of a cure for all the ills of modern life, by appearing to offer the very reverse of pressured city living. Nor were phthisis and

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consumption seen as entirely separate from nervous disorders: the onset of tuberculosis was often linked to the pressures placed on mind and body by professional city life, bringing out the latent seeds of the disease. Prophylactic voyages were also recommended to strengthen the bodily system of those likely to be vulnerable and in preparation for a future professional life. Evidence from ships’ surgeons, the passengers themselves, and shipboard journals suggests, however, that these voyages were fraught with difficulty, and far from offering rest and tranquillity, they could create their own tightly constrained social worlds, in which there was little room for grief, pain, or even illness. The promised withdrawal from modern life was also under threat. Elder records in 1911 that some large English liners now had “[t]ypists and stenographers, Marconi telegraphists, etc.” (144). He also advised that there was no need to purchase reading material in advance, since at most colonial ports, it was possible to get all the latest novels, in paperback, at half the English price (298). The triumph of the steamship, and of spatiotemporal compression, was complete. Cherished values of gentle acclimatisation, slow travel, and freedom from the pressures of information were to be set aside in favour of speed and global connectivity. For the truly tubercular, however, mobility and the ocean waves were to be replaced by the stasis of the sanatorium.

Notes 1. The initial research for this article was completed during my time as William Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago. I am very grateful to Dr. Grace Moore in the Department of English for all her support and to the staff at the Hocken Library. 2. The Sobraon is a well-documented ship, thanks to members of the Elmslie family and the recent work of Geoffrey D. Stephenson (2013). See www. sobraontingira.com, which contains details about the history of the ship, as well as letters, journals, and papers by Captain Elmslie and two of his sons, Christopher and Archibald, who served with him. The Sobraon was sold to the New South Wales Government in 1891 and was moored at Sydney Harbour as a Nautical School Ship for disadvantaged boys. In 1912, it became the HMAS Tingira and served as a training ship for naval cadets until 1927. A general summary of the ship’s history can be found in Lubbock (1921, 163–176). 3. For the cultural significance of spas, seaside tourism, and the spa novel in the nineteenth century, see Pamela Gilbert’s chapter in this volume.

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4. Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s contribution in this volume examines the material and symbolic roles of such objects for nineteenth-century travelers in Africa. 5. A specimen of one of these souvenirs is included in the Photograph Album of a Voyage on the Sobraon from London to Melbourne in 1884, held at the University of Waikato. 6. This chapter quotes Faber’s papers as a reprint in six parts (I, II, III, IV, IVb, and V) in book form. Since this edition lacks consecutive pagination, it is indicated from which parts the quotations were taken. 7. Robert Otter was a close friend of the writer John Addington Symonds, who famously spent the last 16 years of his life in Davos, trying to keep his tuberculosis at bay. Otter concludes his book with a strong endorsement of Davos as a health resort. 8. For another example, see Jones (1900). 9. Promotional literature for the ship also stressed that the route, via the Cape of Good Hope, was chosen to ensure passengers were not subjected to intense heat, or cold, or storms. See also “A Sea Voyage” (1888). 10. Contributions on “Voyaging for Health” were from Arthur J.  Moss (August 23, 394), John W.  Keyworth (August 23, 403), and Rankine Dawson (August 30, 466–467) with a response from Doyle (September 13, 1890b). 11. The suicide is also recorded in the Australian newspapers (and the girl identified), for instance, in the Riverine Herald: “Miss E.  M. Causland, aged eighteen, committed suicide by jumping from the poop of the Sobraon on her last journey” (“Miscellaneous” 1884, 3). 12. Nicholson (1990–1999) lists some of the various manuscript diaries and ship newspapers linked to voyages of the Sobraon; see, for example, vol. I: 488, vol. II: 484, vol. III: 393–394. 13. On the final voyage, first-class passage was between £47.10s and £60, and second class ranged from £18.18 s to £25. Details are from a prospectus pasted within the journal of Thomas Parkin, a first-class passenger on the voyage. See Bax (1954, 182). 14. Charles Yates Fell (1844–1918), born in New Zealand, but educated in England, was to become a noted barrister and politician in New Zealand. Fell kept a diary of his voyage on the Sobraon from 5 October 1869, to their arrival in Sydney on 24 December. 15. The page numbers of Gedge’s diary provided here and in the following are those that are pencilled into the manuscript. 16. On the role of ships’ newspapers in these voyages, see “The Press at Sea” (1867); Rudy (2014); de Schmidt (2016), and Lyons (2018). 17. The diary of a passenger, Thomas Parkin, on the final voyage in 1891 refers to the ship’s “Sobraon Times” (Bax 1954, 192). Other titles were Sobraon

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Gossip, Sobraon Occasional, Sobraon Mercury, and Homeward Bound. In the following, ship newspapers that appeared in print are indicated with italicised titles and those that were in manuscript with quotation signals. 18. These “black-face” productions seem to have been put on by the crew on occasions and thus seemingly encouraged by the captain. Content in the newspapers can also be stridently racist. See, for example, “A Night of Terror” in The Sobraon Occasional (1876, 38). 19. Harold John Graham (1858–1929) left an extensive record in watercolours and drawings of Australian flora and fauna and local scenes (“Harold John Graham, 1858–1929”). 20. Both New Zealand and the United States passed acts to exclude the entry of sufferers from tuberculosis in 1903 (Bryder 1996, 462), and Australia also passed various restrictive immigration acts around the same time (Bashford 2006).

Works Cited “A Sea Voyage.” 1888. British Medical Journal, Apr. 14: 811. Aguiar, Marian, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce, eds. 2019. Mobilities, Literature, Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Bashford, Alison. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bashford, Alison, ed. 2006. Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalisation and Security, 1850 to the Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bax, Allan E. 1954. “The Last Voyage of the ‘Sobraon’: Sea Travel in the 1890s.” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society 40 (3): 179–193. Bridges, E.  Chittenden. 1908. “Ocean Sanatoriums.” British Medical Journal, Nov. 21: 1582. Bryder, Linda. 1996. “‘A Health Resort for Consumptives’: Tuberculosis and Immigration to New Zealand, 1880–1914.” Medical History 40: 453–471. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002572730006169X. Clark, James. 1820. Medical Notes on Climate, Diseases, Hospitals, and Medical Schools, in France, Italy and Switzerland; Comprising an Inquiry into the Effects of a Residence in the South of Europe, in Cases of Pulmonary Consumption, and Illustrating the Present State of Medicine in Those Countries. London: T. and G. Underwood. Clark, James. 1830. The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases, More Particularly of the Chest and Digestive Organs etc. London: John Murray.

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Clark, James. 1835. A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, Comprehending an Inquiry into the Causes, Nature, Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculous Scrofulous Diseases in General. London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper. Clark, Stephen J. 1990. “The Voyage to Otago, 1870”. BA Hons thesis, University of Otago. De Schmidt, Johanna. 2016. “‘This Strange Little Floating World of Ours’: Shipboard Periodicals and Community-Building in the ‘Global’ Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Global History 11: 229–250. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1740022816000073. Doyle, H. M. 1890a. “Voyaging for Health: A Contribution to the Therapeutics of the Sea.” The Lancet, Aug. 2: 226–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-­6736(02)17140-­6. Doyle, H. M. 1890b. “Voyaging for Health: Letter to the Editor.” The Lancet , Sept. 13: 588. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(00)48721-­0. Dutton, Thomas. 1891. Sea-Sickness: (Cause, Prevention and Cure). Voyaging for Health with an Appendix on Ship-Surgeons. A Concise Practical Treatise. London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox. Elder, A.  Vavasour. 1911. The Ship-Surgeon’s Handbook. London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox. Elmslie, Archibald Gordon. 1912. “Particulars and Some Incidents Occurring on the ‘Sobraon’.” Sobraon Archive. http://www.sobraontingira.com/elmslie-­ archives/archibald-­gordon-­elmslies-­paper-­1912/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2022. Evans, J. Gwenogfryn, ed. 1882. Homeward Bound. An Occasional Paper Published at Sea during the Voyage of the Ship ‘Sobraon’ from Melbourne to London, 1882. The National Library of Wales. https://journals.library.wales/view/203692 2/2036969/7#?xywh=-­1253%2C102%2C4708%2C3105. Faber, C. B. 1876–1877. “On the Influence of Sea-Voyages on the Human Body, and Their Value in the Treatment of Consumption.” London: John Brigg. First published in The Practitioner. Fell, Charles Yates. 1869–1883. “Ship ‘Sobraon’. At Sea.’” In Letters to His Parents and Brother, Arthur [part of Correspondence with His Family]: n. pag. Alexander Turnbull Library Collections, National Library of New Zealand. Foster, H. E. 1884. “A Voyage to Australia for Health.” Macmillan’s Magazine 49: 412–418. Gedge, Edith S. 1888–1889. Journal of Edith Gedge, 1888–1889. National Library of Australia. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-­234804208/view. Gilchrist, Ebenezer. 1756. The Use of Sea Voyages in Medicine. London: Printed for A. Millar, D. Wilson, and T. Durham. Gilchrist, Ebenezer. 1771. The Uses of Sea Voyages in Medicine: and Particularly in a Consumption with Observations on That Disease. London: Printed for T. Cadell. Golinski, Jan. 2007. British Weather and the Climate of the Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Graham, Harold John. 1881. Sketches in Victoria and Tasmania, and of the Voyage Out on the Sobraon. National Library of Australia. https://nla.gov.au/nla. obj-­138855782. Haines, Robin. 1992. “Therapeutic Emigration: Some South Australian and Victorian Experiences.” Journal of Australian Studies 16 (33): 76–90. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14443059209387101. “Harold John Graham, 1858–1929.” Watercolour World. https://www.watercolourworld.org/artist/harold-­john-­graham. Accessed 17 Jan. 2022. Janković, Vladimir. 2000. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Janković, Vladimir. 2010. Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Hermann Johnston. 1900. “Ocean Voyages in Pulmonary Phthisis.” British Medical Journal , Jan. 6: 47. Lindsay, James A. 1885. “The Ocean as a Health Restorer.” Chambers’s Journal, Sept. 12: 577–581. Lubbock, Basil. 1921. The Colonial Clippers. Glasgow: James Brown and Son. Lyons, Martin. 2018. “Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century.” Script and Print 42 (1): 5–25. Mason, J. Malcolm. 1907. “The Attitude of New Zealand towards Consumption.” British Journal of Tuberculosis 1: 281–288. Mathieson, Charlotte. 2015. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. “Miscellaneous.” 1884. Riverine Herald, Jan. 1: 3. “Miscellaneous Items.” 1885. Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, Feb. 5: 7. Nicholson, Ian Hawkins. 1990–1999. Log of Logs: A Catalogue of Logs, Journals, Shipboard Diaries, Letters, and All Forms of Voyage Narrative, 1788–1988, for Australia and New Zealand and Surrounding Oceans. Roebuck Society Publication: 3 Vols. Otter, Robert H. 1882. Winters Abroad. Some Information Respecting Places Visited by the Author on Account of His Health. Intended for the Use of Invalids. London: John Murray. Our Voyage. Extracts from the ‘Sobraon Gossip’: A Weekly Newspaper Published on Board the ‘Sobraon’ during Her Passage from Melbourne to London. February 13 to June 12th, 1875. 1875. National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla. obj-­441576471. Photograph Album of a Voyage on the Sobraon. 1884. University of Waikato. https://waikato.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/64WAIKATO_ INST/10hutka/alma993048793503401. “Professional Sketches: The Ship-Doctor.” 1874. The Lancet, June 20: 890–892. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(02)48998-­2.

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Rudy, Jason R. 2014. “Floating Worlds: Émigré Poetry and British Culture.” English Literary History 81: 325–350. https://doi.org/10.1353/ elh.2014.0011. Scoresby-Jackson, Robert E. 1862. Medical Climatology: or, a Topographical and Meteorological Description of the Localities Resorted to in Winter and Summer by Invalids of Various Classes, Both at Home and Abroad. London: John Churchill. Shaw, Lauriston E. 1889. “Consumptives and Long Sea Voyages: Letter to the Editor.” British Medical Journal, Mar. 9: 564. Stephenson, Geoffrey D. 2013. Commanders of Sail: The Story of James and Alexander Elmslie and the Ships Cospatrick and Sobraon. Victoria: n. p. Sutherland, Alexander. 1763. Attempts to Revive Ancient Medical Doctrines. London: Printed for A. Millar. “The ‘Doctors” Ship.” 1925. Aberdeen Press and Journal, Feb. 25: 5. “The Ocean as a Health Restorer.” 1885. British Medical Journal, Oct. 31: 840–841. “The Ocean Voyage as a Restorative [Editorial].” 1886. The Lancet, July 3: 19–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(02)26950-­0. “The Press at Sea.” 1867. Chambers’s Journal, Aug. 3: 488–491. The Sobraon Mercury. An Occasional Journal. Published at Sea During the Voyage of the Ship ‘Sobraon’ from Melbourne to London, 1877. 1877. National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-­20049349. The Sobraon Occasional: Published on Board the “Sobraon” during Her Outward Voyage to Melbourne, from October 7th to December 26th, 1875. 1876. National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-­357138024. “The Therapeutic Value of Ocean Voyages.” 1899. British Medical Journal , Nov. 4: 1301–1302. Thomas, Bryn, and Bryan Gandevia. 1959. “Dr. Francis Workman, Emigrant, and the History of Taking the Cure for Consumption in the Australian Colonies.” Medical Journal of Australia 2 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-­ 5377.1959.tb100435.x. Weber, Hermann. 1899. “Remarks on Climate and Sea Voyages in the Treatment of Tuberculosis.” British Medical Journal, June 3: 1321–1324. https://doi. org/10.1136/bmj.1.2005.1321. Wilson, William S. 1880. The Ocean as a Health Resort: A Handbook of Practical Information as to Sea Voyages for the Use of Tourists and Invalids. London: J and A Churchill. “Winter Holidays and Foreign Health Resorts.” 1880. British Medical Journal, Oct. 2: 552–553. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.2.1512.1384. Workman, Francis. 1884. The Ocean as a Health Resort: Letter from Francis Workman, M.R.C.S. to the Reading Pathological Society. Reading: Printed for the Pathological Society by J. J. Beecroft.

CHAPTER 3

Watering Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Pamela K. Gilbert

A “change of scene” was a standard prescription for illness in the nineteenth century—at least for those who could afford it. More specifically, patients were often directed to travel to specific locations such as spa towns and seaside resorts to “take the waters”, and also to enjoy the amusements associated with such places while escaping the pressures of ordinary daily life and work. This specific kind of medical mobility became exponentially more popular in the nineteenth century, as the extension of railways made travel easier, faster, safer, and cheaper. Western European spa and sea bathing enjoyed renewed popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as new models of the body came to frame both skin cleanliness and perspiration as necessary to health. But even in the mid-nineteenth century, the focus on encouraging the skin’s excretions evoked the opposite possibility: many writers worried that both the skin’s amazing porosity and the disproportionate attention given to the body made the self vulnerable

P. K. Gilbert (*) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_3

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to “foreign” elements and resulted in more contact between differing classes and ethnic and religious groups, as Ariane de Waal’s chapter in this volume also suggests. In novels, British spa towns were often associated with sexual and other transgressions. The continental resort—both sea and spa—had remained largely in the background for much of the first half of the period. From the 1870s on, it moved to the fore as a setting for various dangers, including those of capitalist exploitation and foreign incursion—often figured in xenophobic and antisemitic terms. This chapter discusses these developments and then surveys Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Ouida’s Moths (1880) to show the representation of the spa and seaside resort. It finishes with George Eliot’s 1876 Daniel Deronda and Mont-Oriol, Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 spa novel. Both authors critique the by-then common xenophobic association of spas with Jewishness, though in very different ways. Whereas medical travel to bathing sites seems to offer freedom, pleasure, and health, the novels discussed here show that this liberty is unequally distributed and invites a reactionary fear and policing of the boundaries of both the individual body and the community.

Bathing Western European bathing as a health and leisure pursuit had suffered a period of eclipse after the plague in the late Middle Ages. Still, as Claudia Benthien writes, even after the return of bathing, “[u]p to the nineteenth century, contact with water remained problematic and anxiety-ridden […] because the skin was still seen as not closed off” (2002, 42); even in the late eighteenth century, the body was often anointed with oil to “close” the skin against water penetrating into the body (42). There was, however, a gradual re-popularisation of bathing for health, as medical models shifted from maintaining stasis to seeing the body as a collection of tissues continuously dying and renewing, a model with roots in the physiology of the late-eighteenth-century French anatomist Xavier Bichat. Bichat also argued for the skin’s absorptive properties, believing that people were more prone to disease and other penetrations of the skin in their sleep, because active consciousness was protective, whereas at night, consciousness was passive, and the skin was more open to outside influences (1922, 299). By the mid-nineteenth century, Bichat’s tissue theory had thoroughly permeated medical science, and the body was understood to be constantly ridding itself of decaying matter. Mid-nineteenth-century

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practitioners emphasised cleaning off the body’s own perspiration, in order to keep the pores open for excretion of the body’s internally generated filth. But even in the mid-nineteenth-century popular imagination, the focus on encouraging the skin’s excretions evoked the opposite possibility of penetration. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the permeability of skin became an article of faith and a focus of increasing intervention. Baths and hot air were used at least in part to induce sweating to clean the body and the skin without soaking it. Still, the warm or hot bath could also allow negative forces in. It induced passivity and directed attention toward the body’s sensations rather than outward. It was suspected of weakening the vital force, and perhaps moral fiber. Hot baths were also sometimes feared to cause abortion—and to be used deliberately to that end. 1 Cold water bathing might also be dangerous, but was still considered more manly and moral than hot bathing; it was also considered a specific against venery. The cold shower was less luxurious and pleasurable than a warm bath, something to be done with brisk efficiency: “Never use a tepid bath, unless to begin before you use cold,—it effeminates the whole system”, observed the American hygienist Samuel Fitch (1852, 228). In the period’s considerations of bathing, the skin could be a moral as well as physical sentinel—as in Bichat’s argument that the wakeful masculine skin is more protective of the body’s interior than the passive skin asleep or sensitive as in the women or child (1922, 299). The cultivation of the body could bypass or pervert the moral sense. Yet, throughout the period, the sick body was often treated by travel to spas and resorts, wherein the healing principle was thought to be a combination of immersion in waters with particular properties and the novel stimulus of travel, amusement, and beautiful views. Poised at the seam of moral disease and physical health, spas and seaside resorts became places of cultural—and literary—importance. 2

Spas and Seaside Resorts Thermal spas began to come back into favour in Western Europe in the late Renaissance. L. W. B. Brockliss observes that when spas came back into vogue in France in the seventeenth century, the physicians who controlled the spas “wanted to create centers of therapy, not sociability, and this they achieved” (1990, 39). 3 However, as the popularity of such places grew, they inevitably became again places of social importance. As David

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Harley emphasises, in early-nineteenth-century England, physicians sought to retain control of the therapeutic practices around bathing and imbibing waters by warning of their risks, while the nascent tourist industry (guidebooks included) tended to ignore or downplay any perceived risks of treatment (1990, 52). Harley gives the example of Weedon Butler’s The Cheltenham Guide, which touted that local people were able to drink large quantities of the water without ill effect (1781, 42), whereas the physician Thomas Jameson, in his 1803 A Treatise on Cheltenham Waters, and Bilious Diseases, demurred. Jameson writes with some exasperation that “[i]t is not surprising that patients should deceive themselves, when the faculty propagate errors, and praise mineral waters indiscriminately” (quoted in Harley 52). Both warm and cold bathing were still perceived as sources of danger, especially if the body was not sufficiently disordered to require their corrective. Still, the biggest risks came to be seen as social and moral, not medical. Because people, often moneyed, were far from their usual activities and under injunction to rest, amusements came to be important perks of a spa stay. By the mid-eighteenth century, many spa towns had reputations not only for the health of their waters but also for the pleasures (and dangers) of their nightlife. Gambling and flirtation were often the excitements to be found. As Austin Dobson dryly remarks in his preface to the literary scholar Alfred Barbeau’s history of eighteenth-­ century Bath, “in due course, you will begin to meditate upon your next excursion to The Bath, provided always that you have not dipped [borrowed heavily on] your estate […,] that your son has not gone off with a sham Scotch heiress or your daughter been married […] to a pinchbeck Irish peer. For all these things […] were […] the not infrequent accompaniments or sequels of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging, card-­ playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of ‘the soft-flowing Avon’” (1904, x). There were many genuinely sick patients at Bath, but its reputation as a place of pleasure also caused many to suspect malingering. Writing to Crébillon the Younger, the Abbé Le Blanc remarks of English ladies at Bath: “A visit to Bath is very probably the result of six months of intrigue and consideration. The fair patient has had to feign illness, to win over the servants, to corrupt the doctor, to persuade an aunt, to deceive a husband […]. She naturally seeks compensation for all the trouble she has taken” (quoted in Barbeau 1904, 82). Women were thus particularly morally vulnerable to spas and their pleasures. We also have the testimony, even if fictionalised, of Tobias Smollett, who helpfully not only satirises the bath physicians as money-grubbing

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quacks but describes other kinds of parasitical pests. In Peregrine Pickle (1771), the protagonist learns on the road to Bath that he is in company with British “adventurers”: “Some […] exert their talents in making love to ladies of fortune […]. Others […] frequent […] places where games of hazard are allowed […]. [Still others] lay wanton wives and old rich widows under contribution, and extort money, by prostituting themselves to the embraces of their own sex, and then threatening their admirers with prosecution” (Smollett 2007, 235). Spa towns’ temptations were thought harder to resist when the mind and body were given over to the pursuit of health and leisure, far from ordinary activities and associations. Disordered bodies meant disordered morals, and again, by the mid-nineteenth century, this kind of sustained attention to the body seemed dangerously decadent. As its popularity increased, another risky element of spa life was the varied social milieu. John Walton remarks that though more “prosperity in the relatively open English society of the first half of the eighteenth century ensured that the most fashionable of the spas” had a “heterogenous visiting public”, the expense associated with a stay of any length “acted as an efficient social filter well into the eighteenth century” (1983, 6). But by the later eighteenth century at Bath, it began to attract a “less polished” range of patrons, and more elite patrons shifted to the seaside and to continental spas (7). Yet although sea resorts arose in popularity among the middle and working classes in the latter half of the nineteenth century, among the spa set, sea bathing had long been popular as well. George III took it up, and George IV contributed to make it fashionable (10–12). In the eighteenth century, then, many who favoured spa towns also engaged in sea bathing. Smollett did both, and travelled all over Europe to do so. Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley and sometime partner of Byron, for example, wrote many letters chronicling her various spa and sea-bathing efforts to manage her health. To Mary Shelley, she remarked on her treatments, which give us an idea of the many other activities beyond dipping in the waters that were prescribed for patients, especially during the cold months. Between March 28 and 30, 1830, she wrote from Dresden, where she was working for a Russian family: “At home I was employed in rubbings, stretchings, putting on trusses, dressing ulcers, applying leaches and bandaging swollen glands. Out of doors our recreations were; ant baths, baths of bullocks blood, mud baths, steam baths, soap baths and electricity” (Clairmont 2014a, n. pag.). 4 She alternated between such spa activities and sea bathing. Sea bathing, however,

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offered the stimulation of salt-water, cold, and the pressure of the waves. On August 22, 1844, Clairmont informed Mary Shelley from Dieppe, “I am perfectly well so long as I am in the water […]. [W]e can scarce keep our legs against the waves—but when they beat against my breast and dash wildly over my head I feel well and strong” (2014b, n. pag.). The other advantage to such places was the change of scene and exposure to nature which was thought to brace disordered nerves. Clairmont says of Dieppe: “[Y]ou are […] so alone with wind, sky, water and grass […] that the wearied spirit imbibes from the new influences around it, new and joyful life” (n. pag.). Sea bathing offered the advantages of a romantic encounter with nature, whereas the inland spa town focused on a range of sophisticated treatment options. Over the course of the nineteenth century, extended seaside vacations for health and rest became typical across classes. In the early part of the century, not only elites but “affluent merchants, professional men, manufacturers and even farmers, with their families and servants” made these pilgrimages (Walton 1983, 2). As the free pleasures of the beach were emphasised over those of the costly spa waters, more lower middle-class workers and artisans came out either for short stays or as “day trippers” after cheaper excursion trains started to run in the 1840s, for example, to Brighton. By the 1850s, shopkeepers and white-collar workers joined them, and the end of the century saw this habit spread to “skilled workers” (2), while elites shifted to continental alpine and seaside resorts.

The Novel The British novel, which begins depicting mostly the upper middle classes and gentry, also covers health resorts in domestic spa towns such as Bath, as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817a) and Persuasion (Austen 1817b) and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Smollett 1771). However, the British seaside resort features only as a background location until the 1860s, when the novel begins to foreground it to thematise the dangers of class mixing. The continental resort moves into focus especially from the 1870s on as a setting for various dangers, frequently representing capitalist exploitation and mirroring the continental tendency to figure the foreign as a danger in antisemitic terms. It also, unsurprisingly given the events surrounding the Crimean War in 1855, tends to a more anti-Russian bias.

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Whereas both spa towns and sea resorts come to be seen as a place of potential deracination, sea bathing, like any water location, also offered additional possibilities of seeing women in a state of less-than-usual dress. Historian Alain Corbin notes that women patients were part of the marketing appeal of sea resorts for the all-important male consumer (1994, 74). In British fiction, the domestic seaside resort comes to have some of the same sexualised risks as earlier domestic spa towns. In Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, it is at the Yorkshire seaside resort of Wildernsea (based on Withernsea in Yorkshire) that the hapless George Talboys is tempted into marriage with Helen. Prepared to find a husband, young Helen is brought to the resort, “with the idea that the place was cheap and select” (Braddon 1999, 278). She admits, “I wish to hurry over this part of my life. I dare say I was very despicable” (278). Helen playing her guitar attracts George; as he says with more truth than perceptiveness, she is “for all the world like one of those what’s-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses into trouble” (30). This woman, the villain of the novel, is repeatedly compared to a mermaid, luring men into the water to their destruction, and indeed, at one point, she pushes George down a well, where it is assumed that he drowns. After George’s disappearance, Robert Audley travels to Wildernsea in February. Walking around the empty town, he sees the waterfront’s tawdriness and imagines it disguised in summer by “the yellow glory of a sunny sky, and […] the music of a braying band. It was there that the young cornet had first yielded to that sweet delusion, that fatal infatuation […]. Robert looked savagely at this solitary watering-place—the shabby seaport. ‘It is such a place as this,’ he thought, ‘that works a strong man’s ruin’” (196). At night, he dreams that the place threatens the quintessential Englishness of his uncle’s country estate. He sees “Audley Court, rooted up from amidst the green pastures and the shady hedgerows of Essex, standing bare and unprotected upon that desolate northern shore, threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea […]. [T]he sleeper saw a pale, starry face looking out of the silvery foam, and knew that it was my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction” (195). The bathing woman seduces with what is hidden as much as what is revealed in such a class-deracinated space as a seaside resort, becoming a threat to English manhood. Bathing habits are used throughout the novel as a shorthand to signal moral fitness. Lady Audley is distinguished by her attention to her body. We are told twice that she takes perfumed baths: she “emerged, with

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perfumed hair and in the most exquisitely careless of morning toilets, from her luxurious dressing-room” (296). Robert, however, as his character develops, becomes more like the stern British father of his missing friend, and less addicted to ease and comfort: “Robert had a prim bedroom, and an uncompromising dressing-room […], and he woke every morning upon a metallic spring mattress […]. He emulated Mr. Harcourt Talboys in the matter of shower-baths and cold water, and emerged prim and blue as that gentleman himself” (346). The cold, bracing shower is linked to masculinity and moral uprightness, whereas warm, perfumed soaking is both feminised and morally suspect. Foreign watering holes are presented as even more socially dangerous than domestic ones. In Wood’s East Lynne, Isabel Vane’s doctor, treating her for postpartum health issues, recommends “change of scene […]. Say some place on the French or Belgian coast. Sea bathing might do wonders” (2009, 197). She objects, not wanting to leave her children, and especially objecting to “‘Boulogne-sur-Mer, of all places, in the world! […] It is spoken of as being crowded and vulgar” (197). Boulogne had become a popular French resort in the 1800s and grew rapidly after the railway connected it to Paris in 1848. Isabel tries to avoid the rake whom she loved before her marriage, but in that questionable place, Sir Francis Levison finds and woos her, in part aided by the landscape of this beautiful, and therefore dangerous, place: “[S]he was conscious that all the fresh emotions of her youth had come again. The blue sky seemed as of the sweetest sapphire, the green fields and waving trees were of an emerald brightness” (208). Her weak health both gives him a claim to escort her and makes her less able to resist temptation. As she is more open to the physical pleasures of the environment, she is less able to scrutinise her own motives. In the sensation novel, both men and women succumb to sexual dangers at the seashore. If the average seaport is dangerous in part because of its “vulgarity,” there were the newer continental seaside towns favoured by the wealthy; Victorian novels portray them as sites of glamour but also dissipation. After the 1860s, the dangers of continental resorts become more explicitly linked to foreign threats. In Moths, Ouida’s novel about aristocratic decadence, the English but long expatriated Lady Dolly and the Russian noble Sergius Zouroff are villains and prefer coastal watering holes like Trouville and Monte Carlo; the good characters are associated with alpine spas. The action begins at the seaside resort of Trouville where Dolly, the sexually transgressive siren, “ought to have been perfectly happy. […] She had seen

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her chief rival looking bilious in an unbecoming gown. She had had a letter from her husband to say he was going away to Java or Jupiter or somewhere indefinitely. […] There was a charming blue sea beside her […]. She had floated and bobbed and swum and bathed semi-nude, with all the other mermaids a la mode” (Ouida 2005, 47). Lady Dolly manipulates her daughter Vere, the innocent and very English heroine of the novel, into marrying the sadistic Zouroff. Though Lady Dolly’s first deceased husband was a member of the English aristocracy, she quickly remarried a Dutch financier “of no remarkable lineage” (58), which codes in the period as Jewish. Her daughter, however, has been raised in Devon as an “old-fashioned, prudish, […] touch-me-not Englishwoman!” (65). Vere brings upon arrival in Trouville what Lady Dolly considers a dreadful bathing costume consisting of a “long indigo-­ colored linen gown—high to the throat and down to the feet—of the uneducated British bather, whose mind has not been opened by the sweetness and light of continental shores” (66). By contrast, her mother proposes something that looks like “what circus riders wear”, leaving the bather “naked” (67). The purity of the English heroine is compared to that of alpine spas, contrasted clearly with the continental sea resort. The mountain spa town Ischl, for example, is described in virginal terms: “Ischl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. […] Ischl is calm, and sedate, and simple, and decorous. [...] Ischl does not gamble, or riot, or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little old-fashioned still” (311). In Moths, which is among other things an anti-Russian novel, the seaside resort is again a place where one may become vulnerable to morally questionable and foreign elements: Vere is courted in France and Germany, married and then taken by her brutal husband first to the Baltic (land of resorts), and then imprisoned in the Russian interior, where she sympathises with the oppressed peasantry. As she is taken East, her life becomes progressively worse. The cosmopolitanism of the wealthy continental seaside resort promotes corruption and tolerance of the tyranny associated with Zouroff. When Vere finally leaves Zouroff to live in the Alps with a heroic Italian opera singer, it is presented as an emancipation from both the misery of her marriage and the oppressive political situation in Russia. Benjamin Morgan explains that by 1840, continental spas were enough of a known quantity to the general European and British public to appeal to a broad readership. By the mid-60s, Morgan notes, fiction represented it as “a deeply ambivalent locus of encounter—a venue that both tickles

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and deflates cosmopolitan dreams. […] [S]pas can look like Kantian templates for global citizenship. Yet […] [a]s reliably as lieux communs break down boundaries, they can breed resistance […] and […] efforts toward distinction and delimitation” (2014, 18; emphases in original). The representation of the continental resort illuminates increasingly negative views of cosmopolitan mixing as the century progresses on the part of British authors; such locations are associated with Russian and Eastern European decadence and to some extent antisemitic themes, though this is more common in continental fiction.5 Eliot addresses (and characteristically upends) this theme in her novel Daniel Deronda, which begins in a fictionalised spa town, where the brutal decadent man is English and the good hero is Anglo-Jewish. Deronda first sees Gwendolen Harleth gambling at Leubronn (probably Homberg), where the proximity of various “types” suggests the possibility of corrupted virtue: “Those […] absorbed in play, showed very distant varieties of European type: Livonian and Spanish, Graeco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian. Here certainly was a striking admission of human equality. The white bejewelled fingers of an English countess were very near touching a bony, yellow, crab-like hand stretching a bared wrist to clutch a heap of coin […]. And where else would her ladyship have graciously consented to sit by that dry-lipped feminine figure prematurely old, withered after short bloom like her artificial flowers, holding a shabby velvet reticule before her […]?” (Eliot 2014, 4). Eliot refrains from stereotyping any particular nationality, however. Though Deronda’s mother sees her own second marriage to a Russian prince as a bondage, there is nothing to suggest that he is oppressive. Moreover, it is the English ingénue Gwendolen whose judgment is weakened by being the unlucky cosmopolite: “Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land […]. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, […] to soar above preference into impartiality” (16). The hero Daniel, raised on an English estate as an English gentleman, is in fact the son of a Jewish mother born herself in Genoa of an English “Jewess of Portuguese descent” and an Englishman (532) and her cousin of similar background. Eliot’s point, perhaps, is that combination makes Daniel both the pioneer of a new Israel and the quintessential Englishman. It is telling that he meets his mother in Genoa as war is declared against Austria, as Eliot parallels the Italian and Jewish struggle for nationhood.6

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But Eliot, as always, is an exception. Most British novelists’ representation of continental spas in this period traffic in xenophobia and often implied antisemitism, as do journalistic sources. These themes overlap with continental literatures’ more definite views of such sites as well. After 1870, such novels increasingly offer plots of women in sexual danger against a backdrop of political peril and economic exploitation, and Eliot does too, though the villain Grandcourt is an English noble, whose name hints at Norman descent. De Maupassant’s Mont Oriol is more typical. It offers two parallel narratives: erotic passion (it is an adultery novel) and capitalist exploitation (of the medical spa industry). Young wife Christiane Andermatt arrives from Paris to the village of Enval in Auvergne with her older husband William. Significant additional thermal waters are discovered shortly after her arrival. She is prescribed a thermal treatment against her supposed sterility and, in the course of her residence there, has a love affair with Paul Brétigny. Andermatt, a Jewish banker, invests in revitalising the village, developing it as a spa. The Oriols, peasants who own the land, are enriched, as Andermatt builds the fortunes of the town by hiring slick new doctors to market it: “This thermal station had been brought to birth as they all are, with a pamphlet on the spring by Doctor Bonnefille. […]. All the surroundings were picturesque, filled with splendid sites or landscapes whose graceful outlines aroused soft emotions. […] Then […] he plunged into the therapeutic qualities of the Bonnefille Spring, bicarbonate, sodium, mixed, lithineous, ferruginous, et cetera, et cetera, capable of curing every disease. […] The pamphlet concluded with […] the cost of lodgings, commodities, and hotels” (de Maupassant 1903, 3; emphases in original). This combines the appeal to nature, the latest science, and the pleasures of the spa vacation. Christiane, whose name is significant both in contrast to her spouse and to her own role as a kind of pilgrim in progress, is positioned as akin to the land the spa is designed to exploit. When she arrives to consult her doctor for a cure to her barrenness, “[t]he physician […] commenced to auscultate and to tap his new patient, riddling the dressing-gown all over with little dots of color by way of noting each observation. She resembled, after a quarter of an hour of this work, a map indicating continents, seas, capes, rivers, kingdoms, and cities, and bearing the names of all these terrestrial divisions” (11). As Mary Donaldson-Evans notes with respect to this passage, “Dr. Latonne practices organographism, […] to […] transform the female body into a geographical space […]. When we remember that cartography was one of the most important tools of colonialism […], we are

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able to see Latonne’s ‘mapping’ of Christiane’s body as an act of appropriation” (2000, 143). The doctor’s mapping presages a later scene in which Andermatt inscribes a map of the region, marking the portions owned by Louise Oriol (de Maupassant 1903, 664). Donaldson-Evans sums up the scene as follows: “The physician had mapped the feminine; the banker feminizes the map” (2000, 144). And Christiane’s no-count brother will go on to marry Louise in order to gain control of that land and wealth. Both the land and the women will be rendered fecund, “productive”—but at the cost of suffering. Christiane falls in love with Paul as she falls in love with the place. In her first, carefully detailed experience in the bath, she erotically discovers her body: [T]he pleasant warm sensation mounted to her throat […] in the midst of this caressing heat, in this transparent bath, in this spring, which flowed over her, around her, covering her body with tiny globules all along her legs, all along her arms, and also all over her breasts. […] And these pearls, so minute, […] sprung up over her skin, like light fruits incapable of being grasped yet charming, the fruits of this exquisite body rosy and fresh […]. The sensation of a calm delight composed of rest and comfort, of tranquil dreamfulness, of health, of discreet joy, and silent gaiety, entered into her […]. And her spirit mused, vaguely lulled into repose by the gurgling of the overflow which was escaping. (de Maupassant 1903, 74–75)

The baths lull her “spirit” and fully engage her in the pleasures of the body. Likewise, the beauty of the landscape prepares her for seduction by the artistic Paul, who appears as its representative: “He had a sensual love of nature because it excited his blood, and made his nerves and organs quiver. He said: ‘[…] Madame, it seems to me as if I were open, so that everything enters into me […]. I feel the entire wood in my eyes; it penetrates me, takes possession of me […].’ [A]nd she […] felt herself devoured also, like the wood, by his great avid glance” (80–81). The skin stimulation of the bath makes her more receptive to this environment and to Paul. De Maupassant drives the point home: “If they had lived in a city, their passion, no doubt, would have been different, more cautious […]. But there, in that green country, whose horizon widened the emotions of the soul […] they had thrown themselves suddenly into a wildly poetic tenderness” (155). What she does not initially realise is that she herself is, like the land, an exploitable resource: for Paul, she produces pleasure; for

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her father and brother, a moneyed match; for the doctors, a livelihood; and for her husband, an aristocratic connection and an heir. That is, her “treatment” is successful in that Paul impregnates her and she successfully brings a child to term that shall be known as Andermatt’s. Paul abandons her, disgusted by the materiality of her pregnancy, a fact she discovers just before she gives birth. Her exploitation is paralleled to the more violent exploitation of the land—itself literally blown open with gunpowder to uncover the springs—and of the poor and of animals. The violent death of a dog in the explosion begins the narrative, and an extended meditation of the suffering of working animals (a dead donkey) and the poor people who drive it ends the tale. A parallel to the development of Christiane’s love and loss, pregnancy, and difficult labour is the commercial development of the spa town, which demands these sacrifices in stone and blood and flesh. The novel does not present any of its characters simply as villains. The Marquis de Ravenel, Christiane’s father, is presented as a type of France itself, or at least its aristocracy. Initially resistant to marrying his daughter to a Jew, he is persuaded both by large loans to his family and by appeals to both his conservative and republican principles (18). De Maupassant’s treatment of this theme is part of the undeniable antisemitism that has perhaps caused this novel to be less studied than most of his work. Yet the politics of Otherness in Mont-Oriol are complex. Andermatt (a Swiss place and Swiss-German surname) is related both to anti-German sentiment and to the denunciation of the rapacious finance and colonialism we see obliquely alluded to in Moths, with Lady Dolly’s second marriage to a Dutch colonial financier. The dangers of Russia and Eastern Europe are also distantly indicated by Paul’s “Russian” perfume from his equally Russian ex-lover (77). However, that fragrance also turns out to be, paradoxically, the scent of Auvergne itself. The one Jewish character is the only one who is not misbehaving. De Maupassant sees France as prostituting itself to a foreign finance, because of its own general immorality: the Marquis’s lack of principles, his son’s libertinage and indebtedness, the oppressed peasants’ recognition, and imitation of the upper classes’ loyalty only to money. As Michael Lerner tells us, “Andermatt’s speculating genius” resembles the Jewish financier in de Maupassant’s 1885 novel BelAmi, which had caused a “temporary coolness” in the author’s friendship with Ferdinand de Rothschild (1975, 222). Andermatt is a quintessential capitalist, but he is also presented as an effective ruler over the decadent French aristocrats, and by the end, even the sensitive Christiane is

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rendered sadder, wiser, and also, we presume, loyal to the new order represented by her husband and child. Enval is based on Chatelguyon, France, where de Maupassant repeatedly sought help with his advanced syphilis between 1883 and 1886 (Donaldson-Evans 2000, 141). Donaldson-Evans notes that “[t]he expansion of thermalism in France, facilitated by the increasing network of railroads laid during the Second Empire and the concomitant development of tourism, was especially dramatic after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it came to be regarded as unpatriotic to frequent the previously popular German spas” (141). Donaldson-Evans charges that de Maupassant’s “reduction of the Jew to a generic Other, the Foreigner, is highly significant. […] [T]he drama of Mont-Oriol suggests […] a foreign assault on France” (155). She notes that “immigration into France began in earnest during the 1880s, causing considerable anguish among Frenchmen already concerned about national identity […]. Édouard Drumont’s La France juive was published just months before Mont-­ Oriol” (157). Drumont initiated the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. It is worth noting that Brétigny becomes an investor in Andermatt’s venture, which Christiane feels is a humiliation. But this cross investment—Andermatt’s claiming of Brétigny’s child as his own and, in turn, Brétigny’s claim to the profits of Mt. Oriol—emphasises the fungibility of Christiane, the French nobility, and its ancestral lands, as well as the imbrication of the French nation with the economies of their rivals. According to Lauren Goodlad, nineteenth-century British realism after 1870 does not simply invoke stereotypes of “‘the Jew’ so much as illustrate the dialectic between constructions of Jewishness and of Britain’s own national, ethnic, and […] global identities. […] The answer […] is that these characters’ ultimate referent […] is not Jewishness per se but ambiguous identity” (2012, 213). De Maupassant uses this as a shorthand for similar tensions while also referring to specifically antisemitic narratives about finance and spas, considered magnets for Jewish tourists. In Next Year in Marienbad, Miriam Zadoff shows the importance of Jewish spa patrons throughout Europe: “Jews constituted a dominant population group in the spas in the Western reaches of Bohemia. Their presence left its stamp on the thriving watering places, serving to shape and constitute their nature” (2012, 5). She shows how spa society developed “spa anti-Semitism” (142) less responsive to political developments than to the rhythms of the spa seasons, in which Jews were coveted guests and customers during the season and in some cases forbidden to reside

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there at other times of the year. 7 The association of European Jews with spas, and suspicious adaptability, as well as finance and cosmopolitanism was a long-standing one. Eric Jennings shows in Curing the Colonizers that colonialism spawned a long discussion on the adaptability of Europeans to tropical climates and gave impetus to racist debates on polygenism. Britain engaged in similar arguments. Jennings notes that “James Johnson’s The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1813) marked an important turning point” (2006, 21). Johnson argued, among other points, that Europeans were not initially able to perspire properly upon entering the tropical climate, and this was damaging to the liver (1813, 19–20). Without care, such Europeans might die within a few days or weeks of arrival in the colonies (8–9). In 1861, the French anthropologist Eugène Dally asserted that “mankind is not cosmopolitan, that our European races, for example, cannot acclimate to other lands where other races thrive” (quoted in Jennings 2006, 13). But an exception to most European “races” were the Jewish people. Jennings observes that for Rudolf Virchow, the Maltese and the Jews were the “‘least Aryan’ and most southern of Europeans” and thus the best “candidates for tropical colonization. […] And it would be a small step to transform the image of the protean, acculturable, acclimatable Jew outlined by Virchow into that of the cosmopolitan, errant, and déclassé Jew contrasted by late-­nineteenth-­ century racialists with the firmly rooted Aryan” (29). What seems to be solidifying in Mont-Oriol is the stereotype of the Jewish and perhaps Germanic financier who penetrates the body of France—the flesh of Christiane, the land of Enval—for exploitative purposes. But there are ambiguities, and de Maupassant seems to suggest that the cosmopolitan other is a kind of benign—or at least necessary—modernising invader. Although Andermatt is represented as entirely driven by money, and machinelike, he is not evil or cruel, as the French peasants are (Pere Oriol is the first to blow up the mountain and kill the dog, just as the French peasants on the road are the ones to beat their donkey to death). They exploit the land and are exploited—if the Oriol family does well out of their spa, it is hardly an indictment. It is her father, the Marquis, who agrees to exchange his daughter in marriage for cash, it is her brother who aligns with a peasant for the same reason, and it is his friend who impregnates Christiane and then marries the other peasant sister. Various foreign doctors are brought in by Andermatt to make the place more profitable, but none essentially result in the behaviours that the French

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aristocracy engage in. As Christiane’s brother tells her shortly before she gives birth: The history of those spas is incredible. They are the only fairylands left upon the earth! In two months more things happen in them than in the rest of the universe during the remainder of the year. […] And it is everywhere the same, at Aix, Royat, Vichy, Luchon, and also at the sea-baths, at Dieppe, Étretat […]. You meet there specimens of all kinds of people, of every social grade—admirable adventures, a mixture of races and people not to be found elsewhere, and marvelous incidents. Women play pranks there with facility and charming promptitude. At Paris one resists temptation—at the waters one falls; there you are! (de Maupassant 1903, 323)

The spa is the no-place that makes the latent transgressiveness that might normally be restrained not only possible, but probable, with its seductive beauty, its mix of people, and its sensual abandon. Christiane gives birth, in extreme suffering, to Paul’s baby shortly after she hears he is to marry the peasant girl and, in the ensuing fever, retells the tale of her time in Enval, though her auditors, her father and husband, do not understand it: “[S]he spoke about perfumes. […] Then she uttered a cry of anguish […]. She saw in front of her a dead animal, and she was imploring to have it taken away […]. And now she was addressing this [other] dead beast, consoling it, telling it that she, too, was very unhappy, because she had been abandoned. […] She cried: ‘[…] [I]t is you, you who want me to drag this cart!’” (331). From the seductive perfume of the spa and Paul to her understanding that she, too, is a sacrificial animal, Christiane reorients herself in relation to the land she is earlier mapped onto by the doctor. After a difficult birth, Christiane’s pilgrim’s progress leads her past her initial “sleep” into suffering and, through suffering, into knowledge of the inevitability of human connection, human suffering, and human separateness. Upon awakening from her fever, “[s]he comprehended that even in the clasp of this man’s arms, […] they had only drawn a little nearer to one another, so as to bring into contact the impenetrable envelopes in which mysterious nature has isolated and shut up each human creature. […] She divined the impotent effort, ceaseless since the first days of the world, the indefatigable effort of men and women to tear off the sheath in which their souls forever imprisoned, forever solitary, are struggling” (333). After a century which emphasised the vulnerability of the bathing self to

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outside influences, sexual danger, and “cosmopolitan” others, de Maupassant focuses on individual separation and closure. The skin which was stimulated and lulled by the waters of Mont Oriol and then seduced by the caresses of Brétigny is recognised painfully as the envelope of individuation. Upon awakening to conscience, Christiane must recognise both the limits and the effects of her own agency and suffer responsibility for her actions alone. The danger is not from the foreign; the danger comes from within. Though most late-nineteenth-century representations of watering holes are cynical about both their health properties and the morality of the visitors, de Maupassant suggests, in his typically ironic way, the spa “treatment” may in fact yield morally therapeutic results after all.

Conclusion: Spa Novels and Sedentarism I would like to conclude by gesturing to some of the implications of this reading, both in relation to mobility studies and to place and genre in the period. Mimi Sheller and John Urry explain that the new mobilities paradigm emphasises the ways modernity has always depended more upon mobility than stasis. From colonialism to slavery to the movement of goods, we are reminded that sedentarism, which “treats as normal stability, meaning and place” and locates “authentic places or regions or nations as the fundamental basis of human identity and experience”, is a partial view founded in Enlightenment notions of what it means to be human (Sheller and Urry 2006, 208). Yet this sedentarist view continued to be articulated persuasively in the novel in the nineteenth century, despite the period’s emphasis on travel and colonial exchange in the period. In the case of spa travel, the pleasures of a largely elite mobility depended on sedentarist notions of a subject based in a stable home. This was particularly true in the literature of that proverbially domestic nation, Britain. Even as the British patient goes further afield to spa towns in Europe, the novel presents this travel as an opportunity for self-congratulatory reinforcement of British values. Eliot, in challenging the xenophobia and antisemitism of the 1870s, is exceptional. Novels often represent the spa as what Suzanne Keen calls a “narrative annex”: a place outside of the regular setting of the novel in which events that cannot be accommodated by the home setting take place (1998, 1). Such narrative annexes appear briefly and are often accompanied by a change of genre in narration that works by “interrupting the norms of a story’s world, temporarily replacing those norms, and carrying the reader, the perceiving and reporting characters,

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and the plot-line across a boundary and through an altered, particular, and briefly realized zone of difference” (1). As this chapter shows, the spa setting is presented as a kind of deracinated no-place in which conventional domestic plots can be disrupted. Even when they become the settings of a genre of their own, they retain something of that liminality Keen’s definition captures, in which characters can experience a plot unavailable in the place defined as home or in which those affected by colonial settings can transition back toward a bodily habitus more suited to the home identity. By 1887 in France, however, de Maupassant’s novel reflects from a very different standpoint after a century of war and unrest, both on that idea of the foreign threat and its opportunities. For him, the domestic spa town is always already alienated, a creature of a larger world which the novel sardonically represents both in the othering terms of antisemitic discourse and within a rhetoric of French decadence. It reflects the undermining of sedentarism in its structure as well, in which we see nothing of the places various characters originally come to the town from. The spa town becomes a new permanent home to the characters as they invest in the place as a business venture; the place of mobility becomes a new, uneasy place of sedentarism. Sheller and Urry call for the new mobilities paradigm to avoid a celebratory “disavowal of power” in understanding access to mobility and instead focus on “tracking the power of discourses and practices of mobility in creating both movement and stasis” (2006, 211). These novels remind us that the fiction of home, of nation, and of the liberal subject depends on the assignment of otherness to and containment within certain spaces. They also show precisely how this power to be mobile, or not, is unevenly distributed, as are the rewards and pains of transgressing expectations of home.

Notes 1. Obstetrician James Whitehead observes, “Among accidental causes of abortion, the most common are, violent mental emotion […] falls […,] the use of strong purgative […] medicine, the shock of the shower-bath, the hot foot-bath, copious bleeding” (1847, 253). An American publication, The Water Cure Journal, angrily inveighs against this belief: “There are vile books […] in which the writers affirm that abortion can be produced without any harm […] Cold bathing, for its tonic and astringing effect, has for centuries been recommended as a most valuable means of preventing abortion. […] If it becomes too hot, it weakens the system […] thus tending to cause the very difficulty it is intended to prevent” (“Miscarriage” 1849, 138).

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. For more on bathing and literature, see Gilbert (2019). 2 3. Spas as regulating institutions are also discussed in Heidi Lucja Liedke’s chapter in this volume with a focus on Mary Shelley’s travel writing. 4. Live ant baths were used for weakened and paralyzed limbs; blood baths were often used for bone problems. See “On the External Use of Living Ants” (1841, 102) and Raspail (1853, 40–41). 5. Chapter 4 in this volume by Natasha Anderson examines representations of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism in the context of transatlantic travel. 6. Neither Daniel nor Gwendolyn ever travelled to Russia, but it casts a long shadow over the text. Russians are all over the watering holes of Europe, as both Daniel and Grandcourt amuse themselves with Russian acquaintances there. In Leubronn, Gwendolen’s hotel is the Russie; Daniel’s is the Czarina—as is Grandcourt’s. Most obviously, Daniel’s mother, the Alcharisi, gives up her singing career to become the wife of a Russian noble with a German name (Halm-Eberstein). In Russia, her health is broken. Catherine Brown suggests that after this marriage “she suffers greatly, and Russia was to Eliot an obvious place for someone to suffer in. Its reputation in Britain was that of a barbarous autocracy” (2010, 27). Brown notes that the time of the Alcharisi’s marriage would have been 1851, when relations between Britain and Russia were deteriorating prior to the open hostilities of 1854 (28). Still, Brown proposes that Eliot does not single out Russia explicitly. 7. See also Large (2015).

Works Cited Austen, Jane. 2008a [1817a]. Northanger Abbey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen, Jane. 2008b [1817b]. Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barbeau, Alfred. 1904. Life and Letters at Bath in the Eighteenth Century. London: William Heinemann. Benthien, Claudia. 2002. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia University Press. Bichat, Xavier. 1922. General Anatomy: Applied to Physiology and Medicine. Translated by George Hayward. Boston: Richardson and Lord. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1999 [1862]. Lady Audley’s Secret. London: Wordsworth Classics. Brockliss, L. W. B. 1990. “The Development of the Spa in Seventeenth-Century France.” Medical History 34: 23–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0025727300070976. Brown, Catherine. 2010. “Why Does Daniel Deronda’s Mother Live in Russia?” George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 58/59: 26–42. Butler, Weeden. 1781. The Cheltenham Guide: Or, Useful Companion, in a Journey of Health and Pleasure to the Cheltenham Spa. London: J. Ridley.

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Clairmont, Claire. 2014a. “Clara Mary Jane Clairmont [née Clairmont] to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] Between 28 & 30 March 1830.” In Electronic Enlightenment Correspondence, edited by R.  V. McNamee, n. pag. https://doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/claiclJH0010268a1c. Clairmont, Claire. 2014b. “Clara Mary Jane Clairmont [née Clairmont] to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] Thursday, 22 August 1844.” In Electronic Enlightenment Correspondence, edited by R. V. McNamee, n. pag. https://doi. org/10.13051/ee:doc/claiclJH0020405a1c. Corbin, Alain. 1994. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840. Translated by Jocelyn Phelps. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. De Maupassant, Guy. 1903. Mont-Oriol, or A Romance of Auvergne. Translated by M. Walter Dunne. Ohio: St Dunstan Society. De Maupassant, Guy. 2001 [1885]. Bel-Ami. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dobson, Austin. 1904. “Preface.” In Life and Letters at Bath in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Alfred Barbeau, v–xii. London: William Heinemann. Donaldson-Evans, Mary. 2000. Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857–1894. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Eliot, George. 2014 [1876]. Daniel Deronda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitch, Samuel S. 1852. Six Lectures on the Uses of the Lungs, and Causes, Prevention, and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, Asthma, and Diseases of the Heart; on the Laws of Longevity; and on the Mode of Preserving Male and Female Health to a Hundred Years. New York: C. M. Fitch. Gilbert, Pamela. 2019. Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goodlad, Lauren. 2012. “The Mad Men in the Attic: Seriality and Identity in the Narrative of Capitalist Globalization.” Modern Language Quarterly 73 (2): 201–235. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-­1589176. Harley, David. 1990. “A Sword in a Madman’s Hand: Professional Opposition to Popular Consumption in the Waters Literature of Southern England and the Midlands, 1570–1870.” Medical History 34 (S 10): 48–55. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0025727300070988. Jameson, Thomas, 1803. A Treatise on Cheltenham Waters, and Bilious Diseases. Cheltenham: A. Newman. Jennings, Eric T. 2006. Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham: Duke University Press. Johnson, James. 1813. The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on European Constitutions. The Principal Effects and Diseases Thereby Induced, Their Prevention or Removal and the Means of Preserving Health in Hot Climates, Rendered Obvious to Europeans of Every Capacity. An Essay. London: J. J. Stockdale.

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Keen, Suzanne. 1998. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Large, David C. 2015. The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History of Intrigue, Politics, Art, and Healing. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Lerner, Michael G. 1975. Maupassant. New York: George Braziller. “Miscarriage or Abortion and Barrenness.” 1849. The Water-Cure Journal 7–8: 137–140. Morgan, Benjamin. 2014. “Literary Transmissions and the Fate of a Topic: The Continental Spa in Post-1840 British, Russian and American Writing.” PhD diss., University College London. “On the External Use of Living Ants.” 1841. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 23: 102. Ouida [Marie de la Ramee]. 2005 [1880]. Moths. Edited by Natalie Schroeder. Ontario: Broadview. Raspail, François-Vincent. 1853. Domestic Medicine; Or, Plain Instructions in the Art of Preserving and Restoring Health by Simple and Efficient Means. London: J. Weale. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–226. https://doi. org/10.1068/a37268. Smollett, Tobias. 2007. The Works of Tobias Smollett: Peregrine Pickle. Edited by George Saintsbury and Frank Richards. London: Navarre Society. Smollett, Tobias. 2009 [1771]. The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walton, John K. 1983. The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Whitehead, James. 1847. On the Causes and Treatment of Abortion and Sterility. London: John Churchill. Wood, Ellen. 2009 [1861]. East Lynne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zadoff, Mirjam. 2012. Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

CHAPTER 4

Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles Natasha Anderson

Love and life, disease and death—these varying facets of struggle converge via the ailing and mobile body in the late Victorian novel. 1 Several prominent authors at the close of the nineteenth century portray the body as a vessel of movement and a locus of conflict such as Henry James and Thomas Hardy, who represent international itinerants, rural wanderers, and urban amblers in their fiction. Embodiment is especially central in novels featuring women’s efforts to gain control over their corporeal existence amid manipulative lovers and failed pregnancies. In this chapter, I argue that interdependencies of health and travel come expressly to light in explorations of bodily integrity and itinerant lifestyles in James’s The

N. Anderson (*) Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_4

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Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, penned ten years later, since the respective protagonists navigate possibilities and perils of motion. I hereby expand upon the seminal research of Wendy Parkins (2009), Charlotte Mathieson (2015), and Ingrid Horrocks (2017), who shed light on female characters’ strivings for freedom and encounters with danger while journeying on foot, by ship, or via train in nineteenth-century literature. While scholars such as Lucille Herbert (1970), J.  T. Laird (1984), and Michael Ruse (2016) have contrasted Hardy’s and James’s differing narrative styles, I aim to offer new insights by addressing both key differences and parallels in the heroines’ experiences of mobility intersecting with illness. On the one hand, the voyages of Isabel Archer and Tess Durbeyfield merge a focus on the proliferation of transportation technology and medical tourism in Victorian society with depictions of movement as a danger and an enabler of female autonomy. On the other hand, the peripatetic protagonists’ exertions—ranging from Isabel’s attempts at independence while touring Europe to Tess’s economically necessitated rural removes—are contrasted against infant deaths intertwined with immobility and male characters suffering from illness. In examining the actions and perceptions of mobile bodies, I especially draw upon the research of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty. His 1945 publication Phenomenology of Perception elucidates the embodied enactment and somatic sensation of physical motion. His theories illuminate how characters become aware of their own corporeality through movement just as health aspects—from age and alcoholism to sickness and blindness—foreground the body’s presence and potential frailty. Comparable to contagion revealing exchanges within the body and the porousness of corporeal borders (Vrettos 1995, 22–23), malady displays interpersonal influence and acts infectious when it hampers or stimulates other mobile bodies. I suggest that, in James’s and Hardy’s novels, the interrelationship of diseases and journeys becomes perceptible via ripple effects spreading through ill individuals’ families, as evidenced by Isabel’s and Tess’s overlapping roles as niece,  cousin, sister, wife, and mother. As I analyse the mobile body in states of wellbeing and infirmity, I highlight how ailments facilitate and prevent motion in late Victorian fiction both on the small scale of individual corporeality and on vast voyages along transatlantic networks. Centred around three elements connecting James’s and Hardy’s publications—movement, the ailing body, and maternity—this chapter first outlines the female protagonists’ motions

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as physical enactments of their vivacious energy, before scrutinising how the fitness of the heroines’ male companions delineates liminal spaces of travel. My comparison of the two literary works culminates in connections between maternity, mobility, and mortality. I argue that Isabel and Tess navigate interdependencies of health and mobility by encountering sickness impacting their families and by engaging in multiple forms of movement, from physical activities to transnational travel.

Movements of Travellers and Dancers James and Hardy place the heroines’ independence at the crux of solitary movement and their family members’ health to expose porous boundaries between an individual’s body and interpersonal relations. By complementing the work of scholars who have previously examined the significance of travel in The Portrait of a Lady such as John Kimmey (1984), Azer Banu Kemaloğlu (2010), and Nicoleta Mariana Iftimie (2016), I posit that Isabel Archer’s freedom of mobility exists as an inverse to her male relatives’ physical constitution. Her father’s unreliable lifestyle first exposes Isabel and her two older sisters to Europe when they cross the Atlantic three times before the protagonist turns 14. His passing similarly enables Isabel’s transatlantic crossing alongside her visiting aunt from Albany, New  York, to England. Likewise, the manoeuvres of her chronically ill cousin Ralph Touchett and the subsequent death of her uncle Mr. Touchett supply the young woman with an unexpected fortune to support her excursions across the Continent. The expansive radius of Isabel’s itinerant habits finds its counterpart in her gestures and gait asserting youthful vitality. The heroine’s corporeal engagement demonstrates physiological wellbeing via her hobbies, evoking Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that a person defines location according to a “virtual body” employed in imagined activities, since “[m]y body is wherever there is something to be done” (2005, 291). Planned and performed muscular movements stimulate and situate the body, reinforcing Isabel’s transcontinental change of location from America to Europe on a personal tier of leisurely exertion. Already early in the novel, she is continually in motion and participates in various physical activities. Alongside Ralph, Isabel rambles across the grounds of his father’s estate Gardencourt, rows down a river, and takes pleasure in “handling the reins” as they drive in a phaeton (James 2018, 53). These pastimes display Isabel’s health through physical movement as she proactively assumes control of her direction and revels in her range of motion while

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exploring the area. Her employment of different types of transportation— starting with the steamship conducting her to England and including carriage, rowboat, as well as pedestrian ambles—expresses a desire to expand her horizons and embrace new experiences first-hand through mobility. However, not just the healthy body engages in motion in James’s writing. The impact of sickness pervades the omniscient narrator’s commentary just as much as it penetrates the internal focalisation of several characters throughout the novel in order to underscore the body’s labour and limits. Entanglements of the body’s mobility and stillness feature in the opening scene, when the two younger men, Ralph and Lord Warburton, are strolling across Gardencourt’s lawn, while the elder and frailer Mr. Touchett retires on a garden chair. His lounging stands out against his status as an American expatriate in England since his seniority precludes any further transatlantic travels. In a complementary manner, Ralph’s illness can be construed from his motions because “[h]is gait had a shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on his legs” (James 2018, 17). In both cases, father and son’s limited physical exercise becomes a litmus test of health’s influence on mobility. Just as Ralph displays a compromised manner of walking, his father appears to lack agility due to advancing age. Isabel serves as a deliberate contrast due to her youthful dynamism and unimpeded movements, which invigorate her body even while resting. When Isabel keeps watch over the sleeping Mr. Touchett in his bedroom during his final sickness, she muses: “‘Suppose he should die while I’m sitting here;’ an idea which excited her and kept her awake” (128). Whereas her uncle conveys his waning lifeforce while sitting in a lawn chair or lying in bed, Isabel demonstrates alertness and vigour even in immobility, rising immediately in hopes of greeting him when he briefly opens his eyes. The prospect of coming face to face with death at her uncle’s bedside thrills her, establishing that the juxtaposition of life and death heightens her vitality. The rekindled vigour and pervasive motion energising Isabel’s body are reflected in her freedom of movement while wandering through London. Her saunter in the city is depicted via snapshots of major tourist sites, which flash before her like glimpses from within a moving carriage. Isabel absorbs the cityscape’s sensations by “sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the metropolitan element” (James 2018, 103). Her outings resemble an oceanic voyage of discovery as she gradually becomes attuned to her surroundings and the deeper echoes of urban life below the immediately perceptible surface. Both references to her status as an

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untethered tourist and the maritime imagery of sounding the depths conjure Isabel’s transatlantic crossing from America to England and her subsequent journeys to the capital cities of Europe. The heroine’s enthusiasm fuelling her travels links her desire of discovery with a sense of fluidity, for she seeks peripatetic autonomy rather than a concrete destination. This mobility places her amid a flow of fellow travellers such as American expatriates she encounters during a visit to Paris upon inheriting a hefty sum from her recently deceased uncle. While the initial transoceanic journey to Europe becomes this community’s defining feature, their intercontinental tours further solidify their embodied relationship with travel. One such example is Isabel’s childhood acquaintance Edward Rosier, who fondly recalls their past strolls along the lakeside of Neufchâtel and praises his newfound home  in Paris for its cosmopolitan connectedness. In his description, this city is a nexus for expatriates, resembling a train station bringing voyagers together on their convergent trajectories (James 2018, 153). Among the itinerants Isabel encounters, the elegant Madame Merle appears to uphold an idealised form of a nomadic lifestyle and tellingly classifies her own talents as “some pretence of movement” (143). She not only regales Isabel with tales of visiting Sweden and Malta but also shares anecdotes of her excursions to Florence and Rome. Nevertheless, the lady questions female travellers’ agency and unconstrained movement. She proclaims that American expatriates in Europe are fated to a rootless existence, describing them as “mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil”, and adding, “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl” (140). Undercutting the novel’s prior representations of journeys as freeing physical exertion, Madame Merle associates travel with isolation and the physically demanding activity of creeping. This foreshadows Isabel’s near cessation of mobility following her luckless marriage and reveals threats of despair, exhaustion, and homelessness also associated with travel (Horrocks 2017, 2–3). Ranging from embodied activities of rowing and riding to imagined actions of sauntering and struggling, the transnational mobility Isabel and Madame Merle share with other American expatriates creates a synchrony of muscular movement that accentuates health. In comparison to health concerns amid cosmopolitan voyages in James’s novel, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles introduces mobility on a local scale as an intimate element of the eponymous protagonist’s body and as a constant presence within her family’s house. Building upon Scott

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Rode’s detailed analysis of roads and different forms of transportation in Hardy’s literary exploration of Wessex (2005), I examine the body engaging in everyday and expansive movement. The omniscient narrator identifies Tess Durbeyfield initially by her ambling alongside the other young women of Marlott, “under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm”, walking together during the May Day celebrations (Hardy 1991, 6). Their constant heartbeats mirror the procession’s steady rhythm of movement. Similar to James’s novel, Hardy employs shifts from authorial to figural narrative as the narrator highlights visual details of active bodies, while multiple characters’ third-person viewpoints emphasise anchorless, fluctuating mobility. Parallel to Isabel’s physical activities, Tess displays motion from her “mobile peony mouth” to tapping a stick upon her neighbour’s shoulder while participating in the annual dance (7). MerleauPonty argues that dancing activates corporeality not only in the performance of physical motion but also as “it is the body which ‘catches’ […] and ‘comprehends’ movement”, thereby rooting the awareness and appreciation  of mobility in embodiment (2005, 165).2 In addition to  Tess showing her body’s vivacity via facial features, manual gestures, and perambulations, her vibrancy is  most perceptible while twirling about the village green with fellow virgins of her community in a display of youthful fitness (Hardy 1991, 8). However, the heroine’s mobility wanes as she approaches her home, transitioning from light-hearted dancing to sober walking to more stationary acts of housework. The weight of domestic responsibilities as the eldest daughter in a large family limits her scope of physical motion, especially once her mother bids her stay at home, leaving Tess to later retrieve both her parents from the local drinking establishment. Whereas Isabel experiences the double-edged sword of inheritance facilitating travel before sealing her marriage, Tess’s movements face the strain of poverty due to her father’s increasing inability to work on account of health concerns and a predilection for drink. Motion nonetheless pervades the domestic sphere on an embodied level as illustrated by Tess’s mother energetically rocking her youngest child in a cradle (Hardy 1991, 11). Worn flagstones beneath the cradle are an indication of prior generations performing the same rhythmic activity in a repetitive, transtemporal loop. Moreover, the entire family’s fate and physical wellbeing are metaphorically intertwined with mobility. The heroine’s younger siblings are depicted as “passengers in the Durbeyfield ship”, ensnared in the uncertainty of a maritime journey where “difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease,

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degradation, death” are a distinct possibility (15). Movement encompasses both freedom and fear of health risks in Hardy’s novel, communicating an intertwined opposition of possibility and peril that gains in force when the heroine encounters threats from other travellers. A pivotal example is Tess’s accident upon falling asleep while driving a cart to market in her inebriated father’s stead. This leads to the death of her family’s horse, instigates economic uncertainty for her parents and siblings, and sets her on a collision course with the rake Alec d’Urberville when subsequently searching for employment at his estate. Following this calamity, Tess displays a heightened sensitivity of sensorimotor perception as “the least irregularity of motion startled her” (Hardy 1991, 39). This rising distrust of movement especially plagues her while seated beside Alec on his dogcart further on in the novel, as the rapid pace makes her “uneasy at a certain recklessness in her conductor’s driving” (39). Not only is Alec’s race down steep hillsides dangerous, but Tess is also keenly aware of her disequilibrium and irregular movement as a direct contrast to her affinity to rhythmic motion such as dancing. Building upon Merleau-­ Ponty’s assertion that “the body is our anchorage in a world” (2005, 167), Tess’s control of her body is wrested from her through Alec’s presumptive actions, which make her lose her sense of balance on the unsteady vehicle. Her insistence to halt before descending from the wagon and completing the journey on foot reinstates her autonomy in determining the pace and direction of her own movements. Since the contrast between walking and horseback riding in the nineteenth century signifies a class difference (Mathieson 2015, 21), Tess’s decision to exit the dogcart and stroll by herself asserts a double desire to distance herself from Alec’s advances and from his dishonourable representation of wealth compelled by avarice monopolising her mobility (Hardy 1991, 41). Erratic, equine motion unsettling the heroine reappears as an indicator of risk when Tess agrees one night to ride on horseback with Alec. Their homeward journey soon becomes a directionless route into a mist-­ enshrouded wood, leading the young woman to lose control of her body in twofold succession. She succumbs to slumber and then to her companion’s ignoble intentions when he rapes her. Furthermore, the ride leading to Tess’s compromising position is part of a larger continuum of physical motion. Her exertion throughout the week leaves her fatigued enough to fall asleep after she “had been on foot the whole of each day, and on this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough” and “she had then walked a mile of the way home” (Hardy 1991, 54). The

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extensive distance covered on foot highlights her reliance upon ambling in contrast to Alec’s arrival on horseback and culminates in an exhaustion all-encompassing enough to render her unable to defend herself against Alec’s advances. In this reversal of her prior travel as Tess acquiesces to riding together after initially sauntering, mobility isolates the protagonist with her rapist in a lonesome forest and robs her of the chance to prevent or protest the subjugation of her corporeal integrity. The loss of authority over her body and the resulting pregnancy incite Tess to leave her employment at the d’Urberville estate and set out on several removes, first back home and later onward to escape the taint of rumour surrounding her after her infant son dies. When she heads to a new position as a milkmaid, her wandering charts the borders between traditional and newer forms of mobility. She follows footpaths beyond the reach of technological advancements and strides “onward to a junction of highways, where she could await a carrier’s van that ran to the south-west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of country had never yet struck across it” (79). Whereas the railroad usually enables swifter travel, thereby signifying the encroachment of modernity into rural areas (Mathieson 2015, 12), the encircling tracks cannot ease Tess’s voyage. The railway rather marks the outer edge of her space of movement dependent upon her body’s strength and wellbeing. For Isabel and Tess, the progression from leisure activities such as dancing, riding, and rowing to purposeful pedestrianism to a wider range of travel is halted by an overshadowing threat of inescapability, which dominates their negotiations of health and mobility. Both novels initially establish youthful vibrancy via unconstrained movement, which becomes gradually impeded by their families’ medical difficulties.

Ailing and Itinerant Bodies as Liminal Spaces of Health The health concerns of the heroines’ relatives illustrate the body conjuring a liminal space of self-perception. This occurs via, on the one hand, a sense of defamiliarisation caused by ailments and, on the other hand, an interlacing of mobility and immobility when invalids and family members influence one another. In The Portrait of a Lady, sickness underscores embodied experience as Ralph feels both restrained and repelled by his body whenever he needs to take precautions due to his delicate constitution. I aim to

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track Ralph’s tuberculosis, which impacts his self-image and relationship to Isabel (Luciano 2002, 196; Tankard 2008, 61–64), in conjunction with his body’s motions, spatial presence, and travels. He often mocks his invalid status as an entity separate from himself: “[I]t appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common” (James 2018, 37). Isabel’s cousin exhibits how ill health can foreground and estrange corporeality by limiting its functionality. Ralph especially describes his weakened lungs with a sense of detachment, as if the body were no longer a living whole but anatomised into its component parts: “[H]e exercised his wit indifferently upon his father’s son, this gentleman’s weak lungs, his useless life” (51). In addition to numerical implications of illness when the young man’s views of his physiology are, as Dana Luciano describes them, “self-division”, “self-splitting”, as well as “bifurcated and temporally displaced” (2002, 202), Ralph also imagines physically distancing himself from embodiment. This spatial reimaging mirrors his cyclical voyages by ship and train to warmer regions due to his weakened condition. For instance, when he visits the Riviera soon after his father’s death, Ralph embarks on a trip parallel to Isabel’s departure to Paris, Florence, and Rome but without the freedom of choice (James 2018, 149). Ralph’s excursions imply the concept of “change of air”, a theory popularising the restorative qualities of warm, dry climates that motivated medical tourism in the nineteenth century, especially among affluent individuals suffering from tuberculosis (Morris 2018, 49–50). Isabel’s cousin epitomises the duality of confinement and mobility in medical tourism, for his ailing body requires a yearly exodus from England to southern locales like Algiers in winter. Ralph’s incapability of eluding this seasonal cycle reflects Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that disease can offer “inseparably both freedom and servitude” by monopolising the body (2005, 98). Malady enables Ralph to evade routine pressures by travelling while simultaneously limiting his choices and range of physical activity. The inescapable effects of lingering illness, on the one hand, transform motion into near motionlessness by constraining the body and, on the other hand, ensnare the invalid in enacting a social script of sickness when conforming to medical advice. Even after arriving at his southern destination, Ralph is consigned to inaction “at San Remo, on the Italian shore of the Mediterranean, […] spending a dull, bright winter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella” (James 2018, 156). Feeling trapped in prescribed travel by his own body and encumbered by the guidelines of medical tourism, Ralph seeks to live

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vicariously through Isabel’s exploits and thus becomes a driving force in the novel by giving her his inheritance. Ralph’s disassociation from his condition plays a similar role for his deathly ill father. During Mr. Touchett’s final days, the narrator’s commentary portrays ailment and individual as two distinct entities sharing the same body and vying for control, since in a conversation with his son, “the invalid had not obliterated the man of business” (James 2018, 132). Just as Ralph divides ownership of his physical frame between himself and his weakened lungs, the narrator dissects his father’s corporeality into portions already succumbed to sickness and others still maintaining vitality: “[H]is face was the face of the dying, but his eyes were the eyes of Daniel Touchett” (129). The contrast between the ever-encroaching malady and parts of his body yet untouched by approaching death resembles a silent struggle, which Mr. Touchett can only hope to prolong without winning. Motion diminishes to a minimum during Ralph’s meeting in his father’s sickroom, as the light from the fireplace makes their shadows dance to produce only an illusion of mobility while throwing the chamber’s confines into relief, since the hearth delineates the limits of the son’s pacing. This restriction on Ralph’s range of movement is a reduction from prior exercise such as his conversations with Lord Warburton and Isabel while walking  about Gardencourt. The circumference of his physical motions continues to close around him throughout the novel as his condition worsens. By contrast, Ralph’s mother and Madame Merle can boast unblemished health. Both women are transnational travellers touring European metropolises, who introduce Isabel to an itinerant lifestyle on the Continent while circumventing familial attachments. Ralph’s mother resides in Italy away from her husband for most of the year, and Madame Merle keeps her prior amorous relation with Gilbert Osmond and their illegitimate daughter Pansy a secret. Inspired by their examples, the heroine at first seeks to escape wedlock by rejecting several proposals, instead choosing to journey by steamship and train from America to England, across Europe, and to Asia Minor. Nevertheless, trusting false friends and disregarding her family’s warnings while enjoying the freedom of travelling independently, bequeathed by an unexpected fortune, eventually ensnare Isabel. Her excursions shackle her to an uncaring husband and curtail her mobility in the aftermath of her wedding to Osmond. As wealth passes from Mr. Touchett to Ralph to Isabel, the route of inheritance marks a path of almost infectious suffering from physical death to

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debilitating illness to a living death, respectively. Comparing her loveless marriage to a suffocating existence as if trapped in a tomb (James 2018, 296–297), the heroine openly equates physical wellbeing with mobility by defining illness as the inverse of an active condition. She reasons  that “unhappiness was a state of disease—of suffering as opposed to doing. To ‘do’—it hardly mattered what—would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy” (286). Her rumination implies that motion not merely opens a pathway to reach restorative locations but also becomes a cure. Isabel emphasises the curative potential of activity while placing health and happiness in opposition to physiological limitations constraining movement. Meanwhile, Ralph wrests control of his itinerary despite his drastically declining health when he leaves England. Ralph defies his doctor’s recommendations during this journey, which he nominally initiates to reach the Sicilian seaside city of Catania. Yet, in truth, he voyages to reconvene with his cousin in Rome. However, this attempt to swerve from the prescribed route of medical tourism holds consequences as his condition worsens. It resembles an incident three years before Isabel’s arrival in Gardencourt, when Ralph prolonged his winter departure from England to Algiers and, hence, “arrived more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between life and death” (James 2018, 38). While he escaped the liminal realm of near-­death years before, his visit to Isabel in Rome demonstrates that movement cannot slow the final stages of his illness. The disease etches itself into his physique and overshadows every movement: “[H]is thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek […]. Lean he was altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed […] he shambled and stumbled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness” (234). Ralph’s appearance illustrates sickness pervading the body, causing facial features, posture, and gait to weaken as if his physical frame were unravelling at the seams. Gradually forfeiting his range of motion, Ralph is consigned to sitting when talking to his cousin in Italy and, later, can only lie in bed during his final discussion with Isabel. In contrast, the heroine’s prediction that life will be her business for a long time asserts her robust health (382), although her feeling of disconnection from vitality due to her desolate marriage and her discovery of Madame Merle’s manipulations mirrors her cousin’s liminal status of illness—one paralysed by the prospect of a long lifespan and the other drained while wasting away prematurely. James’s novel explores increased capabilities of travel alongside downsides of transportation technology, since mobility can both alleviate sickness and

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endanger health (Wrigley and Revill 2000, 1), as in the case of Ralph’s final voyage sapping his strength. Railroad travel and ships enable medical tourism to salubrious climates and transnational journeys for young women, but they ultimately can mitigate neither Ralph’s illness nor Isabel’s marital troubles. Likewise, Tess of the d’Urbervilles illuminates health’s impact over ever-­ expanding, concentric circles of distance, moving from domesticity to various modes of transportation to transatlantic voyages. In contrast to Timothy Rivinus’s (1992) and Tony Fincham’s (2008) examinations of alcoholism alongside pregnancy in Hardy’s novel or Rosanna Nunan’s (2018) comparative analysis of hereditary, urban diseases against the heroine’s rural lifestyle, I seek to illuminate health complaints affecting the Durbeyfield, d’Urberville, and Clare families. Substance abuse rather than disease assumes centre stage in this novel, with John Durbeyfield’s alcoholic tendencies already negatively impeding his daughter’s movement in the opening chapters. Tess’s amble to the local drinking establishment to fetch him leads her along a “dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress” (Hardy 1991, 15). Her return while supporting her stumbling father with her mother’s aid draws an oscillating path as the head of the house skews their walking trajectory: “[H]e was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to Bath” (18). In tracking down and propping up her father, Tess is denied a steady and straightforward progression. John Durbeyfield’s drunken state hampers her usually rhythmic motions. The familial scope of his neglected health mirrors Merleau-Ponty’s argument that spatial explorations and interpersonal interactions rely upon corporeality: “I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body […] but, on the contrary, by being this body” (2005, 525). Just as the family’s bodily motions engaged in meandering display a shared negotiation of afflicted health, so do physiological concerns parallel domestic activities. The description of Durbeyfield’s heart clogged like a fat-choked dripping pan (Hardy 1991, 63) implies a comparison to neglected household duties and echoes Victorian physicians associating adipose tissue and alcoholism with idle habits (Fincham 2008, 56). In contrast to Ralph’s sensation of separation from his lungs and ailing body in The Portrait of a Lady, Durbeyfield’s medical condition visualised as a closing ring of fat around his heart creates a claustrophobic image that mirrors the circumference of Tess’s mobility tightening like a noose when,

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despite travelling, she cannot escape rumours surrounding her after her illegitimate pregnancy. Just as her father’s infirm health pushes Tess to depart from her family home early in the narrative in search of work, so does her mother’s sudden sickness call her back. Malady’s individual and interpersonal reach appears side by side as John Durbeyfield’s “ill-health […] of the same indefinite kind” confines him to the comfort of his chair, while Tess remains indoors to aid her indisposed mother (Hardy 1991, 272). Father and daughter demonstrate, respectively, selfish and self-sacrificial ways that ailment curtails movement. Tess thereafter briefly assumes authority over her kin’s physical activities as she finds relief in the “[v]iolent motion” (273) of cultivating a field and planting potatoes alongside her younger sister. She manages to tear her father away from his sedentary position to aid in planting the garden, thus demonstrating harmonised movement in the household—up until Durbeyfield’s death leads to the expulsion of the family from their home. In this vein, a family member’s physical wellbeing affects relatives not just in Tess’s case but also for Alec d’Urberville and his aging, blind mother. Upon first meeting the elderly lady resting in bed, Tess remarks how her gradual loss of sight has given her a “mobile face” (43). Mobility is inscribed upon the body due to incremental changes in the matron’s health, with an excess of smaller motions replacing her impaired vision and limited movement as the lady ensues in “wrinkling and twitching her face into undulations” (44). Furthermore, her status as an invalid affords Alec a greater range of unencumbered freedom, enabling him to accost Tess upon her arrival on the estate and repeatedly waylay her during her employment. When Alec encounters the heroine once again, the concurrence of his mother’s passing and the burial of Tess’s father empowers him to offer his house to Tess as a dwelling. Illness culminating in death meshes with the possibility of physically moving from one residence to another. Alec’s increase in autonomous acting on account of his mother’s ailing health forms an inverse to the protagonist’s relationship to her parents, whose flagging physical constitutions repeatedly restrict her movement. The household of Parson Clare, from which Tess’s future husband Angel hails, offers a stark contrast to the Durbeyfield family as Angel’s parents regularly visit sick parishioners, thus letting the ill health of others drive their rounds to neighbouring houses. In addition, they abstain from any consumption of alcohol to the point that they deem a gift of mead “quite unfit for use as a beverage” (Hardy 1991, 126). Angel’s mother

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instead places it in her medicine closet, converting the inebriating drink from a reviled substance to a medicinal tool in their eyes (126). According to Rivinus, the Clare family represents the temperance movement’s total abstinence mindset, which gained in strength and popularity at the close of the nineteenth century (1992, 254). Rivinus further argues that the Clares reveal the ultimately injurious practice of seeing substance abuse not as a disease but as a choice and moral failure. He reasons that assigning the blame to the alcoholic sets the stage for Angel’s rejection of his wife Tess after she confesses her rape, her illegitimate pregnancy, and her infant’s death (254). Moreover, this mindset leads to the married couple’s separate travel trajectories when the heroine’s husband first departs for his parents’ home and afterwards absconds to Brazil. As Angel claims the freedom of transnational travel for himself, he abandons his wife to an impoverished, itinerant lifestyle as she seeks work in the neighbouring region before returning home to nurse her mother. The novel transitions from Tess, who wanders on account of economic necessity, to Angel, who emigrates half a world away to South America but finds no better luck. The protagonists’ parallel motions demonstrate a shared suffering between husband and wife, with him “lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-­ storms and persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers […] deluded into going thither” (Hardy 1991, 215). Angel’s malaise—due to his transoceanic journey to a southern climate hazardous rather than salubrious—reflects the Victorian focus on germ theory and, particularly, “germs’ invasiveness” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, emphasising infection’s ability to cross corporeal borders and spread through hosts across great distances (Gilbert 1997, 53).3 Illness serves as a bridging element of interpersonal suffering, which links distant individuals in anonymous and oblivious unity. Although Angel shares his fellow emigrants’ fate while caught in cycles of death, sickness, and stubborn mobility, he remains unaware of the connection between his peregrinations amid loss of life and his wife’s encounters with threats upon the road such as exploitive employees and leering pedestrians. Disease encompasses a duality akin to pain, which is a common phenomenon connecting sufferers that nonetheless retains the underlying difficulty of communicating agony’s intensity to others (Ablow 2017, 1–2, 5). Tess unknowingly emulates her husband’s affliction when feeling “stung to a fever” by Angel’s lack of replies to her frequent letters (Hardy

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1991, 231). She also displays presentient sensitivity to his sickness when her thoughts immediately thereafter turn to concern about his health as she wonders, “But is he ill?” (231). Similarly, the words of a traveller accompanying Angel, who soon afterwards is left to wander alone once his companion is struck with fever and dies, haunt him alongside the memory of his wife to the point of feeling ill (268). Whether true disease or simply nausea born out of regret, too little too late, this infectious influence accompanies Tess’s husband long after his companion’s death. After witnessing sickness transcending spatial and social divisions among emigrants in Brazil, Angel returns to England a “[m]ere yellow skeleton” (298) marked by malady and prematurely aged: “His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue […]. The angular hollows and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty years before their time” (290). Rather than embarking on a voyage to bolster his health, Angel courts disease through his excursion overseas alongside other luckless emigrants. While intercontinental shipping routes facilitate his flight from his marriage, such crossings remain outside of Tess’s reach, who remains in England and ends up encountering Alec once again. Just as Isabel’s mobility wanes following her marriage and Ralph feels trapped in travel, so are Tess and Angel caught in a vicious cycle of ill health necessitating movement and, in turn, endangering their wellbeing, for travel cannot ensure long-lasting freedom, joy, or safety.

Maternity, Mobility, and Mortality Maternity, although usually an assertion of embodied presence and renewed life for mother and child, is intertwined with mortality in both novels. While Isabel and Tess experience motherhood only fleetingly as their infants die young, both heroines repeatedly confront death in face-­ to-­face encounters. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel’s travels become few and far between following her marriage in a cessation of agility, precipitated when the loss of her child robs her physical movements of their former vigour. Her brush with maternity supplanted by grief reinforces immobility as she remains by her husband’s side and often sits motionlessly, lost in thought, unlike her former, nimble tread across Gardencourt’s lawn or her habit of pacing while thinking in Albany, New York (James 2018, 33). Isabel’s feeling of responsibility for her stepdaughter Pansy further limits her mobility as she is averse to abandoning the young girl to Osmond’s control. Isabel exemplifies a fluidity of female familial roles due

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to the transfiguration of her interrelationships from mother to mourner for her prematurely deceased child and from stepmother to substitute sister for Pansy. Furthermore, she is not the sole character who experiences maternity’s impact upon travel, on account of Madame Merle’s carefully concealed illegitimate pregnancy. In order to make Pansy’s birth out of wedlock appear legitimate, Madame Merle assists Osmond in utilising the death of his first wife, who passed away following a sudden illness while in the mountains of Piedmont to bolster her health. The pregnancy is assigned posthumously to Osmond’s deceased wife, and, “with the aid of a change of residence”, the birth of a daughter out of the public eye becomes the officially circulated tale for Pansy’s parentage (371). As Madame Merle and Osmond instrumentalise  medical history and adjust records of past excursions, they weave maternity into a tale of travel, health, and death. After discovering Madame Merle’s affair and her influence on the heroine’s marriage to Osmond, Isabel seeks solace in physical motion, first in excursions by carriage and on foot through Rome and later in transnational travel. At the close of the novel, Isabel sets out on a journey by train when word reaches her of Ralph’s nearing death. The desire to see her cousin and find comfort in her family’s company emboldens Isabel to challenge her claustrophobic marriage, defying her husband’s wishes by voyaging back to England to speak one last time with her ailing relative. In the shock of realising her husband’s former romance with Madame Merle, she even begrudges her cousin his death: “She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all” (James 2018, 382). This moment stands in contrast to her previous praise of curative movement, for her disillusionment saps Isabel of animation and appreciation of mobility. Consequently, cessation of all movement appears to her the preferred alternative to activity at the cost of suffering. Amid her rising sensation of inaction, the conjunction of life and death Isabel experiences upon attending Ralph’s final days echoes her vigil during her uncle’s fatal sickness and her own stillness after her child’s untimely death. This establishes an apex of immobility when she kneels beside her prone cousin, united in inactivity as they hold hands. After Ralph’s passing, Mrs. Touchett informs her niece that she is lucky never to have to mourn the loss of a child, negating their parallel positions by leaving the tragedy of Isabel losing her own infant unspoken (Ash 1990, 129–130). Despite this rejection of a shared maternal status, the two women are connected by a conjunction of travel amidst the shadow of mortality. Aunt and niece first

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meet after the funeral of Isabel’s father, gain a closer acquaintance during their voyages across the Atlantic and through Europe buoyed by a common love of independence, and reconvene twice at Gardencourt to witness the deaths of Mr. Touchett and Ralph. The impact of disease along the familial network reveals how illness can equally spark immobility and movement. Ralph’s ailing health forms a constant counterweight to Isabel’s travels, since his approaching death sparks her decision to leave Italy and his demise precedes her departure from Gardencourt at the close of the narrative. In Hardy’s novel, Tess assumes a maternal responsibility early on as she cares for her little sisters and brothers as well as her mother, whom she sees as a child at heart and thus as another younger sibling (Hardy 1991, 26). Her fluid oscillation within the familial network from daughter to sister to substitute mother mirrors how Rivinus describes the heroine as a “parentified child”, a role common among children of alcoholics (1992, 256), displaying another facet of the infectious influence of ailing health spreading through the family. The protagonist further deepens this duty when her son Sorrow is born following her rape at the hands of Alec, although the infant is almost too slight and small to confer such a role upon Tess. The narrator describes the boy as “a child’s child—so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its producer with the maternal title” (Hardy 1991, 74). Just as Isabel’s sinking spirits manifest via limited mobility after her marriage and her son’s death, so does listlessness appear to permeate Tess’s actions following the birth of her illegitimate infant while gathering wheat with her fellow field workers (69–70). The harvesters’ steady pace and cyclic motions mirror the dancers earlier in the novel by enacting the same cadenced mobility at a more sedate tempo and bent towards labour instead of leisure. Amid this repetitive rhythm, Tess’s movements are mechanical and form an inverse to her youthful, carefree motions. Tess marvels that her pain causes no malady in her natural surroundings, yet in a cruel turn of fate, her child falls unexpectedly ill just on that day, causing a renewed rush of grief and agony for the young mother. The sudden onset of sickness monopolises her attention and kindles a heightened awareness of the infant’s health. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty notes, “in cases of illness […] bodily events become the events of the day” (2005, 98). Illness incites mobility in Tess, especially when her father forbids her to seek out the local parson after she wishes to ensure her infant’s baptism. Locked inside the house, her nervous pacing while walking “feverishly

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about the room” re-enacts the circular trajectory of her dancing and work upon the fields, although with an amplified anxiety to compensate for the limited circumference (Hardy 1991, 73). Rosamarie Morgan argues that Hardy composed his novel in opposition to the popular Victorian belief that women engaging in extramarital affairs were “diseased in body and mind” (1989, 31), as illustrated by Tess’s refusal to succumb to despair during her son’s final hours. She baptises her dying child in the supportive presence of her younger siblings, appearing “singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long white night-gown”, and the narrator likens her to a figure of light and energy “with a touch of dignity which was almost regal” (Hardy 1991, 74). Whereas her prior striding to-and-fro creates an agitated inverse to her youthful, light-hearted energy, Tess’s actions for her son transmute fretful motion into determination to counter the fatal illness that claims her infant. Tess alternates between performing acts of maternal nurture and witnessing death on multiple occasions, from the fatal accident of the family’s horse to her infant’s premature demise to, ultimately, her murder of Alec. Her rising disassociation and desire to escape corporeal confines accompanying her string of embodied suffering hereby mirror Angel’s encounters with disease and despair during his travels (Silverman 1984, 22). When she reunites with Angel recently returned from Brazil, they resemble one another in appearance. Tess is “so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle” after killing her rapist (Hardy 1991, 303), whereas Angel’s “sickly face” has become “[w]orn and unhandsome” following his illness-plagued emigration (304). The couple’s complexions not only testify their shared waning health but also complement their unified pedestrian movement as they attempt to elude punishment for Tess’s crime in a final display of joint mobility. Since their escape proves futile, Tess’s act of murder and her resulting execution form the culmination of her contemplation whether she would not be better off hanging or drowning herself after Angel’s rejection (187, 195), which shrouds her marriage with a pall of death just as Isabel refers to her conjugal life as a tomb  and envies Ralph’s death. Both in The Portrait of a Lady and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the respective heroines demonstrate how navigating mobility and maternity charts the body’s flexibility and fragility in the face of inescapable mortality as age, illness, and fatal accidents overshadow the young women’s travels.

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Conclusion: Victorian Heroines’ Health and Travel Despite the two female protagonists’ differences in social status and circumstances, this chapter illuminates key points of connection between James’s and Hardy’s novels by demonstrating that the wanderings of Isabel and Tess run parallel to one another. Both voyages begin with an assertion of the heroines’ mobility, are circumscribed by their male relatives’ ailments as well as their infants’ premature deaths, and feature a final excursion terminating in the unavoidability of mortality. While illness isolates invalids in both novels, it equally highlights interpersonal links  of reliance and duty, thus impacting family members’ bodies by alternating between enabling, enforcing, and inhibiting mobility. Trajectories of travel spurred on by encounters with bodily afflictions and infirmities allow the heroines to confront and highlight cruxes of injustice in Victorian class differences, marriage laws, and social mores. However, the different realisations of mobility—including journeys by train and pedestrian escapes— invariably end in a sensation of inescapability for both heroines. The young women remain caught between autonomous movement and immobility caused by exploitation at the hands of their most trusted confidantes.4 Nevertheless, as Isabel and Tess navigate variations of health from birth through maladies to death, they portray how disparate states of wellbeing and travel entwine in the Victorian novel. Moreover, the interdependencies of bodily fitness and movement intersect with assorted facets of familial fondness and mutual dependence, including blood ties of parent and child, attachment between cousins, and mutable trust among spouses. The heroines’ love for their family in the face of death thus inspires movement in key scenes when Isabel leaves her husband to visit Ralph and Tess baptises her son. Via their protagonists’ peripatetic corporeality, James and Hardy depict attempts to balance familial affection, ailments, and mobility as an ongoing, embodied effort.

Notes 1. This article forms part of a larger research project in literary and cultural studies entitled “The Visceral Novel Reader” designed and led by Monika Class (Principal Investigator) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, from 2019 until 2023. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG—grant number 422574378).

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2. For an analysis of dance as an anti-progressive form of mobility in fin-desiècle poetry, see Stefanie John’s contribution in this volume. 3. Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s and Markku Hokkanen’s contributions in this volume provide detailed discussions of the mobility of disease in colonial contexts. 4. A similar constellation can also be found in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, as Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus demonstrate in their introduction to this volume.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. 2017. Victorian Pain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vwmh6x. Ash, Beth Sharon. 1990. “Frail Vessels and Vast Designs: A Psychoanalytic Portrait of Isabel Archer.” In New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Joel Porte, 123–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9780511624513. Fincham, Tony. 2008. Hardy the Physician: Medical Aspects of the Wessex Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, Pamela K. 1997. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardy, Thomas. 1991 [1891]. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Edited by Scott Elledge. New York: W. W. Norton. Herbert, Lucille. 1970. “Hardy’s Views in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” ELH 37: 77–94. Horrocks, Ingrid. 2017. Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iftimie, Nicoleta Mariana. 2016. “Travelling Women: The Reconstruction of Self and Gender Roles in The Portrait of a Lady.” The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences. https://10.15405/epsbs.2016.09.61. James, Henry. 2018 [1881]. The Portrait of a Lady. Edited by Michael Gorra. New York: W. W. Norton. Kemaloğlu, Azer Banu. 2010. “Travelling and Gender: The Portrait of a Lady.” Muğla Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 24: 103–120. Kimmey, John. 1984. “London in The Portrait of a Lady.” The Henry James Review 4: 96–99. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2010.0153. Laird, J. T. 1984. “Approaches to Fiction: Hardy and Henry James.” In Thomas Hardy Annual No. 2. Macmillan Literary Annuals, edited by Page Norman, 41–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­1­349-­06507-­3_3.

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Luciano, Dana. 2002. “Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.” The Henry James Review 23: 196–217. https://doi. org/10.1353/hjr.2002.0011. Mathieson, Charlotte. 2015. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Morgan, Rosamarie. 1989. “PASSIVE VICTIM? Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” The Thomas Hardy Journal 5: 31–54. Morris, Richard E. 2018. “The Victorian ‘Change of Air’ as Medical and Social Construction.” Journal of Tourism History 10: 49–65. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1755182X.2018.1425485. Nunan, Rosanna. 2018. “Urban Depravity, Rural Unsophistication: Hereditary Taint in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46: 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000013. Parkins, Wendy. 2009. Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rivinus, Timothy M. 1992. “Tragedy of the Commonplace: The Impact of Addiction on Families in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy.” Literature and Medicine 11: 237–265. https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2011.0209. Rode, Scott. 2005. “Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 1: n. pag. Ruse, Michael. 2016. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof :oso/9780190241025.001.0001. Silverman, Kaja. 1984. “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 18: 5–28. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/1346015. Tankard, Alexandra. 2008. “Emasculation, Eugenics and the Consumptive Voyeur in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Story of a Nobody (1893).” Critical Survey 20: 61–78. Vrettos, Athena. 1995. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wrigley, Richard, and George Revill. 2000. “Introduction.” In Pathologies of Travel, edited by Richard Wrigley and George Revill, 1–23. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 5

(Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age Heidi Lucja Liedke

That taking a walk is beneficial for one’s physical and mental health may sound like a common- sense idea in the twenty-first century, particularly in times of a pandemic, when going for a stroll has been one of the few activities that have not been restricted at any point. As the contributions in Richard Wrigley and George Revill’s Pathologies of Travel (2000) attest to, the medical arguments in favour of travelling have been debated ever since the eighteenth century, which made travel for the sake of therapy or cure, both for physical and mental health, a controversial topic. Especially in the Victorian age, travelling was not yet as institutionalised as it is today, and the relationship between the individual, mobility, and space was at the centre of perceptual recalibrations in Western societies (Schivelbusch 1986). Using these insights as a backdrop for my analysis, this chapter proposes a reading of Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s The Lazy

H. L. Liedke (*) University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), Landau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_5

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Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857), and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) with a focus on how these texts take up and play with the intersections of (im-)mobility and (mental) health.1 I will suggest that—while these works come from three different points of the Victorian period— they are unified in their presentation of idling as a transgressive practice that subverts contemporary discourses surrounding (mental) health. I understand idling as a deliberately slow means of getting around—not of getting from A to B but taking in the surrounding space in a searching, mindful manner. As such, apart from related discussions of flânerie (Wolff 1985; Wearing and Wearing 1996; Elkin 2017) or pedestrianism (Jarvis 2000), idling has not received much attention in mobility studies up to this point.2 However, idling can enable the author-traveller to critique the stifling Victorian “institutions of leisure” (Shelley), set into motion ironic and playful reflections on the necessity of rest and mindfulness (Collins and Dickens), and reach a state of mind that transcends the author’s present (Gissing). Through this, the three works read in this chapter offer valuable comments on the connection between gendered frailty, melancholy, and idleness as experienced individually or as a societally “imposed” agenda in nineteenth-century England. Gissing’s travel book does not radically differ from texts by late Romantic idlers such as Shelley—on the contrary. The fact that one can draw parallels between them shows that even though the three texts represent different snapshots of the Victorian continuum and thus a rapidly changing century, they reflect and suggest the recuperative potential of idling and the travellers’ insistence and desire to find and experience idleness in a time and society that did not allow for it.

Mary Shelley and (Mental) Health In her travel writing from the early 1840s, Shelley debated the many functions of idleness, which is why her observations shed light on the ambivalence of the term “idleness” at the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period. Rambles in Germany and Italy, Shelley’s last published work, is the account of an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of having lost her husband and two of her children in Italy; it reflects that what she made of idleness, or what she used it for, changed over the years. My reading in this chapter focuses on her scornful comments on stifling institutions of leisure belonging to the Victorian industry of medical tourism in contrast with the pleasures she gained from her wayfaring and rambles. This analysis exemplifies how idling as a specific form of mobility,

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which Shelley needs in order to rest mentally, also enables her to temporarily escape the stifling grid of institutionalised leisure typical for the early Victorian age. There were several direct and indirect reasons why Shelley travelled in these years: she had been troubled by a nervous illness and headaches for some time. Prior to setting out to Germany in 1840, she had edited her husband’s complete work, which had worsened her depression. As she wrote in a letter to Augusta Trelawny on February 24, 1843, from Nice, “illness has been the dark shadow” (1850, c. 76, fol. 2), and she “suffered so much anxiety & ill health all the winter, that [she] for ever deferred writing until a better day” (fol. 1). She needed a remedy for her grief and health-related problems and hoped that “[t]ravelling will cure all: my busy, brooding thoughts will be scattered abroad” (1844a, 2). On her second trip to Germany, she was looking for a cure for her headaches, which is why she went to spas, for instance, in Kissingen. By 1840, Shelley felt she was losing the thread as a writer. Thus, she undertook the trip “as an antidote to her own depression and professional stagnation” (Frawley 1994, 48) and a new source for inspiration, perhaps similar to the creative inspiration she had experienced in the same places almost 25 years earlier. Yet while she was very much looking forward to her travels, the idea of leisure, freedom, and classlessness “evoked an array of anxieties” (Schor 1993, 241). While Shelley did have an itinerary in mind, she discovered the places she got to by a way of travelling that can be characterised as a meshwork of places. To speak with Tim Ingold, her rambling resembles “wayfaring”, that is, “the embodied experience of […] perambulatory movement” (2011, 148). When Shelley was rambling, she went her way along different paths not lineally, and it is this “alongness” (Ingold uses the adverb “alongly”; 2011, 154) that best describes her travelling style. It also explains her disdain on meeting other travellers who were not interested in experiencing alongness; unsurprisingly, she did not regard them as “fellow travellers” but rather as a different kind of people. Echoing Yorick’s catalogue of travellers in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1786), she distanced herself from them: In a classification of travellers, what name is to be given to those who travel only for the sake of saying that they have travelled? He was doing his Saxon Switzerland; he had done his Italy, his Sicily; he had done his sunrise on Mount Etna; and when he should have done his Germany, he would return

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to England to show how destitute a traveller may be of all impression and knowledge, when they are unable to knit themselves in soul to nature, nor are capacitated by talents or acquirements to gain knowledge from what they see. We must become part of the scenes around us, and they must mingle and become a portion of us, or we see without seeing and study without learning. There is no good, no knowledge, unless we go out from, and take some of the external into, ourselves: this is the secret of mathematics as well as of poetry. (Shelley 1844a, 265; emphases in original)

Imitating the sound of a drumbeat, the verb “do” is repeated in different inflections until it echoes the monotony of the young Englishman’s travels on the Grand Tour. Emphatically addressing an unspecified audience, Shelley introduces an emotional dimension into the discourse on tourism which had become obsessed with efficiency by the mid-Victorian age: “We must become part of the scenes around us”, for a mere skimming of landscapes and collecting of landmarks has nothing to do with sensitive involvement. This stands in line with how John Urry has conceptualised a romantic form of the tourist gaze, a basic paradigm from travel and mobility studies, emphasising the desire to achieve “solitude, privacy, and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze” (2002, 43). As James Buzard continues, “practitioners of the ‘romantic gaze’ required the crowd they scorned and shunned, for they built their travellers’ identities in addition to the crowd” (1993, 153). The above passage, thus, identifies Shelley as such a scornful traveller who is looking for a different encounter with the objects gazed upon, a less profit-oriented and more private one. The passage presents a direct critique of those profit-oriented travellers, those “doing” their travel destinations, who were becoming increasingly proliferous at the time. As Esther H.  Schor points out, “Shelley’s ethic of travel maintains that only when travel is an affair of the body and the mind does it become a matter for the heart; the failure to sympathise indicates a homebound mind” (1993, 239), and thus it is not enough to passively watch and tick off items on one’s itinerary. The necessity of sensible travel as an “affair of the body and the mind” could, in Shelley’s case, be best realised when she was the agent of her wayfaring. She felt comfortable in Baden-Baden because she felt she “could steal away from the throng, and find solitude at will on the mountain tops or amidst their woody ravines” (Shelley 1844a, 37), postponing the confrontation with Italy. What is characteristic of idle travellers is the experience of a voyage that is not timed, that is, a voyage where a

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spatialisation of time occurs and where experiences of “oneness” with the surrounding space are possible (Liedke 2018, 99–107). Thus, the reason why Shelley gave up on her wish to stay in Baden-Baden was that her motivation to go travelling was not to “roost”, like some tourists do, “as if they were fowls with a trellis before their feeding yard” (Shelley 1844a, 41). For Shelley, “to wander, and ramble, and discover new scenes […] is the only real [amusement] to be found in such a place” (41). She was interested in “a less purposeful, less predictable, more leisurely progression than the step-by-step spa regimen” (Kautz 2000, 171). It does not come as a surprise, then, that she did not enjoy her “cur” in Kissingen where she was stuck and surrounded by “a regiment of sick people” and forced “to seek amusement by being surrounded by the rheumatic, the gouty, the afflicted of all sorts” (Shelley 1844a, 184). While she initially found routines like the morning walks pleasant and acknowledged the healing formula derived from the “holistic effect of the spa setting” (Kautz 2000, 171), by which she primarily meant its geographical location turning her stay into an affair of the body and the mind, she fiercely rejected the spa as a space for positive idleness. She was angered and frustrated by the ways in which the spa regimen was under the arbitrary control of doctors, which she saw as analogous to political systems where a small group of rulers exerts power over others. After only a couple of weeks at Kissingen, she could not bear the degree to which her daily life was regulated anymore (168). She could barely tolerate “the disgust of sitting down with two hundred people in one hall, served slowly with uneatable food” (Shelley 1844a, 186). Furthermore, the patients’ intellect also seemed to be slowed down in the spa because they were not even allowed to take lessons in German: “We malades are forbidden to exert our intellects; and, to make this prohibition more stringent, the gas one imbibes with the water produces a weakness in the eyes”, which made it hard for her to write (187; emphasis in original). One must note the irony here: Shelley rightly points out that, although a spa is supposed to be a space for recreation, even small luxuries such as tea and strawberries at breakfast are forbidden (189). Moreover, even though the ballroom would accommodate several hundred people, barely anyone dances there because “the despotic decree of the triumvirate of doctors […] maintain dancing to be absolutely incompatible with drinking the waters” (191) and children are not allowed to visit because this would be too exciting for the patients’ nerves. Instead, everything is regulated in such a way that the patients become productive spa-goers. Also,

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the high degree of regulation and discipline does away with any private and free space for the individual body. In the spa as a “machinery of power” in the Foucauldian sense, the body is made “docile” because it is “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 1995, 138, 136), and the individual is deprived of the possibility of constructing a meshwork of places “alongly” because the notion of traversable space is done away with. Like Foucault, Shelley criticises end exposes the entanglement of institutional and state control and points to “the apparent arbitrariness of the spa rules by establishing their connection to political authority” (Kautz 2000, 169). Her biting criticism culminates in the following passage: The King of Bavaria is so afraid that his medicinal waters may fall into disrepute if the drinkers should eat what disagrees with them, that we only eat what he, in conjunction with a triumvirate of doctors, is pleased to allow us. Every now and then a new article is struck out from our bill of fare, notice being sent from this council, which is struck up for our benefit at the door of the salle-à-manger, to the effect that, whoever in Kissingen should serve at any table pork, veal, salad, fruit, &c. &c. &c., should be fined so many florins. Our pleasures of the palate are thus circumscribed, not to say annihilated: for, strangely enough, though butter is prohibited, their dishes overflow with grease. (1844a, 185–186; my emphases)

With her cynical tone, Shelley makes clear that the patients at the spa are turned into imbeciles; she unmasks the whole process as hypocritical because its only aim seems to be to calm down the patients and establish a healthy atmosphere, while the food does not appear to be especially wholesome. In addition, a patriarchal invasion of tasks typically belonging to the sphere of women, that is, taking care of children and the regulation of diet, occurs (Kautz 2000, 170). Hence, as early as in the 1840s, a few decades before the widespread establishment of various medical institutions, for instance, for patients with mental illnesses and children which the Victorian age is notorious for, Shelley voiced her critique and worries that would be equally applicable in other contexts in the later part of the century.3 In the context of the late Romantic appraisal of idleness, however, one can discern a decisive rejection of any political efforts to institutionalise idleness and turn it into productive leisure—a development which Shelley ultimately could not stop

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but which it was visionary of her to bemoan. In Shelley’s eyes, idleness could not be regulated—it could only be found individually. She therefore felt more at ease in Brukenau (Brückenau) where the public gardens, which in her eyes resembled English pleasure grounds, invited “the wanderer to stroll on, and enjoy in fine weather Nature’s dearest gifts, shady woods, open lawns, and views of beautiful country; loitering beside a murmuring stream, or toiling on awhile, and then resting as you gaze on a wider prospect” (Shelley 1844a, 200–201). Her disdain for the enterprise of linear travel increased when she was forced to roast in a train coach longer than intended because there were stops of several minutes at every station since passengers were offered refreshments and snacks. Apart from criticising modern institutions of the leisure industry such as spas, she was also not entirely convinced by the railway, the key innovation of the nineteenth century.4 Travelling by train from Paris to Metz, she did seem impressed by the speed, yet (because of it) she experienced two nights of “excessive fatigue” (11). Although the railroad to Frankfurt was “not a very good one”, at least “the carriages were comfortable” (29). While she sometimes engaged a veturino, a kind of travel guide, she found that the leisure suggested by such a guide was actually “a false lure” (1844b, 212). The musing and idling traveller was, therefore, not content when she was supposed to employ “artificial” means to move on and when she was told when to be idle and breaks for “enjoyment” were imposed on her. While these breaks were supposed to make the journey less exhausting for the travellers, they strained Shelley’s nerves because for her, idleness could only be recuperative when the notion of time was absent. Rambles presents a deeply grieving woman who is momentarily helped to come to terms with her loss by moments of idleness found in a natural environment. Neither her travels nor her textual account of them provides closure; but ultimately, in Shelley’s case, idle rambling is a means of learning to embrace never-ending grief. Mobility, therefore, functions also as a treatment for her mental health problems and helps her come to terms with traumatic experiences from the past.

Taking a Rest? Dickens and Collins About 15 years later, two famous Victorian writers presented a take on idleness that was similar in its intention to Shelley’s, yet very different in tone, which points to the fact that discourses on idleness and the ways in

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which it was negotiated in literature from the nineteenth century were inherently gendered. What also becomes obvious is a persistent interest both of writers and readers in writing and reading accounts of travel that aim at bringing about a change of a recreational and recuperative kind for the traveller. Collins and Dickens’s novella, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, was originally published in Household Words in 1857, the year in which it also takes place. It was republished in complete form in 1890 with two other short stories, which had also first appeared in the periodical. It is a humorous story, and its two publication dates reflect the great interest of the reading public in the topic of (playful) idleness during the 1850s and 1860s. The motivation of the two characters to go on a lazy tour is to find opportunities for rest from being overworked, something akin to going on a trip to prevent a burnout.5 The novella thus belongs to the wider Victorian discourse on health tourism6 and more specifically suggests that a deliberately slow kind of mobility can contribute to an improvement of a person’s mental wellbeing. In order to get a sense of the “habits of the lip” of the time and time-­ specific “repeated verbal occurrence […] and associations of words through which ideas, values, and cultural attitudes are propagated” (Colella 2013, 317), I conducted a quantitative analysis of the occurrence of the terms “idle”, “idleness”, and “leisure” in the ProQuest “British Periodicals Collection I & II”. The analysis revealed that the occurrence of all three terms is the highest in the 1860s and 1870s, with the term “leisure” coming up 14,184 times and “idle” and “idleness” 16,762 times. My sampling reflects the interest of the public in both topics and their central position in the public discourse.7 This interest seems to be time specific and limited to the Victorian era because by the 1900s, the occurrence of all three terms had decreased by circa 50 per cent. These numbers explain why Dickens and Collins could find it amusing to write their story almost as a textual inflation of idleness in all its semantic forms and inflections—and why the story could be republished 33 years after it had appeared for the first time. The two protagonists of the story, Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, represent two different types of idleness and two attitudes of how to travel (or not to travel) and how to walk (or not to walk). Goodchild is “laboriously idle, and would take upon himself any amount of pains and labour to assure himself that he was idle; in short, had no better idea of idleness than that it was useless industry” (Collins and Dickens 1890, 4). It seems that the character of Goodchild is supposed to represent those pseudo-idlers and tourists who know that

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idleness is fashionable and who, for this reason, want to emulate this lifestyle yet are trying too hard, much like the travellers whom Shelley criticises in Rambles. As a consequence, they end up investing a lot of energy into something that was supposed to relax them. Goodchild, thus, only achieves a pseudo-state of idleness; he can merely measure it by judging it in terms of how much work he has put into achieving this state, which is his major dilemma: “Having done nothing to fatigue himself for a dull quarter of an hour, Francis began to fear that he was not in a state of idleness” (26). He can only be or feel idle after he has done something fatiguing. Thomas Idle, on the other hand, is “a passive idler, a born-and-bred idler, a consistent idler, who practiced what he would have preached if he had not been too idle to preach; a one entire and perfect chrysolite of idleness” (4). For him, through the lens of an idler’s eyes, even the metropolis London presents itself like an oasis: “[T]here are nice short walks in level public gardens, with benches of repose set up at convenient distances for weary travellers—London, where rugged stone is humanely pounded into little lumps for the road, and intelligently shaped into smooth slabs for the pavement!” (12). The two companions have two opposing ideas of moving about: “Thomas was lying in a meadow, looking at the railway trains as they passed over a distant viaduct—which was his idea of walking down into the North; while Francis was walking a mile due South against time— which was his idea of walking down into the North” (4; my emphases). In other words, two versions of mobility are presented: one which consists mainly of physical immobility and letting one’s mind wander (represented by Thomas) and Francis’s very physical approach of actually walking, as if to “power through”. In another passage in The Lazy Tour, one finds a “whimsical attack on the refreshment booths at British stations” (Edgecombe 2010, 591), something that also features in Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1861)8 and would have united him with Shelley: “At long intervals were uncomfortable refreshment-rooms […] where sensitive stomachs were fed, with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning indigestion” (Collins and Dickens 1890, 6). In both Dickens’s and Shelley’s texts, institutionalised refreshment is not refreshing because it forces upon the traveller a schedule that goes against his or her preferences and sense of personal freedom. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices presents a memorable depiction of the atmosphere at railway stations and links this to the semantic field of

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health and disease. Goodchild and Idle simultaneously perceive the railway station as a most idle place and a location where idleness is least likely to be found because everybody makes great effort to be in a hurry. Most notably, this need for busyness is rendered in terms of an unpleasant, dangerous, and contagious disease: Established at this Station, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild resolved to enjoy it. But, its contrasts were very violent, and there was also an infection in it. First, as to its contrasts. They were only two, but they were Lethargy and Madness. The Station was either totally unconscious, or wildly raving. By day, in its unconscious state, it looked as if no life could come to it,—as if it were all rust, dust, and ashes—[…]. One awkward shave of the air from the wooden razor, and everything changed. Tight office-doors flew open, panels yielded, books, newspapers, travelling-caps and wrappers broke out of brick walls, money chinked, conveyances oppressed by nightmares of luggage came careering into the yard, porters started up from secret places […]. Simmering, whistling, trembling, rumbling, thundering. Trains on the whole confusion of intersecting rails, crossing one another, bumping one another, hissing one another, backing to go forward, tearing into distance to come close. People frantic. (62–63)9

On a textual level, this passage is remarkable because it evokes the image of a raging organism—its busyness emphasised through the long enumerations of objects and activities—which then, suddenly, collapses “in a minute” (63). With the railway as the epitome of industrialisation, such a depiction of the atmosphere at the station characterised by extremes implies the need for moderation. Neither “lethargy” nor “madness” can provide the mind with rest; on the contrary, they violate it. It is not easy, however, to accept this and learn how to not do anything, as Goodchild exemplifies: “[W]hile Francis Goodchild was wandering hither and thither, storing his mind with perpetual observation of men and things, and sincerely believing himself to be the laziest creature in existence all the time […,] Thomas made no attempt to get through the hours, but passively allowed the hours to get through him” (55; my emphasis). In The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, idleness can be achieved with a certain spirit, space, and an inclination or willingness to be passive. More precisely, what is depicted here is the notion that the individual’s relationship with the concept of time generally and schedules in particular must be turned around, phrases that sound surprisingly modern and could be taken from a twenty-first-century handbook on how to practice

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mindfulness. To keep busy—no matter in what form—for the characters in the novel means to surround themselves with the dangerously contagious influence of busyness, a state of being that can make one ill. In order to rid themselves of this burden, the characters stop following the dictatorship of time and let the hours go through them. Note that it is not enough to lean against time, as Francis Goodchild does in the passage quoted earlier—he must let go completely. While the novella thus implies the benefits of taking a break and rest, thereby including a hidden critique of the beginnings of capitalism, it was written almost around the same time as Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853), whose protagonist famously prefers “not to”. Yet the novella’s potentially anti-capitalist stance is at the end relativised again. Thomas Idle is turned into parody when he decides never to do anything again because business and activity only cause him trouble—a morale that readers at the time would have found amusing. The novella, thus, suggests the necessity of travel as providing distance to the daily obligations and routines and idling as a form of travel that encourages a person to slow down and restore his or her energies.

Gissing’s Brooding Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea takes idling very seriously and thinks about the connection between this form of mobility and mental health without the irony and humour found in Shelley’s and Collins and Dickens’s works. Gissing’s travel book from 1901 marks the end of the nineteenth century and Queen Victoria’s reign. Nevertheless, it does not show significant parallels to other narratives about Italy or Greece by late Victorian travellers, such as Richard Ridley Farrer (A Tour in Greece, 1880) or James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) who were too trained in their faculties of critical inquiry to idealise the Platonic Golden Age without a feeling of unease or fraud (Pemble 1987, 180–181). Gissing, a realist in his fiction, was immune to the demystifying powers of reason in depictions of ancient Italy in his factual writing. Idling through Magna Graecia, a phrase used to describe the ancient Greek cities of Southern Italy, he wrote a distinctly nostalgic account that acquires the shape of a testimony written by a person who wanted to physically and mentally escape his contemporary society and succeeded at it. Gissing’s travel book shares surprising parallels with late Romantic idlers such as Shelley. Even though the two texts stand on different ends of the Victorian continuum, they share mindsets and

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sensibilities of seeing, as well as a desire to find and experience idleness to achieve a better state of mental health. Gissing’s account presents the entanglement of an account of mobility and self-curing in that the traveller-­ narrator wants to cure himself of his brooding and nostalgia by going to the places he misses most. Through exposing himself to the predetermined experience of loss inherent in such an encounter, the quiet, idling traveller can procure for himself at least momentary states of joy and a peace of mind. A dominant mode of idleness in Gissing’s work is negative, a state similar to inertia. It is an expression of the fact that Gissing does not care to change his present feelings because they do not concern him: idling for him means to approach the past and surround himself with it, if only in imagination. Idling is a constant immersing in times long gone by; to realise this makes the travelogue a depressing, life-negating read. Notably, this negative idleness attains a state of blissful perfection when Gissing “travels” in a fever dream when he is on the verge of death. Gissing’s idly rambling imagination enables him to go on an actual journey and a virtual one to the past. My reading focuses on the role of emotional reappropriation that is central to his response to the past. Connecting Gissing’s position as an idle onlooker who is separated both from the landscape when he is on a train and the landscape of the past to the position of the traveller in Michel de Certeau’s chapter “Railway Navigation and Incarceration” from The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), I argue that the boundaries between the “real” and “unreal” blur in Gissing’s text. In his account, there is a constant tension between physical (im-)mobility and mental health; to some extent, to travel calms down his spinning mind. In addition to presenting a man’s obsession with the dead and the past, Gissing’s book must also be read as an account of a victim of the Victorian idea of progress and the mentality of busyness that Collins and Dickens still could joke about 40 years earlier but that had driven the nineteenth century dynamically and, ever efficiently, to its end. By the Ionian Sea is also written “towards the end of the Victorian expansionist empire, against the background of the Boer War, the jingoist attitude of which dismayed him” (Ouditt 2006, 124–125). From the outset, his going to “backward” Italy is an escape from progress, industrialisation, and modernity. Gissing chose rather unknown areas of Italy for his real travels—not because he was so used to writing about gloomy industrial districts and poverty but because they made up Magna Graecia and were “saturated with classical tradition” (“Fiction in the Light of Travel” 1901, 535). According to

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John Pemble, the Victorian-Edwardian response to the South was twofold, for it consisted of the world that British travellers experienced and the one they invented (1987, 167). Several articles on Gissing’s travels emphasise this invented, imaginary journey, calling him a daydreamer (del Nobile 1997, 20), a man trying “to live out his dream” and “a worshipper of the ancient spirit of Magna Graecia” (Ouditt 2006, 125), and claiming that the text contains “lyrical reverence” (128). I would not argue with any of these observations but want to put the focus a little differently: there is a particular kind of idleness that manifests itself in Gissing’s writing because he is literally “idling” or “emptying” out the categories of present time and space and filling them with his imagination. One may indeed say that he is perfecting what Dickens and Collins’s Idle does half-­ heartedly, namely, allowing the hours to get through him. On going to Italy and realising that he is separated from the Italy of the past, Gissing engages in a process of emotional reappropriation of time by approaching it with his radical subjectivity. Even though he may at first glance appear to passively submit himself to the flow of his journey, he, in fact, stays in control and does not let the uncertainties of the time and space he travels through intimidate him. Throughout the book, Gissing rests assured in the power of his subjectivity. In Gissing’s response to the places he visits, there is a parallel to the experience of the (sensitive) modern traveller on a plane or train, who has the (melancholy) pleasure of seeing what he is separated from, that is, the past. De Certeau’s railway traveller, too, sees the landscape passing by the window but is at once separated from it as inside the railway carriage, “there is the immobility of an order” (1984, 111, my emphasis). One can draw an analogy to Gissing’s travelogue, for he encounters this “immobility of an order” already in his present space and time. Since Gissing despises contemporary “scholars”, culture, and perhaps even most people, the present for him plays the role of an enclosed cubicle that may be relatively neat and tidy but which stifles him with its order. He escapes from it by dreaming himself into a decidedly more chaotic yet, from his perspective, more desirable past. As in de Certeau’s railway carriage, the present for Gissing is a space where he can only rest. He transforms this negative, imposed idleness that is not beneficial for his mental health into a more positive force and form of self-care when rambling through the villages. When de Certeau’s traveller looks out of the window and sees “ephemeral” (112) and strangely quiet things, it is the spatial distance that makes him or her retrieve the imaginary shadows from the past and inspires

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virtual travel. In Gissing’s case, it is the temporal distance that has precisely the same effect on his imagination: the relics he finds or, as shown above, the people he observes function as triggers—they are the shadows of “these things put at a distance” (112). De Certeau continues his argument thus: “There is something at once incarcerational and navigational about railroad travel; like Jules Verne’s ships and submarines, it combines dreams with technology. The ‘speculative’ returns, located in the very heart of the mechanical order. Contraries coincide for the duration of a journey. A strange moment in which a society fabricates spectators and transgressors of spaces, with saints and blessed souls placed in the halos holes (auréoles-alvéoles) of its railway cars. In these places of laziness and thoughtfulness, […] atopical liturgies are pronounced, parentheses of prayers to no one (to whom are all these travelling dreams addressed?)” (113; my emphases). What de Certeau describes here is valuable both for a general discussion of the connection of idleness and travelling and specifically applicable to Gissing’s writing. By claiming that contrasts exist side by side during the duration of a journey, de Certeau stresses the transitoriness of journeys but also their power to suspend concepts and entities that are normally structuring society: for the time, the traveller is in a railway carriage, the concepts time and space are suspended. “[S]pectators and transgressors of spaces” come into being inside the carriage; it is up to them what they are going to do with that temporarily assigned role. Then follows a remark that is crucial for the discussion of a positively connoted, productive idleness: the carriages are called “places of laziness and thoughtfulness”—they are not lazy and thoughtless or lazy and therefore not thoughtful, but both. A connection is thus established between (physical) laziness and immobility which is imposed by the “incarceration” of the train and thoughts and “travelling dreams”. The railway carriage becomes a place, which, despite its clear demarcation, opens up some leeway for speculation and imagination. A causal link is made between the idle body and the active mind which suggests the medical benefits of the former for a regeneration of the anxious mind. This description of Gissing’s journey by train to Cotrone picks up this link: “While daylight lasted, the moving landscape held me attentive. […] At the falling of dusk we passed a thickly wooded tract large enough to be called a forest; the great trees looked hoary with age, and amid a jungle of undergrowth, myrtle and lentisk, arbutus and oleander, lay green marshes, dull deep pools, sluggish streams. A spell which was half fear fell upon the imagination; never till now had I known an enchanted wood.

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Nothing human could wander in those pathless shades, by those dead waters. It was the very approach to the world of spirits” (1956, 59–60; my emphases). Of course, it is not the landscape that is moving but the train, yet from his enforced position of the spectator, Gissing can enjoy the fact that it seems to be spread out in front of him for him to watch. After dusk, the landscape he observes from the train window seems to be clad in a nocturnal garment—even though he is in the safety of the train, what he sees is dreamlike and eerie. In combination with the failing light of dusk, the shaggy wilderness evokes a feeling of awe and the image of an “enchanted wood”. He is observing a “world of spirits” that has a phantasmal quality: it resembles a magic lantern show outside his window, yet it might also be happening in his dream. In the above scene, his speculation is obscure and concerns the realm of a world of fables; yet with regard to the remainder of his observations on his travels, he is rambling among the imaginary ruins of the past. All his speculations aim at a reconstruction of past relics and classical figures. Throughout his visit to Southern Italy, therefore, Gissing is driven by the melancholy pleasure of seeing what he is separated from (de Certeau 1984, 114). On the train, it is literally the landscape or the forest he sees outside his window that he is separated from. When he is looking at Italian houses, ruins, or peasants, he sees the past that he is separated from. As his son, Alfred, said, his father “did not read history, he saw it” (quoted in Korg 2001, 228; my emphasis). Apart from the extreme focus on his self as the organising centre of perception and other authors’ thoughts (when he puts ancient sources in conversation, for example), Gissing also enjoys solitude and not having to think. When he is on the ship toward Paola, he sings to himself “with joy” because “I was the only cabin passenger, and solitude suits me” (1956, 21). When two strangers want to share a carriage with him on the way to Cotrone, he is annoyed because “he much preferred to be alone with [his] thoughts” (26). This reveals parallels to Shelley’s behaviour, who similarly hated the company of “sick people” at spas and did not enjoy “leisurely breaks” on the train, and to Dickens’s descriptions of the refreshment rooms. Gissing might, for instance, find the climate (and the “evil smells”) in Cosenza exhausting and unpleasant, but the town “has wonders and delights which tempt to day-long rambling […] at every step, from the opening of the main street at the hill-foot up to the stern mediaeval castle crowning its height, one marvels and admires” (34–35). He measures out the city in steps; it is made endurable and even highly enjoyable by “being

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walked in and through”. A companion or fellow passenger would only make each turn, each step, less spontaneous which is why Gissing prefers to be alone on his rambles. In an often-quoted episode, Gissing encounters a period of enforced idleness and physical inertia when he falls ill for ten days. This period of sickness presents an experience of history that is “hyper real” or even better than history itself. If one conceives of Gissing’s fascination with the past as an obsession—Maria Teresa Chialant also points out that he “almost obsessively looked for traces of Magna Graecia in the urban environment of late-nineteenth-century Calabria” (2010, 106)—the fever dream is so blissful because all the traces of history finally come to him. After a graphic description of the physical symptoms of the fever, Gissing writes about “a visionary state” he fell into: Lying still and calm, and perfectly awake, I watched a succession of wonderful pictures. First of all I saw great vases, rich with ornament and figures; then sepulchral marbles, carved more exquisitely than the most beautiful I had ever known. The vision grew in extent, in multiplicity of detail; presently I was regarding scenes of ancient life thronged streets, processions triumphal or religious, halls of feasting, fields of battle […]. Things which I could not know, which my imagination, working in the service of the will, could never have bodied forth, were before me as in life itself. I consciously wondered at peculiarities of costume such as I had never read of; at features of architecture entirely new to me; at insignificant characteristics of that bygone world, which by no possibility could have been gathered from books. I recall a succession of faces, the loveliest conceivable; and I remember, I feel to this moment the pang of regret with which I lost sight of each when it faded into darkness. (1956, 82–83; my emphases)

The vision ends in a truly Coleridgean fashion when the “gate of dreams [is] closed” (83). Usually, Gissing’s virtual travels to ancient times are a one-sided effort because it is up to him to let his imagination work and let him see what he wants to see. In this fever dream, however, he takes on the role of a theatre or movie spectator when he—forced to be physically idle and lie in bed—is invited to watch lifelike pictures of all the things and settings that interest him the most, as if in a phantasmagoria. The sick body is not presented as an obstacle to imaginary travels but rather as their vehicle. Being physically immobile while fighting the illness increases his mental mobility and enables him to go on a perfect trip to antiquity. Most importantly, his knowledge of the classics is at an end when he sees these pictures because he is confronted with costumes he “had never read of”

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and information that he could not have “gathered from books”. This passage advocates a more intuitive kind of learning, an education that must have been, in fact, foreign to Gissing. In this evocation of visions that reveal the truth, Gissing also outlines the idea of a “collective, inherited memory” and “a recollection of emotion” (Jolly 2008, 144) that makes him stand in the tradition of Romantic poetic writing: his soul is the Aeolian lyre. He notes twice that the visions in the dream were something he “could not know”—the limits of knowing are demarcated. What Gissing’s experiences with different places in Magna Graecia attest to is the potential of the idle traveller to procure in himself moments of recuperative self-care and mindfulness in the psychological sense. The traveller-­ narrator also uses his own resources in order to help him experience a version of himself that is more at ease with himself.

Conclusion: Resting Minds in Idly Moving Bodies Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, Collins and Dickens’s Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, and Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea, when read side by side, are not only different renderings of the (stylised) traveller-persona, they also provide vignettes of the changing status of the concept of idling and idleness in connection with experiences of mobility and its role for (mental) health. Idling is presented as a practice that allows the traveller-­ narrator to break out of contemporary prevalent discourses surrounding (mental) health, as in the case of Shelley’s critique of the stifling Victorian “institutions of leisure” and historical stability. Dickens and Collins’s novella, in all its playfulness and humorous tone, is a tentative attempt to suggest the necessity for rest, especially in a point in time where many Western societies begin to define themselves qua efficiency and productivity. Shelley’s and Dickens and Collins’ texts redefine what kind of idleness can be truly recuperative and whether it needs to be experienced individually or as a societally imposed agenda. At the threshold to a century which would irrevocably and even more drastically shift the human perception of speed and efficiency, Gissing’s idleness especially represents one thing most emphatically: the transcendent power of the human imagination. Taken together, these literary, partly fictional and partly factual, works on idling serve as resources for the study of the interplay of mobility and medicine as they bring to the fore the recuperative potential inherent in idle travel and how, as a specific kind of mobility, it can remind the individual traveller of his or her capacities for self-care.

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Notes 1. This chapter is based, in part, on my monograph, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901 (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), especially Chap. 11: “George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) as a Paradise of Idleness”. I remain grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for the kind permission to republish these sections in a revised form. Other sections have appeared previously in an altered and extended form as “Female Idling and Social Critique in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)” in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Liedke 2019) and are republished here with the kind permission of NCGS. 2. In addition to my aforementioned monograph, Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi’s edited collection on Idleness, Indolence and Leisure (2014) must be mentioned in this context with regard to the topic of idleness, but they do not explicitly focus on travel or mobility. 3. One such context, the asylum system in Lancashire in the second half of the nineteenth century, is examined by Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland in Chap. 9. 4. For an analysis of railway travel as a new mode of transport and its potentially damaging effects on people’s health and their skin, see Ariane de Waal’s contribution in this volume. 5. For a brief discussion of the phenomenon of “overwork”, see also Sally Shuttleworth’s chapter in this volume. 6. See, for instance, Charteris (1885), who wrote in detail about the benefits of health resorts, and Taylor (1893), who focused on the value of the health resorts on the Canary Islands from a medical perspective. 7. Of course, the total number of periodicals on the market increased in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, which is also a factor that has an influence on how many times the terms come up in the database. However, the general tendency is that both the number of new publications increased and the occurrence of the terms, that is, the topics of idleness and leisure were present in the public discourse and came up in a wide range of publications. 8. On Dickens and idleness in other stories, see Schelstraete (2014). 9. See Collins and Dickens (1890, 64) for the use of the terms “infection” and “contagion” to describe the atmosphere at the railway station— phrases that strike a particular sensitive chord in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions.

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Works Cited “British Periodicals Collection I & II.” ProQuest Database. https://about.proquest.com/en/products-­services/british_periodicals/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2013. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture,’ 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon. Charteris, Matthew. 1885. Health-Resorts at Home and Abroad. London: J. & A. Churchill. Chialant, Maria Teresa. 2010. “Pictures from Naples in Dickens’s and Gissing’s Italian Books.” In Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers, edited by Michael Hollington, Catherine Watts, and John Jordan, 89–114. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Colella, Silvana. 2013. “‘That Inscrutable Something’: Business in the Periodical Press.” Victorian Periodicals Review 46 (3): 317–342. https://doi. org/10.1353/vpr.2013.0030. Collins, Wilkie, and Charles Dickens. 1890 [1857]. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. No Thoroughfare. The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. London: Chapman. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. “Railway Navigation and Incarceration.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, 111–114. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Del Nobile, Annarita. 1997. “Travel and Writing: George Gissing’s Ideological Journey in Italy.” The Gissing Journal 33 (1): 19–22. Dickens, Charles. 1905 [1860–1861]. The Uncommercial Traveller. London: Chapman & Hall. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. 2010. “Two Dickensian Features of Style.” Style 44 (4): 591–593. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.44.4.591. “Fiction in the Light of Travel. (Two Books by Mr. Gissing).” 1901. Academy, June 22: 535–536. Elkin, Lauren. 2017. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Vintage. Farrer, Richard Ridley. 1880. A Tour in Greece. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Fludernik, Monika, and Miriam Nandi. 2014. Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1995. “Docile Bodies.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, 135–169. New York: Vintage Books. Frawley, Maria H. 1994. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. London and Toronto: Associated University Press. Frazer, James. 1890. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan. Gissing, George. 1956 [1901]. By the Ionian Sea. London: Richards.

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Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge. Jarvis, Robin. 2000. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jolly, Roslyn. 2008. “Gissing’s Italian Vision.” In Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture, edited by Penny Gay and Catherine Waters, 135–146. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Kautz, Beth Dolan. 2000. “Spas and Salutary Landscapes: The Geography of Health in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy.” In Romantic Geographies. Discourses of Travel 1775–1844, edited by Amanda Gilroy, 165–181. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Korg, Jacob. 2001. “Gissing and Ancient Rome.” In A Garland for Gissing, edited by Bouwe Postmus, 225–234. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Liedke, Heidi. 2018. The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Liedke, Heidi. 2019. “Female Idling and Social Critique in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 15 (3): n. pag. Melville, Herman. 1986 [1853]. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” In Herman Melville: Billy Budd and Other Stories, edited by Frederick Busch, 1–46. New York: Penguin. Ouditt, Sharon. 2006. “‘Elemental and Permanent Things’: George Gissing and Norman Douglas in Southern Italy.” Studies in Travel Writing 10 (2): 123–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2006.9634808. Pemble, John. 1987. The Mediterranean Passion. Victorians and Edwardians in the South. Oxford: Clarendon. Schelstraete, Jasper. 2014. “Idle Employment and Dickens’s Uncommercial Ruse: The Narratorial Entity in ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47 (1): 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2014.0004. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schor, Esther H. 1993. “Mary Shelley in Transit.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Esther H. Schor, and Audrey A. Fisch, 235–257. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Mary. 1844a. Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. Vol. 1. London: E. Moxon. Shelley, Mary. 1844b. Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. Vol. 2. London: E. Moxon. Shelley, Mary. 1850. “Letter to Augusta Trelawny, 24 February 1843.” MS. Abinger c. 76, fols. 1–3. Oxford, University of Oxford. Bodleian Library, Abinger Collection.

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Sterne, Laurence. 2008 [1786]. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, John. 1893. The Health Resorts of the Canary Islands in their Climatological and Medical Aspects. London: J. & A. Churchill. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. Theory, Culture & Society. London: SAGE. Wearing, Betsy, and Stephen Wearing. “Refocussing the Tourist Experience: The Flâneur and the Choraster.” Leisure Studies 15 (1996): 229–243. https://doi. org/10.1080/026143696375530. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture & Society 2 (1985): 37–46. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0263276485002003005. Wrigley, Richard, and George Revill, eds. 2000. Pathologies of Travel. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

PART II

Pathologising Mobilities

CHAPTER 6

Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss Monika Class

In the essay “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), Mary Ann Evans alias George Eliot formulates the mid-Victorian desideratum for novels in the great “realist” tradition to authentically represent “psychological character—their conception of life, and their emotions” (1990, 111).1 The composition of novels should pass seamlessly “from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in […] unreality” (111). Eliot criticises the stereotyping of certain postures in literature. The “slouching shoulders” of “the conventional countryman” should not merely function as an indicator for “an upright disposition”; that is “too simple”, she notes (109). Instead, Eliot calls for novelists to reimagine people’s embodied lives and their milieu. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) explores the structural differences that give rise to the double standards in girls’ and boys’ body motions. Her second novel recounts the coming of age of two siblings during a

M. Class (*) Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_6

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period of roughly ten years, from the age when Maggie Tulliver is ten years old and Tom is 13. It unfolds the short life of the “rebellious girl” (Eliot 2015, 32), who has experienced a comfortable early childhood in a coastal town in the rural Midlands. When the Tulliver family suddenly loses their mill, which means their livelihood, Maggie experiences social isolation, religious enthusiasm, and forbidden love, while her brother learns a trade, labours, and schemes tirelessly to pay off the family debts and buys the mill back. The siblings end up drowning together when Maggie attempts to save Tom from the deadly tidal flood. It is known that Eliot details body posture in her early fiction to create authentic fictional characters and embed them in the narrated world (Korte 1997, 164). However, the scholarship on Eliot’s realist poetics has focused on non-verbal behaviour rather than mobility. The present chapter showcases how Eliot’s fiction reflects the variable manners in which people inhabited their bodies in the Victorian age not as static beings but in movement. Body movement warranted attention, in literature and beyond, because of its signalling potential of agency. I argue here that the novelist’s critical engagement with Victorian double standards of acceptable bodily postures and movements, which is the focus of mobility within The Mill on the Floss, conveys the link of medical and moral norms in a vision towards variable, and even untamed, gender identities. I propose that the novel is prefigured by two divergent trends in Victorian medical culture: normative posture, on the one hand, and the primal, erupting life force of the lived body, on the other hand. Accordingly, this chapter examines Eliot’s two main characters, Tom and Maggie, as embodied beings and as figures of two opposed discourses on motor motion in the mid-­ Victorian period: the emergent subdiscipline of medicine (orthopaedics) and physiological speculations on motion in Victorian philosophy. Whereas Tom exemplifies the proto-military, gymnastic formation of the docile body in entitled white middle-class masculinity, Maggie embodies the dark-skinned “deviant” life force struggling against the narrow restrictions of bodily motions for white middle-class women. Nineteenth-century Western culture saw the emergence of “an entire medical sub-speciality that defined the healthy body and treated the ill body based on notions of acceptable posture” (Gilman 2018, 204). These so-called gymnastics built on medicine and, partly, on dietetics in Galenic medicine. Dietetics were also called the nonnaturals of hygiene, consisting of six categories including “motion and rest” (Emch-Deriaz 1992, 135). Dietetics promoted a healthy lifestyle to prevent ill health as well as

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regulate excessive feeling. Within proto-orthopaedic discourse, posture correlated directly with health and moral character. “By the time of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber’s Die ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Medical Indoor Gymnastics, 1855)”, Sander Gilman notes, “the line between physical state and moral position had become completely blurred (if it was ever clear)” (2018, 205–206). Schreber reinforced the ableist view that “your external bodily position defines your moral attitude” (39)—which resonates with the Roman slogan “a sound mind in a sound body” (51). The notion did much to establish not only gymnastics but also the gendered codes of bodily conduct in Victorian life. Derived from French posture, and Latin positura, the English lexeme “posture” denotes the position and the carriage of the body as a whole, indicating emotion and attitude. Posture is synonymous with bearing, comportment, pose, stance, or mien (44–45). It is often thought of as a frozen body image, but it actually comprises both the resting and the moving body (30). Closely associated with military drill, posture connotes habituated coercion by disciplinary power. After all, the soldier’s perfect posture exemplifies Michel Foucault’s docile body: “a lively, alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach, broad shoulders, long arms, strong fingers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet, because a man of such a figure could not fail to be agile and strong” (1977, 135; my emphasis). Albeit compartmentalised into body parts, agility and strength characterise the docile body as a whole. Above all, posture is predicated on bipedal body movements and an “erect head” and dominants bodily motions as such. George Henry Lewes’s physiology-based philosophy, by contrast, considers bodily motion as a material foundation of life. In one of his articles published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1856, Lewes divides the physiology of life into three “cardinal aspects—Nutrition; Motion; and Sensibility [sic]” (289; see also Diedrick 1988, 30). Lewes posits the nervous system at the centre of his life model and compares it to “the great fountain of influence” that “runs off in three distinct streams—the Nutritive, the Locomotive, and the Sensitive” (289). The three streams are interdependent insofar as Lewes claims that there is “a given amount of energy” (290), which is to be distributed between the streams: “[T]he activity of one will always be at the expense of another” (290). This principle of life applies to humans and animals alike in Lewes’s physiological studies. Digestion, locomotion, and sensations are not only entangled but require a certain distribution of energy flow through the “three streams” of

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physiology to maintain life. On the one hand, movement underpins Lewes’s theory of the materiality of life, but, on the other hand, it also eludes his physiological and evolutionary designs (Erchinger 2013, 157). Considering the ineffability of motion, narrative fiction offers an opportunity to convey such intricate vitality. Eliot’s novel features variable points of view (among other expressive devices) that lend themselves to the creative evocation of the interplay of locomotion and sensation (Ricoeur 1985, 81). The title of the novel with its eponymous river already indicates as much: The Mill on the Floss “revolves insistently” around the uncontrollable flow of the tidal river (Law 2010, 16). The novel associates the material power of the river with the living bodies of the heroine and her brother not least because they drown in it. Moreover, Eliot’s principal characters operate as filters for the gendered codes of mobility, which, in turn, question the dominant double standards in Victorian mobilities regarding physical agency and potential empowerment. By prioritising Maggie’s perspective, the narrative composition challenges the extraliterary norms that reduce mobility to masculinity and stasis to femininity. The Mill on the Floss, illuminates how, as Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Cresswell put it, “gender constitutes mobility and is constituted by mobility” (2008, 5). The novel represents, at times satirically and at times empathetically, the way gendered postures regulate and shape the stream of the protagonists’ motions whose passions overwhelm them in much the same way as modern irrigation technologies channel and block the tidal river but cannot prevent it from flooding. In this sense, mobility in Eliot’s novel captures Cresswell’s conceptualisation of mobility in modernity as “socially produced motion” (2012, 3). French existential phenomenology corroborates mobility as socially produced motion (Cresswell 2012). Iris Marion Young’s feminist framework is based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Both suit Eliot’s and Lewes’s theory of motion since the phenomenology of perception conceives of movement as a major constituent of embodied consciousness (i.e. the lived body). Merleau-Ponty locates the conscious orientation of the body (i.e. intentionality) in movement. For him, the power of movement is key to “original intentionality” (2012, 139). We inhabit space and time consciously through movement. The power of movement creates and is created by conscious life (137); or, as Alva Noë notes, “the world makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction” (2004, 1). It follows that kinaesthesis (bodily movements) does not merely supplement aisthesis (sensory perception).

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Rather, aisthesis is inherently kinaesthetic (Kristensen 2012, 29). The world discloses itself sensorily through motor action, such as turning our trunk, or stretching our arms; movements shape and are shaped by our engagement with the world. Movement thus underpins the sensory perceptions and, by extension, embodied consciousness. The lived body orientates us towards the world and simultaneously expresses our orientation. Young observes that “it is the ordinary purposive orientation of the body as a whole toward things and its environment which initially defines the relation of a subject to its world” (1980, 140). Being a body, then, is part and parcel of bodily movement (including rest). In the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir, Young establishes differences in men’s and women’s motor performances irrespective of their sexual organs or genetics. In her influential essay “Throwing Like a Girl”, the feminist theorist provides a phenomenological description of “the modalities, meanings, and implications of the difference between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ body comportment and movement” and the relation in space (1980, 138). Here, “feminine” and “femininity” connote “a set of structures and conditions which delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular” milieu (140). This definition includes persons with female sexual organs to be not “feminine”, as well as those with male sexual organs to be “feminine”. Young ascertains that feminine comportment and body movement “are frequently characterized, much as in the throwing case, by a failure to make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities […]. Typically, the masculine stride is longer proportional to a man’s body than is the feminine stride to a woman’s” (142). On the one hand, Young’s theory suggests that regulations of the female body seep into lived experience and become ingrained in habits, skills, gestures, and, especially, patterns of movements. On the other hand, Young indicates that the masculine and feminine modalities of comportment have existential implications beyond sexuality. “As stylistic characteristics of a person, ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are”, as Sara Heinämaa notes, “not anchored on any particular activities or objects, but are given as two different ways of relating to objectivity, acting on objects and being affected by them” (2012, 236). The two styles of movement amount to two styles of intentional life and thus two modes of engagement with the entire world. Differentiating between posture (as a subcategory of disciplinary power) and style of movement (as the modality of the lived body), I trace the way in which Eliot’s literary configurations in The Mill on the Floss evoke the transition from girl- into womanhood and boy- into manhood

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as the conflicted or harmonious engagement of the lived body with posture and, more broadly, with what it means to be “normal”. I contend that the narrative composition of Maggie’s trajectory challenges the normative scripts of feminine posture inasmuch as Tom’s development eventually conforms to, and reinforces, dominant masculine upright motion.

Masculine Variations of Body Movements: Tom’s Correct Posture The Mill on the Floss critically engages with Victorian gender norms; indeed, the novel throws the exclusion of Victorian girls from formal education into sharp relief. Eliot’s narrative exposes the flawed logic that the brightest member of the family is barred from classical education because of her sex. Maggie represents the intellectually curious and gifted child, whereas Tom is an “average” boy, who is forced to learn mathematics and ancient languages although he loathes the subjects (Eliot 2015, 31). Thus, the novel highlights Tom’s privilege as a white male from the landowning ranks of society. It narrates the ways in which Tom’s expensive, classical education enhances his development in general and in particular his comportment. Thanks to his experiences at the boarding school at King’s Lorton, Tom finds his posture much improved. Extradiegetic commentary does much to satirise the growth of the clumsy boy of flesh into the self-made merchant and unforgiving head of the Tulliver family. In Book One, the narrator still belittles Tom’s teenage physique, describing him as one of “those lads that grow everywhere in England […] with indeterminate features” (31–32). Not only is his physiognomy depicted as pale and indistinct, his moves are also still uncoordinated, looking like the waddle of a “gosling” (31). The narrator in one of his satirical moods describes Tom as “this pink-and-white bit of masculinity” (32). On the one hand, the diminutive “bit” suggests immaturity and weakness. On the other hand, “pink-and-white […] masculinity” makes Tom’s privilege explicit. Accordingly, the representation of his style of movement conveys entitlement, domination, and mastery. The narrative composition thus passes seamlessly from the mocking description of external actions to the serious configurations of emotional states and sensibilities, interweaving the outside and inside aspects as an exploration of a white middle-class boy’s capability of movement.

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Tom’s outdoor activities reveal the discrepancy between his illusions of superior posture and actual clumsiness, which suggests that Tom prematurely assumes the role of mastery. Adolescent Tom envisions himself as a “benevolent patron” (47), treats his playmates “with authority” (45), and declares “I’m master” (48). However, it is actually the poor neighbour’s son, Bob Jenkins, who possesses superior agility compared to Tom: “Bob […] could climb trees like a squirrel, […] detecting hedgehogs and stoats […] making gaps in the hedgerows, [and] throwing stones” (45). Fascinated as Tom is with “such qualities in an inferior” (45), he regards Bob as a surrogate for his own body, one that is under his command just like the terrier Yap. When Tom fails in the water-rat hunt and Bob refuses to submit, Tom feels so “humiliated as a sportsman” (47) that he attacks Bob. Having won the fight against Bob only with the help of Yap’s sharp teeth, Tom walks away from the defeated Bob “without looking round” (49). The narrative composition of Tom’s failed attempt at hunting waterrats features a style of movement that deviates from proper posture and conveys instead a masculine fragility which arises from an exaggerated sense of one’s own physical capabilities and mistaken entitlement. Eliot constructs Tom as “a boy made of flesh and blood” and opposes him to “a boy in the abstract”, a role occupied by Tom’s fellow pupil, Philip Wakem (2015, 160). Tom finds it nearly impossible to retain any learning in Greek or Latin classics. The chapter “The Young Idea” recounts the details of Tom’s education at the hands of Mr. Stelling. One passage intermittently focalises through the teacher, who assumes the authority of the “educator-judge” within the “carceral network” to diagnose the abnormality of Tom’s mind (Foucault 1977, 304). For Stelling, Tom is “a boy born with a deficient power of apprehending signs and abstractions, [who] must suffer the penalty of congenital deficiency” (Eliot 2015, 159). The description of Tom’s learning difficulty reinforces his inferiority compared to Philip and Maggie. More importantly, however, the passage satirises Mr. Stelling as the “incompetent” judge of Tom’s “exceptional dullness” (159). The narration shows discipline to serve primarily the financial gain of the privileged since Stelling keeps a boarding house to be able to afford an expensive lifestyle: “[W]ithout private fortune it is difficult to see how they could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or government” (159). The narratorial voice gives way to the internal presentation of Stelling’s narrow-mindedness. The resulting ambiguity exposes him as an opportunist who profits from the burgeoning professionalisation of education in the early nineteenth century despite his

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pedagogic incompetence. Passing normalising judgements is the essential posture that Mr. Stelling performs within the diegesis. Eliot’s cynical narrator suggests that behind Mr. Stelling’s pedagogic façade lurks a man entrapped by his “fixed opinion” (159). Switching between the character’s deluded internal focalisation and satirical narratorial comment, the passage revolves around a trope of the “thumb-screw” that associates discipline and punishment with torture (159). “Mr Stelling”, the narrator notes, “had a fixed opinion that all boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing to teach: if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened” (159; my emphasis). Stelling personifies a major pitfall of disciplinary power: he detects abnormality and applies punitive measures where his norm is too narrow. At no point does Tom live up to Stelling’s “abstract” expectations (160). The boy “of flesh and blood” resents Stelling’s tuition and loves Mr. Poulter’s physical education: martial arts, drill, and military history. These activities take up considerable room in “Book Second” entitled “School-­ Time”. Indeed, the drilling lessons are Tom’s favourite subject: “There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example, and some credit on this score was due to Mr Poulter, the village schoolmaster, who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom—a source of high mutual pleasure” (160). Tom models his movements on those of the ex-­ soldier. The male figures of authority at Tom’s school are all associated with the military realm. Eliot configures Mr. Stelling’s main bodily style, to some comic effect, through the phrase “broad-chested” (e.g. 127, 158). The expression links Stelling’s professional habitus as a teacher with the military command “chest out!” (Gilman 2018, 109). The tuition of a war veteran reinforces the bellicose connotations of upright posture within the novel and thus encodes the roots of posture in military practices. However, the drilling master’s memory of the Peninsular War against Napoleon (1808–1814) is clouded (Meyer 1996, 149). Part of Poulter’s embodied memories is the mystification of his war injury: “[N]o other flesh would have healed in anything but the same time” (Eliot 2015, 161). Stories like these spur Tom on to follow Poulter’s drills and to imitate his movements outside of class. Eliot depicts the drilling-master’s posture in detail: “martial erectness”, “scrupulously brushed”, “strapped” uniform, and “an exceptionally spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum” (160). The image suggests perfect posture, but the narrator mocks this manly performance of verve and vitality by pointing out that it would be impossible without the aid of inebriation: “[N]othing but gin

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could enable him [Poulter] to sustain with any firmness” (160). This comment gives readers more insights into the nature of the drilling lessons than the intradiegetic characters have. The discrepancy reinforces readers’ sense of Tom’s naivety and ridicules his eagerness for the drills. The narrative captures the modalities of Poulter’s fencing exercise. Once the drill master starts his martial demonstration in the “carriage house”, he is “entirely absorbed in the cut and thrust—the solemn one, two, three, four” (164). Although the narratorial commentary mocks such solemnity, the internal focalisation through Tom gives us a glimpse of the boy’s admiration for the veteran’s movements. His bearing meets the expectations of universal patriarchal posture and, moreover, extends to the automatic handling of the weapon. Through experience of combat, Poulter has mastered the incorporation of the sword into his body schema so that the tool functions as an extension of his lived body (Leder 1990, 33); that way, the ex-soldier exerts control over the weapon, cutting effortlessly through the air. Second, Poulter’s movements take full command of the spatial dimension in the enclosed facility, while Tom observes the martial exhibition “from as great a distance as possible” (Eliot 2015, 164). Eliot represents the feelings this spectacle incites in the boy through Tom’s mimicry of Poulter’s posture. Tom’s accident with the sword illustrates this further. It is prohibited to bring weapons into the dorm room. Nonetheless, the gymnastics teacher conspires with the pupil and even lends the sword to the boy against a small fee. Once in his possession, Tom tries to wield it in his bedroom while Maggie is watching. He wishes to perform “with the severity of a great warrior” (168). The description of his movements indicates misjudged overdetermination, “he grasped the sword […] with decision” (168), since the untrained teenager wants to show off “the cut and thrust as would necessarily be expected of the Duke of Wellington” (169). The attempt exposes his lack of capacity and training, while the representation combines the external action with interior psychology (164–165). Tom frowns “with a double amount of intention, if not of corrugation” but cannot help smiling (169). The narrator comically juxtaposes Tom’s beginner’s mistakes with Poulter’s masterful cut and thrust on the count to four: Tom lifts the sword “resolutely” on the count of one, his wrist trembles on the count of two, he loses the momentum of his thrust on the count of three, and on the count of four, the “sword swung downwards”, falling “with its edge on Tom’s foot, and in a moment after, he had fallen too” (169). The incident satirically conveys Tom’s pre-mature and

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perilous incorporation of the sword. To habituate oneself to such a weapon “is to take up residence in them, or inversely, to make [it] participate within the voluminosity of one’s own body” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 145). It takes sustained training to achieve such a skilled incorporation of an instrument—training that Tom has not yet undergone. Furthermore, Tom’s inadequate handling of the weapon poses a serious threat to both himself and his sister, who is “shrinking away from him into the opposite corner” (169). Maggie’s shrieks indicate the violence that Tom naively glorifies and reproduces. Ironically, however, it is not the sister but the brother who swoons. The fainting fit effeminates the boy, while the foot injury emasculates him temporarily. In “School-Time”, Tom’s impaired mobility connects the flesh-and-­ blood boy with the boy in the abstract, Philip. The latter suffers from “kyphosis—excessive curvature of the spine” (Gilman 2018, 36). The boys’ relationship is fraught due to Tom’s prejudice. With the exception of Maggie, the Tullivers reject Philip’s father, calling him a “rascal”, and feel “repulsion to Philip’s deformity” (Eliot 2015, 156). The Tullivers’ hostility towards Philip echoes stigmatisations of the “hunchback”, according to which crooked posture reveals an inborn nature. Similar to Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), The Mill on the Floss rewrites this stereotype of deformed posture and dissociates it from immorality (Gilman 2018, 40). Preferring sedentary activities that conceal his abnormal spine (Eliot 2015, 151), Philip’s perspective on events highlights the role of the imagination in mobility. After all, “imagination is itself a practice of transcending physical and sociocultural distance” (Acosta 2021, 525). Philip, for instance, reminds Maggie that “we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive” (Eliot 2015, 280). During the protracted restitution of his physical mobility, Tom benefits from Philip’s empathy, aid in Latin and Greek, and entertaining stories. But once Tom’s mobility is restored, the old animosity erupts again. The upright mould of the body predominates Tom’s narrow views so much that his repulsion extends to any woman who might love a deformed man. The thought that his “sister” might be married to Philip is unbearable for Tom (315). The prejudice is mirrored in the conversation between Philip and his father, which reveals that Philip has internalised such ableism (393–394). The contrast of the two boys conveys a chiasm, featuring the mobile in the immobile and, vice versa, the immobile in the mobile: the impaired Philip is closely associated with imaginary mobility, which he shares with Maggie, while the agile Tom aspires towards manly posture

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and illustrates an imaginary fixation on war. The crossed configuration of mobility and immobility in these types of boyhood pushes against the narrow limits of upright posture and points towards the variability of masculine bodies. Thanks to his early bourgeoise schooling, Tom develops exemplary bearing, which proves to be an asset for his social mobility as a young man. The events in Tom’s life as a 20-year-old show the main outcome of Tom’s classical education at the boarding school ironically to be the improvement of his posture rather than his intellect. The trained upright demeanour plays an important role in Tom’s social and financial redemption of the Tullivers. Tom’s career as a business apprentice and member of society in St. Oggs culminates in the meeting with his father’s creditors in “Book Fifth”. Through hard work and shrewd investments, Tom manages to pay off his father’s debts. This means that Mr. Tulliver regains “his honest name” and the whole family no longer lives in “disgrace” (328). Everyone present at the meeting, including Tom’s employer, praises his work ethic, loyalty to his family, and moral conduct. Tom’s posture plays a vital role in this crucial moment at the bank: “Tom himself got up and made the single speech of his life” (328). Tom lives up to the expectations of masculine comportment to the dot: he stands up, stays upright, and expresses little emotion. His elocution is as brief as possible: “Tom looked so gentlemanly as well as tall and straight, that Mr Tulliver remarked […] that he had spent a deal of money on his son’s education” (328). The configuration conveys that “the straight/gay dichotomy has deep roots that are reflected in” notions about acceptable and poor posture (Gilman 2018, 51). Standing up straight and controlling his feelings makes Tom a “real” man. His posture signals his elevated status according to the Darwin-inspired idea of upright manhood as the pinnacle of evolution (Dawson 2010). In terms of social class, his “normal” masculinity expresses the self-controlled bearing and quiet confidence that used to be the mark of noblemen. The novel suggests that this elite posture and ideal of masculinity widened in the nineteenth century to include the lower strata of society. Tom’s role model, the entrepreneur Mr. Dean, carries himself like a “nobleman” with a “general solidity without heaviness” (Eliot 2015, 59). The narrator comments that Mr. Dean’s comportment is “a type of physique to be seen in all the ranks of English society” (59). Tom’s gentlemanly look does not imply illusion about social rank on Tom’s part but serves as a marker for his elevation to the symbolic realm of “true men”. The overall narrative composition, however, questions male dominance and especially Tom’s

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moral integrity when he abandons his sister in her moment of greatest need after her supposed elopement with Stephen. On the one hand, the scene with the creditors conveys Tom’s rite of passage to “true manhood” in British capitalist society. By the close of the nineteenth century, “certain tests had made it easier to ascertain if one were a true man: the duel, courage in war, and more generally, the possession of will power as well as the manly virtues of ‘quiet strength’ and of an acceptable moral posture. Proper looks and comportment had provided proof of true manhood” (Mosse 1996, 91–92). The Mill on the Floss suggests that paying back debts does not only figuratively straighten the spine as it feels like a weight lifted off the debtor’s shoulders but also that the financial transaction belongs to the test of manhood. Furthermore, Tom has taken away an essential lesson from King’s Lorton, namely, his manly conduct. On the other hand, it seems ironic that Mr. Tulliver unwittingly reduces Tom’s elite education to lessons in comportment, which was known as one of the domains of Victorian schools for middle- and upper-­ class girls. The rite of passage into “true manhood” widens the set of possibilities through which the world discloses itself to Tom. It is his choice to pursue his father’s wish single-mindedly to buy back Dorlcote Mill, which had previously belonged to the Tullivers for generations.

Feminine Variations of Body Movements: Maggie’s Deviant Posture Feminine mobility is curbed right at the start of The Mill on the Floss. The circumstance that introduces little Maggie to readers is her “heavy disappointment” that she is not allowed to join the trip in her father’s gig because of sartorial conventions: “[T]he morning was too wet […] for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet” (Eliot 2015, 26). The bonnet features as one of the constant markers of the sartorial deceleration imposed on girls and women in the novel. While going for a walk, for instance, Maggie wears her bonnet but takes it off as soon as she feels unobserved (260). Eliot variously configures Maggie’s style of movement as a struggle against the decorum of feminine immobility. The novel describes the manner in which Maggie’s corporeal experiences lead beyond norms that women were meant to comply in the nineteenth century (Gowing 2012, 813), giving us insights into the lived experience of “deviant” girlhood and womanhood at the time. Proper English girlhood until the

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mid-Victorian period meant, according to Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1868 article “The Girl of the Period”, that “a girl […] was neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind” (1996, 356; my emphasis). Above all else, girls had to be “tender, loving, retiring or domestic” (358). Eliot fictionalises the psychological impact of this norm. The heroine knows and internalises the standards of female propriety, but she does not fully incorporate them in her style of movement. Her movements keep defying posture. Perceived as “dangerous, unmanageable” by hegemonic men like Wakem Senior (Eliot 2015, 396), Maggie’s bearing is ambivalent insofar as it simultaneously adopts, challenges, and transgresses the nineteenth-century scripts of immobile femininity. Early in the novel, the narrator anticipates that “the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being” (32). However, the plot and figurative composition suggests that Maggie is never fully tamed. Eliot ends the novel with a natural disaster, in which the heroine unleashes her physical potential in the attempt to save and protect others. Furthermore, Maggie is a “troublemaker” (Ahmed 2010, 60–64), her life “troublous” (Eliot 2015, 45). As a child, for instance, she forgets to feed Tom’s rabbits and lets them die; then she sticks her head into a bucket full of water to sabotage her curls; she cuts her hair off; she unintentionally knocks over Tom’s card house; and she befriends Philip against her family’s will. As a young woman, she feels attracted to her cousin’s fiancé, Stephen Guest, but rejects his proposal of marriage. Her list of offenses against the norms of Victorian womanhood also includes “growing with a rapidity which her aunts considered highly reprehensible” (174), being “[t]oo’ cute [acute and clever] for a woman”, “read[ing] almost as well as the parson” (12), and protesting sedentary needlework (13). Significantly, her mother others Maggie in racist terms: her “brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter” (12). From the point of view of Mrs. Tulliver, whom the narrator ridicules persistently, the dark complexion is a sign of Maggie’s inferiority. Most of the brief narratorial characterisations of little Maggie’s style of comportment lie within the semantic field of energetic movements, such as “tossing”, “jumped up”, and “whirling” (e.g. 23, 27–28).2 Eliot thus creates a prototypical tomboy. The narrator evaluates her qualities negatively in the sense of the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century meaning of tomboy as a girl misbehaving like “a spirited or boisterous boy; a wild romping girl’” (Moon 2021, 195). Yet at the same time, the narrative insights into Maggie’s endearing mischievousness and

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understandable anger anticipate the positive connotations of the tomboy figure in the emergent girls’ culture from the 1880s to 1910s (Mitchell 1995, 3). Eliot bolsters up the heroine’s tomboyism through similes: Maggie, for example, has “the air of a small Shetland pony” (2015, 13), and she is “like a Skye terrier suspecting mischief” (15). These figures of speech create an impression of constant movement. The construction of Maggie’s flight to the gypsies harnesses this effect. In this episode, Maggie runs away several miles to “Dunlow Common” to lead a nomadic life with the Roma of the area. She aborts her flight as soon as she gets out of breath, tired, and hungry (99). The episode nonetheless portrays Maggie as a runner fit enough to cover several miles. This representation of girlhood undermines the nineteenth-century views on moral and physical hygiene, such as those of Schreber. His Gymnastics regulates feminine posture, advising that girls should not generally be allowed to “raise” their “knees”: “the most immediate working of this movement is a heating one; and its use must therefore be dependent on this consideration, and regulated accordingly. […] By women, where there is a disposition to orgasm […,] it is to be used with caution. For girls it should be allowed only as an exception” (1856, 57). Women and girls should generally be prevented from getting “hot”. Schreber sexualises feminine perspiration as he casts it as a state of arousal that threatens women’s moral and physical health.3 Furthermore, he pathologises women’s libido and bars girls from running as a measure of inhibiting feminine sexual arousal. Disregarding such regulations of the female body, Eliot’s narrator dedicates significant detail to Maggie’s image as a girl runner: “[S]he ran along [until she] got out of breath” (2015, 99). Maggie’s run implies the quick extension of her lived body into her surrounding space. The representation encodes the spatiality of the girl’s extending body and thus rejects the “enclosed” mode of prescribed feminine existence (Young 1980, 149). This running girl, then, is part of Eliot’s re-­ evaluation of the tomboy trope and, broadly speaking, amounts to a counterhegemonic, protofeminist representation of Victorian girlhood. Maggie’s perceived naughtiness is closely associated with the spatiality of her lived body. The episode when Maggie pushes her delicate cousin Lucy Deane into the mud epitomises this correlation. The chapter heading spells out that this iconic event is to establish Maggie’s reputation as a troublemaker: “Maggie behaves worse than she expected” (Eliot 2015, 3). While exploring the area around their favourite pond, Lucy, who is unaccustomed to outdoor activity, blocks Maggie’s view of the

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water-snakes: “[W]ith a fierce thrust of her small brown arm, [Maggie] was to push poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud” (95). The opposition between “brown” and “pink-and-white” skin reinforces the earlier racialisation and othering of Maggie. Eliot configures her heroine’s offense against white feminine posture in somatic terms as an aggressive demand for space through the forceful flexion and extension of her arms. Driven by the desire for an unblocked view on the spectacle that the water might disclose, Maggie spontaneously reclaims her place through the medium of her body. She uses her body, and she is her body at the same time. Figuratively speaking, Maggie overthrows the dominant Victorian model of girlhood. Lucy, by contrast, personifies standard, domestic, delicate girlhood since she embraces the social constraints that bind girlhood to future wifeliness. Victorian middle- and upper-class girls are raised to fulfil the role of the “angel of the house”. The fiancée’s point of view illustrates this bourgeoise ideology. From Stephen Guest’s perspective, readers learn about Lucy’s qualifications as a future wife: “A man likes his wife to be pretty […] accomplished, gentle, affectionate, and not stupid” (342). The representation of Lucy matches these patriarchal expectations. Her impeccable behaviour extends to her perfect posture: “Lucy Deane is such a good child—you may set her on a stool, and there she’ll sit for an hour together, and never offer to get off”, Maggie’s mother notes (41). The passive voice is significant: not only is the perfect girl to perch for hours, but the position of the body is also to be determined by someone other than herself. Little Maggie’s immobility is as “deviant” as her mobility: the girl likes “lingering in great spaces of the mill” (28), “sit[ing] down by the holly” (45), or perching on a low stool near the fire “dreaming over a book” (15). In so doing, she follows her idle thoughts and escapes into her imaginary world, “a little world apart from her outside everyday life” (28). This representation undermines another aspect of the docile body that Schreber postulates. His Gymnastics takes the unity of body and mind as the point of departure for his “paean to mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body” (Gilman 2018, 207; emphasis in original). Conflating mental and physical health with productivity, he notes: “He [universal man] is destined to activity in both ways—to the full use of his mental and bodily powers: his whole being is so arranged. The sluggish of mind or idle of body long in vain for the full enjoyment of mental or bodily pleasures” (Schreber 1856, 5). For Schreber, idle or sluggish comportment is

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a symptom of “physical pathology” as well as of “moral degeneration”, as Gilman notes (2018, 205). It requires a cure. A strong spine, in turn, allegedly prevents nervous conditions ranging from hypochondria to hysteria (Schreber 1856, 57). The representation of the sedentary side of Maggie’s bearing resists these postural norms and, concomitantly, defies the docile body (Foucault 1977, 137–170). Furthermore, the narrative composition indicates the way the patriarchal regulation of feminine lifestyle affects Maggie’s orientation within the diegetic world. “For any lived body”, Young notes, “the world also appears as populated with opacities and resistances correlative to its own limits and frustrations” (1980, 147). Eliot does much to represent the experience of such limitations; indeed, the novel includes the internal focalisation of what it is like for Maggie to have her fluctuating energy curtailed all the time: “Maggie thought it would make a very nice heaven to sit by the pool in that way, and never be scolded” (2015, 38–39). The absence of disapproval alone would be heaven for the young girl. Eliot represents the older brother as an influential patriarchal figure in Maggie’s life, whose “contemptuous conception of a girl” (95) extends to a strong disapproval of their spontaneous movements. Tom excludes his sister from outdoor activities on sexist grounds, claiming that “all girls were silly—they couldn’t throw a stone so as to hit anything, couldn’t do anything with a pocket-knife” (38) or that girls are “unfit to walk in dirty places” (95). All these activities involve dexterity, mental focus, flexion, and extension, be it of hands and arms or the whole body. Throwing certain objects at a target can bring the entire body into motion; it involves the extension of the body in space, stretching sideways, twisting the trunk, extending legs backwards, stepping and leaning forward, planting the foot and releasing. Tom considers girls to be naturally deficient in mobility, which points to the patriarchal reduction of the feminine repertoire of movement in Victorian culture. Eliot shows her heroine to internalise patronising behaviour, while Tom acts out patriarchal and sexist disciplinary practices. Their joint fishing outing is a case in point: Tom “threw her line for her, and put the rod into her hand” (38). By throwing the fishing line for her, Tom prevents her from expanding her body spatially and teaches her to underestimate her own capacity. This behaviour shapes Maggie’s expectations: she “thought it probable that the small fish would come to her hook, and the big ones to Tom’s” (38). The girl cannot imagine catching a large fish on her own. Promptly, when a fish bites, Tom “came running to prevent her

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from snatching her line away” (38). The composition shows Maggie to experience her body as a set of limitations rather than possibilities: she “was frightened lest she had been doing something wrong, as usual” (38). Eliot thus conveys a specific modality of the girl’s lived body, one that relates to the world in terms of “incapacity” (Young 1980, 147). Maggie’s style of fishing configures the “discontinuity between aim [here: catching a fish] and capacity to realize the aim” (150). This discontinuity, in turn, takes the shape of “tentativeness and uncertainty which characterizes the inhibited intentionality of feminine motility” (150). While Maggie’s comportment retains elements of spontaneous energy, Eliot’s representation of her movements also showcases the conformity to feminine posture advocated by dominant medical discourse. At the same time, however, the internal focalisation through Maggie sheds a critical light on Tom’s patronising behaviour and the ways in which feminine posture seeps into the girl’s lived experience and hampers her motor performance. Maggie’s style of engaging with the world thus gradually matches the inhibited intentionality that characterises feminine comportment according to Young (1980, 146). Maggie eventually fulfils the bodily norms of white middle-class womanhood. Yet, Eliot eschews the conventional script for the tomboy tamed by marriage (Moon 2021, 195), since Maggie never ties the knot. Instead, her conformity culminates in her participation in the charity event at St. Oggs. The occasion marks the adolescent girl’s rite of passage insofar as her body no longer bursts with energy but waits anxiously (de Beauvoir 1989, 357–358). The setting at the bazaar attributes the status of passivity to femininity just like a ball does. In her stand, Maggie “was sitting quite still”, waiting in front of a “stream of costumers” (Eliot 2015, 402). Maggie’s performance of ideal Victorian womanhood points to the capitalist underpinning of the gender binary: while Tom becomes mobile enough to purchase and trade, Maggie acquires enough sedentariness to be purchased. Looking “at once beautiful and simple [naturally elegant]” (397), Maggie is mockingly represented as the great success story of patriarchal regimentation since the naughty girl has finally adopted feminine posture. Part and parcel of her commodification is her sexualisation since the portrayal renders her “an ornamental surface for the male gaze” (Threadcraft 2016, 207). Tellingly, this respectable surface of “simple, noble beauty” is modestly “clad in a white muslin” (Eliot 2015, 397). With her dark complexion concealed, whiteness combined with embodied passivity firmly

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places Maggie in the symbolic realm of white, English middle- and upper-­ class women: “as passive object—within white supremacist patriarchal culture” (Threadcraft 2016, 214). The configuration, then, associates Maggie closely with the inanimate merchandise sold at the bazaar. Commerce in this scene operates strictly along the divide of female sellers and male buyers. Given that most women sell their hand-made products, which identifies the seller with her merchandise, the representation of these kinds of trade even smacks of prostitution: sexual difference is reduced to the binary of female objects/goods and male subjects/customers. The male gaze and heteronormative desire dominate the entire perception and meaning of the so-called charity event. The bazaar illustrates Foucault’s repressive hypothesis since it exposes the profound fascination of Victorian society with sexuality behind the guise of philanthropy (1981, 15–17). The female competitors are obsessed with Maggie’s sex appeal. Envying Maggie for her popularity, they condemn her high selling rate “at once [as a sign of] frivolity” (Eliot 2015, 398). So prevalent is the male gaze, adopted by female and male characters alike, in the configuration of the pinnacle of Maggie’s social career that Eliot can be said to anticipate de Beauvoir’s insight that “man defines woman in relation to himself […]. She appears to man as an essentially sexual being because he has produced her as such” (1989, xxii; emphasis in original). Concomitantly, this male-gaze dynamic reinforces regulative discourses that determine socially acceptable behaviour for two binary genders and make heterosexuality compulsive (Threadcraft 2016, 218). Whereas Tom’s rite of passage consists in the upright delivery of a concise speech, a speechless bow to her potential father-in-law, Wakem Senior, and to Stephen marks the highest degree of Maggie’s social acceptance that she ever gains as an “admired member of the society of St. Oggs” (Eliot 2015, 397). Maggie’s symbolic gesture suggests that the two patriarchs approve of her and are willing to grant Maggie’s full social validation by virtue of marriage either to Philip, who needs his father’s permission to marry, or to Stephen, who disregards his family’s wishes. The final course of events, however, brings out the energetic, strong side of Maggie’s bearing, which correlates with her rejection of both options for marriage. With the great tidal flood, Eliot creates a setting that calls for the relinquishment of the strictures on the female body for the sake of survival. In this natural catastrophe, Maggie takes initiative from the start. She notices the flooding in the middle of the night; wakes her friend and landlord, Bob Jenkins, and his family; fetches his two boats; enters one of them; and

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sets off across the floods to her old home, the mill, to save her brother. Eliot ascribes attributes like “fearless”, or “without a moment’s shudder of fear” to her heroine, accompanied by active verbs, such as “she plunged”, “she mounted”, “crept into”, “unfastening”, and “mastering an oar” (478). The author spells out the rationale for Bob’s untypical failure in chivalry, letting her set off without any male assistance: “The fact that Maggie had been up, had waked him, and had taken the lead in activity, gave Bob a vague impression of her as one who would help to protect, not need to be protected” (478). The word choice “vague impression” points to the difficulty of representing a woman’s strong, independent bearing seriously. The narrator’s unusually earnest tone reinforces Eliot’s previous representation of Bob’s working-class code of honour. His background enhances the authentic configuration and recognition of women’s physical strength, which is otherwise seen as highly dubious within middle- and upper-class Victorian culture (264). The chapter “The Last Conflict” represents Maggie’s deviance from feminine posture in a series of actions that evoke the capable and unwavering mode of movement of an “I can” in relation to her body’s task orientation in the world (Young 1980, 146; Merleau-Ponty 2012, 139). The depiction of Maggie’s navigation of the rowing boat conveys an intentionality of movement that is capable of the incorporation of large tools into her body scheme (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 144–145). Her movements are equally controlled and directed by muscle memory as Poulter’s performance of masculinity is in Book One: “She seized an oar and began to paddle the boat forward with the energy of wakening hope […]. She was hardly conscious of any bodily sensations—except a sensation of strength” (Eliot 2015, 480; my emphasis). The description of Maggie as “clutching the oar mechanically” highlights her dexterity and intuitive motor movement (479). Readers also learn about “all her skill and power” to manoeuvre the boat in the current (481). Eliot does not convert Maggie into race-boat rower. The heroine also rests during a “helpless” moment (481), but, overall, the scene encodes Maggie’s complete absorption in the strenuous physical exertion and represents her ability to integrate the oars automatically into her motor performance. The portrayal of Maggie’s heroic act features signs of darkness and madness. The surroundings are cast in black—“twilight,” “black trees,” “the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark” (479–480)—and Maggie’s long, open, dishevelled hair suggests hysteria, her “streaming hair was dashed about by the wind” (480; see also Pearl

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2010, 165–167). The dark shades of the “final rescue” realign Maggie with her highly agile body during her flight to the Roma people and with her racialisation as non-white. Crucially, these features demarcate the deviance from white feminine posture. Maggie reaches the mill, where she finds Tom “pale with awe and humiliation” (Eliot 2015, 482). Commentators have failed to observe that it is Tom who rows the boat when some huge drifting debris crashes into the siblings before he can navigate away from it. “Pale” as Tom features here, his whiteness apparently overwrites his helplessness and incapacity as a fictional character. Much (unfavourable) scholarly attention has been paid to the subsequent scene, in which Maggie and Tom reconcile and drown in an eternal embrace (Atkinson 2015, xxiv). Scholars have failed to observe the remarkable representation of Maggie’s physical stamina that precedes their deaths. Eliot’s composition of Maggie’s rescue attempt transcends white feminine posture, while Tom’s otherwise correct white masculine posture suggests untypical fragility and errors in navigation.

Conclusion: Maggie’s Expansion of the Victorian Repertoire of Feminine Mobility and Beyond My analysis of Eliot’s embodied narration has shown that Maggie remains an iconic character that expands the Victorian repertoire of feminine mobility. Beyond that, Eliot models the siblings’ characteristic movements loosely on the water ecology of the tidal river.4 Maggie’s untamed style of body movement resembles the tidal flow of water energy pictured in the opening of the novel insofar as the incoming tide, parallel to Tom’s masculine dominance, checks the flow of the river Floss, parallel to Maggie’s lived body (Eliot 2015, 7). The narrator resumes the aquatic image in the final book. The course of Maggie’s actions is to “reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river: we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home” (371). Considering gender norms, the allegory implies that femininity and masculinity are at times discrete but ultimately joint flows of water without stable boundaries and that they merge with and dilute in the currents of the seas and oceans. On a material level, the novel conveys both Maggie’s and Tom’s embodied characters to be predicated on life force as a flow of energy but unequally channelled, blocked, and stagnated by modern technologies. This poetic configuration is partly prefigured by, and simultaneously

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transforms, the ways in which Victorian orthopaedics and other medical disciplines prescribe people’s movement along the axis of gender, sexuality, class, and race (Ricoeur 1988, 246). Eliot’s often satirical take on the proto-orthopaedic discourse and medical gymnastics corresponds to her critical portrayal of the modern techniques of irrigation. Human life forces, the narrative suggests, are prone to overwhelm modern disciplinary power by virtue of deeper primal energies that erupt periodically like the equinoctial tidal flooding at the end of The Mill on the Floss.

Notes 1. This article forms part of a larger research project in literary and cultural studies entitled “The Visceral Novel Reader” designed and led by Monika Class (Principal Investigator) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, from 2019 until 2023. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG—grant number 422574378). 2. For readings of similarly energetic physical movements of the heroines of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), see Natasha Anderson’s contribution to this volume. 3. The chapters by Pamela Gilbert and Ariane de Waal in this collection contain further analyses of the cultural and medical significance of perspiration. 4. Representations of water and rivers form one distinct context in which Victorian fiction negotiates the interplay of medicine and mobility, as Ursula Kluwick demonstrates in Chap. 7.

Works Cited Acosta, Raúl. 2021. “Mobility.” In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology, edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cliggett, 523–539. Los Angeles: SAGE. Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Atkinson, Juliette. 2015. “Introduction.” In The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight, vii–xxviii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2012. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Dawson, Gowan. 2010. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1989. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. Diedrick, James. 1988. “The ‘Grotesque Body’: Physiology in The Mill on the Floss.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 21 (4): 27–43.

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Eliot, George. 1990. “The Natural History of German Life.” In Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, 107–139. London: Penguin. Eliot, George. 2015 [1860]. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emch-Deriaz, Antoinette. 1992. “The Non-naturals Made Easy.” In The Popularization of Medicine: 1650–1850, edited by Roy Porter, 134–159. London: Routledge. Erchinger, Phillip. 2013. “Mobililty, Movement, Method and Life in G. H. Lewes.” In Perspectives on Mobility, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland, 151–175. New York: Brill. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Gilman, Sander L. 2018. Stand up Straight!: A History of Posture. London: Reaktion Books. Gowing, Laura. 2012. “Women’s Bodies and the Making of Sex in Seventeenth-­ Century England.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (4): 813–822. https://doi.org/10.1086/664469. Heinämaa, Sara. 2012. “Sex, Gender, and Embodiment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199594900.013.0012. Hugo, Victor. 2009 [1831]. Notre Dame de Paris: The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Oxford: Raintree. Korte, Barbara. 1997. Body Language in Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kristensen, Stefan. 2012. “Maurice Merlau-Ponty I – Körperschema und leibliche Subjektivität.” In Leiblichkeit: Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, edited by Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny, and Tobias N.  Klass, 23–36. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Law, Jules David. 2010. The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. London: University of Chicago Press. Lewes, George Henry. 1856. “Dwarfs and Giants: Essay in Two Parts.” Fraser’s Magazine 54: 140–153 (Part I); 286–293 (Part II). Linton, Eliza Lynn. 1996. “The Girl of the Period.” In Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology, edited by Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell, 355–361. New York: Garland. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge. Meyer, Susan. 1996. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. London: Cornell University Press.

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Mitchell, Sally. 1995. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press. Moon, Jina. 2021. “Tomboys in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction.” Journal of Victorian Culture 26 (2): 194–211. Mosse, George L. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Pearl, Sharrona. 2010. About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1985. Time and Narrative. Translated by Mclaughlin, Kathleen and David Pellauer. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative. Translated by Mclaughlin, Kathleen and David Pellauer. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schreber, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz. 1856. Illustrated Medical In-Door Gymnastics: Or a System of Medico-Hygienic Exercises Requiring no Mechanical or Other Aid, and Adapted to Both Sexes and All Ages, and for Special Cases. Translated by Henry Skelton. London: Williams & Norgate. Threadcraft, Shatema. 2016. “Embodiment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Jane Disch and M. E. Hawkesworth, 207–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uteng, Tanu Priya, and Tim Cresswell. 2008. “Introduction.” In Gendered Mobilities, edited by Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Cresswell, 1–14. Bodmin: Ashgate. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3 (2): 137–156.

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CHAPTER 7

The Mobility of Water: Aquatic Transformation and Disease in Victorian Literature Ursula Kluwick

The pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has taught us much about mobility. Specifically, it has flagged up the fact that disease is mobile. Rather than being merely something that can be contracted through an individual’s movement, it is a condition that itself moves through human bodies, in both senses of the word: while viruses spread into the various parts of the organism, disease is also transmitted through the movement of those already ill. Viruses move along with people, but the intersection of human and nonhuman matter also creates far wider ranges of mobility: viral matter is carried in human particles and transported by air and on the surface of objects.1 The new mobilities paradigm helps us think through this by showing how mobility is not only “always located” but also always “materialised”,

U. Kluwick (*) University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_7

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occurring through “rearrangements of the materiality of places” (Sheller and Urry 2006, 210). John Law (2006), for instance, explores this in an analysis of mobility and foot and mouth disease, while Simon Marvin and Will Medd (2006) follow the mobile materialisations of fat in urban metabolisms in the very same issue in which Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s seminal article appeared. More generally, however, mobility studies tend to concentrate on the mobility of people and objects (see, for instance, Cresswell 2006). This chapter, by contrast, offers a critical intervention by drawing on new materialism to conceptualise disease as mobile matter. It approaches disease both as a form of movement of matter from one person or object to another and as a result of shifts between different forms of materialisation. Specifically, this chapter focuses on disease as mobile matter within the context of nineteenth-century sanitary reform. Mid- to late Victorian theories of disease aetiology relied on visions of contagion as movement, both in contagionists’ views of the introduction of decomposition processes into living tissue and in anti-contagionists’ accounts of the production and effect of miasma: germs and miasma were understood to move into healthy bodies and make them sick. Due to concerns about contaminated drinking water as well as its role for the production of miasma, water played a significant role in writing about public health, as a carrier and as an agent of disease. It is this latter aspect that I want to highlight in this chapter by exploring the repercussions of ideas about material agency on concepts of mobility and disease. With water, material agency is almost intuitively perceptible2 because water exists in so many forms and materialisations that can be readily observed in nature (Kluwick 2019, 245–247). Due to its specific properties as well as to its role in Victorian public health, water seems an ideal medium for examining the nexus of material agency and material mobility in the context of disease. In what follows, I discuss literary works that engage with the mobility of aquatic matter and disease aetiology, both directly and metaphorically. I look at Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), two texts that represent different approaches to the links between water and disease: The Woman in White relates illness to processes of disease aetiology characteristic of nineteenth-­ century miasmatic discourse, while Three Men in a Boat expresses a vision of disease indebted to germ theory. Both novels connect water and disease in significant, but different, ways. The Woman in White, a sensation novel, contains key scenes that relate aquatic landscapes (such as a lake that

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produces miasma) and aquatic phenomena (such as rain) with dangers to health, while Three Men in a Boat, a humorous account of Thames travel, playfully contrasts ideal preconceptions of river tourism with pollution anxiety. Both works, moreover, depict water as agential and mobile and link its pathogenic potential with these properties. In order to conceptualise their depiction of aquatic agency and mobility, I draw on two related fields that engage with the agency of matter and with water, respectively: new materialism and the blue humanities.

Mobile Matter Awareness of aquatic transformability has a long tradition. Thales of Miletus already described the mutability of water “from solid to liquid to gas” (Linton 2010, 76), and Jamie Linton sketches “premodern water”, which was believed to be “an element in the classical sense” as “at once elementary, unstable (in its transmutation into the other two proximate elements, air and earth), and heterogeneous (in its unique manifestation in different places and circumstances)” (77). The conception of water changed with Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments in the 1780s, which proved that water was a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, but this sea change did not principally alter awareness of aquatic transformability and mobility. In nineteenth-century Britain, both miasma theory and concerns about drinking water were based on the intrinsic capacity of water for movement: as a vapour and as mobile matter that transported and circulated other substances.3 Expressed in contemporary critical vocabulary, this is precisely the kind of agency that Jane Bennett describes in terms of “activities and powers” in her outline of a vital materialism when she refers to the “movements and effectivity of stem cells, electricity, food, trash, and metals” as examples of the vitality of matter (2010, x). Agency thus conceived is the power to cause something, such as “the ability of plants and animal matter to induce effects in the human bodies that eat them” (53). As Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann stress in their introduction to material ecocriticism, agency in a new materialist sense “is not restricted to human action, to human subjectivity and intentionality, nor is it something humans grant to nonhuman animals” (2012, 467). Karen Barad, to avoid the traditional association of agency with individual subjects and intention, even suggests that “perhaps it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies” (2007, 23).

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In my discussion of Collins’s The Woman in White and Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, I aim to show that Victorian water texts about disease and infection convey a sense of aquatic matter “as an actively formative and productive agent” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 467). I do not claim that matter was consciously theorised as agential by Victorian writers. Rather, I want to demonstrate that literary writing about water and water-­ related disease betrays an awareness of material agency that is linked with the mobility of matter implicit in theories of disease aetiology. Water is never completely at rest, and my analysis of Victorian water novels suggests that this fact influences its literary portrayal. Research on the resonances between water, its material properties, and its representation have recently gained traction through the relatively new field of the blue humanities, a sub-field of the environmental humanities that is also influenced by new materialism. The blue humanities began to take shape around 2009 with increasingly frequent calls for ecocriticism to pay more attention not only to “green” but also to “blue” nature. At the same time, an increasing number of literary scholars not primarily invested in ecocritical research were also turning to maritime studies.4 While work on the role of the oceans in literature and culture has, of course, a much longer tradition,5 current blue humanities scholarship explores the wider consequences of an epistemological shift of perspective from land to water. As Steve Mentz contends, to regard the oceans not “simply as bodies to be crossed, but as subjects in themselves […] can open up new analytical frames” (2009b, 997). This approach entails not only a historicisation of the sea but also, and crucially for my purposes, a focus on the material constitution of water. Water is a physical compound that is essentially metamorphic in its behaviour (see, for instance, Strang 2004, 49). Its inherent mobility derives not only from the fact that it is constantly on the move— as flowing rivers, waves, and tides, as drinking water processed by human bodies, or as water put to technological use, for instance, as steam or as a cooling agent—but also from its principal material constitution on a molecular level. What we call “water” in our everyday speech is, of course, only the liquid phase of a molecular compound that also exists in solid and vaporous aggregate states. The specific form H2O takes in any one instance depends on its reaction to external conditions, factors such as air pressure and temperature, which cause the hydrogen and oxygen atoms within H2O to contract and expand in certain ways. This also means that bodies of water are in a constant if gradual process of renewal, through evaporation and condensation. Political and human geographers Philip Steinberg

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and Kimberley Peters (2015) stress the consequences of this in what they call a “wet ontology”. If space is thought in terms of water, the fact that it “is continually being reproduced by mobile molecules” comes to the fore since “in water these properties are distinct in the speed and rhythm of mobility, the persistent ease of transformation, and the enclosing materiality of depth” (2015, 252). Thinking with water thus “allows us to rethink motion and matter and how it shapes the world as we know it” (250), with “place […] forever in formation” (261). Hitherto, blue humanities scholars have mainly emphasised the spatial dimension, focussing on concrete bodies of water, mostly on the sea. For the subject of Victorian disease aetiology, this work on aquatic space is important insofar as it highlights the intrinsic transformability of water and the way in which various forces and forms of matter together influence and turn aquatic into an “emergent” space (250). This is also the rationale on which miasmatic theory was based: the idea that different substances (water, wet environments, and organic waste) together with specific forces (decomposition) produced disease. Thus, the “nuisances” that Victorian public health texts persistently deplored, namely, the moist environments contaminated with sewage and other organic waste that were believed to breed disease, can be conceptualised along these lines: as existing in a constant process of transformation and as generative, albeit with results that were potentially harmful to humans. The conceptual vocabulary of the blue humanities therefore sharpens awareness of, and makes visible, the vibrancy already implied in Victorian views of disease. It would be limiting, however, to restrict water to space, either as concrete watercourses or as specific accumulations of moisture, such as humid ground. As an extremely versatile chemical compound, water is intrinsically metamorphic. The very shape it takes depends, among other factors, on the speed of the movement of its molecules: in ice, for instance, molecules move more slowly and are further apart than in liquid water. In addition, by moving through space as well as through aggregate states, water also interacts and intermingles with other matter. As Astrida Neimanis maintains, this entails both repetition and transfer since “the materiality of water endlessly cycles and repeats, yet all the while becoming ‘different’” (2017, 53). Movement in this sense also contains the potential for contamination. It is this mobility and dispersal, together with the more visible movement of, for example, river water, that this chapter explores with recourse to representations of disease in Victorian literature.

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These, then, are the three types of aquatic mobility that I examine: the mobility of water as a substance that contains and transports other matter; the mobility of water as it moves from one phase into another; and the mobility of water as it moves of its own accord and helps generate disease. Collins’s The Woman in White and Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat are two very different types of novels, but in their specific ways, they share a conception of disease as caused by material mobility. Material agency was at the core of Victorian understandings of infection, and an exploration of processes of materialisation and material transformation offers an important extension to a mobility studies approach to disease.

Aquatic Transformations: Rain as an Agent of Disease in The Woman in White Proceeding chronologically, with the development of theories of disease aetiology from miasma to germ theory, I first turn to Collins’s 1860 sensation novel The Woman in White. As is typical of this genre, this text relies on intrigues which hinge on mobility (characters move and are moved about to accomplish complex ploys) as well as, frequently, illness (characters are whisked away or prevented from interfering under the cover of illness). The Woman in White tells the story of Laura Fairlie, a rich heiress who is robbed of her identity. She is committed to an asylum and declared dead by her husband, Sir Percival Glyde, who thereby gains access to her fortune. Her identity is exchanged with her doppelgänger Anne Catherick, who is persecuted by Sir Percival because he suspects her of possessing knowledge that is dangerous to him. Anne dies and is buried as Laura. Meanwhile Laura’s half-sister, Marian Halcombe, and Walter Hartright, Laura’s drawing teacher and, later, lover, work to save Laura and to restore her identity and fortune. The scene discussed here takes place before the identity switch is accomplished. It belongs to a part of the novel narrated by Marian, through diary entries in the first person, immediately after the events witnessed.6 Marian eavesdrops on Sir Percival and his partner in crime, Count Fosco, as they discuss their plan of how best to rob Laura of her estate. She is already aware of her sister’s unhappy marriage and suspects that Sir Percival is trying to obtain her sister’s money by fraud. She finds out about the men’s plans to eliminate Laura before the end of the summer and so appears to have gained a crucial advantage over Sir Percival and Count

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Fosco—until she succumbs to an illness caused by water.7 The period before this fateful night is marked by oppressive heat, and all the characters are waiting for the weather to break. The change in weather comes while Marian is hiding on the roof to eavesdrop on her adversaries, but she fails to notice, and then decides to ignore, the rain. However, her decision to stay outside has grave consequences: her drenching results in a prolonged and severe bout of fever. Bedridden and delirious, she is unable to warn her sister, let alone foil Sir Percival’s ploy.8 The episode in question demonstrates what new materialist and blue humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo calls trans-corporeality, a concept that “reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” (2010, 2). Trans-corporeality highlights the fact “that bodies and places are continuous” (11), constituted through material exchange. Even though this concept is not per se related to illness but rather describes a basic condition, contagion offers a particularly clear example of how trans-corporeal relations work. In fact, Collins’s depiction of the rain and its effect on Marian appears like a step-by-step performance of the progress of the water towards and into her body. Initially, Marian only smells the rain. The heat is still stifling, but the moisture is gathering in the air: “There was a smell like rain in the still, heavy air; and I put my hand out of window. No. The rain was only threatening; it had not come yet” (Collins 1999, 316). This is an oblique acknowledgement of what modern biochemistry has identified as petrichor (Bear and Thomas 1964), an odour caused by the release of geomsin, which is produced by bacteria in soil and stone and activated through moisture after periods of dryness. The smell of the as yet absent rain thus indicates that the landscape is reacting to approaching rain and that humans are included in this chain of reaction, at least through their olfactory sense. Marian’s registering of this smell is thus the first step in the trans-corporeal rapprochement between bodily and aquatic matter, whose commingling will eventually cause her fever. It also shows how material agency (the gathering moisture, the chemical reaction producing the smell) activates what Neimanis calls “bodies of water” (2017, 30), a figure that conveys how “we live as bodies, and specifically as wet and spongey ones”, in relation to water “as a particular kind of embodied and environmental materiality” (30). A crucial question that Neimanis poses concerns the “membranes that separate […] or differentiate” bodies and “[w]here and how” they “break down” (29). The smell of rain here suggests that the membrane between Marian’s body and her environment is breached

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from the start, but her behaviour in this scene indicates complete denial of what new materialists would identify as her trans-corporeal condition. Even though Marian’s initial recognition of the “threatening” rain is explicitly conscious as well as sensory, the further progression of the scene is characterised by a lack of perception and sensuous awareness. Marian fails to realise that it is raining, as all her faculties are focussed on listening and secrecy. She only notices the rain through Count Fosco’s comments: “The Count moved from the verandah to the gravel walk outside. I knew that he had moved, by his voice. ‘The rain has come at last,’ I heard him say. It had come. The state of my cloak showed that it had been falling thickly for some little time” (326; emphasis in original). As this passage suggests, Marian does not at first perceive the rain directly through her own physical sensations, but rather by proxy. And once aware of it, she still does not feel it but merely observes its traces on her coat. In contrast to the Count, her emphasis is hence on a sense that is associated with distance (sight) rather than closeness (touch). Instead of acknowledging the potential effect of the rain on her body, Marian stresses the protective barrier between them: her coat, which has hitherto kept her safe from the actual experience of wetness, and thus, implicitly, the inability of the raindrops to move beyond a certain boundary. The membrane breach is becoming obvious, but Marian persists in ignoring the rain, concealing its impact in a half-sentence and shifting the focus to Madame Fosco’s reaction to the rain. The latter observes the rain from her window: “I saw her fingers steal round the corner of the blind, and draw it on one side. The dim white outline of her face, looking out straight over me, appeared behind the window. I kept still, shrouded from head to foot in my black cloak. The rain, which was fast wetting me, dripped over the glass, blurred it, and prevented her from seeing anything. ‘More rain!’ I heard her say to herself. She dropped the blind—and I breathed again freely” (326–327). Marian’s main concern in this scene is for her immediate safety, and so she highlights the fact that she escapes detection due to the rain. Again, the cloak appears as a protective shell which hides her from view; but so, now, does the rain itself. It has become a veil that prevents Madame Fosco from seeing clearly what lies in front of her. As before, Marian disregards the trans-corporeal effect of the rain and concentrates on the conversation below. But in a brief side remark, she also concedes that the rain is “fast wetting” her. The membrane breach has now become palpable, and she is no longer protected from the discomfort

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of cold and wetness. The rain soaks her, and even though its impact can be temporally ignored, it cannot be prevented. It is only when Sir Percival and Count Fosco retire and Marian is free to move again that she becomes fully aware of the pathogenic effect of the rain. From then on, references to the rain punctuate the account of her rapid deterioration. With the words “It had been raining, raining all the time” (333), Marian finally consciously acknowledges the rain, and the weary repetition of “raining” conveys her admission of its stealthy but sustained force. The steady fall of the rain has quickly transformed Marian from an active, energetic, and resolute young woman into a helpless wreck, a wet body in a wet environment: “I was cramped by my position and chilled to the bones. When I first tried to move, the effort was so painful to me that I was obliged to desist. I tried a second time, and succeeded in rising to my knees on the wet roof” (333). Marian is now reduced to creeping, no longer as a stratagem, as when she initially entered the roof, but because she can no longer rise higher than to her knees. In her own words, she returns to her room “drenched to the skin, cramped in every limb, cold to the bones, a useless, helpless, panic-stricken creature” (334). As water moves right into the tissue and bones of Marian’s body, it causes material change in the form of disease, a fever that later turns to typhus (371). Back in her room, Marian, the most practical and resolute of female characters in the novel, finds herself unable to decide or do anything. Her willpower has literally been washed away, and she has become immobile: she remains sitting in one spot, afraid to even lie down for fear of not having “the sense and the strength to rise again” (335). The body of water here receives a decidedly morbid inflection, and Marian’s last lamentation before her diary becomes illegible, acknowledging the rain as an agential force that has robbed her of her power to move and act: “Oh, the rain, the rain—the cruel rain that chilled me last night! […] So cold, so cold—oh, that rain last night!” (335). Disease in The Woman in White signifies immobility and the inability to act, to defend oneself or others. The rain in this novel is a deus ex machina that intervenes at a crucial moment in the novel to suspend Marion’s agency and allow the sinister plot against Laura to run its course. But in this literary function, it relies on the role of water as mobile matter that transforms both itself and its surroundings, operating on human bodies and provoking material change. As Marian’s lament about the effect of the water on her body, her faculties, and even her ability to move indicates,

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this role of water was recognised by Victorian writers, even if it was not expressly identified as aquatic agency.

The Flow of Disease: Aquatic Infection in Three Men in a Boat The power of water to act was much more explicitly acknowledged with respect to its flow (for instance, in rivers and floods) and its ability to move objects and matter. As regards disease aetiology, water was recognised as an important conduit for matter that caused illness. This role of water came to the fore with concerns about the contamination of drinking water during the middle of the century and again with advances in germ theory.9 In fact, Wietske Smeele has recently argued that early and mid-century satirical cartoons about the cholera “actively engaged with, and even anticipated, the scientific breakthroughs of [John] Snow and [Robert] Koch” (2016, 16) by criticising the quality of London drinking water. Cartoons such as William Heath’s “Monster Soup” (1828) and John Leech’s “A Drop of London Water” (1850) drew water as inhabited by myriads of minute creatures. In contrast to sanitary reformers, whose “focus was on the air surrounding the water, not the water itself” (Smeele 2016, 20), cartoonists directed attention to the harmful agents within drinking water rather than to miasma. Their cartoons implied that acts as mundane and necessary as drinking water enabled disease to move into and, in the case of “A Drop of London Water” and its spectacle of humanoid contamination,10 also between human bodies. In the same satirical vein, this concern is also at the heart of the comedy of a scene from Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat written five years after Koch’s discovery of the cholera bacillus in 1884. Jerome’s late Victorian bestseller is a parody of Thames travel guides which describes a trip up the river by three friends, George, Harris, and J., with their dog, Montmorency. The novel developed out of a series of vignettes penned by Jerome for the magazine Home Chimes. Jerome wanted to create a new version of the popular Thames guidebook genre by combining factual historical information with humorous relief in the form of anecdotes that were taken from his personal experience of boating on the river with two friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel. As Alison Byerly observes, the Thames trip was a “standard pastime” (2013, 85) in the last third of the nineteenth century, when the “cleaning up of

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the Thames in the 1860s and 1870s paved the way for its reemergence as a site of leisure and recreation” (86). It is precisely the popularity and “power” of what Byerly calls “the Thames fantasy” in its standard narrative form that “made it tempting to deflate” (111). She argues that “[t]he guidebook format was so well established by the end of the century that it could be brilliantly parodied in Jerome’s book” (111). In fact, parody and humour took over, and most of the historical passages were eventually cut. What remains, therefore, is a comical account of the three protagonists’ trip upriver, interspersed with the occasional bit of history. Essentially, the novel is a pseudo-picaresque tale of three friends in pursuit of pleasure on a river that constantly thwarts their designs. The fact that the three friends travel upstream is significant, as it means that they revert the more usual direction of Thames travel. As Byerly points out, Thames excursionists would typically proceed to Oxford by train and then row back to London (99–100). But the fact that Jerome’s protagonists travel upstream points to the importance of the literature of exploration as a subtext for this novel. As Byerly notes, Victorian Thames travel narratives tend to present the journey upstream as a movement “away from London, from civilization, from the present, into a fantasy world of the narrator’s own making” (100). The journey up the Thames was also a journey into rural England, a version of England nostalgically reinterpreted as some kind of “essential” England (86), a counterpoint to the industrialised nation that England had become. In Thames travel rhetoric, the rural landscapes of the upper Thames were pastoral landscapes, repositories of the harmonious vision of benign and invigorating nature also integral to Jerome’s three men’s expectations of “a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river” (Jerome 1999, 167). At the same time, the movement away from London also signified a movement away from the familiar landscape of the city, a movement that was endowed with the mystique of exploration: “The sense of exploration associated with going upriver allowed the traveller to feel that he or she was penetrating into unfamiliar, if not unknown, territory. This redefinition of rural England as uncharted territory reflects the growing estrangement of the city-dweller from the countryside and his or her nostalgia for that lost world” (Byerly 2013, 101). By reversing the usual direction of Thames travel, Jerome taps into this symbolic meaning and presents his protagonists’ journey as a conduit into a different world quite separate from life in the metropolis. In Jerome’s parody of the “popular imperial romance formula” (Scheick 2007, 407) established by the explorer and writer Henry M. Stanley, and

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epitomised just over a decade after the publication of Three Men in a Boat by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), rural England is uncivilised as well as pastoral, and this disconnect between rural and urban experience also influences the engagement with water in the scene to which I now turn. In this scene, the three friends run out of drinking water, beg water off a lock-keeper, and are told to drink the water from the river. The humour which develops in the course of this conversation derives from a misunderstanding that points to completely divergent understandings and practices of hygiene. When asked for water, the lock-keeper tells the three travellers to “take as much as [they] want, and leave the rest” (Jerome 1999, 117), but as it does not even occur to them that the river water can be drunk without being filtered or purified, they initially fail to understand him: “‘Thank you so much,’ murmured George, looking about him. ‘Where— where do you keep it?’” (117). Drinking water, for the three bourgeois Londoners, is something delivered by pipes, to be subjected to special treatment and kept separate from other bodies of water. The lock-keeper, by contrast, regards these middle-class city men as coxcombs who fail to see the wealth of drinkable water right in front of them: “‘Why, bless us, where’s your eyes?’ was the man’s comment, as he twisted George round and pointed up and down the stream. ‘There’s enough of it to see, ain’t there?’ ‘Oh!’ exclaimed George, grasping the idea; ‘but we can’t drink the river, you know!’ ‘No; but you can drink some of it,’ replied the old fellow. ‘It’s what I’ve drunk for the last fifteen years’” (117; emphases in original). In its popular form, the Thames travel narrative was usually associated with health and invigoration, as it combined exercise with the escape from the polluted city and spiritual renewal (Byerly 2013, 96–97). But Jerome introduces a different, and more negative, health aspect by focusing on the actual quality of Thames water. Conceptions of what is fit for human consumption—what you can and cannot drink—obviously vary considerably in this scene. Whereas George would like his water to come “out of a pump” (Jerome 1999, 117), the lock-keeper presents the river as an abundant and unproblematic source of drinking water. There is obviously an element of teasing, perhaps even derision, in this presentation of the townsman’s standard of hygiene as squeamishness, and the narrator himself develops this ridicule further when he comments that the pump water they eventually manage to procure is likely to have come from the river as well but that what actually counts is not so much the real but the imagined origin of the water and that it is their belief in its purity that prevents them

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from further harm: “I dare say that was only river water, if we had known. But we did not know, so it was all right. What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over” (117; emphasis in original). While the joke is on the three townsmen in this scene, however, the lock-keeper also misreads the river, despite his familiarity with it. His reply to George’s question about where he keeps his water casts the source of water as an unchanging and, crucially, immobile entity: “It’s always in the same place, my boy” (117). But while this might be true of the river, it is not true of its water, the key characteristic of which is flux. And this mobility is also implicated in the three men’s suspicion of the river water, as its movement and intermingling of matter also foster the circulation of substances that have a negative effect on human health. As Tina Young Choi argues with respect to sanitary reports on insanitary living conditions, the “rhetorical force” of such descriptions “depends upon the multiple connections represented as possible and often probable—the links between the middle-class observer, the observed lower-class individual, and, most disturbingly, the anonymous individuals present only as bodily remnants, as vitiated bodily fluids and gases overflowing from the observed sewer” (2001, 566). And even though the present scene from Jerome deals with a different sanitary subject, the connection between bodies is also relevant to the assessment of drinking water and, in fact, was one of the main concerns in Victorian debates about water and health (Gilbert 2004, 112–116). The lock-keeper’s conviction that the river water is local and stationary—“always in the same place”—ignores aquatic mobility and circulation, on which much of the three friends’ reservations about drinking “the river” rests. Connectivity is a key factor in the perception of health risk, and it also influences Jerome’s three men in their assessment of Thames water. This is demonstrated by the following reminiscence which is triggered in the autodiegetic narrator by the incidence just discussed. He remembers a previous episode of being on the river without access to pure water, with the same friends. In that instance, they decide to use river water for their tea but remain nervous about this decision: “[I]t was a case of going without our tea or taking water from the river. Harris was for chancing it. He said it must be all right if we boiled the water. He said that the various germs of poison present in the water would be killed by the boiling. So we filled our kettle with Thames backwater, and boiled it; and very careful we were to see that it did boil” (Jerome 1999, 117; emphasis in original). What is at issue here is another instance of trans-corporeality. Water is

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presented as a potentially dangerous substance, full of harmful living matter: by drinking from the river, the friends risk imbibing “germs of poison” which must be “killed” in order to make the water fit for human consumption.11 However, killing the germs is not enough; as the remainder of the narrator’s memory shows, the sheer prospect that harmful matter, even if theoretically rendered harmless (in this case by boiling), could move into their bodies is both frightening and repulsive. This is demonstrated by the following encounter the friends have just as they are about to drink their tea: […] George, with his cup half-way to his lips, paused and exclaimed: ‘What’s that?’ […] Harris and I followed his gaze, and saw, coming down towards us on the sluggish current, a dog. It was one of the quietest and peacefullest dogs I have ever seen. I never met a dog who seemed more contented—more easy in its mind. It was floating dreamily on its back, with its four legs stuck up straight into the air. It was what I should call a full-bodied dog, with a well-­ developed chest. […] George said he didn’t want any tea, and emptied his cup into the water, Harris did not feel thirsty, either, and followed suit. I had drunk half mine, but I wished I had not. I asked George if he thought I was likely to have typhoid. (118)

What is at stake in this scene is mobility and the unexpected trans-­ corporeal connections which it facilitates. On the one hand, there is the natural flux of the river water, which transports objects and substances, picks them up, discards, and spreads them along its path, thus randomly linking different places and things with each other. On the other hand, there is the movement of matter from one body to another as a form of undesired connection, enabled and quickened by the agency of water. As J.’s reference to the dog’s “well-developed chest” humorously suggests, this dog is in an advanced stage of decomposition. The almost pastoral mode of description of the peaceful and “contented” dog contrasts ironically with what is actually happening to this dead and waterlogged animal. The dog is changing shape, well on its way to breaking apart, spreading its dissolving flesh, and merging with the water of the river, a morbid version of the body of water indeed. Faced with this sign of material transformation, J. and his friends lose their appetite in a classic example of what Julia Kristeva describes as abjection. Indeed, this scene brings together two of the “elementary” causes of abjection that Kristeva names,

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namely, “food loathing” (1982, 2) and the corpse (3). According to Kristeva, abjection functions as a form of self-protection, and this is borne out by this scene: the revulsion caused by the putrefying dog triggers an instinctive shrinking away that immediately separates the three characters from the source of abjection, the dog. They turn, to adopt Kristeva’s phrase, “to the side and […] away from defilement” (2). Practically, this separation takes the form of spilt water as the three friends pour the tea back into the river. In refusing to drink their tea, George and Harris protect their bodies against the “chaos” which Kristeva regards as the central threat of the abject, which “draws [the subject] toward the place where meaning collapses” (2). This chaos is perceptible in the narrator J.’s reaction, who has “drunk half” his tea “but wished [he] had not” (Jerome 1999, 118). In drinking the water which potentially contains putrefying dog matter, he feels he has lost control over his body. His question to George, whether he thinks he is “likely to have typhoid”, betrays a conception of disease as an instantaneous chain of reactions: J. worries that he might already be ill a mere seconds after he has drunk his tea and spotted the dog in the river. Most significantly, this means that his perception of his own state of health becomes unreliable; he simply does not know whether he has been infected or not, and this is expressed in an immediately confused sense of self. George’s answer is characteristically light-­ hearted, but nevertheless shares J.’s sense of disease as chaos: “He said: Oh no, he thought I had a very good chance indeed of escaping it. Anyhow, I should know in about a fortnight whether I had it or not” (118). Even as George reassures J., he reaffirms the idea that he might already be ill. J.’s current state of health is precarious and uncertain, and what he will know in two weeks is whether he has been ill all along. The model of disease aetiology that underlies this scene is contagionist: disease is contracted literally by the introduction of decomposition processes into living tissue—here, potentially, by the imbibing of water that has been contaminated by the dead dog. But the view of disease as instantaneous is also reminiscent of anti-contagionist theories with their belief in the spontaneous production of disease from putrefying matter through the generation of miasma. In both views, disease and infection are conceptualised as forms of mobility: disease occurs when putrid matter moves into and corrupts healthy bodies. The bloated dog renders this mobility visible. Before it floats into view, the three friends persuade themselves that the water must be fine, but the appearance of this potential source of infection shatters this illusion. The decomposing dog stands

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metonymically for the material change taking place in the river as water becomes both the carrier and the agent of disease. Putrid matter oozes from the corpse and infects the water; minute particles of dirt, sewage, and other substances have the power to modify the physical constitution of anyone who drinks from the river. The dead dog in the Thames thus highlights the inexorable agency and mobility of matter as it moves into and out of human bodies, potentially producing disease and forging abject connections.

Conclusion: Aquatic Agency and Mobility Water is an actant in Bruno Latour’s sense, an “acting agent” or “intervener” able to modify other actors (2004, 75; emphasis in original). As mobile matter, it operates on other substances—bodies and things—and provokes material change. As Pamela Gilbert’s contribution to this collection, for instance, stresses, in the Victorian period, water was employed as an agent to cure disease, for example, through hydrotherapy and in spas. But when not harnessed in these conscious ways but left to its own natural devices, the agency and the mobility of water lay outside human control. Victorian writers recognised this and often sketched water and its material transformability as uncanny and potentially harmful. As both a carrier of disease and as mobile matter in itself, water is written into Victorian fiction as a sign of the uncertain position of the human which had to find and defend its place in an environment that, far from being passive and static, was ceaselessly shifting and changing, not only being modified through human intervention and new technologies but also transforming both itself and the humans that were part of it in myriad, beneficial, as well as harmful and even destructive ways. My readings of Collins’s The Woman in White and Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat show that a new materialist perspective supplements the mobilities paradigm by highlighting the inherent mobility of substances such as water. Material mobility is not restricted to materials and objects being moved by external agents and in response to external impulses. With substances such as water, mobility is inscribed into the basic molecular structure. In conceptualising material agency, new materialism hence also makes visible a fundamental kind of mobility that lies at the bottom of more visible forms of movement. As the blue humanities submit, water is especially useful for the type of analysis showcased here not only because it is mobile but also because it is

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a key component of human bodies. Humans depend on constant access to water and what water they drink and what matter this water carries crucially influences their health. As the two novels discussed here show, human beings are bodies of water. The rain and its move into Marian’s body in The Woman in White and the possibly infectious river in Three Men in a Boat demonstrate how water and the disease it brings were conceived by Victorian writers as mobile matter. The trans-corporeal connections with H2O that (potentially) lead to disease in these novels thus expose the fundamental ways in which mobility shapes human health.

Notes 1. In her work on the intersections between avian, human, and viral mobility, Stephanie Lavau, moreover, helpfully distinguishes between “two modes of mobility, that of viral movement and that of mutability” (2014, 298; emphasis in original). The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a wave of research into viruses and mobility—see, for instance, Sirkeci and Cohen (2020) and Adey et al. (2021). 2. As Rowan Ellis observes in his discussion of “water as a mobile materiality”, it may even “be stating the obvious to say that water is mobile” (2014, 269). 3. On miasma theory and the controversy about drinking water, see, for instance, Allen (2008) and Wohl (1983). 4. For blue humanities scholarship avant la lettre, see, for instance, Brayton (2012), Cohen (2010), Mentz (2009a), Yaeger (2010), or, even earlier, Klein and Mackenthun (2004). Mentz proposed the term “blue cultural studies” in a programmatic article published in 2009. 5. See, for instance, Gilroy (1993) and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s publications on maritime history (2000; Rediker 2004). 6. The Woman in White continues to be famous for its unconventional narrative structure, consisting of numerous “documents”, such as letters, diaries, and legal texts and hence unravelling a complex plot through numerous characters’ perspectives. 7. The entire episode takes place in Chaps. 9 and 10 of Marian’s diary in the second epoch of the novel. See Collins (1999, 316–335). 8. Water has a negative effect here that relates to one of its broader aesthetic and thematic functions in Victorian writing. For an analysis of aquatic aesthetics and the Gothic, see Kluwick (2017). For a discussion of women and water as punishment, see, for instance, Nead (1990).

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9. See, for instance, the work of Allen (2008), Gilbert (2004), Halliday (2009), and Wohl (1983) for the role of water during the sanitary reform period. 10. These humanoid creatures allude to fears of the contamination of drinking water with sewage, and as such, “this illustration acknowledges the role that humans play in proliferating cholera” (Smeele 2016, 20). 11. Among other aspects, Markku Hokkanen’s chapter in this volume considers unclear or contaminated water as a specific health concern of nineteenth-­ century colonisers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Works Cited Adey, Peter, Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and David Tyfield, eds. 2021. “Pandemic (Im)Mobilities.” Special issue, Mobilities 16 (1). https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17450101.2021.1872871. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Allen, Michelle. 2008. Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens: Ohio University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bear, I.  J., and R.  G. Thomas. 1964. “Nature of Argillaceous Odour.” Nature 201: 993–995. https://doi.org/10.1038/201993a0. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Brayton, Dan. 2012. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Byerly, Alison. 2013. Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cohen, Margaret. 2010. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collins, Wilkie. 1999 [1860]. The Woman in White. Edited by Matthew Sweet. London: Penguin. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 2007 [1899]. Edited by Robert Hampson. London: Penguin. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Ellis, Rowan. 2014. “Water.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 269–278. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

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Gilbert, Pamela K. 2004. Mapping the Victorian Social Body. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press. Heath, William. 1828. “Monster Soup, Commonly Called Thames Water.” Coloured Engraving. London: T. McLean. Halliday, Stephen. 2009. The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis. Stroud: The History Press. Jerome, Jerome K. 1999 [1889]. Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel. Edited by Jeremy Lewis. London: Penguin. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (3): 448–475. Kluwick, Ursula. 2017. “Die unheimliche Natur: Schauer- und Sensationsroman als Spielarten einer ökologischen Ästhetik.” In Ökologische Genres und Schreibmodi, edited by Evi Zemanek, 181–194. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kluwick, Ursula. 2019. “Aquatic Matter: Water in Victorian Fiction.” Open Cultural Studies 3: 245–255. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-­2019-­0022. Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun, eds. 2004. Sea Changes: Historicising the Ocean. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lavau, Stephanie. 2014. “Viruses.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 298–305. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Law, John. 2006. “Disaster in Agriculture: Or Foot and Mouth Mobilities.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 227–239. https://doi.org/10. 1068/a37273. Leech, John. “A Drop of London Water.” Cartoon. Punch. 11 May 1850: 188. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. Linton, James. 2010. What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Marvin, Simon, and Will Medd. 2006. “Metabolisms of Obecity: Flows of Fat through Bodies, Cities, and Sewers.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 313–324. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37272. Mentz, Steve. 2009a. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Bloomsbury.

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Mentz, Steve. 2009b. “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature.” Literature Compass 6 (5): 997–1013. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-­4113.2009.00655.x. Nead, Lynda. 1990. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury. Rediker, Marcus. 2004. “The Red Atlantic, or, ‘A Terrible Blast Swept over the Heaving Sea.’” In Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, edited by Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, 111–130. New York: Routledge. Scheick, William J. 2007. “Going to Find Stanley: Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 50 (4): 403–414. https://doi.org/10.2487/elt.50.4(2007)0008. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Sirkeci, Ibrahim, and Jeffrey H.  Cohen, eds. 2020. COVID-19 and Migration: Understanding the Pandemic and Human Mobility. London: Transnational Press London. Smeele, Wietske. 2016. “Grounding Miasma, or Anticipating the Germ Theory of Disease in Victorian Cholera Satire.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 49 (2): 15–27. Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. 2015. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1068/ d14148p. Strang, Veronica. 2004. The Meaning of Water. Oxford and New York: Berg. Wohl, Anthony S. 1983. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Yaeger, Patricia, ed. 2010. “Oceanic Studies”. Special issue, PMLA 125 (3). Young Choi, Tina. 2001. “Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability.” Victorian Studies 43: 561–589.

CHAPTER 8

A “Feverish Restlessness”: Dance as Decadent Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry Stefanie John

In his polemical treatise Degeneration, the German doctor and critic Max Nordau described the “fin-de-siècle state of mind” (1895, 1), which supposedly afflicted European literature and culture at the end of the nineteenth century, in pathological terms. “The disposition of the times” was, in Nordau’s words, “a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement” (2). While Nordau’s assessment of the period—and his critique of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements in particular—was notoriously pessimistic, he was not alone in evoking health and disease in descriptions of contemporary culture. In his essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), the British poet and critic Arthur Symons (1865–1945) conceived of Decadent writing as “a new and beautiful and interesting disease” (1989, 72) and coined the catchphrase of a maladie fin de siècle (73, emphasis in original). While modern scholars of Decadence continue to make use of the trope,1 interconnections of the

S. John (*) Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_8

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maladie fin de siècle and the paradigm of mobility—paired in Nordau’s notion of a “feverish restlessness”—have received little attention. Nordau’s phrasing, which evokes the symptom of excessive body temperature alongside mental and physical states of nervous agitation, illustrates the pathological and kinetic language of Decadence, which will be the central concern of this chapter. Decadence, commonly defined as a radical continuation of art for art’s sake in literary works that celebrated transgressive sensory and mental experiences, was itself a mobile phenomenon, which had travelled from continental Europe to Britain. Symons’s essay, which lists writings by French and Belgian authors as models of the “beautiful and interesting disease”, illuminates this transnational dimension. The movement was most alive in epicentres of urban mobility such as London and Paris, where poets witnessed the acceleration and mechanisation of everyday life. But while new opportunities for long-distance travel, urban transport, and cultural exchange arose at the end of the nineteenth century, physical and mental ailments as well as the pathologisation of non-normative sexual identities could entail immobility and confinement. This was a pressing concern for queer authors such as Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), whose conviction for “gross indecency” in 1895 entailed two years of imprisonment and put an end to his career. The poets Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece and lover Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who wrote jointly as Michael Field, escaped this fate, and took advantage of the improvements in women’s mobility at the turn of the century. Their commutes between London and the suburbs and travels in Europe crucially inspired their creative method (Vadillo 2005, 154–195). But the two women later also experienced the physical constraints imposed by ill health. Both died from cancer within less than a year of one another. The careers of Wilde and Symons illuminate further confluences of mobility and health. Both writers moved from the “periphery” of Ireland and Wales, respectively, to London, and both visited European metropolises such as Paris and Rome, which Symons, an avid travel writer, would reflect on in his prose and poetry. For Wilde, the continent eventually became a place of exile, following his release from prison. He died in Paris—presumably from complications of an ear infection and meningitis (Robins and Sellars 2000). Symons outlived Wilde, Bradley, Cooper, and many other key figures of fin-de-siècle England but experienced a mental breakdown while travelling in Italy in 1908 and was diagnosed with “General Paralysis of the Insane” (Beckson 1983, 4).2

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These twists and turns in the lives of Wilde, Symons, Bradley, and Cooper substantiate, in anecdotal manner, the argument of this chapter, which approaches disease and mobility as metaphors and aesthetic effects in British Decadent poetry. It traces interconnections between the sense of cultural decline Victorians associated with the final decades of the nineteenth century and poetic renditions of “unhealthy” states between movement and stasis, which come to the fore with particular force in depictions of dances and dance-like movements. Drawing on selected poems by Wilde, Symons, and Field, I demonstrate that these poetic mobilities responded to and inspired conceptions of Decadence as a disease. Rather than pessimistically lamenting the deterioration of Victorian culture, the poets developed aesthetic means of productively engaging with the speed of modernisation at the turn of the century. As Stephen Arata has noted, “[t]he highly stylized patterns of certain decadent texts […] allows them to be seen as at once a symptom of and a response to the increasing mechanization of contemporary society” (2014, 1009). These “symptom[s]” arise not merely in Decadent stock images of urban nightlife—including smoky bars and cafes, music halls, and gas-lit alleys—but, as I will demonstrate, also come to life in poetic choreographies which foreground restlessness, circularity, and idleness. Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885); Symons’s “The Street-Singer” from Days and Nights (1889), his “Prologue”, and “La Mélinite” from London Nights (1895); and Field’s “The Iris Was Yellow, the Moon Was Pale” from Underneath the Bough (1893) present subjects and objects which idle, wheel, and waltz in space and in poetic form. By combining strange modes of agitation and paralysis, the poems flirt with medical understandings of fin-de-siècle culture and subvert Victorian paradigms of regularisation, progress, and productivity. Their morbid choreographies “disturb bipolar logics of […] the mobile and the immobile” and anticipate, in lyric form, the practices associated with the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006, 216). The following section of the chapter outlines in more detail the medical imagery which pervaded the cultural discourse surrounding Decadence and illuminates its interconnections with mobility and the theme of dance. Subsequent sections examine Wilde, Symons, and Field’s poetic renditions of Decadent mobilities.

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Urban Mobility, Dance, and the Medical Rhetoric of Late Victorian Cultural Criticism In the late nineteenth century, the term “decadence” was loaded with anxieties surrounding cultural deterioration. It was “first commonly used to describe a society as it decayed, falling from a state of health and prosperity to one of physical and ethical ruin” (Denisoff 2007, 33). In “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, Symons evokes such connotations when he argues that recent innovations in European literature exemplify “all the qualities that mark the end of great periods”, including “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” (1989, 72). The restless pursuit of extreme sense experiences accounts for the pathological character of Decadent writing: “Healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered” (72). While Symons found value in such “beautiful” (72) depravity, other Victorian critics made use of pathological terminology to vilify any artistic expression that perverted established moral codes. In his infamous attack on the Pre-Raphaelites, Robert Buchanan accused the “fleshly school of poetry”, in which he included Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, for their “morbid deviation from healthy forms of life” (1871, n. pag.). Buchanan condemned the poets for “diligently spreading the seeds of disease broadcast wherever they are read and understood” (n. pag.). In a similar vein, Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have called Swinburne “a perfect leper and a mere sodomite” (quoted in Hyder 1933, 180). But the most rigorous and elaborate condemnation of Aestheticism and Decadence in medical terms remains Nordau’s Degeneration (1892, translated into English in 1895). Introducing “degeneration as a form of mental pathology bound to hysteria, leading to the narcissism and will-lessness of the modern artist” (Bourne Taylor 2007, 14), Nordau identified alleged symptoms of such derangement among artists and authors as diverse as Rossetti, Wilde, Walter Pater, Richard Wagner, and Henrik Ibsen. Nordau treated their work as evidence of “the Dusk of nations”, a condition of society in which “[t]hings as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that is worth an effort to uphold them” (1895, 5–6). The verbs “totter”, “plunge”, and “reel and fall” convey a view of social decline in terms of a series of imbalanced and unrestrained downward movements. Like

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Buchanan’s notion of poets “spreading the seeds of disease”, Nordau’s wording partakes in the cross-fertilisation of discourses of modernity, mobility, and medicine in the late nineteenth century. While “Nordau’s extremism” may seem “laughable” today (Denisoff 2007, 31), at the time of writing, (pseudo-)scientific theories were frequently called upon to explain social and cultural phenomena. Ideas inherited from social Darwinism, eugenics, psychology and psychiatry, sexology, and criminology all fed into complaints of cultural and racial degeneration. Nordau’s diagnosis of late-nineteenth-century society shares key assumptions with studies as diverse as Bénédict Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857); Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (1876), published in English as Criminal Man in 1911; and Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886, translated into English in 1894). Nordau’s role in fin-de-siècle debates around cultural degeneration has been well documented,3 and yet the conceptualisations of mobility and immobility which inform his medical rhetoric deserve further attention. These intersections can illuminate Decadent poetic practices. Nordau’s book is structured like a medical treatise, in which dissections of individual artists and writers are framed by chapters titled “The  Symptoms”, “Diagnosis”, “Prognosis”, and “Therapeutics”. He lines up physical as well as mental failings to explain processes of cultural decline. In the opening chapter, Nordau describes the fin-de-siècle “disposition” as “curiously confused, a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent feeling is that of imminent perdition and extinction” (1895, 2). This condition oscillates between excessive movement and a lack of direction, between sensual overstimulation and paralysis. For Nordau, these tensions are evidence of an outright “severe mental epidemic”: “But the physician, especially if he have [sic] devoted himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies, recognises at a glance, in the fin-de-­ siècle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ‘decadent’ works and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia” (15, emphasis in original).

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Hysteria and neurasthenia were common medical diagnoses in late Victorian society. The former gained recognition through Freudian psychoanalysis, while the term “neurasthenia”, which describes a state of nervous exhaustion, was popularised by the American neurologist George Miller Beard. Comprising a dubiously broad array of symptoms, ranging from chronic fatigue to suicidal mania, “neurasthenia was ideally suited to the concerns and preoccupations of the last decade of the century” (Wood 2001, 174), especially to those of the urban intellectuals. Nordau, accordingly, locates the cause for nervous ailments in the accelerated lifestyles of modern city-dwellers. “The inhabitant of a large town”, he writes, “is continually exposed to unfavourable influences which diminish his vital powers far more than what is inevitable” (1895, 35). He lists overpopulation and the growing crime rate amongst such “unfavourable influences”, but even more significant are the technical innovations in transport and communication, which profoundly affected the pace of modern life.4 Nordau explains how the speed and bustle of modernity presumably overstimulate the nerves: “All these activities, […] involve an effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue. Every line we read or write, every human face we see, every conversation we carry on, every scene we perceive through the window of the flying express, sets in activity our sensor nerves and our brain centres. Even the little shocks of rail way travelling, not perceived by consciousness, the perpetual noises, and the various sights in the streets of a large town, our suspense pending the sequel of progressing events […] cost our brains wear and tear” (39). The new modes of navigating space supposedly strain the nervous system and cause perpetual sensory agitation, leading to the “feverish restlessness” experienced by the urban classes. But as the diagnosis of neurasthenia implies, excessive movement of body and mind can also entail feelings of exhaustion and languor, defined by immobility. Nordau deems the paradigmatic Decadent condition of ennui, the feeling of “despondency” (19), and “disinclination to action of any kind” (20), as characteristic of the degenerate mindset. Both excessive and reduced states of mobility inform his portrayal of the fin-de-siècle disposition. Ultimately, Nordau merely reproduced “the ‘hysteria’ that he claimed to see all around him”, as Jenny Bourne Taylor notes (2007, 13). But his argument nonetheless consolidated intersections of malady and mobility in the fin-de-siècle vocabulary. In “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, Symons, too, draws on the language of sensory overload and imbalance to describe the “unhealthy” attributes of fin-de-siècle society and its new literature: “[T]his unreason

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of the soul—[…] this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion, is but another form of the maladie fin de siècle. For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization grown over-­ luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct” (1989, 73; emphasis in original). Both Nordau and Symons resort to pathological images of mobility and paralysis. A “feverish restlessness”, an “unstable equilibrium”, a sense of the spirit being “overbalanced” and of nerves being overstimulated exist, in their accounts, alongside a tendency towards languor, uncertainty, and inaction. From a medical perspective, their language reflects the overlapping of physiological and psychological knowledge, implying that the state of the mind can affect the body and vice versa. From a cultural point of view, the account of the maladie fin de siècle in terms of inactivity, irregularity, and imbalance undermines teleological ideals of progress, of moving towards a designated aim. Nordau’s and Symons’s evocations of overstimulated, dejected conditions contrast sharply with the ideal of linear progression that characterised the Victorian pursuit of ever-increasing economic, imperial, and scientific advancement. Their insistence on imbalance and irregularity runs counter to the mainstream narrative of mobility in the era of “high modernity”, described by Tim Cresswell as “a moment when mobility became increasingly regulated and regular—marked by timetables and mechanization” (2006, 10). Irregular mobilities also found their way into Decadent poetry. As Nick Freeman has pointed out, “the brevity of encounters and the transience of perceptions”, experienced, above all, in the metropolis, “required a mode of writing newly responsive to spontaneity” (2018, 76). By employing short forms and impressionistic techniques which prefigured twentieth-­ century Modernism, Decadent poets sought to express the new experiences of moving in time and space, in “a desperate endeavour to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life” (Symons 1989, 74). Such literature cannot reproduce movement directly, but, through its “morbid intensity in seeing and seizing things” (74), it replicates the quick succession of sense perceptions and in that way creates the effect of mobility and flexibility. Decadent poetry attempted, to adapt Wilde’s phrase from The Picture of Dorian Gray, “to convey the sense of swiftness and motion” by way of “the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile” (2008, 5).

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Such concerns emerged with particular force in Decadent treatments of dance. Dance was central to fin-de-siècle entertainment culture, from classical ballet to music halls, and it served as a versatile literary image. Oscillating between regularisation and self-expression, dance encapsulated Decadence’s prioritisation of, in Michael Shaw’s words, “purposelessness, beauty, curiosity, ‘barbarity’, and sensation” over “function and commerce” (2019, 84). As Symons, who was also a prolific dance critic and reviewer, proposed in “The World as Ballet” (1906), dance embodied “everything in the world that is passing, and coloured, and to be enjoyed” (1989, 81). Dance stands out amongst other domains of nineteenth-­ century mobility, such as transportation via railway, omnibus, and bicycle, in that the body serves as the vehicle enabling movement. Unlike walking, dancing is an art form, subject to rehearsed patterns and choreographies. Dance is “often thought of as a realm of freedom, pleasure, and play” (Cresswell 2006, 123). But at closer inspection, “[t]he history of dance, like the history of work, reveals the operations of an array of disciplinary practices and deep-rooted ideologies of mobility” (123). Since dance is intimately bound up with “beliefs about appropriate and inappropriate mobility” (123), it offered Decadent poets a stage for testing out “morbid”, non-normative forms of bodily movement. Decadent poetry embraces dance’s connotations of eroticism, otherness, and voyeurism. It explores dancing bodies’ interweaving of organic and choreographed movement in poetic form and imagery and thus challenges dance’s “kinetic otherness to literature” (Marcsek-Fuchs 2015, 1). My readings of poems by Wilde, Symons, and Field in this chapter acknowledge the significance of dance as a Decadent symbol of transience and “artistic autonomy” (Beckson 1992, 332). Yet, rather than merely treating dances as static images, I explore how the individual poems allow for movement to unfold in language and form and how they enable dance to emerge as part of a spectrum of “unhealthy” mobile acts. Wilde’s, Symons’s, and Field’s poetic treatments of dance contrast moving bodies with immobile spectator positions; they relate dance to other mobile practices such as walking and emphasise the kinds of nervous, erratic motions which cultural critics of the fin de siècle, such as Nordau, deemed pathological. By organising their poems around tensions between mobility and stasis, aimlessness, and continuity, Wilde, Symons, and Field transfer physical and metaphorical states of “feverish restlessness” to poetic form.

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Compulsive Restlessness: Oscar Wilde’s Dancers Wilde’s poetry of the 1880s counterpoints the commotion of urban life with moments of stillness and idleness. Such tensions come to the fore in “Symphony in Yellow” (1889)—where the “restless” pedestrians of central London contrast with the tranquillity of the Thames that “[l]ies like a rod of rippled jade” (Wilde in Beckson 1981, 240)—but they are particularly prominent in “The Harlot’s House”. The poem, which was first published in The Dramatic Review in 1885, connects two forms of mobility: walking and dancing. The speaker and his companion explore the city on foot and stop to watch, through a window, the strangely alluring, ghostly dancers in the harlot’s house. Predating Wilde’s most famous depiction of dancing in his play Salomé (1896), “The Harlot’s House” exemplifies the Decadent preoccupation with “patterned movement”, as Jan Gordon puts it (1971, 429). Wilde inherits the theme from other nineteenth-century writers: his poem contains echoes of Charles Baudelaire’s “Danse Macabre” from The  Flowers of Evil (1859). But “The Harlot’s House” creates its own spin on the danse macabre—originally a medieval allegory of mortality—by attuning it to the accelerated whirl and “nervous excitement” (Nordau 1895, 9) of fin-de-siècle city life. In “The Harlot’s House”, the steady rhythm of the dance moves produces effects of uncertainty rather than consistency. The first stanza builds momentum by moving through a series of kinetic nouns and verbs: We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house. (Wilde 2007, 88)

The steps of the “loiter[ing]” pedestrians and the “dancing feet” echo one another in the steady “tread” of the iambic tetrameter, only momentarily “stopped” by an end-stopped line. In twelve tercets, the poem evokes “the din and fray” (88) of the dance performance in a series of “aural-motional collisions” (Boyiopoulos 2015, 42). The poem is organised around fleeting perceptions and the morbid ecstasy conveyed by the dancers’ silhouettes: “What the speaker watches like a voyeur are not the grotesque dancers but their artistic-impressionistic representations through a window frame, their two-dimensional outlines on a kaleidoscopic, cinematic screen” (43). Wilde’s use of poetic subjectivity enables

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his exploration of Decadent mobility. The speaker remains an oblique, impersonal entity, whose individuality is effaced by the collective “we” in most stanzas. Lines starting with verbs of perception—“we heard”, “[w]e watched” (Wilde 2007, 88)—direct attention to the couple’s compulsive fascination with the dance. At once enticed and alienated by the performance, the speaker and his lover epitomise any anonymous pedestrians who roam the modern city at night and sway in its rhythms. The cause of the dancers’ allure lies in their ecstatic, ghostly, and machine-like motions: Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind. (88)

The speed of the silhouettes racing across the blinds produces the effect of shape-shifting spectres or puppets, or even of emaciated invalids close to death: “Slim silhouetted skeletons” (89). Their spinning and turning also makes it impossible to mark out individual identities; they seem to have become part of the machine of modernity. The stanza’s imagery contains organic elements—the “fantastic arabesques” allude to plant-like ornaments as well as a ballet position—and industrial dimensions. Assuming the role of the producer, the “mechanical” shadows “make” the ornaments. The wording suggests the patterns created by a shuttle racing across a weaving loom; and the use of the verb “spin” in the next stanza enhances such connotations of fabric and fabrication. Alternating between the organic and the mechanical, Wilde’s descriptions anticipate the fragmentation of movement in modern dance, which, according to Norman Bryson, responded to the industrialisation and mechanisation of society (2003, 72). Just as the organic relationship between manufacturer and made object is obliterated in the process of mass production, so the distinction between dancer and dance is blurred: “The movements most expressive of modernity incarnate fragmentation, repetition, and velocity into the human figure, but the figure is only a synecdoche, a part for the whole. On stage, it will have no bounded outline; it will not play with the shapes formed by its own enclosedness and boundary, as in the arabesque” (72). Bryson primarily refers to an early-­ twentieth-­century “futurist repertoire of movement, figured in distilled form in constructivism and ballet mécanique” (73, emphasis in original). In “The Harlot’s House”, which describes a performance of the

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traditional “saraband” and “quadrille” (Wilde 2007, 89), this stage of utter fragmentation is prefigured but has not yet fully occurred. The dancers’ uncanny, whirling bodies fluctuate between natural and mechanical  motions. Their silhouettes are “black leaves wheeling in the wind”—recalling P. B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820), which envisions decaying leaves as “pestilence-stricken multitudes” (2006, 1175)—but they also resemble “wire-pulled automatons” (Wilde 2007, 89). The form of “The Harlot’s House” underscores such ambiguity. End rhymes link consecutive stanzas and mirror the quick succession of steps, twists, and turns, but off-rhymes (“wind”, “blind”) and metrical irregularities disrupt this pattern. In the lines “Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed/A phantom lover to her breast,” and “Sometimes a horrible marionette/Came out, and smoked its cigarette” (89), the stresses on initial syllables mimic the moments when the dancers break out of their routine. Another such interruption occurs when the speaker’s female companion joins in the spectacle. “Then suddenly” the music changes, and the dance is over: “The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl” (89). Finally, dawn arrives, which “[c]rept” down the street “like a frightened girl” (89). Kostas Boyiopoulos discerns a moment of resolution in this ending, noting that “[t]he frightened girl symbolises a sobering-up, the postcoital tristesse of a poetic transgression” (2015, 44). Yet by closing on images of mobility, the final stanza suggests continuity rather than a fixed endpoint. The dawn’s “silver-sandalled feet” (Wilde 2007, 89) foreshadow the speaker’s return to flânerie while also implying that the whirling dance will resume the following night. The reiteration of the first stanza’s rhyme words, “feet” and “street”, enhances this effect of circularity and compulsive continuity. Wilde’s poem undermines Victorian norms of conduct not merely by employing the setting of the harlot’s house and depicting it as a site of voyeurism and desire. The poem also contests conceptions of mobility as linear and progressive. Unlike the train journey or omnibus ride, which shorten time and economise travelling routes as the vehicles go back and forth between fixed points, the erratic mobility of the flâneur and the “whirling” dance of the prostitutes lack a destination, and they prolong rather than contract the experience of time by indulging in the present moment. Wilde’s dancers and their spectators subvert normative, “healthy” modes of mobility: they rejoice in the “restlessness” which Nordau later condemned as symptoms of a “degenerate delirium or hysterical

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psychological process” (1895, 44). The Decadent mobility of “The Harlot’s House” conveys both the thrill and anxieties that surrounded the advent of urban modernity.

The Malady of Monotony: Arthur Symons’s Dancers The morbid motions of Wilde’s dancers enact the “unstable equilibrium” which Symons located at the heart of Decadent literature. In Symons’s poetry collections Days and Nights (1889), Silhouettes (1892), and London Nights (1895), renditions of stage performances, dance, and urban walking give expression to his conviction that “the test of poetry which professes to be modern” is “its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there, indoors or out” (Symons quoted in Holdsworth 1989, 11). “The Street-Singer” from Days and Nights depicts a sick street performer roaming the city and begging for money. The woman’s “shivering body creeps on painful feet/Along the muddy runlets of the street”, as she is shaken by coughs (Symons 1989, 28). Forced to stay on the move for monetary and health reasons, she constitutes a grim counterimage to the archetype of fin-de-siècle mobility, the upper-class flâneur, who casually and voluntarily strolls around the city. Tensions between restlessness and stasis impel the sonnet: “Feverishly hungering in a hopeless hope”, the street-singer begs for “pence” that will “mean rest” (28)—a rest that the poem only temporarily allows. Rhymed with “chest”, the word “rest” concludes the second quatrain but returns twice in the sestet. Only the final line offers respite by way of a full stop. Symons’s use of synaesthesia and oxymoron—“eyes that grope” rhyme with “hopeless hope” (28)— propel these directionless motions. Where the male flâneur seeks infinite sensual gratification, the street-singer yearns for economic and physical respite and is compelled to stay mobile. Like other Decadents, Symons was fascinated by dancing, as his reviews of dance performances, his essays on dance, and his poetry attest. Dancers in Symons’s work have often been understood as static symbols, charged with ritualistic and erotic meaning. But there is merit in approaching Symons’s poetic dances as movement in space and time.5 The formal and thematic connections between dance and morbidity in Symons’s poetry, moreover, reflect late Victorian anxieties surrounding the mental and physical effects of mechanisation, acceleration, and sensory overstimulation. “The modern malady of love is nerves”, writes Symons in “Nerves” from London Nights (1989, 48). In this collection, as Joseph Bristow

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notes, “Symons’ speaker locates the intensity of sexual desire in pathological terms: morbid, sterile, shivering, fainting” (1995, 78). Depictions of shifting, “shivering” bodies form part of Symons’s register of mobility beyond evocations of erotic desire. The “Prologue” to London Nights equates dance with artificiality and sensual enjoyment. The poem proceeds in circular form, opening and closing with the assertion “My life is like a music-hall” (Symons 1989, 38). The simile sets in motion a fantasy of self-­ transcendence and of rendering mobile what is immobile: Chained by enchantment to my stall, I see myself upon the stage Dance to amuse a music-hall. (38)

Immersed in the performance, the speaker seems unable to dissolve the boundaries of self and other. Paradoxically, it is his fixed position in his seat which enables identification with the dancers. But the dancers, too, are trapped in their “empty” routine, having to go on as “[h]our follows hour” (38). Their turning and tripping motions oscillate between repetition and variation, as do the poem’s symmetrical quatrains, where “chained” resonates in “enchantment”, “amuse” in “music”, and the first and last line, respectively, end on the same word. The rhyme scheme ababa cdcdc efefe agaga contributes to this “gyratory” aesthetic (Herold 2017, 150). As the poem builds momentum through formal variation, the reeling rounds of the dancers effect a gradual evacuation of meaning: My very self that turns and trips, Painted, pathetically gay, An empty song upon the lips In make-believe of holiday: I, I, this thing that turns and trips! (Symons 1989, 38)

These part-imagined, part-real movements are neither erotically alluring nor do they progress towards any destination or climax. The dance represents an aimless, almost neurotic form of mobility. Heather Marcovitch argues that London Nights “constructs the music hall as a ritual space, the performers and audience as participants in a near-­ sacred rite that is camouflaged by the conventions of modern

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entertainment” (2013, 462). But even though Symons’s poems betray a sense of “enchantment” (1989, 38), the forms of mobility they evoke often seem aimless and ambiguous. In the “Prologue”, the “empty song” and the wearying recording of time in “Hour follows hour/I count them all” (38) suggest a sickly sense of monotony. The poem hovers between erratic movement and stagnation, as embodied by the spectator’s dream of himself staggering along to the music. Out of these tensions emerges Symons’s allegorical vision of the contradictions of modern “life”, which is “[l]agging, and loud, and riotous” (38). His poem presents dance and the relationship of performance and contemplation it relies on, not merely as a captivating and enticing artistic spectacle but also as a neurotic, futile, and anticlimactic form of mobility. It is art for art’s sake but also, in a manner reminiscent of Nordau’s critique, hints towards the oversaturation of fin-de-siècle life, the “riotous” state of modernity. “La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge” from London Nights depicts the French cabaret star Jane Avril, who was nicknamed “La Mélinite” due to her erratic dance style (Marcovitch 2013, 475). She embodies morbid mobility in another scene of self-contemplation: Alone, apart, one dancer watches Her mirrored, morbid grace; Before the mirror, face to face, Alone she watches Her morbid, vague, ambiguous grace. (Symons 1989, 41)

The poem establishes the music hall as “an artificial world, spinning around its own centre” (Herold 2017, 150). As the dancer indulges in her own “morbid, vague, ambiguous grace”—enhanced by effects of mirroring and repetition worked into the stanza’s symmetrical form—her motions recall the “unhealthy” beauty that Symons describes as a trait of Decadence. The poem’s “rhythms, employing run-on lines, approximate the movements of the dancer in her narcissistic transcendence”, which, as Karl Beckson argues, is “symbolic of the artist’s need to create a mirrored image of the isolated self for art’s sake” (1992, 332). But the movements also recall the anxieties and states of alienation connected with nineteenth-­ century society’s acceleration and mechanisation. Avril is separated from a group of dancers, described as “shadows” (Symons 1989, 42). Steadily repeating their routine  and “returning” in a “full circle” (41), they

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resemble the perpetually mobile anonymous crowd of the modern metropolis. Symons’s verse employs forms which turn back on themselves and images that are “vague” (41) and graceful at the same time. Reflecting the Victorian pathologisation of certain kinds of physical and mental exertion, the poems draw aesthetic energy from what Nordau disparaged as the “compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement” (1895, 2) of the fin-de-siècle condition.

Paralysis and Desire: Michael Field’s Dancers The poetry of Field, too, explores the symbolic and intermedial potential of dance. Even though “Field insistently declared that they were not ‘decadents’” (Richardson 2011, 72), the patterns of restless circularity enacted in their dance poems are consistent with, even prefigure, the morbidly mobile aesthetic of Wilde and Symons. Field’s poeticisations of mobility often occur in the countryside rather than the city. “A Dance of Death” from Poems of Adoration (1912) depicts the biblical Salomé dancing on a frozen river. The poem combines erotic and tragic subtexts with tensions between stillness and restlessness, thus drawing on the states of idleness and nervosity that critics of Decadence and Aestheticism deemed pathological: the “ice, so motionless and still” is offset against Salomé’s dance, described as both “[e]cstatic” and conveying “languor” (Field in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 170, 169).6 An earlier incarnation of Field’s interest in dance can be found in “The Iris Was Yellow, the Moon Was Pale”, a lesser-­ known poem from Underneath the Bough (1893). Most critical discussions of the volume have concentrated on its exploration of Bradley’s and Cooper’s dual authorship and their influences, in particular their response to Persian and Elizabethan literature (Bristow 2007; Thain and Vadillo 2009, 112–113). But Marion Thain’s notion that Underneath the Bough is “devoted to Michael Field’s obsession with understanding, and figuring poetically an erotic, and lyrical, congruence between bodies across time and space” (2007, 90), and her conception of Field’s authorial method as “a harmonious dance between the two poetic voices” (98) also points towards movement and mobility as structuring principles. “The Iris Was Yellow, the Moon Was Pale” belongs to the “Fourth Book of Songs” in the collection. This series of originally untitled poems7 revolves around love, desire, and sensual pleasure, combining visions of unity with intimations of transience and mortality. In Decadent manner, “The Iris Was Yellow” contemplates the momentary transcendence of the mortal world.

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The poem describes the speaker’s dream-like encounter with a ghostly creature and their whirling dance to a “noiseless music” (Field in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 133). By employing a semi-supernatural setting, the poem exemplifies the tendency to embrace “mysticism” which Nordau decried as yet another symptom of “the mental condition of the degenerate” (1895, 22). Field’s use of imagery and form explores tensions between circularity, ecstasy, and idleness and thus enters intertextual dialogues with the Decadent mobilities explored in other late Victorian poems. The first stanza introduces a rural landscape, where the speaker is caught between the impulse to move and a sense of paralysis: The iris was yellow, the moon was pale,   In the air it was stiller than snow, There was even light through the vale,    But a vaporous sheet    Clung about my feet,   And I dared no further go. I had passed the pond, I could see the stile, The path was plain for more than a mile,   Yet I dared no further go. (Field in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 132)

Stillness pervades the scene, heightened by the static verb “was” and by the connotations of the yellow iris, a flower frequently used in heraldry and Victorian interior decoration. The enigmatic irises appear in each stanza. Like a decorative frame, they hold the poem’s narrative in place. At the same time, the “vaporous sheet” of fog, eerily clinging to the speaker’s feet, introduces movement and materiality to the scene. The image creates an air of mystery, prefiguring the otherworldly encounter that is about to occur. It also resonates with references to fog in Decadent city poems, such as the “yellow fog” of London “creeping down/The bridges” in Wilde’s “Impression du Matin” (in Beckson 1981, 242). The prevalence of these images in fin-de-siècle writing can be traced to the infamous yellow-­tinted “pea soup” fog, caused by air pollution, which frequently descended upon London in the nineteenth century.8 It disrupted traffic and other forms of mobility as well as bearing health risks. Although Field’s poem is not set in the city, its repeated references to air, vapour, and mist build on fog’s ability to impair human bodily agility. In the first stanza, the image of the “vaporous sheet” clinging to the speaker

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contributes to the mounting tension between paralysis and progression, made explicit in the wanderer’s insistence that she “dared no further go” despite the prospect of the path continuing “for more than a mile” (Field in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 132). The repetition of “I dared no further go” (132) at once negates linear movement and, enhanced by the stanza’s masculine rhymes, suggests continuity. Like Wilde’s and Symons’s poems, Field’s lyric conjoins mobile and immobile states, using circular forms that evoke anti-progressive restlessness. The second and third stanzas describe the speaker’s dance-like movements to a “noiseless music” which suddenly “moved through the mist” as she grasps “[s]trange, little hands that I did not know” (132–133). Field here prefigures the folkloric Aestheticism of William Butler Yeats, whose “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899) is also organised around mobility. Yeats’s wanderer is called into the magical otherworld by an unnamed “glimmering girl” and later imagines that he will find her again, “[a]nd kiss her lips and take her hands” (2008, 29–30).9 Further aspects of wording and narrative link Field’s poem with Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House”. “The Iris Was Yellow” translates the spectacle of Wilde’s danse macabre into rural terms. Both poems flirt with the wish to momentarily escape everyday life. They each create a liminal setting of mist and moonlight, out of which the “ghostly dancers” (Wilde 2007, 88) and the “elvan bands” (Field in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 133) emerge. Both poems synaesthetically combine physical and musical movement, choreographing scenarios of circling bodies and wild tunes. “With that music I must go: / And I found myself in the heart of the tune, /Wheeling round to the whirr of the moon” (133). These lines from Field’s second stanza resonate with Wilde’s imagery of bodies spinning “[t]o sound of horn and violin, /like black leaves wheeling in the wind” (2007, 88). The poems employ the same repertoire of sounds and verbs of movement to describe the erratic dance. Field’s alliterative pattern of “whist!”, “whirling ring”, “with”, and “would” (in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 132–133) echoes Wilde’s “wheel and whirl”, “wind”, and “waltz” (2007, 88), a mobile register which is propelled by the “ceaseless swirling” of Baudelaire’s “skeletons” (1993, 99). Whereas Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” upholds the separation of spectator and performance, materially amplified by the screen of the window blinds, Field’s poem portrays the speaker’s own physical immersion in the “whirling ring” of the dance (in Thain and Vadillo 2009, 133). But both works frame the frantic dances as momentary and ultimately directionless forms of mobility. In each poem, the advent of morning, at least

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temporarily, disrupts the dance. Field’s speaker describes how “[t]he little hands dropped that had clung so tight” and concludes with a modified version of the static opening image: “And I saw again by the pale dawnlight/The iris-heads in a row” (133). The line picks up on the “pale” light and the flower image of the first stanza, completing the poem’s circular trajectory while deferring narrative resolution. In the context of Bradley and Cooper’s joint authorship, the rhythmically entangled bodies and hands can be understood as emblems of erotic and creative intimacy. But reading the dance as a static symbol ignores the oscillations between mobility and stillness which animate Field’s verse. Such tensions structure the entire “Fourth Book of Songs” in Underneath the Bough. The poem “Across a Gaudy Room” depicts an interior, “[w]here everyone sat tired” (130). Two guests longingly exchange glances yet remain trapped in their state of “distance” (131). The poem’s evocation of ennui and lack of progression approximates the “dejectedness” and “incapacity for action” which Nordau pairs with nervous restlessness in his diagnosis of fin-de-siècle culture (1895, 20–21). To Field, romantic fulfilment equals perpetual onward motion: “As Two Fair Vessels Side by Side” imagines a pair of lovers who hope that they “should always glide” (131). By contrast, in “I Lay Sick in a Foreign Land”, heartbreak entails paralysis, symbolised by the “broken wings” (133) of a personified love. But the poem also alludes to real physical ailment: in 1891, Edith Cooper fell ill during a trip to Germany and was hospitalised with scarlet fever. The event may explain why the threat of mortality—of immobilisation—often overshadows expressions of love in Underneath the Bough (Thain and Vadillo 2009, 29, 113). In the works and lives of Bradley and Cooper, subjects and objects shift between agility and impairment, between stasis and erratic movement. These patterns align Field’s “lyrical aestheticism” (Bristow 2007, 54) with the choreographies of Decadent mobility.

Conclusion: Progressing in Circles My readings have highlighted intersections of mobility and pathology as themes, imagery, and formal patterns in selected late Victorian poetry. By orbiting around the Decadent trope of dance, Wilde, Symons, and Field put into practice the “unstable equilibrium” (Symons 1989, 73) of mind and body which both advocates and critics of Decadent poetics considered a symptom of the maladie fin de siècle. What I have described as Decadent mobility—the tensions between stasis and nervous restlessness which are

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enabled by circular, impressionistic verse forms—confirms the “temporal paradox” that shaped fin-de-siècle poetry following Pater, “the desire to celebrate the flux and transitory nature of life by stilling the moment and preserving it” (Thain 2008, 226). Yet the figurations of dance routines and aimless wandering in Wilde, Symons, and Field prolong and defer progress in both temporal and spatial terms. The challenge of rendering movement—defined as “the spatialization of time and temporalization of space” (Cresswell 2006, 4)—into linguistic form animates the work of these poets. It can be read as a response to the increasing mechanisation, acceleration, and sensual overstimulation of everyday life in late-­ nineteenth-­century Britain, which inspired fantasies of economic prosperity as much as concerns around mental and physical wellbeing.10 In Western cultures, conceptions of “mobility as progress, as freedom, as opportunity, and as modernity, sit side by side with mobility as shiftlessness, as deviance, and as resistance” (2). Embracing such “deviance”, Wilde, Symons, and Field find poetic value in ambiguously erotic, idle, and anti-progressive states of mobility. Poetry in the Decadent tradition “is to be something vague, intangible, evanescent” but also “a winged soul in flight ‘toward other skies and other loves’”, as Symons declared in his 1893 essay (1989, 75). The evanescent poem ascending to heaven—an allusion to Paul Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” (1874) and thus a transculturally mobile image—embodies perpetual aspiration and mutability. Its upward trajectory stands in stark contrast to Nordau’s pathological account of a society that “totter[s] and plunge[s]” towards its doom (1895, 5). The movements of Decadent verse occupy a liminal space between stasis and progression. Neither succumbing to pessimistic narratives of cultural degeneracy nor perpetuating simplistic romanticised notions of movement as progress, Decadent poets experimented with morbid mobilities to test out a radically modern lyric aesthetic at the turn of the century.

Notes 1. In 2019, a symposium at Birkbeck School of Arts in London, titled “La Maladie Fin de Siècle: Decadence and Disease”, critically investigated the medical dimensions of the Decadent movement. 2. In Chap. 9 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland discuss the cultural connotations of general paralysis of the insane (GPI) in more detail.

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3. For recent accounts see, for example, Bourne Taylor (2007), Härmänmaa and Nissen (2014), Karschay (2015), and Kistler (2019). 4. Turn-of-the-century sociologists followed similar lines of argumentation. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, first published in 1903, Georg Simmel observes: “The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (2004, 13; emphasis in original). 5. In her essay on Symons’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s dance poetry, Katharina Herold argues that these poets “consciously play with kinesthetics to actively engage their readers in a sensory experience” (2017, 141). 6. For a detailed reading of “A Dance of Death”, see Richardson (2011). 7. Following Thain and Vadillo (2009), who reprint a selection of poems from the first edition of Underneath the Bough (1893), and other modern commentators, I refer to first lines of the poems as titles. 8. Wilde related the aesthetic interest in London’s fog to the rise of impressionism in the visual arts, an assessment which Nordau took all too literally: “[Wilde] asserts, however, that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have painted fogs—a statement so silly as to require no refutation. It is sufficient to characterise it as artistic mysticism” (1895, 322). For a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the “pea souper”, see Corton (2015). 9. See Thain (2007, 205–209) and Williams (2016) for further examples of Field’s influence on Yeats. 10. The chapters by Sally Shuttleworth and Heidi Liedke in this collection explore similar modes of alternative nineteenth-century mobilities that counter this culture of mechanisation and acceleration.

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Bristow, Joseph. 1995. “‘Sterile Ecstasies’: The Perversity of the Decadent Movement.” In The Endings of Epochs, edited by Laurel Brake, 65–88. Cambridge: Brewer. Bristow, Joseph. 2007. “Michael Field’s Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough.” In Michael Field and Their Work, edited by Margaret D.  Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, 49–62. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press. Bryson, Norman. 2003. “Cultural Studies and Dance History.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 55–77. Durham: Duke University Press. Buchanan, Robert. 1871. “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti.” The Victorian Web. https://victorianweb.org/authors/buchanan/fleshy.html. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021. Corton, Christine L. 2015. London Fog: The Biography. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Denisoff, Dennis. 2007. “Decadence and Aestheticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, edited by Gail Marshall, 31–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, Nick. 2018. “Curious Intricacies: Some Versions of City Writing at the Fin de Siècle.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, edited by Josephine M.  Guy, 70–89. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gordon, Jan B. 1971. “The Danse Macabre of Arthur Symons’ London Nights.” Victorian Poetry 9 (4): 429–443. Herold, Katharina. 2017. “Dancing the Image: Sensoriality and Kinesthetics in the Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Symons.” In Decadence and the Senses, edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, 141–161. Cambridge: Legenda. Härmänmaa, Marja, and Christopher Nissen, eds. 2014. Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holdsworth, Roger. 1989. “Introduction.” In Selected Writings by Arthur Symons, edited by Roger Holdsworth, 9–24. Manchester: Carcanet. Hyder, Clyde K. 1933. “Emerson on Swinburne: A Sensational Interview.” Modern Language Notes 48 (3): 180–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2912166. Karschay, Stephan. 2015. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kistler, Jordan. 2019. “The Science of Decadence.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 232–247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lombroso, Cesare. 1876. L’uomo delinquente. Turin: Bocca.

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Marcsek-Fuchs, Maria. 2015. Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter. Leiden and Boston: Brill-Rodopi. Marcovitch, Heather. 2013. “Dance, Ritual, and Arthur Symons’s London Nights.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 56 (4): 462–482. Morel, B. A. 1857. Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine. Paris: J. B. Baillière. Nordau, Max S. 1895. Degeneration. 5th ed. New York: Appleton. Richardson, LeeAnne. 2011. “Michael Field’s ‘A Dance of Death.’” Nordlit 28: 71–78. Robins, Ashley H., and Sean L.  Sellars. 2000. “Oscar Wilde’s Terminal Illness: Reappraisal After a Century.” Lancet 356: 1841–1843. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(00)03245-­1. Shaw, Michael. 2019. “Decadence and the Urban Sensibility.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 82–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–226. https://doi. org/10.1068/a37268. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2006 [1820]. “Ode to the West Wind.” In Romanticism: An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu, 3rd ed., 1175–1177. Malden: Blackwell. Simmel, Georg. 2004 [1903]. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The City Cultures Reader, edited by Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall, 2nd ed., 12–19. London and New York: Routledge. Symons, Arthur. 1989. Selected Writings. Edited by Roger Holdsworth. Manchester: Carcanet. Thain, Marion. 2007. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thain, Marion. 2008. “Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, edited by Gail Marshall, 223–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thain, Marion, and Ana Parejo Vadillo, eds. 2009. Michael Field, The Poet. Peterborough: Broadview Editions. Vadillo, Ana Parejo. 2005. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. 1886. Psychopathia Sexualis. Stuttgart: Enke. Wilde, Oscar. 2007 [1885]. “The Harlot’s House.” In Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Talia Schaffer, 88–89. New York: Pearson. Wilde, Oscar. 2008 [1891]. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Kelsey. 2016. “‘Copied without Loss’: Michael Field’s Poetic Influence on the Work of W. B. Yeats.” Journal of Modern Literature 40 (1): 128–146. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.40.1.07. Wood, Jane. 2001. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland

In August 1874, Martin Sweeney was admitted to Liverpool’s Rainhill Asylum suffering from mania of one month’s duration, caused by “intemperance” (Liverpool Record Office Dec. 1873–July 1877, 84).1 Aged 40, Sweeney had been born in Ireland and came to Liverpool in May of that year. Prior to that, he had lived in Manchester for a couple of weeks and “previously had been on the tramp” (84). Though in good physical condition, he was “under the impression that people are engaged in a conspiracy against him, that whenever he got work they followed him & he had to leave one town after another, is very restless & has a vacant & suspicious expression” (84). Sweeney claimed that “he has been a soldier & left the army in 1856 […], has been in Gaol on several occasions for desertion

C. Cox University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] H. Marland (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_9

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[…] his mental state has been of some years duration” (84). He remained in Rainhill for ten years, showing no change or improvement, before being removed to Whittingham Asylum, near Preston, in December 1884 (84; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 118).2 In his movements, from army to gaol to tramping around Lancashire, and his diagnosis of mania associated with intemperance, Sweeney’s experience was common to those of many Irish patients entering Lancashire’s asylums in the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the movement of Irish patients into and through the expanding Lancashire asylum system in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the experiences of patients such as Sweeney, it focuses on the numerous Irish migrants who ended up in asylums after prolonged periods spent “wandering” across Lancashire, England, or the globe. Asylum superintendents claimed that the mobility of Irish people was a central factor prompting their frequent decline into mental illness, related as it was to unstable lives, unpredictable employment, and in many cases an absence of family and community connections. This mobility, taking the form of both migration to new lands but also the wandering or tramping of Irish people in their host country, was exacerbated, according to asylum case records, by poverty, a fondness for drink, immorality, violence, and criminality. These traits were highlighted more amongst Irish than English patients and often featured as causes of insanity in asylum casebooks. Asylum admission records also reported that many Irish patients entering Lancashire’s asylums had no fixed place of abode and were brought in as vagrants or admitted via local workhouses or prisons. The high representation of Irish patients in Lancashire asylums was mirrored across the globe (Garton 1988; Fox 1991; McCarthy 2008; Malcolm 2012a). David Wright and Tom Themeles have concluded that “[t]he Irish had the dubious distinction of having the highest reported rate of institutional incarceration at home while simultaneously constituting the most conspicuous of inmate populations in settler societies” (2012, 41). Across the globe from New York to Toronto, Dunedin to Victoria, Irish admission rates soared in the second part of the nineteenth century out of all proportion to the number of Irish people in the general population. The Irish came to comprise the largest ethnic group in Australasian asylums, representing a quarter of admissions in New South Wales and New Zealand in the 1880s (McCarthy 2008, 50–51; Malcolm 2012a, 120). In 1851, 80 per cent of admissions to Boston Lunatic Asylum were Irish (while Irish people made up 31 per cent of the total population);

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such high rates were attributed by the Commissioner on Lunacy to intemperance, irritability, doubt, anxiety, and physical suffering (Torrey and Miller 2001, 239). Still, in 1900, the Irish made up almost 30 per cent of foreign-born whites in US asylums, while making up only 15.6 per cent of the total foreign-born white population (Malcolm 2012b, 18–19). With regard to migration, David Fitzpatrick has argued that “[f]or both Irishmen and Irishwomen emigration became an expected episode in the life-cycle, akin to marriage or inheritance” (1980, 126), while Irish emigration to America was depicted as “a desperate cure for those evils” of low wages and misery (“Irish Emigration to America” 1851, 4). Even in 1876, long after the post-Famine flight from Ireland had slackened, the probability of migrating was almost one-half, and “many contemporaries believed, emigration was a palliative drug to which Irish society had grown dangerously addicted” (Fitzpatrick 1980, 126, 127). Fitzpatrick also famously described Irish migrants as a “peculiar tramping people”, highlighting the numbers of Irish migrants who once in Britain “roamed about the industrial centres hoping for casual employment […] unsettled, transient, centrifugal in their drift” (1989, 623, 625). Migration and tramping were cited in official reports and asylum records as key factors in producing insanity amongst Irish patients. In his report on the incidence and institutional management of insanity in Massachusetts, published in 1855, Dr. Edward Jarvis concluded that Irish migrants were particularly vulnerable to the stresses of migration, while a “semi-nomadic way of life” was a characteristic noted of the Irish gold-rush miners admitted to asylums in colonial Victoria (Report on Insanity and Idiocy in Massachusetts 1855; Malcolm 2012a, 140 and 2012b, 26). Both forms of mobility—migration and the Irish propensity for tramping or wandering, sometimes on a global scale—greatly concerned the Lancashire authorities. Local government, Poor Law officials, and asylum superintendents alike were alarmed at the scale of migration and the overwhelming poverty of the majority of Irish migrants to the county, who were also depicted as likely to take advantage of their right to access welfare institutions, notably workhouses and public asylums. The Great Irish Famine (1845–1852), which led to a huge increase in migration to Liverpool, coincided with the establishment of several new asylums in Lancashire under the 1845 County Asylums and Lunacy Acts, which made it mandatory for counties to establish asylums supported by local rates. Lancaster Asylum had been established in 1816 following earlier permissive legislation in 1808, and a further three asylums opened in the second

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half of the century: Rainhill, serving the Liverpool area, in 1851; Prestwich, near Manchester, also in 1851; and, in response to acute pressure on the other institutions, Whittingham Asylum, near Preston, in 1873. The latter came to cater largely for chronic, incurable cases. All four institutions admitted high numbers of Irish people. At the height of the Famine, migration through the port of Liverpool, one of the main ports of entry from Ireland, took place on a vast scale. In 1850, around a quarter of a million Irish arrived in Liverpool, and the 1851 census listed 22 per cent of the city’s inhabitants as of Irish origin (Neal 1988, 7–8). Meanwhile, during the 1850s, Irish admissions came to account for approximately half of the total intake of patients to Rainhill Asylum. In Manchester, by 1871, the Irish made up under 10 per cent of the general population, while 25 per cent of the inmates of the city’s Prestwich Asylum were Irish-born (Malcolm 2003, 125). The pressure on county institutions persisted after the Famine; in 1871, 28 per cent of the Irish population of Lancaster were resident in the prison, Lancaster Asylum, the workhouse, or other hospitals (Pooley 1989, 75). Whilst the enormous cost of delivering welfare provision and asylum care to large numbers of Irish migrants was a major burden on ratepayers, this chapter explores how their plight, desperation, and emotional vulnerability might also be acknowledged with a degree of sympathy (Cox and Marland 2015). Alongside the rise of anti-Irish sentiment, attitudes were shaped by ideas of civic responsibility in responding to a major humanitarian crisis and by recognition that Irish labour was valuable to the local economy. This chapter moves on to examine the ways in which asylum superintendents sought pragmatic explanations for the high rates of Irish insanity in the act of migration itself while at the same time reproducing broadly held stereotypes about the Irish “race” and the cultural practices and behaviours that contributed to their mental breakdown. Taking the theme of mobility as central to our analysis, the chapter investigates, alongside migration between nations, the association of the Irish with wandering or tramping and briefly examines their movements between asylums and prisons, with both institutions admitting very high numbers of mentally ill Irish people.3 Our sources include asylum annual reports, admission registers, committal papers, and casebooks, notably those of Liverpool’s Rainhill Asylum, prison records, and the reports of the Lunacy Commissioners, all of which commented on the high numbers of Irish migrants entering the Lancashire asylum system as well as their wandering characteristics, rootlessness, and

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dislocation. The local press, meanwhile, described and oftentimes inflamed the negative attitudes of host communities towards Irish migrants, depicting them as a burden on the local rates, troublemakers, and beggars, as well as detailing the challenges in terms of providing sufficient asylum accommodation. We also draw on a set of notebooks produced after 1866 by the General Finance Committee of the Lancashire County Council that sought to establish settlement and thus chargeability for Irish, Scottish, Manx, or “foreign” patients. The notebooks provide insights into individual patients prior to asylum admission (place of residence, employment, and family circumstances), which particularly highlight the isolation of Irish patients and in some instances can be linked to patient histories in asylum casebooks (Lancashire Archives Dec. 11, 1866–Aug. 31, 1869; Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893).

Reception, Discrimination, and Anti-Irishness Irish migration into Lancashire escalated significantly during the Famine and remained high in the post-Famine period. In the early nineteenth century, many Irish migrated in family units, but after the 1860s, young and single men and women dominated, without family support networks and particularly vulnerable in trade depressions. While by the late nineteenth century increasing numbers of Irish migrants were middle-class professionals, of the 250,000 Irish arriving in Liverpool in 1850, almost 78,000 (31 per cent, likely an underestimate) were reported to be paupers, and the majority of Irish people entering Lancashire’s public asylums were impoverished, Roman Catholic (RC), and from the rural midlands of Ireland (Neal 1988, 82). Many arrived in Liverpool severely undernourished, their weak state of health further undermined, despite the brevity of the voyage, by the miserable and hazardous conditions on board the steamships bringing them from Ireland (Neal 1986). On 6 January 1847, a leader in The Times reported that “[s]hiploads of the most miserable destitution daily arrive at these devoted shores” (“There Are Occasions” 1847, 4). In 1854, eyewitnesses described the human trafficking occurring on a daily basis between ports in Ireland and England: “[T]hey are generally crowded round the funnel of the steamer, or huddled together in a most disgraceful manner […,] they get sick, and perfectly helpless, and covered with the dirt and filth of each other” (“First Report of the Select Committee on Emigrant Ships” 2002, 88–89). The inhabitants of Liverpool were horrified at the dumping of huge numbers of

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impoverished, sick, famished, and diseased migrants on the dockside (Neal 1986). Newspaper editorials described how the Liverpool townspeople became steeled against the Irish vagrant. Irish paupers, according to one correspondent to the Liverpool Mercury, should be prevented from landing “on our shores” (“Irish Paupers in Liverpool” 1847, 8), yet the “rush” of emigration “shows no symptoms of subsidence” (“Ireland” 1851, 2). In 1851, the Liverpool Mercury further noted that “[o]n Friday a steamer left Waterford for Liverpool with 600 souls on board, and as many were left behind for lack of accommodation as would freight another vessel” (2). In comparison with Irish migration to America and Australasia, the movement of Irish migrants to England was unmanaged, unchecked by immigration controls and medical examinations, and facilitated by the cheapness of steamship travel (Kraut 1997; Bashford 2006, 2013). The cost of the passage to England from Ireland was substantially cheaper than the return fare, which was likely to be paid by the Poor Law. Many migrants moved to and fro across the Irish Sea, those repatriated often travelled back again to Liverpool, and the factors that encouraged emigration— poverty, the shortage of land and employment—made permanent return to Ireland unlikely (Fitzpatrick 1989, 566). The fluidity, almost casual nature of these migrations, was a consistent problem and cost for the Poor Law and asylum authorities. Irish migrants were recognised as a crucial source of labour, vital to the local economy at times of peak employment. However, the arrival of large numbers of Irish in Lancashire also prompted a series of challenges for civic, religious, welfare, and medical authorities, particularly as the Irish clustered in low cost, poor-quality accommodation, the mythical “Little Ireland” ghetto in Manchester and Liverpool’s cellars (Pooley 1989, 75–79; Belchem 2007, 56). Roger Swift has described the problems of the “outcast Irish in British cities”, lumped together as “ignorant, dirty and primitive Paddies and Biddies”, who were distinguishable by virtue of their race, nationalist politics, Catholicism, and poverty, and associated with the undercutting of wages and strike breaking, outbreaks of epidemic disease, high crime rates, and disorder (1987, 264). Famine and subsequent generations of migrants, especially the impoverished, encountered a culture of anti-Irishness and were held responsible for a range of evils that threatened the social equilibrium (Lowe 1989; MacRaild 1999; Belchem 2007). As a trading and commercial rather than industrial centre, it was jobs as unskilled labourers that were most likely to attract migrants to Liverpool, who came into direct competition with the Protestant labour

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force. The sheer scale of Irish migration also overwhelmed opportunities for employment, something exacerbated during economic downturns, notably the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–1865. Though the Irish were often depicted as lacking a fixed place of abode, at the same time, they were castigated for congregating in the worst streets, slums, and lodging houses, and local Medical Officer of Health Reports portrayed them as particularly liable to spread contagion, due to filthy and overcrowded living conditions. In June 1847, W. H. Duncan, Liverpool’s first Medical Officer of Health, reported that “60,000 to 80,000 [Irish] had located themselves amongst us, occupying every nook and corner of the overcrowded lodging houses […]. Fever had become more than usually prevalent” (1851, 1847 Report, 5). Some diseases, notably cholera, were associated with the movement of migrant workers, and blame for introducing such diseases fell on seamen, navies, and jobbing labourers, who were often Irish. In 1849, cholera struck Liverpool, and Duncan recorded that “[o]n the 10th December, an Irish family arrived in Liverpool by steamer, from Dumfries, where the Epidemic was then at its height”; on landing, one child was found to be suffering from cholera, and a few days later, the first case originating in Liverpool occurred in “a crowded Irish house” (1851, 1849 Report, 25, 26). The 1866 outbreak of cholera, initially limited to German and other emigrant ships, established itself in Bispham Street, “inhabited by the lowest of the Irish population”, and intensified following a wake of “maudlin and frantic drunkenness” (Trench 1866, 21). By the end of the month, 48 people had died within a radius of 150 yards of the wake (44).

Migration, Wandering, and Asylum Admissions The stress that would be placed on Rainhill Asylum’s facilities was attributed, as with epidemic disease, to the peculiar conditions of large manufacturing and commercial centres, the press of people, overcrowding, people moving in search of work, poverty, “low living”, and a range of temptations which debilitated body and mind, such as drink, prostitution, and crime. Even in times of prosperity, insanity, in the view of Dr. Cleaton at Rainhill, increased, largely as a result of intemperance (Wellcome Library 1855, 91). Yet more commonly, asylum superintendents argued that “industrial crises and trade depressions, with their attendant trials and privations, are peculiarly productive of mental alienation” (LRO 1879–1882, 133). In the case of Irish migrants to Liverpool, their vulnerability to

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mental disorder was exacerbated, as they attempted to find work and to settle, by the stress of moving from a largely rural economy to a large and turbulent port city. This was particularly notable with regard to the numbers of Irish prostitutes committed to both asylums and prisons, usually following charges of being drunk and disorderly. While it was recognised that employment opportunities for female migrants were severely limited, these “immoral and depraved women” were castigated for their “dissolute and intemperate habits” (Twenty-Fifth Report of the Inspectors of Prisons of Great Britain. Northern and Eastern Districts 1860, 31; see also Cox and Marland 2019, 184). Irish migrants, including prostitutes, were deemed to be particularly susceptible to general paralysis of the insane (GPI), the mental disorder associated with end-stage syphilis, that accounted for increasing numbers of asylum admissions in the latter decades of the century. Such patients required extra care and management, as their physical and mental health deteriorated over many years before their deaths (Cox and Marland 2022, 189–191). In part, the association of GPI with Irish patients reflected prejudices about their behaviour, given its link with hereditary predisposition, “immorality”, and alcoholism. Irish vulnerability to the disease was also attributed by asylum doctors to the stress of moving from rural to urban environments, with their many temptations, and faster pace that placed a severe strain on mental energy. While it was remarked that the disorder barely existed in Ireland, Liverpool, as a bustling commercial centre and port, presented a particular risk, with its large number of brothels (Cox et al. 2012, 2013, 52–53).4 The impact of the Irish on the Lancashire asylum system was enduring. At Rainhill Asylum, Irish patients accounted for around half of the admissions by the late 1850s, and in 1863, at the peak of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, out of 138 pauper patients in the Lancaster Asylum, 90 were “natives of Ireland” (LRO 1863, 9). As late as 1871, Irish patients accounted for nearly half of the resident population of Rainhill and in 1884 more than half (LRO 1871–1874, Table XV, 114 and 1883–1886, Table XIII, 125). Haydock Lodge private asylum, near Liverpool, and the lunacy wards of local workhouses also took large numbers of pauper patients during the nineteenth century, many of whom were Irish, as the public asylums filled to overflowing (Cox and Marland 2015). While more Irish women than men were transferred in 1884, the proportion could vary, and in other years, there were more men than women (see Table 9.1).

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Table 9.1  Nationality of patients in Rainhill Asylum, 31 December 1884. Liverpool Record Office 1883–1886, Table XIII, 125

English Irish Scotch Welsh Manx American German Russian Spanish Austrian Portuguese Total

Male

Female

Total

200 89 6 4 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 307

215 121 9 9 5 0 4 0 0 0 0 363

415 210 15 13 7 1 5 1 1 1 1 670

The debate on the relationship of migration to mental breakdown prompted a wide variety of interpretations with some alienists insisting that the mentally vulnerable were likely to emigrate, while others concluded that the process of migration produced high rates of mental illness (Cox et  al. 2013, 54).5 Our samples from asylum records and the Lancashire County Council notebooks suggest that both the stresses emigrants underwent immediately after emigration and the disappointment and strain experienced after migration over a longer period were reported to threaten migrants’ mental health. As the close relationship between migration and confinement in English asylums became increasingly evident, admissions to Irish asylums also rose. Between 1871 and 1911, when the overall population declined by 20 per cent, the number of patients in Irish asylums trebled (Cox 2012, 54). Seeking to account for the phenomenon, the Irish Inspectors of Lunacy suggested that “those who emigrated were the most able and resourceful among the Irish population and that those who were left behind were the sick, the incompetent, the old and the mad” (Tenth Report on the District, Criminal and Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland 1861, 14–15). This did not tally with the opinions of the host communities and asylum superintendents, and in some cases, the Irish seemed to step directly off the boat into the asylum. Ann Torney, a domestic servant, travelled to Liverpool from Ireland in July 1868 with the purpose of migrating to America, but, instead, was taken to Rainhill Asylum on arrival in the city (LRO Feb. 1865–Jan. 1870,

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265). Similarly, Ann McDuggan, also listed as a servant, was taken from the S.S. Helvitia in November 1874 as it docked in Liverpool, first to the workhouse and thence to Rainhill. She was noted in the casebook to be suffering from mania of unknown duration, was violent, thin, and poorly nourished (LRO Oct. 1873–July 1878, 107; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 140). A sizeable number of Irish female migrants admitted to Lancashire asylums were employed in domestic service, as exemplified below, and other occupations that made them vulnerable to committal (Cox et al. 2012). Lancashire medical superintendents referred specifically in their reports to the pressure the Irish placed on what were rapidly to become severely overcrowded institutions and the proneness of the Irish to institutionalisation. The Irish were also admitted in disproportionately high numbers to the county’s workhouses; many then found their way into workhouse lunacy wards and from there were transferred to local asylums (Cox and Marland 2015). The vagrant shed too was depicted as a resource particularly exploited by the Irish, as they wandered from shed to shed, “professedly, to find work; but in reality to beg” (LRO Sept. 1851–July 30, 1853, 1). In 1863, when Irish patients accounted for two-thirds of the institution’s inmates, Dr. Broadhurst, Medical Superintendent of Lancaster Asylum, remarked that Ireland had excellent District Lunatic Asylums and urged legislation to “remove so heavy a burden from the county” (LRO 1863, 9). Even as their overall proportions declined, asylum superintendents continued to highlight Irish admissions and to use Irish patients as exemplars of the wider problems of overpopulated asylums and rising numbers of long-term patients who blocked new admissions. In 1874, Prestwich’s Medical Superintendent, Dr. H.  Rooke Ley, alluded to the continued draw of Lancashire and its high wages, for the “never failing stream” of Irish immigrants, “many of whom failing in the race of life, break down and find their way into the Asylums” (LRO 1871–1874, 69). In 1884, over 25 per cent of Prestwich’s inmates were Irish, and half of these had no settlement in the city (LRO 1883–1886, 65). It was noted that “[s]ome of them were on their way to America then they were overtaken by sickness; others came here seeking employment, only a small percentage have friends resident in England, and very few have ever contributed one farthing to the rates which they encumber” (LRO 1871–1874, 69). In 1876, the Commissioners in Lunacy reported that of the many nationalities amongst Rainhill patients, “more than one-third of the whole number on the books is described to be Irish; a very large proportion of

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the patients has been drafted from the very lowest social strata; many have been sailors and dock labourers; and 15 men and 11 women are traced back to Broadmoor [Criminal Lunatic Asylum] and prisons” (LRO 1875–1878, 144). Migrants to Liverpool often intended to travel on to America or Australasia, and Britain was “seldom the desired or promised land” (Fitzpatrick 1989, 625). Significant numbers arriving at Liverpool had their passage onwards prepaid and transferred directly to vessels heading to America. In 1849, out of 299,498 emigrants leaving Ireland for America, half travelled via Liverpool (“The Tide of Emigration to the United States and to the British Colonies” 1850, 16). The number of Irish using Liverpool as a planned stepping stone remained significant even after the establishment of direct journeys from Ireland to America in 1859 (Herson 2008, 60). Many, however, got stuck in Liverpool, held back by a lack of resources or sickness. Significant numbers of these “failures” made their way into asylums. While relating the proneness of the Irish to mental illness more broadly to inbuilt mental weakness and hereditary factors, asylum superintendents also recognised the process of migration to be destabilising and a potential cause of mental distress, marshalling a form of “stress hypothesis” to explain high rates of Irish admissions and emphasising the impact of failure and disappointment on people already exhausted, impoverished, and in poor physical health.6 Dr. John Cleaton commented on the number of Irish RC admissions to Rainhill in 1854: “In three instances insanity seemed to have been produced by the excitement and embarrassment incidental to contemplated migration to America, and in each of these three cases the patients were Irish peasants” (Wellcome Library 1854, 81). His successor, Dr. Thomas Lawes Rogers, reported in 1856 that one-third of admissions were Irish: “This will not be so much a matter of surprise, when the large extent to which the Irish element prevails in the population of Liverpool is borne in mind, and when it is also recollected that it is the port through which more of the emigrants from Ireland, to America and Australia, have to take their departure, and through which many of these poor people, who have been crushed by disappointment in a foreign land, seek to return to their native homes” (LRO 1856, 85). One such patient was Johanna Hennessey, a 36-year-old Irish woman, “probably a servant”, who was reported to be suffering from dementia (LRO June 1853–Dec. 1856, 152).7 Johanna had emigrated from Ireland to America “expecting to find some friends who had previously gone out”, but “in this she failed” (152). On her

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return to England in July 1855, she was admitted to Haydock Lodge and was transferred to Rainhill in the following year. She remained there until her death in March 1870 (152). As Dr. Rogers commented, the return of patients like Johanna was not uncommon: “Many cases occur annually of Irish peasants who have become insane in America, or on their passage home, being placed on shore in Liverpool by the captain of the vessel, to be taken charge of by the police, transferred to the workhouses, and subsequently sent to the Asylums” (LRO 1856, 85). While the process of migration itself was seen by asylum doctors as potentially damaging, Irish people were also reckoned to be more at risk of asylum confinement by virtue of the social isolation that might follow on from migration. The relative isolation of the Irish poor was exacerbated, according to contemporary observers, by their slowness to adapt to English ways of life, in some cases continuing to speak Gaelic, and “to enter primary relationships with the native town-dwellers” (Anderson 1971, 153–154).8 After the Famine period, Irish migrants to Lancashire travelled less in family groups, and impoverished Irish asylum patients, particularly men, were more likely to be single. Between 1856 and 1906, 50 per cent of male Irish asylum admissions were single compared with 40 per cent of non-Irish patients. Many admission certificates noted “nearest relative unknown”, “no friends”, or that their closest relatives were in Ireland. Irish patients were liable to be “found wandering” or their “previous abode not known” (LRO 1851–1906). These factors often led to long-term or permanent confinement in asylums; even if their mental health stabilised or improved, many Irish patients were without family or friends to take responsibility for them on discharge. Domestic servants were especially vulnerable, isolated, and rootless, and many single Irish servants ended up in asylums. Mary Lennon, aged thirty, single, RC, and Irish, was brought to Rainhill in 1875. She was reported to be “Irish-in service in Birkenhead and Seacombe only a few days previous to coming to Liverpool where she resided a week and then went to asylum” (LRO Oct. 1873–July 1878, 131; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 135). Her bodily condition was poor, she was agitated and restless, “constantly getting into corners & praying” and rambling about being “an Exile of Erin & wanting freedom” (LRO Oct. 1873–July 1878, 131). Years after the extremes of the Famine, many Irish people were still brought to the asylum impoverished, weak, and exhausted, often after lives on the move. Mary Steging, a 28-year-old single woman, RC, Irish, and a “dealer”, arrived by steamer from Warrenpoint (County

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Down, Ireland) and on arrival was taken by the police to the workhouse and then to Rainhill Asylum in December 1875, in a weak physical condition, “bruised”, and “thin” (172; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 151). She claimed that she dealt in eggs and butter and sailed between Warrenpoint and Liverpool twice a week. Mary also explained to the asylum staff that she had been married for six years to a German shoemaker and had borne six children (including two miscarriages). She believed she was being poisoned and that she had been crucified, showing a mark on her foot where the nail was driven in. Eight months later, she was reported to be improved and was discharged recovered in August 1876 (LRO Oct. 1873–July 1878, 172). Phillip Murray, a widower aged 30, was reported on his admission in March 1871 to have had no settled place of residence in the 15 years he had been in England working as a labourer. Suffering from mania and extreme delusions, after 2 years in Rainhill, he was removed to Whittingham Asylum “unimproved” (LRO May 1870–Dec. 1873, 57; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 39).

Anti-Irish Hostility and Stereotyping Irish Insanity Aside from the more sympathetic responses expressed in asylum records that took account of the vulnerability and stress produced by migration, the confinement of the Irish at considerable cost to the county prompted unease, hostility, and criticism, stridently expressed in  local newspapers. The editors of the Preston Chronicle, when discussing the “great financial penalty for pauper insanity”, identified the main causes as “imported mad into Lancashire”, along with “drunkenness” that produces “crime, poverty and wretchedness” and “generates madness” (“Madness and Its Cost in Lancashire” 1869, 4–5). In 1870, the Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser complained that “many persons now in our asylums are ‘importations’—people belonging to other counties, principally Ireland, who are brought to Liverpool, &c. then deserted and then picked up […] and kept at the expense of the ratepayers” (“Lancashire and Its Lunatics” 1870, 6). This had prompted the need for extra asylum accommodation that resulted in the building of Whittingham Asylum in 1873 (Melling 2015). The article sought a better system to prevent migration of the “finest pisantry” into Lancashire: “We have plenty of insane people in the county without being put into trouble of keeping any of ‘Ould Ireland’s’ demented children” (“Lancashire and Its Lunatics” 1870, 6).

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Asylum superintendents may have been influenced by and even reinforced stereotypes of the Irish as violent, intemperate, drawn to low living, and liable to particular forms of mental illness, notably mania, GPI, and insanity associated with excess alcohol. Far higher proportions of Irish patients had their mental collapse ascribed to drink compared with non-­ Irish patients. In 1866, drink was assigned as a cause of mental breakdown for 20 per cent of Irish patients compared with 10 per cent of non-Irish patients in Rainhill. Mania—related to bellicose and violent behaviour prior to admission and during confinement—was diagnosed in over half of all male and female Irish patients compared with 20 per cent of non-Irish patients. In 1867, Dr. Rogers blamed the “bad condition” of some women patients, “as regarded their destructiveness, violence, &c., owing to their being drawn from the Irish quarters of Liverpool” (LRO 1864–1874, 368; see also Cox et  al. 2012). Mary Kelly, a 31-year-old Irish servant, admitted to Rainhill in 1867, had “varied her time latterly by alternatively visiting prisons and asylums of which she makes a boast” (LRO Feb. 1865–Jan. 1870, 39). She had been a patient a year previously but had escaped and was incoherent and noisy, especially at night when she disturbed the other patients (39). Many Irish patients were transferred from prisons to asylums, prompting Dr. Rogers to despair at the continual presence of the criminal class in Rainhill “as they not only give much trouble and interfere with the discipline, but their presence and intercourse have also an injurious and demoralizing effect on the younger patients” (LRO 1879–1882, 17). In 1875, it was claimed that 13 per cent of the 446 Irish admissions to Prestwich Asylum had been sent from the police courts and gaols of the district (LRO 1875–1878, 66; see also Walton et  al. 1999). Prisoners were removed to asylums at the termination of their sentences if still deemed insane, including Mary Leonard who was found guilty of burglary at the Liverpool Assizes in December 1868 and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. After removal to Millbank Prison in London (presumably to confirm her mental state), she was taken to Broadmoor Asylum in 1873 and, in 1876 at the expiration of her sentence, transferred to Rainhill. She was described as noisy, incoherent, and excitable, having “delusions of an exotic kind and uses obscene language” (LRO Oct. 1873–July 1878, 175). Margaret McNally, transferred from Liverpool Prison to Rainhill in April 1896, was noted to be “frequently noisy & excited but never in the least violent. Her condition is an exaggeration of the normal mental state of a good tempered Irish blackguard” (LRO Oct. 1895–July 1897, 73).9

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William Moore, aged 30, was admitted to Kirkdale Prison in Liverpool for stealing lead before being removed to Rainhill in March 1873. Moore was reported to have enlisted in the army aged around 14 and had served in India. Since arriving in England and leaving the army, he had “tramped about”, staying in lodgings (LRO May 1870–Dec. 1873, 211; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 89). In June, he took his opportunity to escape from Rainhill as the patients were coming out of church (LRO May 1870–Dec. 1873, 211). John Flanaghan was brought in June 1874 to Rainhill by Kirkgate Prison’s jailor prior to his trial for burglary. He had been in and out of gaol since 1853 (LRO Dec. 1873–July 1877, 58; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 111). Flanaghan first escaped in September and was picked up in Blackburn selling a stolen pair of trousers and again in December, when he was found asleep at the roadside. He was reported to be constantly fighting with the other patients and was finally removed to Broadmoor in January 1876 (LRO Dec. 1873– July 1877, 58). Poor Law authorities and asylum superintendents expressed particular frustration about Irish migrants who were returned from America to Liverpool as their port of departure rather than Ireland, their place of birth. The rise of Nativism in the 1850s brought increased hostility towards Irish and other migrants in America, resulting in the removal of Irish migrants from almshouses and asylums in Massachusetts and, in some instances, eventual deportation and return to Liverpool, their port of departure (Hirota 2017). Though relatively small in number, they became emblematic of wider issues concerning settlement and repatriation and were often brought back to Liverpool in a terrible mental and physical state. In 1858, a report in the Northern Daily Times described how the ship The Resolute had arrived from Boston with 35 persons on board, many lunatics, who were in great distress when forcibly shipped to Liverpool. More were said to be on their way (“Select Vestry” 1858, 6). In November, the Clerk at the Brownlow Hill Workhouse reported that during the last year, 108 paupers had been returned from America, including 90 Irish. Most were sickly and broken down, and 17 were listed as lunatics and epileptics. The majority were subsequently returned to Ireland at the county’s cost, though 15 remained in the workhouse. The Workhouse Committee members claimed that many of those returned had resided in America for years, including women married to American citizens (“Workhouse Committee” 1858, 7). Of the 17 insane paupers, Rainhill only took in 6, due to its crowded state. Its superintendent, Dr.

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Rogers, condemned such practices while also expressing concern that they were likely to continue and that Liverpool, as the chief port of departure for American ships, would suffer most (Wellcome Library 1859, 92).10 In addition to those removed to Liverpool, individual cases were admitted after wandering on a global scale, across America, Australia, and India, in search of work, serving in the army, and slipping in and out of community support networks, their link to Liverpool fragile or non-existent. Michael Meaney was sent by the Parish of Liverpool to Rainhill on 12 December 1879. He had arrived by ship from Quebec on 2 December and was admitted to Liverpool workhouse on the same day. Meaney was reported to be originally from Waterford in Ireland, and the cause of his insanity was given as “drink” (LRO July 1877–June 1881, 212; Lancashire Archives Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893, 282). He was incoherent, dull, and melancholic, though the casebook entry noted: “Says he has been in the army for a number of years left it a few years back & has been in america [sic]” (LRO July 1877–June 1881, 212). Meaney remained in Rainhill for five years before being removed to Whittingham Asylum (212).

Conclusion: Irish Mobility, Sympathy, and Frustration For many Irish people, while their mobility had often led to their confinement and made them subject to medical intervention, the move to the asylum marked an abrupt halt to their movements. Isolated and alone, like Sweeney and Meaney, they remained there for many years, filling up the chronic wards, often until their deaths. The Lancashire asylum system continued to grow resolutely throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, alarming ratepayers, Poor Law officials, Lunacy Commissioners, and asylum superintendents, whose institutions expanded hugely in size but who were still unable to cope with the number of patients seeking admission. By 1867, Lancashire’s three county asylums contained some 2553 patients, and by 1890, after the establishment of Whittingham in 1873, this had swelled to 6416, while an additional 2309 pauper lunatics were maintained in workhouses (Twenty-First Annual Report of the Lunacy Commissioners 1867, 62; Forty-Fourth Report of the Lunacy Commissioners 1890, 30).11 By the late nineteenth century, the Irish of Liverpool and Lancashire tended to be more prosperous, more middle class, and more diverse in

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their residential profile; many were artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, and professionals. Yet still, circumstances forced some to “the hardest, the most precarious, and the worst paid employments in the English labour market”, and while “Irish names [continued] to figure so often in the police courts”, they were “confined to one wretched class” (Taylor 1976, 163). The Irish who stayed in Liverpool were referred to as “the dregs”, unfit to leave the city to seek other opportunities (101). By this time, the number of Irish-born asylum patients was in decline but still highly visible and much commented on by asylum doctors, and their numbers swelled by second-generation Irish patients who, as Dr. Rogers at Rainhill stated, were Irish in “everything” except place of birth (LRO 1866–1870, 115). They were emblematic of the massive rates of incarceration, no longer wandering, now fixed and immobile in large warehouse-like asylums. Asylum records demonstrate the many ways in which the Irish persisted in short- and long-distance migration, even if challenged not only by poverty but also susceptibility to mental breakdown. In Lancashire, patients were admitted to asylums immediately on arrival, following years of living in Lancashire or after periods of wandering on a local or global scale. In contrast to Angela McCarthy’s findings that New Zealand migrants were institutionalised after years of settlement, many Irish patients took a rapid route into the asylum and were notable for their isolation and lack of roots and connections (2012, 66). Asylum superintendents revealed a blend of pragmatism and sympathy towards the plight of Irish migrants but, at the same time, might also have been influenced by cultural stereotyping and discrimination.12 While the comments of the asylum doctors took into account the disappointment and disruption of migration, dealing as they were with an unwelcome and very significant patient population, their patience wore thin, and mixed messages, of sympathy and frustration, typified their complex responses to Irish patients and to their rootlessness and experiences of mobility.

Notes 1. Materials taken from the Liverpool Record Office, the Lancashire Archives, and the Wellcome Library are listed according to the archive or library’s name and the date of the respective source in this chapter. The Liverpool Record Office will be abbreviated hereafter as LRO. 2. From the late 1860s, the Lancashire County Council produced a set of notebooks intended to record the settlement of Irish patients for the pur-

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pose of chargeability. We were able to link patients in the asylum casebooks to entries in the council notebooks, which provided more information on patients’ experiences prior to confinement. 3. For the scale of admissions of Irish “lunatics” to local workhouses and negotiations and disputes between the Poor Law and asylum authorities over admissions, see Cox and Marland (2015, 263–287). 4. See Cox and Marland (2022, Chap. 4), for more detail on the movement of people with general paralysis (GPI) between prisons and asylums. For GPI, see Davis (2008). 5. For discussions of mental health and illness and their entanglements with mobility in nineteenth-century literature, see Heidi Lucja Liedke’s and Stefanie John’s chapters in this volume. 6. For stress models and the impact of theories of heredity in asylum practices, see Ray (1981). 7. Dementia during this period was widely utilised to label a state of deterioration in mental state and unresponsiveness to treatment, often regarded as irreversible, but was less strongly associated with elderly patients than today. 8. For consideration of integration amongst the Irish middle classes in Britain, see Pooley (1989) and essays in Belchem (2000). For a case of an asylum patient speaking Gaelic, see Bridget Nicholson, a 52-year-old married “housewife” admitted to Rainhill in January 1871. She was “constantly talking incoherently in her native tongue, the only word that can be made out is ‘accoushila’” (LRO Jan. 1870–Oct. 1873). The case notes are not clear on whether these patients lapsed into Gaelic as a result of mental illness or spoke little English at all. “Accoushila” is probably a phonetic spelling of A chuisle mo chroí (“My heart’s beloved”) or Mo chuisle (“My beloved”). 9. For women in Liverpool Prison, see Cox and Marland (2019). 10. For similar examples, see McCarthy (2012, 59), and Ellis (2020, esp. Chap. 6) for the repatriation of lunatics. 11. See Cox and Marland (2015). 12. By contrast, Markku Hokkanen’s chapter in this volume examines instances of positive stereotyping of the mobilities of British colonisers.

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Bashford, Alison. 2013. “Insanity and Immigration Restriction.” In Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World, edited by Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, 14–35. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Belchem, John. 2000. Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Belchem, John. 2007. Irish, Catholic and Scouse. The History of the Liverpool Irish, 1800–1939. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Cox, Catherine. 2012. Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cox, Catherine, and Hilary Marland. 2015. “‘A Burden on the County’: Madness, Institutions of Confinement and the Irish Patient in Victorian Lancashire.” Social History of Medicine 28 (2): 263–287. https://doi.org/10.1093/ shm/hku082. Cox, Catherine, and Hilary Marland. 2019. “‘Unfit for Reform or Punishment’: Mental Disorder and Discipline in Liverpool Borough Prison in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Social History 44: 173–201. https://doi.org/10.108 0/03071022.2019.1579977. Cox, Catherine, and Hilary Marland. 2022. Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Catherine, Hilary Marland, and Sarah York. 2012. “Emaciated, Exhausted and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums.” Journal of Social History 46 (2): 500–524. https://doi. org/10.1093/jsh/shs091. Cox, Catherine, Hilary Marland, and Sarah York. 2013. “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire.” In Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World, edited by Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, 36–61. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Gayle. 2008. ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Duncan, W. H. 1851. Report of the Health Committee of the Borough of Liverpool, on the Health of the Town During the Years 1847–48–49–50. Liverpool: Harris and Co. Ellis, Robert. 2020. London and Its Asylums, 1884–1914: Politics and Madness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. “First Report of the Select Committee on Emigrant Ships. 1854. Minutes of Evidence, S.  Redmond.” 2002. In Irish Migrants in Britain 1815–1914: A Documentary History, edited by Roger Swift, 88–89. Cork: Cork University Press.

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Fitzpatrick, David. 1980. “Irish Migration in the Later Nineteenth Century.” Irish Historical Studies 22: 126–143. ­ https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0021121400026158. Fitzpatrick, David. 1989. “‘A Peculiar Tramping People’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–1870.” In A New History of Ireland, vol. V, edited by W. E. Vaughan, 623–657. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Forty-Fourth Report of the Lunacy Commissioners. 1890. House of Commons Papers, 274, XXXV.I.35. [available through ProQuest U.K.  Parliamentary Papers] Fox, J.  W. 1991. “Irish Immigrants, Pauperism, and Insanity in 1854 Massachusetts.” Social Science History 15: 315–336. Garton, Stephen. 1988. Medicine and Madness. A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940. Kensington: New South Wales University Press. Herson, John. 2008. “‘Stirring Spectacles of Cosmopolitan Animation’: Liverpool as a Diasporic City, 1825–1913.” In One Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Past, edited by Sheryllyne Haggerty, Anthony Webster, and Nicholas J. White, 55–77. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hirota, Hidetaka. 2017. Expelling the Poor. Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Ireland.” 1851. Liverpool Mercury, Sept. 5: 2. “Irish Emigration to America.” 1851. Manchester Times, Oct. 18: 4. “Irish Paupers in Liverpool.” 1847. Liverpool Mercury, Nov. 30: 8. Kraut, A. M. 1997. Silent Travellers: Germs, Genes and the ‘Immigrant Menace’. Baltimore, MD, and London: John Hopkins University Press. “Lancashire and Its Lunatics.” 1870. Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser, June 18: 6. Lancashire Archives. Dec. 11, 1866–Aug. 31, 1869. Register of Class 1 Lunatics, Covering Admissions. QAM 4/1. Lancashire Archives. Feb. 4, 1869–Feb. 15, 1893. Register of Class 1 Lunatics, Covering Admissions. QAM 4/2. Liverpool Record Office. 1863. Annual Report Lancaster Asylum. M614 RAI/40/2/29. Liverpool Record Office. 1856. Annual Reports of the County Lunatic Asylums at Lancaster, Rainhill, & Prestwich. M614 RAI/40/2/26. Liverpool Record Office. 1879–1882. Annual Reports of the County Lunatic Asylums at Lancaster, Prestwich, Rainhill, and Whittingham. M614 RAI/40/2/4. Liverpool Record Office. 1866–1870. Annual Reports of the Lancashire Asylums. M614 RAI/40/2/1. Liverpool Record Office. 1871–1874. Annual Reports of the Lancashire Asylums. M614 RAI/40/2/2.

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PART III

Mobilities and Medical Regimens

CHAPTER 10

Exposure, Friction, and “Peculiar Feelings”: Mobile Skin in Victorian Medicine and Literature Ariane de Waal

Ernest Foxwell, a self-appointed advocate of the national railway, draws to the conclusion of his pamphlet “Express Trains: An Apology” (1883) with a bold claim: “Theories of Democracy were useless prior to railways. […] For fifty years, […] people of every sort and variety have come across each other, and been intimately mixed up in the affairs of life. This constant rubbing against one another has taught them more of the quality of the stuff of which they are all made, it has caused them to be more kindly disposed to all sorts and conditions […]. This is Democracy, and this is the work of railways” (1884, 37–38). If his celebration of the railway as the cornerstone of democracy seems somewhat overstated, Foxwell is unapologetic about the ardent tones of his deliberately “one-sided” defence of English express trains (1884, Preface). As evident from his self-consciously

A. de Waal (*) University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_10

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triumphal treatise, Foxwell was aware that his favourable assessment of throwing “people of every sort and variety” into immediate contact would raise more than a few eyebrows. Stories about assault, theft, murder, sexual violence, injuries, and psychological damage incurred on the railway were engraved onto the “mental structures of anxiety which were the collective heritage of Victorian travellers” (Harrington 2000, 229–230). While fears about an erosion of gender and class boundaries resulting from the “new connectedness” of “masses of people” (Urry 2007, 91; emphasis in original) as well as the railway’s purported impact on the nervous system have been the subject of much scholarship (Daly 1999; Harrington 2000), this chapter calls attention to a hitherto unrecognised health concern underlying the anxious discourse surrounding railway trains. Foxwell’s figure of speech is revealing: his emphasis on a “constant rubbing against one another” in stations, on platforms, and in train compartments highlights the involvement and activation of passengers’ skin—even if their “travelling bodies” are typically “wrapped up in railway rugs or enveloped in thick layers of clothing” (Mathieson 2015, 47). Beyond stressing the frequency of accidental encounters, Foxwell’s phrasing invites readers to consider the precise physicality and physiology of travelling bodies “rubbing against one another”, a formulation that he uses at least twice in the pamphlet (1884, 21, 38). Rubbing, in his machinic view of the body and society, suggests a positive, vitalising form of corporeal (and, to some extent, cutaneous) contact. While Foxwell considers “organic […] mingling” (37) as conducive to social energies and civic values, other sources testify to the moral or physiological dangers of such friction. Consider, for example, the “human guests” passing through the narrow passage of the Casterbridge inn in Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), who “rubbed shoulders indiscriminately” (2008, 40). Rubbing here signifies social mixing across gender and class lines, which spurs the social mobility of some characters but spells tragedy for the novel’s titular mayor. Complementing this hint at the moral risks of mingling, the medical wisdom of excessive rubbing is questioned in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) when Justice Hare, whose “gentleman’s toilette” consists of “rubb[ing] his face to a shiny brilliancy” (2005, 229), suffers several strokes over the course of the novel. In the same year as Foxwell’s treatise, London’s Monthly Homeopathic Review released an instalment of Austrian physician Gustav Pröll’s “Secret Enemies of Medical Effort”, which strikes a sceptical note regarding the forceful rousing of the skin to action. Grounding his expertise in case studies from

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his practice at Bad Gastein, Pröll admits that “rubbing the skin is undoubtedly useful when a bath has not been taken for some length of time” yet warns that application of “the flesh brush and towel” renders the skin morbidly thin and vulnerable (1884, 26). Particularly illuminating is his conjecture that “were peasants, artisans, coachmen, &c., to apply friction, in this way, they would be unable to endure the constant and often violent changes of weather to which they are exposed” (26). Although most Victorian dermatologists were emphatic about the importance of exfoliation, Pröll’s warning testifies to the competing belief in a protective crasse, or crust, that envelops the body and had best be left undisturbed (Sarasin 2001, 283). Travelling entails exposing the skin not only to rough winds or drastic temperature changes but also to the toxins and odours emanating from other—potentially unwashed, illness-infested, and infectious— bodies. One might surmise, then, that Hardy’s “fine old crusted characters” (2008, 96), like the wrapped-up railway travellers that Charlotte Mathieson (2015) has identified as characteristic figures in the mid-nineteenth-century novel, are suitably equipped for the strains of travel.1 Yet the image of the cloaked or crusted travelling body jars with the imperative of freeing the skin from obstructions reiterated in endless variations across dermatological treatises, conduct books, and periodical articles from mid-century onwards. How best to prepare the skin for the exigencies of massive public mobilisation is a controversial and hitherto largely unexamined concern of medical writers, cultural commentators, and novelists. This chapter investigates the rich significance of mobile skin in medical and literary representations of travel and bodily movement from the midto the late nineteenth century. Victorian skin could become mobile in at least two, often complementary, senses. The first aspect of this mobility pertains to the movements of matter that became perceptible through advances in microscopy and anatomy, which led to Victorian dermatologists approaching the human skin as a “part in motion” (Milton 1879, 35). Their model of the “continual movement of the skin” (Wilson 1853, 252), consisting in the transport of effete matter through the perspiratory tubes and pores, was widely disseminated in lectures, public health leaflets, sanitary rhymes, and an unceasing string of articles in the periodical press. On a larger scale, the skin could become mobile through exertion of the whole body. Cutaneous reactions to the physical exercises of walking and horseback riding as well as to travelling on the railway were frequently discussed and problematised in dermatological treatises and advice manuals. This chapter combines a medical humanities perspective with a

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mobility studies approach to Victorian travelling skin. As defined by the new mobilities paradigm, I attend to the “broad-ranging generic sense” of mobility, that is, “embracing physical movement such as walking […] to movement enhanced by technologies” such as the railway (Sheller and Urry 2006, 212). This perspective on physical movement will be complemented by an approach to the skin’s mobility on the microscopic scale, focusing on dermatologists’ descriptions of the vital processes of perspiration and evaporation. Dermatology became established as a new medical subdiscipline around the mid-nineteenth century; the foundation of the first specialised skin hospitals and a steep increase in dermatological publishing activities thus coincided with the systematic expansion of “mobility systems” (Urry 2007, 13).2 Most of the medical sources I discuss in this contribution were written by specialists seeking to establish their authority in this newly professionalised field. Throughout the chapter, the wider dissemination of dermatological knowledge will be traced through Victorian periodicals, public lectures, and conduct books. To gauge how the skin’s motions were evaluated in the literary imagination, I draw on key passages from canonical Victorian novels. George Eliot’s oeuvre, as keenly representative of medical realism (Rothfield 1992; Kennedy 2010),3 is my main point of reference, alongside a discussion of works by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In examining Victorian responses to skin-care stipulations, this chapter focuses on an exclusive segment of Victorian society: the characters whose movements and travels will be accompanied over the following pages all hail from the white educated middle class, who were addressed as the main readership of dermatological advice. While there is no sparsity of writing on the skin’s mobility, the discursive terrain I wish to sketch is often incongruous. As Foxwell’s laudatory and Pröll’s cautious comments on rubbing exemplify, the exposure of travellers’ skin to friction, atmospheres, and public scrutiny was subject to competing cultural and medical convictions. The broad circulation of advice on how to obtain and maintain a healthy skin, particularly from mid-century onwards, is governed by a similar contradiction as concurrent debates on the expansion of the railways. On the one hand, railway travel, as evident from Foxwell’s account, was seen as inherently democratising. In John Urry’s historical assessment, the “railway compartment and the station” became “new sites of sociability”, leading “early commentators to believe that there was something democratic about rail travel since it took

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place with masses of other people, mainly strangers” (2007, 104). On the other hand, the division of travellers into different carriages worked to institutionalise class differences (104–105), which were further exacerbated by disparaging accounts of social mixing. Along similar lines, exclusionary and discriminatory tendencies threatened to undermine the democratic potential of dermatological discourses. As writers on the skin insisted, eruptions, irritations, or parasites could afflict any human skin. Medical specialists considered their inclusive ideal of healthy skin universally achievable, provided that their suggestions for sanitary reform— including, for instance, establishing affordable bathing and laundry facilities for the poor (Wilson 1853, viii–xiii)—were put into practice. On the other hand, dermatological descriptions of the skin’s structure and texture reinforced racialised and classed differentiations.4 Another, yet more central, aspect binds Victorian dermatology to mobilisation initiatives: healthy human skin was seen to depend on constant motion. Firstly, the body’s active physical movements were understood as a core prerequisite for a healthy integument; dermatologists were explicit and often effusive about the right type, amount, duration, and intensity of bodily exercise (Innis 1849, 50–57; Wilson 1853, 140–156; Milton 1879, 94–95). Secondly, the cutaneous structure itself was seen as the site of constant movements of matter, both perceptible (sweating) and imperceptible (evaporation) to the person inhabiting it (Wilson 1853, 44; Bulkley 1894, 16). As was regularly explained and illustrated in the periodical press, the skin perpetually engages in excreting “waste matter” through its perspiratory tubes and pores and, to a lesser degree, in “absorbing small particles from the air or any other substance in contact with it” (“The Structure” 1852, 24). One of the main aims of dermatological writing was to provide lucid illustrations of these processes in order to alert readers to the necessity of facilitating continuous cutaneous movement, not least through keeping the body itself in motion (Innis 1849, 50). Nineteenth-century debates on how physical movement benefits or harms the skin will be the focus of the first subsection of this chapter, which examines the exceedingly detailed, and often conflicting, exercise instructions circulated through dermatological treatises, public lectures, and advice manuals. The second section approaches the skin’s micro-level mobility by analysing how skin-care manuals and fiction navigated the risk of so-called checked perspiration. Drawing on selected examples from the novels of Eliot, Brontë, Gaskell, Wood, and Braddon, I will suggest that the dermatological imperative of measured movement lends itself to

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narrative improvisations in Victorian fiction. The third part focuses on horseback riding as a type of exercise that was thought to be of prime benefit to the skin. Turning to literary treatments of riding, I will demonstrate how Eliot’s female equestrian protagonists avail themselves of medical discourses in order to control their own mobility. The final section of the chapter returns to railway travel and foregrounds the risks associated with crowded railway compartments in light of dermatological accounts of cutaneous secretions and contagion.

Exercise: The Skin in Motion Throughout the nineteenth century, medical and popular texts unanimously emphasised the importance of physical exercise for maintaining the skin in a state of health and physiological balance. While opinions on the exact exercise regimens most conducive to cutaneous health differed, the relevance of exercise as such was uncontested. A key proponent was Erasmus Wilson, one of the most prominent Victorian dermatologists credited with popularising the new medical subdiscipline. Wilson’s Practical Treatise on Healthy Skin (1845) appeared in various editions and remained in print for decades. “Obviously”, as Pamela Gilbert notes with regard to Wilson’s success, “there was a large and probably anxious market of readers for dermatological advice” (2019, 118). Wilson specifies the following “rule of health”: “[N]amely, by food, by raiment, by exercise, and by ablution, to maintain and preserve an agreeable warmth of the skin” (1853, 106; emphasis in original). Apart from adding an emphasis on “pure air” (Folger Fowler 1864, 6; emphasis in original), virtually all dermatological writings echoed this rule. Wilson’s treatise on Healthy Skin is typical in devoting an entire chapter to a discussion of exercise, which was also excerpted in the periodical press (“The Human Skin” 1846, 260). Wilson’s “secret of beneficial exercise” (1853, 142; emphasis in original) is brought to the following conclusion: “The exercise best adapted for the adult is walking, and riding on horseback; and for the elderly, walking, and the more gentle exercise of riding in a carriage. Walking, when practised with a proper regard to the conditions mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, bestows all the advantages which are to be derived from exercise. It favours digestion and nutrition, facilitates respiration, stimulates the skin, and promotes its action; increases the temperature of the body, and invigorates the physical and mental powers” (155). This paragraph follows on the heels of over a dozen pages that

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detail the conditions exercise has to meet if it is to be beneficial to the skin. To summarise these briefly, exercise should be regular, yet moderate; it should take place at the right time of day and outside in the fresh air (Wilson specifies mid-day during winter and morning or evening during summer); the person exercising outside has to avoid frost, damp, or great heat; exercise should neither take place immediately before nor after meals; finally, the right clothing is essential to produce the effects of “stimulat[ing] the skin, and promot[ing] its action”, as Wilson outlines above. This heavily prescriptive catalogue is no idiosyncrasy of Wilson’s. John Laws Milton, who founded St John’s Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in London in 1863, stresses the high demand for dermatological advice on physical exercise in the introduction to his treatise on The Hygiene of the Skin (1879): “Inquiry is constantly made by patients for a text-book, to which they can refer when in doubt about some point connected with diet, baths, soaps, exercise and so on” (3). Somewhat surprisingly, Milton questions Wilson’s recommendation of walking as best practice. He calls “the daily walking pursued by some persons” a “mistake”, seeing as it is often “carried to […] excess” and thus becomes “highly injurious in many cases” (94–95). Milton suggests “as substitutes […], as far as is practicable, riding, cricket, bicycle riding, boating, dancing” (95). These minor disagreements notwithstanding, Victorian dermatologists rallied behind the benefits of keeping the body in steady motion. Another aspect that unites Wilson, Milton, and many of their colleagues is that, against the overwhelming evidence of misogyny in contemporary medical writing, they propounded comparatively progressive values when it comes to exercise. Taking dermatology into account, I would reconsider the general verdict on medicine’s key role “in shaping a bourgeois economy which harnessed women to their bodies and necessitated their exclusion from the public domain”, as Jane Wood argues (2001, 11). While the construction of female bodies as frail or fallible applies to Victorian medicine broadly construed, dermatologists should be credited with loosening some of these harnesses. They were, for instance, united in their criticism of female fashion habits such as tight-lacing, condemning restraints on female muscular movement in the harshest terms (Wilson 1853, 149–154). Both Wilson and Milton were adamant that parents and schools should offer girls “a great deal more out-of-door exercise than they usually get” (Milton 1879, 95). Evidently, one cannot champion these writers as proto-­ feminists, as they still frame female health “in terms of reproductive capacity […], focusing on the constitutional demands of motherhood to ensure

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the future of the next generation” (Vrettos 1995, 127). Though Wilson expresses the hope that sufficient physical exertion will adequately prepare girls “to perform the duties of British mothers”, he vehemently opposes the notion of “lady-like” exercise (1853, 153, 155).5 Milton is yet more egalitarian (in gendered terms) in his advice, even if his recommendation of riding, cricket, and boating points to the affluence of the readership he has in mind. In his ironic dismissal of genteel female education with a view to “some accomplishment”, he imprints on the implied female reader the necessity of outdoor exercise to keep “her health and skin in good trim”, specifically reassuring her that “[s]he need not be afraid of damaging her skin by tanning and freckling; the one is a good sign, and freckles never yet spoiled beauty” (1879, 95). Milton’s unusual praise for suntans and freckles sounds especially permissive when considered against the race-, gender-, and class-specific norm of “[a] white skin, slightly tinged with carnation, soft and smooth to the touch” (“On the Beauty” 1807, 10) that remained predominant well into the second half of the century. Female commentators contributed a wealth of instructions on how to obtain an ostensibly “natural”, healthy white skin as writers of medical literature, advice columns, and conduct books. A notable example is Lydia Folger Fowler, one of the first women to receive a US medical degree, who continued her successful lecturing career after moving to London in 1863. One of her public lectures, held for a female audience, was published in 1864 as How to Preserve the Skin and Increase Personal Beauty. Although Folger Fowler echoes dermatologists’ insistence on exercise, what she posits as a beautiful and natural skin appears out of reach for most Victorians: only “as the skin is free from blemishes, freckles, and marks of disease do we admire it” (1864, 7) is one of her dictums. Most writers on the skin (including dermatologists like Wilson) sided with Folger Fowler’s interpretation of freckles and tans as injuries to “genuine complexions” (6), perceiving them as undesirable aberrations from the exclusive ideal of unmarked white skin. Hence, especially for female readers, advice on exercise was confusing at best and contradictory at worst. Wilson’s claim that even a physical activity so basic as going for a walk needs to obey precise rules reverberates throughout nineteenth-century publications. Towards the end of the period, the key to unlock Wilson’s “secret of beneficial exercise” was still in high circulation and thus, apparently, far from self-evident, as an article on “The Secret of Beauty” in the North American magazine Current Literature from 1890 reveals: “Regular exercise must be enforced. Walk

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briskly but not too fast, and for a constitutional go, rain or shine, a certain distance and without stopping, so that there will be no opportunity for sudden checking of the perspiration” (196). The risk of checking perspiration is behind almost all of the more alarmist tales of insufficient or improper exercise that were widely distributed in medical and popular publications (Condict 1855, 78; “Checked Perspiration” 1856, 4; Milton 1879, 34–35). Next to monitoring their skin for signs of freckling or tanning, Victorian readers were asked to ensure that their pores remained open during exercise. What is thus at stake, particularly for Victorian women, is the management of a fragile equilibrium: they had to keep up and aid the autonomous movements of their cutaneous system while carefully avoiding over-stimulating or overexposing their skin to harmful environmental influences.

Checked Perspiration: The Motions of the Skin With recurrence to Galen, Victorian dermatologists maintained that the skin expels a considerable amount of waste matter through the processes called “insensible” and “sensible perspiration”, thus differentiating the invisible exhalation of vapour from the perceptible production of sweat (Bulkley 1894, 16–17). What differentiates Victorian treatises on the skin from earlier proto-dermatological works is a reliance on advances in microscopy and anatomy, especially the determination of the number of pores (approximately seven million) and the discovery of the sweat ducts in the early nineteenth century (Te Hennepe 2014, 400). These new anatomical insights enabled Victorian dermatologists to offer more detailed and mathematical descriptions of the passage of matter through the skin. To give one characteristic example from Balmanno Squire’s 1867 textbook Unhealthy Skin: Its Prevention and Management, “The […] ‘insensible perspiration’ […] amounts to something very considerable in twenty-four hours. Thus, it has been calculated that two and a half pounds is the average amount of cutaneous exhalation during that time” (43; emphasis in original). Many Victorian skin treatises encourage readers to undertake experiments to observe this otherwise undetectable process of insensible perspiration, so that they would become more cognisant of the much-commented danger of checked perspiration.6 Specialist and popular sources alike describe this process as a sudden obstruction of the pores resulting from exposure of the heated organism to cold substances or from interrupted movement, which locks “foul material” into the “inner

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organs” (Condict 1855, 78) and leads to “sickness, disease, and death” (“Checked Perspiration” 1856, 4).7 Readers were held responsible for ensuring the smooth passage of matter and preventing checked perspiration not only by implementing the rules of beneficial exercise but also by properly cleansing their pores (Bulkley 1894, 141). In Victorian Skin (2019), Gilbert convincingly reads the Victorians’ “aggressive promotion of self-help via pore management” as “coupled with an older sense of the culpability of those whose skin is marred by disease” (114). Even though the moral undertones of their writings are often discernible, I would stress that dermatologists largely worked towards decoupling the skin from antiquated associations with morality. While the moral benefits of ablution are especially pronounced in treatises published up until mid-century (Wilson 1853, viii–xiii), later dermatologists abandoned the Chadwickian ideals of clean bodies and minds in favour of more accurate clinical understandings of the aetiology of skin diseases.8 As articulated in “The Secret of Beauty” (1890), the “epidermis is the direct reflector of one’s physical condition” (196), rather than of vice or virtue. By promoting a physiological model of the skin’s motions, medical and popular writers assigned to readers the responsibility of care for and maintenance of their cutaneous system. Victorian novels reflect this notion of the responsible, ‘skin-caring’ middle-class subject, albeit often in an ironic or critical vein. There are innumerable passages where characters stir their skin into action through a brisk walk and duly achieve the result of an improved circulation and complexion. Examples include Shirley Keeldar and Catherine Helstone in Brontë’s Shirley (1849), who “strayed through the garden” on “a breezy sunny day; the air freshened the girls’ cheeks” (2008, 237); Margaret Hale in Gaskell’s North and South (1854–1855), whose walk along “the length of a street—yes, the air of a Milton Street—cheered her young blood […]. Her step grew lighter, her lip redder” (2008, 131); or Dorothea Brooke in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), who “walked briskly in the brisk air, the colour rose in her cheeks” (1994, 27). The semantic and syntactical similarity of these passages, which resonate with the above-quoted call to walk “briskly but not too fast” for “a certain distance and without stopping”, shows that it was a truism that the facial skin could be invigorated through active walks under the right conditions, which would hardly make these scenes relevant to plot or character development. At the same time, the formulaic and often clichéd nature of such passages allows for novelists’ creative deviation from skincare scripts in order to call attention to

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character or narrative. As the following examples from Eliot’s early work will demonstrate, the acts of breaking into an unhealthy pace or coming to an abrupt halt can alert readers to decisive moments in the plot or in a character’s development. Two of Eliot’s early characters violate dermatological stipulations in the way they walk. In Adam Bede (1859), Bartle Massey unexpectedly walks himself from the periphery to the centre of the narrative when he hastens to the Rectory to become involved in Hetty Sorrel’s court case. After being shown up to Mr. Irwine’s study, Bartle is “soon joined” by the parson (Eliot 2008, 374). It is after Bartle has voiced his appeal that the narrator interrupts the dialogue to note that “Bartle was heated by the exertion of walking fast in an agitated frame of mind, and was not able to check himself on this first occasion of venting his feelings. But he paused now to rub his moist forehead, and probably his moist eyes also. ‘You’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said, when this pause had given him time to reflect, ‘for running on in this way about my own feelings’” (374–375). At first sight, one might expect that Bartle has injured his frame by “the exertion of walking fast” and coming to an abrupt stop at the Rectory. Yet the narratorial detail about his “moist forehead” is revealing, for this is the only instance in the novel where a character’s “sensible” process of perspiration is observed. The sweat breaking out on Bartle’s skin, which he duly wipes away, gives the narrator, the character, and readers a “pause” to note his physicality. By rendering his heretofore unobtrusive body physiologically expressive, Eliot turns Bartle, who had seemed singularly narrow-minded, into a round, breathing, perspiring character. This partly explains why his exertion is not punished with the adverse effects of checked perspiration. There is also a medical explanation implied in the observation that Bartle “was not able to check himself”: even though he comes to an abrupt halt, he keeps his skin in motion, facilitating the expulsion of sweat (and “probably” also tears) by “venting his feelings”. Bartle’s rehabilitating perspiration can be contrasted to Caterina Sarti’s walk in the second part of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story”. Out of sexual jealousy—a legitimate rival has arrived to spoil her illicit flirtations with the heir apparent—emerges Caterina’s “need of rapid movement. She must walk out in spite of the rain” (Eliot 2015, 126). Judging that “Caterina could hardly have chosen a less suitable walk” (127), the narrator highlights the conscious choice made in favour of a walk detrimental to health. By deliberately “labouring along the wet paths with an umbrella that made her arm ache”, Caterina obtains

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“nature’s innocent opium—fatigue” (127). That Caterina knowingly injures her complexion by exposure to cold and wet elements, and has, in the process, potentially caught the disease that will eventually kill her, is reflected by the juxtaposition that follows upon the description of her walk.9 She arrives at the dwelling of the one character in the novel whose complexion is of a peculiar “red-rose tint” (103), Mr. Bates, only for her to be presented with an appraisal of the instant injurious effects of the exercise: “But ye look very whaite and sadly, Miss Tiny; I doubt ye’re poorly; an’ this walkin’ i’ th’ wet isn’t good for ye” (129). While Mr. Bates’s good-natured comments are benignly paternalistic, Victorian novels abound with scenes where male characters “diagnose” female complexions and make patronising recommendations on exercise regimens accordingly. In numerous narratives, male suitors misunderstand the invigorated facial skin obtained through exercise as a reflection of their erotic charms. This is the case with Dorothea Brooke, who walks “briskly in the brisk air” so that “the colour rose in her cheeks” (Eliot 1994, 27). Dorothea’s healthy pace is “checked” by a “cantering horseman” (29)— her admirer, Sir James Chettam—who misinterprets her exercise-induced “heightened colour in the way most gratifying to himself” (30). These dynamics are also reflected in North and South, where Henry Lennox engages in the reverse fallacy of misattributing Margaret Hale’s “radiant” looks, elicited by her long-desired reunion with Mr. Thornton at a London family dinner, to the healthy walks to Hampstead on which he has accompanied her (Gaskell 2008, 429). In these and other novels penned by female authors, male characters often misattribute the pallor, blushes, or flushes of female characters who are pining for them to insufficient or improper exercise. Robert Moore in Shirley, for example, reacts to the extreme “paleness” of the lovesick Catherine Helstone with the unhelpful suggestion: “You must take care of yourself. Be sure not to neglect exercise” (Brontë 2008, 212–213). The same obliviousness gives rise to Archibald Carlyle’s response to Barbara Hare in East Lynne: “How flushed you look […]. Have I walked too fast?” (Wood 2005, 128). This brief account of the connections between exercise, healthy skin, and frustrated longings in the Victorian novel might suggest that female characters’ movements are strictly surveyed and controlled by male commentators. But this assessment would be incomplete without noting how female characters also avail themselves of the pervasive self-help discourse on exercise in order to increase their autonomy. Before falling ill, Brontë’s protagonist Catherine Helstone can rely on the established importance of

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“[e]xercise” and “fresh air” to seek out Robert Moore’s “premises” (2008, 89) more often than might otherwise be socially warranted. Equally, for Gaskell’s heroine Margaret Hale, “active exertion” is a subterfuge that allows her to escape from and “dispel the oppression” (2008, 198) of a home haunted by illness, death, and grief. To complement this overview of predominantly realist novels with a brief glance at another sensation novel, a further twist on the exercise imperative can be identified: in Braddon’s novels, the socially accepted need for exercise enables female characters to screen their criminal or, conversely, investigative activities from scrutiny. This is particularly pronounced in Mrs. Powell’s and Aurora’s walks in Aurora Floyd (1862–1863). For instance, the ironic narratorial observation that “Mrs Powell [was] walking for the benefit of her health in the north shrubberies, and incurring imminent danger of a sun-­ stroke for the same praiseworthy reason” (Braddon 2008, 244) in a passage where the reader plainly knows of her secretive errand, reveals that such strategies had already become a stock device in mid-Victorian fiction. It thus seems that, rather than simply reiterating the medical significance of the skin’s mobility, the “praiseworthy” pretext of well-regulated exercise provides authors with a script that allows for satire, rule-bending, and subversion.

Horseback Riding: Cutaneous Friction This flexible relationship to medical discourses can also be determined in novelistic explorations of dermatologists’ favourite exercise, horseback riding. More so than with walking, dermatologists unanimously embraced and often overstated the benefits of riding for the health of the skin. The Scottish physician and author of The Principles of Physiology (1834), Andrew Combe, whom a contributor to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal considered “among the first to direct popular attention in this country to the important uses and functions of the skin” (“The Human Skin” 1846, 258), held riding in special regard for “exciting the cutaneous functions” (Combe 1852, 76). Although every exercise gives “general vigour to the circulation”, none compares to riding, in Combe’s estimation, for facilitating “continued gentle friction between the skin and the clothes”, thus “stimulating the cutaneous vessels and nerves” (76). Combe was not alone in emphasising these benefits; dermatological recommendations of riding can be found from the beginning of the Victorian age (Wood 1832, 156) through to its final years (Bulkley 1894, 140). What is striking about

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Combe is the amount of physiological detail he provides. He goes so far as to turn himself into the object of a medical case history, reporting in an almost titillating tone that he found riding “to excite the skin so beneficially as to keep it always pleasantly warm, and generally bedewed with moisture, even to the extremities of the toes” (1852, 77). Combe’s case study—notwithstanding its almost sensual idiom—was emulated in an article in the religious periodical The Circular, in which a clerical correspondent instructs male readers to “[l]earn how to rise gracefully in the saddle, after the fashion of John Bull; the exercise is absolutely splendid, stimulating the capillaries vastly by the friction of the clothes against the person, starting a genial perspiration over the whole body” (“Riding” 1860, 84). It is no coincidence that the healthy equestrian in these examples is male. Victorian horsewomen had to carefully weigh the dermatological benefits of riding against the dictums of fashion and propriety. Female equestrians’ abilities to stimulate the skin through friction were also limited by practical restrictions, such as riding side-saddle, as well as by the heightened scrutiny that riding horses in public entailed. That the cutaneous benefits of riding could not be addressed outside of such gendered concerns is evident from contemporary publications. Seeking to redress the dearth of “practical hints” addressed to female equestrians, Anna Brackett evidently felt a need to distance her piece on “A Woman on Horseback” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1890) from aspects of “show”, insisting that she proposes “only to speak in a practical, common-­ sense way of riding for exercise, fresh air, and rest” (236). In Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (2006), Gina M.  Dorré captures this balancing act as follows: “While horseback riding for women is often viewed positively for the exercise it provided, it was at the same time a suspect activity because it brought women out of the purportedly protected space of the domestic sphere. Women who did thus venture out on horseback are made vulnerable by so doing, and quite often, are duly punished” (78). As is the case with contradictory advice on walking, female mobility here once more poses a conundrum: how could the Victorian horsewoman attend to the imperatives of healthy exercise and pore management without turning her invigorated facial skin into a public spectacle? Even though riding side-saddle may have reduced the potential for stimulating the skin, it is important to appreciate the dramatic alterations made to Victorian riding habits in favour of facilitating mobility. While Regency riding costumes had been decidedly more ornamental, the

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mid-Victorian riding habit consisted of a tight bodice, a tailored jacket with closely fitting sleeves, and a floating yet simple habit-skirt. As Alison Matthews David has argued, the Victorian horsewoman “represents a turning point in the history of female dress. She adopted the first sports costume specifically designed for women” (2002, 179). This trend in making female dress more reduced, practical, and—relatively speaking— “gender-neutral” (179) might be at least partly indebted to dermatologists’ egalitarian insistence on exercise. By the end of the century, the suitability of horseback riding for skin-care purposes had become so well-­ known that abstention from it earned ridicule. In her popular manual How to Be Beautiful (1889), Teresa Dean deplores the flawed exercise regimen of the fashionable horsewoman: “She rides horseback occasionally if it chances to be popular; not early in the morning when the air is fresh and balmy, and each breath is new life, but in the afternoon when well regulated people are expected to ride. These fashionable exercises, which are better than none at all, are given up at twenty, if she marries. In a few years she finds her complexion muddy” (35–36). As Dean’s threatening tone insinuates, “muddy” complexions were the projected punishment for affluent women who had access to horseback riding but failed to implement it in terms of skincare stipulations. In the Victorian novel, female characters often navigate the dichotomy of beneficial versus fashionable horseback riding under intense public scrutiny. Male commentary on and interference in women’s riding practices is especially pronounced in Middlemarch. This also pertains to Dorothea’s much-noted decision to quit riding (Dorré 2006, 14). The opening chapter’s description of Dorothea informs readers that “[m]ost men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air […], and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it” (Eliot 1994, 9–10). Although the narrator overtly gestures to the piety that seems lacking in Dorothea’s enjoyment of riding, there is also an unexplored connection here to dermatological discussions of the time. That Dorothea is conscious of the medical benefits of riding becomes obvious when Sir James wishes to dissuade her from giving it up by assuring her that “riding is the most healthy of exercises”, to which she “coldly” replies, “I am aware of it” (21). The narratorial comment that her “cheeks glowed” when on horseback signals that Dorothea is successful in

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invigorating her facial skin by carrying out this exercise as warranted. Hence, it helps to connect Dorothea’s “conscientious qualms” to contemporary treatises on the physiology of riding in order to fully grasp her ambiguous relinquishing of equestrianism. It is not only the “pagan sensuous” enjoyment of riding that becomes problematic for Dorothea; more specifically, the friction that heightens her sexual attractiveness by bringing a glow to her facial skin threatens to undermine her ascetic self-image. Rosamond, in contrast, turns both the fashionable and medical aspects of horseback riding to her advantage. When Lydgate urges her to abstain from riding during her pregnancy, the narrator comments on her “victorious obstinacy” as follows: “[S]he was very fond of the exercise, and the gratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate, Sir Godwin’s son, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met in this position by any one but her husband, was something as good as her dreams before marriage” (585). The convoluted subclauses attached to the noun exercise indicate that Rosamond’s subterfuge can be unmasked so easily that she has only taken half care to screen it. This syntactical arrangement throws into sharp relief the self-reflexivity with which Eliot wields “horse-­exercise” (581) as a pretext for Rosamond to engage in riding as a public spectacle without inviting the ridicule reflected in Dean’s manual. Like Dorothea, Rosamond is far from ignorant of the medical benefits and risks of riding. As Doreen Thierauf (2014) has demonstrated, Rosamond’s stubborn ride can be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to terminate her pregnancy. By acknowledging the extent of Rosamond’s control “over her reproductive system at a time when that control was supposed to be her husband’s prerogative” (480), such a reading enables us to recognise the nuances of female characters’ autonomy. In line with the examples explored above, Rosamond has recourse to the exercise imperative in order to expand her physical and social mobility. Consequently, Victorian (horse)women were not merely the pathologised objects of medical discourse, but they demonstrably acquired flexibility and self-determination as its agentic interpreters.10

The Railway Carriage: The Skin as Contact Zone From walking and horseback riding, I return to railway travel by way of concluding this chapter. As the previous sections have shown, dermatologists emphasised the importance of keeping the skin in motion in order to facilitate cutaneous excretions. This serves to explain both Foxwell’s

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enthusiastic statements on the physiological benefits of high-speed travel and the repulsion that his comments evoked. If the skin’s rubbing against clothes was seen as a largely desirable process in horseback riding, the idea of bodies “rubbing against one another” (Foxwell 1884, 38)—or worse, rubbing matter off of each other—must have been a frightening prospect for Victorian travellers. The skin’s constant expulsion of waste matter, which medical and popular sources dwelt on, leads to unwarranted exposure to the stuff that is cast off from the skin of others, particularly in the enclosed space of the railway carriage. Folger Fowler urged her female audience to consider their own reactions to such “secretions”: “We vitalize food, and why is it not possible to vitalize the secretions of the skin? As the dry membrane peels off, it may carry a part and parcel of our natures with it. In what other way can we account for the peculiar feelings that we unconsciously have toward different individuals that we casually meet? What a relief it is to us sometimes when certain persons leave the omnibus or the railway-carriage in which we are travelling” (1864, 16). Blending the medical with the affective, Folger Fowler gives a somewhat odd dermatological explanation for the “peculiar feelings” that arise from the accidental encounters that railway travel had turned into a quintessentially modern experience. In her view, travelling skins engage in a vital interchange of matter and moods. Due to the skin’s constant secretions of waste materials and its vulnerability to harmful exposure or irritation, railway trains appear a particularly fraught location to navigate for the health-conscious Victorian traveller. Especially in the case of female travellers, the potential for their skin to rub against other bodies, or absorb the waste matter expelled by them, amplified prevalent anxieties surrounding social mixing. These are reflected in depictions of solitary female railway passengers in Victorian fiction. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Mirah Lapidoth’s account of her desolate travels across Europe, relayed to the eponymous character, briefly glosses the following scene: “[O]n the way from Cologne there was a young workman sitting against me. I was frightened at every one” (2003, 220). It is noteworthy that her fellow passenger is sitting against, rather than next to, Mirah; the wording accentuates cultural worries that the proximity of bodies might erode gendered and classed divisions. In the same novel, the otherwise not particularly sensitive Grandcourt instructs his assistant, in preparation for setting off on the Paris train: “[A]nd mind no brute gets into the same carriage with us” (281). Although neither his wish nor Mirah’s fearful account invokes the skin explicitly, the human

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integument materialises as Victorian travellers’ contact zone, a fallible boundary that precariously protects the body from the arousal of peculiar feelings or contamination. Just as it was a new experience for Victorians to be thrown into regular proximity with some “brute”, the fact that their skin could be the point of attack for germs was a relatively new insight as well. These cutaneous risks were often negotiated in an implicit manner, but with growing knowledge about the skin’s role in infectious transmissions, they became more and more explicit. Thus, an article on “Overcrowding in Railway Carriages”, published in 1887 in The Lancet, called attention to the “possible transference of infection and other contagium vivum of parasitic nature” in overcrowded railway compartments (quoted in Harrington 2000, 232–233; emphasis in original). Up until the end of the Victorian era, dermatologists never tired of reiterating the rules of skin care that would help make these crowded encounters as safe and sanitary as possible. As this chapter’s investigation of a vast array of medical, popular, and literary sources has demonstrated, Victorian advice on skin care and travel was mutually reinforcing: the two discourses are linked by a joint emphasis on measured movement, healthy invigoration, precaution, and prevention of adverse health effects. To obtain and preserve a healthy skin, or to travel safely and comfortably, Victorians were asked to follow a neatly stipulated set of rules, disseminated through conduct books, lectures, advice columns, and periodicals, and reflected in depictions of the skin’s mobility in literary narratives. As the multiple editions as well as the sheer number of articles and treatises on skin care and exercise suggest, anxieties about the medical side effects of massive public mobilisation, extending from walking via horseback riding to railway travel, seemingly secured the market value of these publications. However, Victorians who ensured the motions and mobility of their skin in compliance with dermatological dictums should not be misconstrued as meek, disciplined subjects in the grip of an overpowering medical establishment. Countering the heavily prescriptive nature of dermatological instructions, the imaginative improvisations and subtle subversions of medico-patriarchal authority in the novel showcase strategies to deflect and resist impositions on physical mobility, particularly for white, able-bodied middle-class women.

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Notes 1. Mathieson insightfully suggests that only “comfortably enveloped” bodies were deemed fit for “safe participation in the spaces of modern mobility” (2015, 47, 54). Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s chapter in this volume underlines this point by taking a closer look at how commodities were used as material and symbolic “cocoons” by British travellers in Africa. 2. The medical establishment firmly resisted the idea of dermatological specialisation, which is why it took until 1841 for the first among the “speciality hospitals […] devoted to skin diseases”, the London Infirmary for the Cure of Diseases of the Skin, to be founded (Crissey and Parish 1981, 136). 3. As I have discussed elsewhere, Eliot’s work—and Middlemarch (1871–1872), in particular—can also be productively read as processing new dermatological insights (de Waal 2020). 4. Victorian dermatologists bolstered scientific racism by confirming the existence of what Marcello Malpighi had, in the seventeenth century, identified as the skin’s second layer, the so-called rete mucosum. For instance, in a standard guidebook on The Skin, in Health and Disease (1849), Thomas Innis writes that the “Rete Mucosum, or second portion of the skin, is that structure which imparts their peculiar colour to the dark races of mankind, being comparatively absent in persons of a fair and delicate complexion” (4). 5. For a consideration of the gendered regimes of posture, exercise, and comportment in the Victorian age, see Monika Class’s chapter in this volume. 6. A characteristic invitation to perform such an experiment reads as follows: “If any one wishes to know how much foul matter is constantly being thrown off by a healthy skin in what is called ‘insensible perspiration,’ let him cover up a portion of his body tightly with a wet bandage so as to exclude the air, keep it there for an hour or two, and then apply his nose to the moist cloth as he removes it” (“Another Important Way” 1880, 58). 7. An example that testifies to this widespread notion is an offhand comment Archibald Carlyle makes in East Lynne when he accuses his sister of having “caught a cold” by drinking “a great draught of [ale] cold, when you were in a perspiration” (Wood 2005, 339). 8. From the 1860s onwards, new understandings of contagion slowly began to replace the older, miasmatic model of disease transmission through respiration and absorption with more accurate accounts of the skin as a carrier of germs. For an example, see Aya Homei and Michael Worboys’s discussion of dermatologists’ identification of the fungal parasite that causes ringworm as “an early candidate to be a germ disease” (2013, 23).

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9. Ursula Kluwick’s chapter in this volume provides a reading of a similar scene involving rain and illness in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). 10. In addition to horseback riding, the scope for female mobility expanded considerably with the bicycle and, to a lesser degree, the automobile in the fin de siècle. As Sarah Wintle has observed, “the freedom, physical independence and sense of personal control offered literally and symbolically by all three kinds of transport was, when seized by women, a kind of trespass on traditionally masculine territory” (2002, 66).

Works Cited “Another Important Way.” 1880. The Common Good 1 (4): 58. Brackett, Anna C. 1890. “A Woman on Horseback.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 80 (476): 236–249. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2008 [1862–1863]. Aurora Floyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brontë, Charlotte. 2008 [1849]. Shirley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bulkley, Lucius Duncan. 1894. The Skin in Health and Disease. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co. “Checked Perspiration.” 1856. The Belfast News-Letter, Sept. 10: 4. Combe, Andrew. 1852 [1834]. The Principles of Physiology Applied to the Preservation of Health, and to the Improvement of Physical and Mental Education. Edited by James Coxe. Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart. Condict, H. F. 1855. “The Skin.” The Water-Cure Journal 20 (4): 78. Crissey, John Thorne, and Lawrence Charles Parish. 1981. The Dermatology and Syphilology of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Praeger. Daly, Nicholas. 1999. “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses.” ELH 6 (2): 461–487. Dean, Teresa H. 1889. How to Be Beautiful: Nature Unmasked; A Book for Every Woman. Chicago: T. Howard. De Waal, Ariane. 2020. “Looking Both Ways: Middlemarch, True Skin, and the Dermatological Gaze.” Victorian Network 9: 101–122. Dorré, Gina M. 2006. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Aldershot: Ashgate. Eliot, George. 1994 [1871–1872]. Middlemarch. London: Penguin. Eliot, George. 2003 [1876]. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin. Eliot, George. 2008 [1859]. Adam Bede. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliot, George. 2015 [1857]. Scenes of Clerical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Folger Fowler, Lydia. 1864. How to Preserve the Skin and Increase Personal Beauty. London: W. Tweedie. Foxwell, Ernest. 1884. English Express Trains: Two Papers. London: Edward Stanford.

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Gaskell, Elizabeth. 2008 [1854–1855]. North and South. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, Pamela. 2019. Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hardy, Thomas. 2008[1886]. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrington, Ralph. 2000. “The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity.” In Pathologies of Travel, edited by Richard Wrigley and George Revill, 229–260. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Homei, Aya, and Michael Worboys. 2013. Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850–2000: Mycoses and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Innis, Thomas. 1849. The Skin, in Health and Disease: A Concise Manual. London: Whittaker. Kennedy, Meegan. 2010. Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mathieson, Charlotte. 2015. “‘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 Adrienne E.  Gavin and Andrew F.  Humphries, 44–56. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Matthews David, Alison. 2002. “Elegant Amazons: Victorian Riding Habits and the Fashionable Horsewoman.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (1): 179–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150302301098. Milton, John Laws. 1879. The Hygiene of the Skin. London: Chatto and Windus. “On the Beauty of the Skin” (Excerpt from The Ladies’ Toilette; Or, Encyclopaedia of Beauty). 1807. La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine 3: 205–207. Pröll, Gustav. 1884. “Secret Enemies of Medical Effort: No. 3.” The Monthly Homeopathic Review 28: 25–28. “Riding, Health, Selfishness, &c.” 1860. The Circular 9 (21): 84. Rothfield, Lawrence. 1992. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sarasin, Philipp. 2001. Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–226. https://doi. org/10.1068/a37268. Squire, Balmanno. 1867. Unhealthy Skin: Its Prevention and Management; A Popular Treatise on Cutaneous Hygiene. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

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Te Hennepe, Mieneke. 2014. “‘To Preserve the Skin in Health’: Drainage, Bodily Control and the Visual Definition of Healthy Skin.” Medical History 58: 397–421. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2014.30. “The Human Skin.” 1846. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 121 (258): 258–261. “The Secret of Beauty.” 1890. Current Literature 4 (3): 196. “The Structure of the Skin.” 1852. Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art 9 (213): 24. Thierauf, Doreen. 2014. “The Hidden Abortion Plot in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Victorian Studies 56 (3): 479–489. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vrettos, Athena. 1995. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wilson, Erasmus. 1853 [1845]. Healthy Skin: A Popular Treatise on the Skin and Hair; Their Preservation and Management. London: John Churchill. Wintle, Sarah. 2002. “Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move.” The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, 66–78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, Ellen. 2005 [1861]. East Lynne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Jane. 2001. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, William. 1832. An Essay on the Structure and Functions of the Skin. Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart.

CHAPTER 11

White Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence Monika Pietrzak-Franger

Despite the thriving Victorian health industry, propelled by “medical tourism” (Willis 2016, 2018; Bonea et al. 2019), travel itself, like larger patterns of migration, was associated with numerous health hazards. As John M. MacKenzie puts it in “Environment and Empire”, “the patterns of mobility set up by imperial rule led to the accompanying journeys of germs and diseases with often disastrous human consequences” (2016, 9). In this context, what was enigmatically called “the tropics”, and chiefly associated with Africa, was invariably perceived as extremely attractive on account of its natural resources while, at the same time, inspiring awe as the “white man’s grave” (Curtin 1961, 1990), a site of contagion and death. As a geographical but most of all conceptual space, the tropics represented “something culturally and politically alien, as well as

M. Pietrzak-Franger (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_11

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environmentally distinctive” from what was seen as the civilised world (Johnson 2009, 537).1 Jessica Howell (2014) has shown to what extent explorers maintained the fiction of Africa’s fatal environment. Notoriously, journalist Henry Morton Stanley described the continent as “Fatal Africa!”—a site whose every secret was “environed by so many difficulties,—the torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the noisome vapors enveloping every path” (Stanley 1909, 296). In this piece of rhetoric, Africa’s fiendish anthropomorphic climate seems to guard the continent against explorers, settlers, and the “builders” of the British Empire and thus endangers its “civilisational mission”. It is especially in this context that the health of the travellers and explorers became of issue in official and popular discourses. Clearly, one of the major questions was how it was to be protected. In times when parasitology, sanitary science, and microbiology began to focus on vector-borne diseases while climatic aetiologies put blame on geographical specificities, and miasma theories continued to permeate in many texts (Johnson 2009; Wells 2016), there was very little that could be done for the protection of the citizen-traveller. The coexistence of these paradigms along with the failure of most isolationist strategies led to an emphasis on citizens’ own responsibility in the preservation of their health, the health of the nation, and the empire. This development could partly account for the importance of “moral hygiene” to the preservation of Europeans’ health—a highly prescriptive regime and a series of practices that always implied proper self-conduct and carried clear moral overtones (Wells 2016).2 These practices also involved a particular consumer behaviour that promised to equip the traveller with a necessary shield against tropical and other diseases. Indeed, as critics have acknowledged, “the British built a considerable commodity culture around the preservation of white European health” (Johnson 2009, 530). Tropical outfits—a variety of objects expertly selected for the voyage—were sold with the intention of “easing” the journey’s hardships while inevitably also propelling the exchange of goods between the metropolitan centre and the colonies. They encompassed, next to “tabloid medicine”, also particular dress items. Indeed, besides necessary medications, tropical dress appears to have been central to the colonial project. S. Leigh Hunt and Alexander S. Kenny, authors of On Duty Under a Tropical Sun (1883), make this abundantly clear: “When we consider, that a man’s health and comfort are so materially dependent upon the manner in which his body may be clothed, under the varying circumstances of

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climate, and the peculiar nature of his occupation, the selection of proper material, and the adoption of such patterns of dress as practical experience may have shown to be most generally fitting and serviceable, becomes a question of paramount importance” (1883a, 147). This “paramount importance” of clothing to the preservation of individuals’ health in the tropics, and, by extension, to the health of the empire, points both to the symbolic but also, if not especially, to the material significance of dress in the colonial networks of health and disease that existed in the nineteenth century. Despite the continuing prominence of new material studies and an unremitting grip of Victorian commodities on our imagination, “tropical outfits” in the narrower sense of “tropical clothing” have only recently received some critical attention. In fact, some well-known exceptions such as the dress reform movement notwithstanding, clothing and health have rarely been considered together. What partly accounts for this neglect is a general tendency in, for instance, medical humanities as well as cultural and social histories of medicine to overlook the role of clothing and fabrics in larger networks of health provision. In this chapter, I address this critical lacuna by attending to tropical clothing and its role in larger geographies of health and disease in Victorian Britain. In doing so, I pick up cultural health scholar and sociologist Deborah Lupton’s (1994) early call for a critical consideration of health commodity culture and its intertwining with cultural hegemonies, power relations, and resulting social inequalities. For this to be possible, I consider clothes not only with reference to their semiotic/symbolic meaning but also follow Arjun Appadurai’s (2013) sociological approach and see them as travelling objects, whose trajectories and thus biographies are of utmost importance for cultural analysis. In other words, rather than solely concentrating on their symbolic value within discourses of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and the empire, I draw attention to their material significance within the colonial but also domestic geographies of health and disease. I argue that the juxtaposition of the sites of their consumption with those of their production sheds light on the transcontinental networks of dependence that otherwise remain obscured.

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Victorian (Health) Commodity Culture and the Tropics Victorians were fascinated by commodities. Theirs was “a culture organized around the production and exchange of material goods” (Lindner 2003, 3). As consumerism increased in the mid-nineteenth century, “different forms of social life—economic, political, cultural, and literary— became more and more grouped around the new coordinating frame of the commodity” (Pleßke 2020, 163; see also Briggs 1990). As Thomas Richards suggests, in the 1850s, “the commodity became and has remained the one subject of mass culture, the centrepiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world” (1990, 1). The scholarship of the last four decades has shown the extent to which the Victorian empire and commodity culture were intertwined as the flow of goods from and to the colonies reached unprecedented dimensions (McClintock 1995; Trentmann 2016). Indeed, scholars agree that the economic, political, and material networks that were thus created were full of tensions and uneven distributions of power and therefore should be read in terms of “multi-sited histories” (Anderson 2004; see also Pratt 1992; Arnold 1993, 2006; Raj 2007). The commodification of the vast natural resources was one of the goals of colonisation, next to finding space for surplus population, and for new markets and outlets that were necessitated by rapid industrialisation. At the same time, extant commodity culture, in a way, was the precondition of this commodification. The tropics, of course, tempted with yet unexplored raw materials. Medical Officer Thomas Heazle Parke recognises it in his Guide to Health in Africa (1883): The hitherto dark interior of the African continent is now being gradually opened up to the scrutinizing gaze of the civilized nations of the earth, and there is no doubt that its vast stores of unutilized productive energy will in future be objects of the greatest interest and importance to the overflowing populations of the European and American continents. […] [T]he inducements held out by its mineral and vegetable wealth, and its vast stores of unused water-power, must tend to make the study of its physical and meteorological characters very desirable to the rising generation of the inhabitants of the British Islands. (1893, 1)

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In this fragment, the “study” of the continent is justified by stressing its “mineral and vegetable wealth”. Yet the promise of “vast stores of unutilized productive energy” that literally waited to be commodified was counterpoised with the imaginary dangers so vividly evoked by Morton Stanley. Colonial outfits served as material and symbolic defences against the anthropomorphised dangers of the continent and a necessary precondition for the exploration of its raw materials. It is therefore not surprising that traveller’s guides to the tropics contain never-ending lists of articles that were allegedly indispensable for the journey: from mosquito curtains and portable baths, enamelled pots and kettles to artificial flowers, toilet paper, sketching materials, a knife-­ cleaning machine, refrigerator, mincing machine, cement, or musical instruments, not to mention a sufficient supply of food including but not restricted to brandy, anchovy paste, and Erbswurst (Hunt and Kenny 1883a, b; Heazle Parke 1893). Among these select, gender-specific lists of articles, clothing takes the pride of place. For women, Hunt and Kenny recommend handpicked textiles for various stages of the voyage: “a black or blue flannel or serge” for a sea journey, “a few prints or cottons for the Red Sea and tropics; and a silk dress to wear at dinner, or in the evenings, with a few sets of lace ruffles, &c. to make some little variety” (1883b, 10).3 In their recommendations, they do not only consider travellers’ ease but also pay attention to the means of transportation and the qualities of encountered surroundings: “For travelling on land, by rail &c., a grey or dust-coloured dress of a very light woollen material, simply and loosely made, will be found most comfortable and serviceable” (11). At the same time, they emphasise the importance of the “little extras”: “Take with you a most liberal supply of tulle, net, lace, ruffles, frillings, white and coloured collars and cuffs, artificial flowers, ribbons, and all the little ‘et ceteras’ that go so far in rehabilitating the oft-work dress or bonnet” (18–19). As these suggestions make evident, and as Ryan Johnson rightly observes, “women’s tropical attire […] relegated them to the domestic sphere” (2009, 558).4 Men’s portable wardrobe was, unsurprisingly, less fanciful, albeit not less plentiful. For a journey of two years, for instance, Heazle Parke recommends the following suit for the metropolitan male traveller: helmet, night-cap and soft cap, colonial belt, four pairs of shooting boots, three pairs of Veldtschoons, spare laces, two pairs of leather leggings, six suits of silk and wool pyjamas, two waterproof coats, three pairs of woollen knickerbockers, half-dozen calico drawers, six pairs of knitted stockings, six

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pairs of socks, two pairs of tennis suits, one dozen silk and wool shirts, six silk vests, and three pairs of silk handkerchiefs (1893, 154–156). These and other items were, according to James Cantlie, co-founding editor of the Journal of Tropical Medicine, to enable the “modern man of the north […] to conquer the exigencies of tropical life” (quoted in Johnson 2009, 531). Indeed, Julia Wells contends, “[t]he protection of white settler bodies and minds against the tropical climate was a central concern in Britain’s African territories” (2016, 68).5 In fact, as these cluttering lists of commodities suggest, the exploration of Africa’s rich natural resources required the protective aura of domestic materiality—a portable cocoon, a mobile cordon sanitaire. Importantly, domestic commodities thus participated in a circular process as they enabled exploration and exploitation of natural materials, which were then turned into exotic goods for export. They were part of the self-perpetuating monster of capitalism, a hydra of commodities breeding further commodities ad  infinitum, a never-ending process oblivious to the finiteness of natural resources. The commodities, of course, were not only supposed to protect against diseases but also did the symbolic work of stressing white superiority and distinguishing Europeans from indigenous societies, not to mention saving them, at least imaginatively, from the ever-present crippling dangers of degeneration and atavism. The first part of this project—protection against diseases—was chiefly a protection against the alien, fiendish climate, “a naturally unhealthy”, “enemy territory” prone to weaken the constitution of the European body (Ratschiller 2018, 121). In popular guidebooks to the tropics, two issues dominate the discussion: the types of fabrics and their role in the process of climatic adaptation, and the quality of the fabrics and their salubriousness. In this context, the chief consideration of guidebook authors, medical practitioners, and colonial outfitters was not germs and how to avoid these but rather the influence of such major factors as heat, sun, humidity, and abrupt changes of temperature and the role of clothing in regulating body temperature, protecting against the sun, and enabling adequate perspiration.6 The fabric itself also had to fulfil a series of requirements: [I]t should be porous and absorbent, to admit air freely to the surface of the body, and to soak up perspiration, otherwise the wearer lives in a constant steam bath, of which the garments form the walls; it should dry quickly, for the moisture of saturated garments conducts heat readily, and the wearer will be overheated while walking in the sun, and may take a chill when

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s­ itting in the shade; it should not be irritating to the skin; it should be thick enough for protection against the sun; sufficiently light in weight for comfort, and yet warm enough to guard the wearer against the risk of chill. (Bostock 1913, 18–19)

Unfortunately, such a multifunctional fabric did not exist. “[U]ntil the manufacturers succeed in producing a mixed fabric to fulfil all requirements”, Leonard Bostock recommended “mixing fabrics in point of time, if not in material” (1913, 20). In his work on The Influence of Clothing on Health, Frederic Treves expressed a similar opinion (1886, 41). He identified wool, cotton, and linen as best suited for climatic changes, if not the most sanitary. Whereas wool was considered a good isolator, cotton and linen were said to be good transmitters and because of that not well suited for changing temperatures (39). In contrast, James Horton highlighted the superiority of cotton, claiming that “from its slowness of conducting heat, [it] is admirably adapted for the tropics” (1874, 639).7 As these two statements make clear, and as Johnson rightly contends, there existed a variety of opinions on the subject. Of course, each manufacturer had a “unique” idea of what was healthy (Johnson 2009, 538–539). Mostly, “colonial outfitters” were in favour of all three fabrics along with stocking other desirables like lace or ribbons and frilled dresses together with hats decorated by various wonders of taxidermy. Others exerted themselves to develop adequate fabrics. Solano, for instance, was a patented material that was supposed to protect against sun radiation, the so-called actinic rays (Bostock 1913, 21–22). In the preface to Health Culture, German zoologist, anthropologist, and physician Gustav Jaeger promoted his sanitary woollen clothing as particularly suitable to any climate imaginable: “The Company which represents my System in the British Empire has had the honour of supplying to eminent Travellers and Explorers outfits of clothing and bedding for use under every possible climatic condition […]. This affords striking evidence in favour of my contention that the Sanitary Woollen clothing is eminently adapted for wearing in hot countries as well as in cold, and, a fortiori, in our changeable climates” (1907, n. pag). Indeed, as the letters from “traveller[s] in the tropics” (n. pag) that Jaeger “cited” in his works make abundantly clear, woollen clothing was more than suitable for explorers. It did not only help their bodies adapt to the climate but also turned them into the specimens of heroic masculinity that were so often associated with the empire (Johnson 2009).8

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Unlike specialised “East India and Tropical Outfitters”, Thomas Burberry advertised his garments, particularly the patented gabardine, as suitable not only for the tropics but for any kind of extreme weather. His “Gabardine Weatherproof Tropical Kit” promised to “[insure] comfort and security in every kind of weather & climate” and to “prevent ill-effects arising from exposure to heavy rain, mist, or dew” (1913, 285). What is more, the advertisement stressed that “Gabardine is invaluable for bush or jungle sport, as even exotic thorns are powerless to penetrate its flexible yet leatherlike texture” (285). Like in many other Burberry advertisements, the promoted fabric was conceived of both as armour and cocoon— preventing from the ill influence of the climate and providing home-like comfort. This, of course, went hand in hand with the conception and presentation of travelling bodies of white settlers in the tropics. There lurks, in this presentation of Gabardine, another argument that was also present in guidebooks for the travellers to the tropics—an argument that became chiefly visible in recommendations concerning the provenance of the fabrics that were to be purchased. If economy was an issue, female travellers were advised to take with them home-made fabrics and patterns and, if need be, commission local tailors to refresh their stock. Hunt and Kenny stress the improvements brought by new trends in commodity retail, which made travellers independent of local workforce or material (1883b, 9–10). Leaving one’s measures “with a good and reliable dressmaker” and “The Pattern and Parcel Posts” were signalled as viable, and cheaper, alternatives (10). While they consider fabrics like suede more suitable for the tropics than the familiar wool, Hunt and Kenny recommend that female travellers take with them home-made fabrics to replenish their stock of undergarments (19). In this context, the quality of British fabrics is hailed as superior. What especially speaks for the “British” fabric is its alleged “purity”. This quality was ostensibly ensured by refusing to add substances to the material and using new technologies in its manufacture. Famously, Lewis Tomalin, who patented Dr. Jaeger’s Sanitary Clothing System, advertised his products in the following way: “The JAEGER Company maintain a Scientific Staff and a Laboratory fitted with every requisite for testing chemically and microscopically the purity of their Woollen yarns and materials. Which outer Firm incurs this labour and cost in order to protect the Public against imposition? It guarantees Pure Wool […]. It represents a successful strand against the Dishonesty and Trickery of Adulteration” (Jaeger 1883, 15). This emphatic insistence on purity echoes the

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substance adulteration debate that became prominent in mid-nineteenth-­ century Britain, especially in the context of food, drink, and drugs (Rowlinson 1982; Rioux 2019) but also in the context of other materials. In contrast to this self-praise, J. T. Arlidge, Consulting Physician to the North Staffordshire Infirmary, Stoke-on-Trent, writing about occupational diseases in cloth factories, drew attention to the inferiority of many fabrics due to addition of China clay. Because of this “mischievous adulteration”, “[t]he buyers of the most inferior cloths—chiefly the ignorant dwellers in eastern lands—actually buy in weight much more china clay than cotton; and I am assured by the clay merchants in the potteries, that far more china clay is consumed in weighting cotton cloth than in the manufacture of earthenware and china” (1893, 65). Tomalin’s company is promoted not only through self-distancing from such practices but also by a juxtaposition to any “outer Firm”. This is surprising considering that Tomalin built it on the system of Jaeger, who himself commissioned the German firm Wilhelm Benger Söhne to produce clothing according to his principles from 1879 onwards. Jaeger did not only allow Tomalin to use his name but also gave him the exclusive rights to use Jaeger patents and trade with the British Empire (Clark and de la Haye 2009).9 General concerns regarding the type and quality of fabrics suitable for accommodating the European body to the changing temperatures in the tropics were accompanied by prescriptions regarding its treatment, which for Wells fall into the category of “moral management” (2016, 85). Indeed, even the best quality of home-made fabrics did not guarantee that the body would stay clean throughout the journey. Like everything else, it was liable to contamination. In order to avoid illness from swarms of “parasites” and germs lurking on the surface of every object, the authors of tropical guidebooks recommended exposing fabrics to high temperatures, boiling them, or using disinfectants. Bostock (1913, 34–36) and Heazle Parke (1893, 163–165) include state-of-the-arts sections on germ theory and chapters on disinfection, urging travellers to disinfect not only the surfaces but also their clothes as one preventive measure. Hunt and Kenny also provide advice on the type of disinfecting agents (1883a, 163–164). This advice highlights the co-existence of aforementioned scientific paradigms. On the one hand, the influence of miasmic effluvia and climatic factors could be alleviated and European bodies shielded with the use of clothing. On the other hand, to stay salubrious, clothing had to be produced with care, without the use of various adulterants, and regularly freed from ever-present germs.

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In accordance with the rhetoric which pathologised the “tropics” and symbolically transformed domestic commodities into both allegedly impenetrable armours and mobile domestic spaces, tropical clothing appeared to constitute another shield against the dangers of the hot climates but also provided a cocoon of comfort. However, the recurring insistence on home-made fabrics and the conviction of its higher quality carried with themselves further overtones. While they turned home-woven wool, cotton, and linen into guarantors of British health abroad, they at the same time occluded the colonial (and international) networks of trade that lay at the core of the domestic production of these fabrics. Last but not least, they ignored the (domestic) health conditions that resulted precisely from this exchange.

Agents of Disease: Intercontinental and Domestic Ecologies In The Social Life of Things, Appadurai calls for a reading of objects in “their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (2013, 5). The life cycle of tropical clothing thus has to include at least two other nodes: the sites of cultivation of raw materials and the sites of domestic production of clothing. Only in this way can the function of tropical clothing within larger geographies of health and health provision be established. In this context, a number of issues must be taken into consideration. Firstly, the colonies, metropolitan areas, and other involved countries must be seen as co-­ constitutive and intertwined analytical fields (Cooper and Stoler 1997; Hall 2002; Stoler 2002; Hall and Rose 2006; Stoler et al. 2007). Secondly, as already mentioned, the networks they inspired must be regarded as full of tensions, continuous negotiations, and uneven distributions of power that had to do with, for instance, various types of local appropriation practices and cultures of knowledge, which are both simultaneously intertwined and multiple, and therefore should be read in terms of “multi-sited histories”. Thirdly, the scientific and lay knowledge created in these processes formed an entangled web of everchanging forces (Vaughan, 1991; Prakash 1999; Anderson 2006). Materiality, and especially commodities, played an important role in this web (Thomas 1991; van Binsbergen 2005). Within this context, both tropical clothing and the fabrics that they were made of gained in importance not only as portable cordons sanitaires, sites of symbolic construction of national, imperial, and indigenous

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cultures and ideologies but also as travelling incarnations of these entanglements. In order for this to become transparent, they must be conceived of not as “objects without” but as “objects with history”, i.e. objects whose geographical provenance remains a visible site of its identification (Chakrabarti 2010). Out of all the fabrics discussed earlier, cotton has not only been regarded (albeit slightly prematurely) as “the first modern commodity” (Riello 2016, 141) but also as “essential for the emergence of modern economic growth” (Olmstead and Rhode 2018, 1), as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2015), Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014) have exemplarily shown. Giorgio Riello offers a more nuanced thesis arguing that “cotton was the first ‘transcontinental’ manufactured product whose commodity chain brought together capital, labour, land, technologies and consumers in different continents” (2016, 136). He further argues that “the ‘modernity’ of cotton did not just lay in its capacity to restructure global trade” but also in the way that it “reshaped consumption” (137). While the straightforward narrative of the birth of capitalism, and the significance of cotton manufacturers for its transcontinental shape, has been contested (Olmstead and Rhode 2018; Vries 2017), it is undeniable that cotton, like wool, linen, jute, and hemp, was a commodity whose production, distribution, and consumption necessitated a series of international and intercontinental networks. These networks included the cultivation and retail of cotton, the manufacture of fabrics and clothing, their marketing, as well as the secondary networks that spanned the circulation of the by-products (e.g. second-hand shops, manufacture of shoddy). These systems, of course, developed over time and were formed not only by Britain’s imperial expansion but also, with the advent of industrialisation, by an increasing mechanisation of labour, changing institutionalisation of trade, and ongoing transformations of the market (Riello 2016, 146–147). Each node in these networks was associated with specific health risks. Sanitary conditions on US-American plantations, the prime producer of the raw material for the UK market (in 1906, it constituted 80 per cent of all the imports; Helm 1907, 76), were far from satisfactory, so that the working slave population was exposed to various health hazards. Sharla Fett (2002) has shown that under slavery, the doctor-slave-owner triangle rendered the slave voiceless and their health position precarious. While an expansion of health facilities could be observed, little regulation of sanitary facilities was responsible for the prevalence of worms, diarrhoea, as

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well as typhoid fever. Improper nutrition and excessive labour weakened the slaves’ constitutions and made them susceptible to communicative diseases. An expensive article, the slave’s body was often also exploited after death for various didactic purposes, thus testifying to the existence of “post-mortem or anatomical racism” (Kenny 2013, 38; see also Savitt 1978; Fett 2002). Ships and retail brought with themselves other risks. Out of all these intertwined spaces, British textile mills were particular material and symbolic sites that draw attention to the international and intercontinental networks of dependence created by cotton trade and to the geographies of health and disease that were thus produced. Unlike other institutions participating in the life cycle of tropical clothing, textile mills and factories were distinguished by their specific artificial climate, which differentiated them from other sites of production and circulation and brought them—at least conceptually—into proximity with tropical climates. What was perceived as a kind of cocoon that helped European bodies adapt to tropical climates was in fact responsible for creating artificial—unhealthy—tropics at home. Interestingly enough, as Sue Bowden and Geoffrey Tweedale ascertain, “[c]otton manufacture [was] rarely considered a dangerous occupation” (2002, 577). Nonetheless, it is important to point out the health hazards that textile manufacture in general, and cotton manufacture in particular, constituted to factory workers. As by the end of the century, textile industry was one of the major sources of exported goods next to iron, steel, and railway machinery, the concomitant impact on workers’ health was considerable.10 At the same time, the working conditions at home—already at the beginning of the century—were so dire that they had to be regulated in a series of Factory Acts (from the Cotton Mills and Factories Act in 1819 to the Factory and Workshop Act in 1901). The chief factor behind many chronic ailments of textile factory workers was the unregulated use of steam and the materials used in the production process. Although steam engines and boilers were used to mechanise various industrial processes, what is often forgotten is that steam was also used for ventilation (Janković 2010, 69–91) and the creation of “artificial humidity” in textile factories for the fibres to remain flexible (Lander 1914, 10). Despite the proliferation of textile factories in regions with climates most favourable for the manufacturing procedures (e.g. the Midlands), gradual introduction of steam to the processes of production further regulated moisture, humidity, and temperature in the mills. In his work on Recent Cotton Mill Construction and Engineering (1894), engineer Joseph Nasmith, for

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instance, recommended the use of a “drosophore”, a humidifying apparatus, to optimise the conditions of textile production: “The value of humidity in a textile factory is that it preserves the natural moisture in the fibre being treated, and enables it, as far as possible, to maintain its original condition. […] On the other hand it is equally necessary that the temperature of working should be high, in order to soften and render flexible the natural coating of way surrounding the fibre” (102–103). With the implementation of the steam engine, textile mills and factories became (artificial) tropical sites within domestic geographies of textile production.11 Janet Greenlees argues that the various “local boundaries of public health made the textile mills of some towns healthier places in which to work than elsewhere” (2013, 674). Despite that, the reports of local medical health officers, like the public discourse, continued to address the health hazards attributable to steaming and the use of particular materials in various stages of cloth production (675). Although not as present in popular consciousness as these factors, the growing technologisation of textile manufacture was said to account for accidents which were the primary source of damage to health. Arlidge listed, next to various dangers of sedentary labour and operations on the machines leading to accidents, “heat of the workrooms, neglect of ventilation, rebreathed air, unnecessary consumption of gas” (1893, 141) as most hazardous. In the public discourse, local health agendas continued to be dominated by an emphasis on contagious and respiratory diseases, which were believed to be caused by the hot, humid environment of the factories (Greenlees 2013, 675). Heat, humidity, and the neglect of ventilation led to the general weakening of the workers’ health. This weakening of workers’ constitutions, along with unsuitable clothing, was seen as the first step towards illness. Arlidge noted that “the neglect of proper clothing, unnecessary exposure to cold by passing from heated rooms into the outer air, improper food, dissipation and unhealthy homes” (1893, 62) could lead to major diseases such as tuberculosis. What astounds in this comparison of natural and artificial tropics is not necessarily their metaphorical similarity; rather, what becomes visible is that the similarity of the material conditions in these spaces contrasted sharply with the provision of health that they were meant to effectuate. It was only in the late 1920s that artificial atmospheric conditions were proven to be of little effect on the health of factory workers (Greenlees 2013, 676). Next to the artificially created tropic-like heat and humidity that was seen as enfeebling the workers’ bodies, the raw materials themselves

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endangered their health. More specifically, the inhalation of what was enigmatically called “factory dust”—and could mundanely be described as a variety of particles, be it of cotton and other fibres or of substances added in the course of industrial production—was conducive to ill health. In fact, these particles were the actual cause of respiratory diseases (Bowden and Tweedale 2002). All the raw materials used in textile manufacture were hazardous to human health. “Viewed in the ascending order from the least injurious”, noted Arlidge, “we have, silk, wool, cotton, flax, jute, and hemp” (1893, 62). The manufacture of cotton fabric, with cotton itself positioned somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy, was most problematic for two groups of workers: women responsible for the “earliest stages of sorting, mixing, and scotching”, who often suffered from “peculiar bronchitis and asthma of cotton workers”, and the so-called “‘strippers’ and ‘grinders’—men who cleaned and sharpened the steel teeth of the carding machine”—“a class particularly subjected by their work to the inhalation of dust, and among whom a high ration of chest disease prevail[ed]” (64). In fact, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-­ century medicine recognised, and named, “byssinosis”, a particular chronic, occupational disease resulting from exposure to cotton and flux dust (Bowden and Tweedale 2002, 561–562). By the late nineteenth century, medical officers increasingly linked cases of death from phthisis to textile manufacture (562). Thus, the fabrics that were specifically produced to screen the middle and upper classes from illnesses in the tropics were the ones that shrouded the domestic working class with a climate of infection and death. The fabrics that cocooned travellers in warmth and gave them the space to respite and inhale, in their microscopic variants, cocooned and suffocated the organs of textile workers. This danger is poignantly articulated by Bessie Higgins, a character from Elisabeth Gaskell’s North and South, who, when asked about the cause of her illness, explains: “I began to work in a carding-room soon after and the fluff got into my lungs, and poisoned me. […] Little bits, as fly off fro’ the cotton, when they’re carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there’s many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they’re just poisoned by the fluff” (2008, 102). As the novel records, avant la lettre, what today would pertain to environmental health humanities, it also signals, but does not explore, the imperial geographies of health and disease sketched in this chapter.

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This imaginary instance of poisonous particles that nest in a worker’s chest and poison her were not really visible under the microscope.12 Although, according to Elijah Helm, under the microscope, “a cotton fibre has the appearance of a twisted flattened ribbon” (1907, 95), postmortem dissections of workers’ lungs showed neither fluff nor ribbons but expanding fibrosis. Edward H. Greenhow, who reported on the occupational diseases in mills, thus describes the flax-dresser’s lungs: “Sections taken from the apex of the lung were almost of a black colour, and were seen under the microscope to be intersected by fibrous bands containing black pigment within their substance. The walls of the air-cells were thickened, and some of the cells contained granular exudation without oil. Masses of black pigment of irregular size and shape were studded over the field in great abundance” (1868, 8). In this account, the white fluff metamorphoses into black pigment. Through juxtaposition, it offers an invaluable image of the way the tropics invade the most intimate of spaces—the workers’ lungs. Other particles that medical officers wrote about were mineral agents that were added in the production to ensure the longevity and robustness of the fabric. In this context, Arlidge especially points to the processes of cloth “sizing”: “In former years”, he writes, “the materials used for sizing were of innocent quality, consisting of fermented flour and tallow; but these have almost everywhere been replaced by a compound of china clay and certain mineral salts, among which are chlorides of zinc, magnesium and calcium, with a good proportion of sulphate of magnesia. These salts were added to the dressing, primarily with the view of preventing the formation of mildew on the cotton cloth, especially where it had to travel long distances and to hot countries” (1893, 69). What transpires from these considerations is that industrial modernity did not only contribute to the domestication of artificial tropics at home. In creating those spaces, it exposed workers to unfavourable climatic conditions along with highly injurious particles that greatly impacted their health—a form of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) inflicted on their bodies.

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Conclusion: Health, Commodities, and Global Networks of Dependence Reading tropical clothing as particular objects—commodities—with their own trajectories and biographies and with reference to the two major nodes of their international existence, as this chapter has done, throws light on a series of complexities. The first one refers to the importation of what was considered as the imaginary space of tropics. With their unregulated use of steam, textile mills and factories became veritable tropical sites within domestic geographies of work. Within the nexus of these domestic and foreign “tropical” spaces, fabrics morphed into fibrosis. What was hailed as the adaptive cocoon, enabling the traveller to survive in the tropics, became extremely dangerous to the body of the worker. The cocoons in the factory—the fluff—transformed the surface of the workers’ lungs into scarred tissue, thus, in the worst case, causing death by suffocation: white fluff turned into black pigment. At the same time, tropical clothing, especially the discussion of adequate fabrics, intensified a discourse of national purity. With the emphasis on the quality of the fabrics made in Britain, the imperial nexus of trade— its economics and, simultaneously, its various processes of exploitation, were occluded—became invisible and, with it, the various nodes of disease production in the vast geographies of colonial health. What becomes evident in this context is the complexity of objects in global networks of dependence. The metamorphosing colonial outfits are a material and symbolic proof of the Janus-faced character of Victorian consumption: the commodity culture that promised the health necessary to the colonial project simultaneously consumed the bodies of the working classes (and slaves). The fabric of the empire was built on the inflamed tissue of worker’s lungs. A discussion of Victorian travelling objects that draws attention to their various trajectories and the nodes of their journeys allows for a cultural study of the Victorian era that brings together health and environmental humanities with material studies. It helps shed light on various yet unexplored networks of exploitation that were spurred by industrial capitalism. Those networks, albeit reshuffled, continue to exist today as the worldwide web of textile production, which lays at the core of our fast-fashion industry. If the Victorian mill workers suffocated for the sake of the colonial project, the workers of Bangladeshi and other factories outsourced to the “third world” suffocate not for the sake of alleged protection in

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particular climates but for a mere whim of fashion. In this context, we should not forget that the worldwide web of textile production is one of the major polluting industries. It is here that the impact of traveling objects—the clothing and fabrics—becomes most conspicuous: in the artificial climates that we have been producing for centuries and in their impact on our health.

Notes 1. Similarly, Philip Curtin famously claims in Death by Migration: “The intercommunicating zone for commerce became an intercommunicating zone for the spread of ideas and religions—and diseases” (1989, xiv). On tropics, see also Shields (1992) and Arnold (1993, 2006). Some guidebooks featured here consider “tropics” chiefly as a climatic zone (e.g. Heazle Parke 1893, 25; Murray 1895, 4), while Hunt and Kenny alert to the diversity of temperatures and humidity in various “tropical countries” (1883b, 19), David Kerr Cross praises the African continent for the natural “sources of wealth” within this zone, as compared to Central Australia or South America (1897, 16). 2. For more on disordered morality and “moral hygiene”, see Pamela Gilbert’s contribution in this volume. 3. Hunt and Kenny urge women travellers to account for their different destinations and choose their clothing accordingly, bearing in mind that cities like Brisbane and Calcutta “require a more varied and expensive outfit” suitable for the season, while more provincial destinations need no such exertion (1883b, 9). 4. For a detailed description of clothing in Dutch colonies, see Locher-­ Scholten (2000). 5. Manufacturers also, if not especially, sold clothing that was adapted to specific occupations (Johnson 2009, 532). 6. For an analysis of medical prescriptions for travellers in the context of railway travel, walking, and horseback riding, see Chap. 10 by Ariane de Waal. 7. Often, the argumentation for a particular type of fabric took rather curious turns. While some critics have suggested that Europeans imitated indigenous dress (as particularly adapted to the heat and the sun) (Johnson 2009), others proposed to look at animals and the way their bodies adapt to various temperatures. On this basis, Gerhard Rohlfs argued that since “sheep lose their wool in very hot climates […] [and] Lions and other animals—have only thin hair in the tropics” (quoted in Jaeger 1907, 74), Europeans should wear cotton and not wool. Jaeger used this example only to ridicule it by stating that “[t]he arguments in favour of cotton […]

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would be sensible and intelligible if, when sheep are transposed to the tropics, cotton or grass were to grow on their bodies instead of wool. […] The tropical animals simply teach us to clothe ourselves more lightly, but not to select another material, such as vegetable fibre” (76). Indeed, his recommendation signals appropriate type of clothing as much as fabrics, as he takes up the rhetoric of diseased tropics: “So long as Europeans persist in the error of walking under a tropical sun in as complete an outfit as is worn in London, Berlin, or Paris, the tropics will continue to be a cemetery for them” (79–80). The same advice is directed to women, who are urged not to use too many layers lest their bodies overheat (87). 8. The eponymous “traveler in the tropics” recounts that his use of woolen clothing paid off: “It was delightful to see the natives, accustomed to the heat, sweating, groaning, and idly lolling, while I, who am only a poor Northerner, accustomed to a cold climate, ran about, loaded and saddled donkeys, made purchases, carried burdens, and in short worked unceasingly, and yet felt no inconvenience” (Jaeger 1907, 81). Indeed, as a list of explorers demonstrates, Jaeger clothing had been worn “under every possible climatic condition” (82). For more on heroic masculinity in the context of nineteenth-century explorations of Africa, see also the following chapter by Markku Hokkanen. 9. It was only around the 1950s, undoubtedly because of WWII, that Tomalin’s company began to distance itself from its German roots (Clark and de la Haye 2009). 10. Of course, textile manufacture did not only encompass wool and shoddy, linen, cotton, and silk but also jute and hemp manufactures, as well as carpet-, lace-, and hosiery making (Arlidge 1893, 59). 11. In times of industrial capitalism, human labour became “the living part of the mechanized and automated process, made up of inanimate power sources, complex mechanical clusters, and organisational schemes aimed at regulating the input-output flow” (Barca and Bridge 2015, 4). 12. Hamilton Freer-Smith also drew attention to the effects of factory “fluff” (1914, 98). See also Flint (2000) for the paradoxical nature of dust in Victorian cultural imagination.

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Janković, Vlasimir. 2010. Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Ryan. 2009. “European Cloth and ‘Tropical’ Skin: Clothing Material and British Ideas of Health and Hygiene in Tropical Climates.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83 (3): 530–560. https://doi.org/10.1353/ bhm.0.0252. Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kenny, Stephen. 2013. “The Development of Medical Museums in the Antebellum American South: Slave Bodies in Networks of Anatomical Exchange.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (1): 32–62. https://doi.org/10.1353/ bhm.2013.0016. Lander, Cecil. 1914. Ventilation and Humidity in Textile Mills and Factories. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Lindner, Christoph. 2003. Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern. Aldershot: Ashgate. Locher-Scholten, Elsbeth. 2000. Women and the Colonial State. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1994. “Consumerism, Commodity Culture and Health Promotion.” Health Promotion International 9 (2): 111–118. https://doi. org/10.1093/heapro/9.2.111. MacKenzie, John M. 2016. “Environment and Empire.” In The Encyclopedia of Empire, edited by John M. MacKenzie, 1–13. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Murray, J. 1895. How to Live in Tropical Africa: A Guide to Tropical Hygiene. London: George Philip & Son. Nasmith, Joseph. 1894. Recent Cotton Mill Construction and Engineering. London: J. Heywood. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W.  Rhode. 2018. “Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism.” Explorations in Economic History 67: 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2017.12.002. Pleßke, Nora. 2020. “Empire  – Economy  – Materiality.” In Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900, edited by Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-­ Franger, 149–172. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter. Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.

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Raj, Kapil. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ratschiller, Linda. 2018. “Material Matters. The Basel Mission in West Africa and Commodity Culture around 1900.” In Verflochtene Mission. Perspektiven auf eine Neuemissionsgeschichte, edited by Linda Ratschiller and Karolin Wetjen, 117–139. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau. Richards, Thomas. 1990. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Riello, Giorgio. 2016. “Cotton: The Making of a Modern Commodity.” East Asian Journal of British History 5 (1): 135–149. Rioux, Sébastien. 2019. “Capitalist Food Production and the Rise of Legal Adulteration: Regulating Food Standards in 19th-Century Britain.” Journal of Agrarian Change 19 (1): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12265. Rowlinson, P. J. 1982. “Food Adulteration: Its Control in 19th Century Britain.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 7 (1): 63–72. https://doi.org/ 10.1179/030801882789801250. Savitt, Todd L. 1978. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shields, Rob. 1992. Places of the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Stanley, Dorothy, ed. 1909. The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley G.C.B. London: Sampson Low and Co. Ltd. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stoler, Ann Laura, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds. 2007. Imperial Formations. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trentmann, Frank. 2016. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. London: Allen Lane. Treves, Frederick. 1886. The Influence of Clothing on Health. London: Cassell & Co. Van Binsbergen, Wim. 2005. “Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities. Introduction.” In Commodification. Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited), edited by Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere, 9–51. Münster: LIT. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vries, Peer. 2017. “Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion: Some Comments on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton.” Journal of World History 28 (1): 131–140. Wells, Julia M. 2016. “Hats, Sundowners, and Tropical Hygiene: Managing Settler Bodies and Minds in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890–1939.”

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CHAPTER 12

From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire Markku Hokkanen

[P]oor old Livingstone […] used to protest against settlement on the low ground and advocated the high land and then he waded about in mud and water till he died! (Waller to Laws 1886)

Questions of mobility, when and how to move healthily, lay at the heart of nineteenth-century medicine and hygiene in Africa.1 Such questions had long been important for travellers (whether African, Arab, Indian, or European). David Livingstone and other British explorers arrived in a world that was already mobile, dynamic, and pluralistic in its medical cultures. Specific medicines for travellers were known in several African medical traditions,2 and specialist healer-diviners, waganga, were part of

M. Hokkanen (*) University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_12

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Nyamwezi caravan groups in East Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance (Rockel 2006, 73). This chapter explores the connections and interplay between mobility and medical ideas, ideals, and practices, including hygiene as preventive medicine, as perceived by British travellers and colonialists in tropical Africa from the mid- to the late nineteenth century. For professionals and laypeople, medicine and hygiene could be conceptually and practically associated with specific forms of mobility such as modes of travel, bodily movement, and exercise or their absence. Though few in number, the late Victorian travellers in tropical Africa were enthusiastic and relatively prolific writers, whose many texts shaped and reshaped contemporary perceptions of the region and have been analysed by historians, geographers, anthropologists, and literary scholars (e.g. Brantlinger 1988; Livingstone 1992; Kennedy 2013). Questions of health and mobility recur throughout these texts, which include travel books, health advice pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and correspondence. While highly selective by necessity, the works discussed in this chapter were authored not only by famous explorers, such as Livingstone (Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries) and Mary Kingsley (Travels in West Africa) but also by lesser-­known figures, such as Horace Waller (Health Hints for Central Africa) and John Buchanan (The Shire Highlands). Furthermore, they are largely concerned with regions that were regarded as particularly dangerous to health in South-Central and West Africa. Notably during the late nineteenth century, parts of Southern Africa were increasingly seen as healthy for Europeans, particularly for those suffering from tuberculosis, and a moderate “health tourism” to Cape Colony was promoted by steamship companies and sanatoriums (Zangel 2017).3 This idea of African sites as health resorts stood in sharp contrast to older images of “the white man’s grave” (based on high mortality on the West African coast) and the colonial tradition of “sensationalising Africa” as a continent of dangerous diseases, wild beasts, and heroic male white explorers, scientists, and doctors (Curtin 1989; Crozier 2007; Rankin 2015). In addition to examining texts from the period of British exploration and early contacts into the formal colonial conquest of the 1880s and the 1890s, this chapter draws on the historiography of health and medicine in colonial Africa, particularly the seminal works of Philip Curtin. My case studies focus on the British in South-Central Africa (present-day Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia) and, in the case of Kingsley, on the West African coast and the interior of Congo and Cameroon regions.

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Travelling in the Shadow of Fever “Fevers” had been a major obstacle to exploration. Famously, Livingstone used quinine as prophylaxis against fever during his transcontinental journey across Southern Africa in the 1850s. As interest in the African continent grew, explorers became celebrated heroes across Europe—particularly those who survived and were able to publish bestselling accounts of their travels (Jeal 1974; Brantlinger 1988). However, while quinine had reduced European mortality in the tropics, it was not always effective, and there were doubts about how the drug actually worked (Fabian 2000, 65; Hokkanen 2017, 186). There was, of course, little consensus about the causes or nature of malaria and other “African fevers”. Nineteenth-century medical thought and practice were in considerable flux, with older ideas about humours, miasmas, “climates and constitutions” still persisting alongside newer conceptions of bacteria, contagion, nerves, and parasites (Worboys 1993, 1996; Harrison 1999). Walter Elmslie, a Scottish missionary doctor in Central Africa, noted to a recently arrived colleague who had suffered several bouts of malaria: “I see you are bilious like me; well, never mind, bilious folk live long” (quoted in MacAlpine n.d., 3). Old ideas about temperaments and constitutions were still evident in doctors’ parlance in the 1890s, and this was even more the case among laypeople. Some of the more influential Victorians who wrote about health and survival in tropical Africa were not medical professionals, including Henry Morton Stanley (Jeal 2007), Kingsley (Birkett 1992; Nambula 2020), Waller, and Harry Johnston, the first Commissioner of British Central Africa, later Nyasaland and now Malawi (Hokkanen 2017, 54–56). European explorers were seen as epitomising some ideals of Victorian masculinity. They were portrayed as heroic figures in the service of science, civilisation, and Christianity.4 Facing the dangers of tropical climate, potentially hostile peoples, wild beasts, and numerous hardships, they had to be brave, energetic, strong, controlled, enduring, and even ready to die for their mission. In their public images, the explorers’ African allies and associates, who actually enabled much of the exploring, were frequently airbrushed out of their narratives (Brantlinger 1988; Fabian 2000, 36; Hokkanen 2017, 67–68). As Anna Crozier has noted, the tradition of depicting European doctors as lonely heroes in tropical Africa was a recurrent theme in popular medical discourse about the continent from the 1890s to the 1930s at least (2007, 395–399; see also Bashford 2004).

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This can be seen as a continuation of the earlier explorer tradition, which, in turn, was influenced by early modern nautical exploration. Dane Kennedy has argued that the British nineteenth-century explorers of Africa and Australia approached the “blank” continents very much like uncharted waters, which complicated their engagement with indigenous inhabitants and local knowledge (2013, 6–16). For Waller, Livingstone was “the hardest man that ever entered Africa” (1893, 46), arguing that his celebrated constitution enabled him to endure malaria, various intestinal illnesses, repeatedly being drenched through and living on scarce supplies year in year out in conditions that would have quickly killed most men (46). In addition to a strong constitution, the mobile explorer-hero had to demonstrate his willpower. Samuel Baker held that nothing “in this world has power to resist a determined will, as long as health and life remain” and that as someone who was from his youth “inured to hardships and endurance in wild sports in tropical climate” (1886, Chap. 1), he was particularly suited to exploration in Africa. Baker stated that alone he would have been quite ready to die “upon the untrodden path”, had he not been accompanied by his wife Florence, who provided him with comfort, care, and concern. He describes Florence’s unusual will to travel to dangerous places with him as “woman’s constancy and devotion”, comparing her to Ruth in the Old Testament (Chap. 19). Exploration, like medicine, was usually portrayed as a masculine form of activity: the African interior was generally not seen as suitable for European women. However, this characterisation took little account of women such as Mary Livingstone and Dr. Jane Waterston in Central Africa, Florence von Sass-Baker in Abyssinia, and Mary Slessor in West Africa, or of Kingsley, who became a bestselling female explorer-author with her classic studies of West Africa (Birkett 1992; McKenzie 2012; Nambula 2020). Nevertheless, as Casey Blanton has noted, the public reception of female explorers was mixed. Despite the popularity of her work, Kingsley (like Isabella Bird) was also a figure of ridicule in the contemporary popular press, with a cartoon portrayal of her “precariously perched” in a canoe, “out of place” in a dress and a bonnet surrounded by Africans (2002, 45–46).

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Mobility as Prophylaxis and Cure Samuel and Florence Baker seem to have favoured walking or riding, rather than being carried, during their journey from Egypt to Central Africa. When struck by illness in early 1864, Samuel tried to continue to ride on his ox until he was completely exhausted (Baker 1886, Chap. 19). There were practical reasons for continuing the journey rather than resting en route, of course: food, drink, shelter, and treatment would all be better available in settlements than relying on potentially dwindling supplies at an improvised rest stop.5 “It is only by moving about and living an active life that one can be kept alive in the lowlands” (1863, n. pag.), Livingstone wrote to Sir Thomas Maclear, one of his influential supporters, in May 1863 as the Zambesi expedition was wrapping up after almost five years. The expedition and the Oxford and Cambridge Universities’ mission that followed it were withdrawing from the interior after several deaths, including that of Mary Livingstone (Hokkanen 2017, 54).6 The notion that activity and mobility could secure health was apparent in discussions about the efficacy of quinine. While exploring the Shire River in 1859, Livingstone and Dr. John Kirk, the expedition’s first medical officer, stopped taking prophylactic quinine probably due to its side effects and extremely bitter taste. Instead, they advocated a good diet and the benefits of physical activity (in the form of energetic work or being on the move), noting that Portuguese residents on the Zambesi shared their views in this respect (Livingstone and Livingstone 1865, 309–314). Later, however, British imperial travellers often chose to sweepingly dismiss the Portuguese, who had experience of living in the Zambesi region since the seventeenth century, as lazy, immoral, and lacking in energy (Elton 1879, 149–156; Buchanan 1885, 52). Former naval officer E. D. Young, who led an expedition in search of Livingstone in the 1860s and a pioneer mission party to Malawi in 1875, expressed his firm opinion that remaining “idle on one spot” was particularly dangerous to health (Young 1877, 43). For Young, mobility was therapeutic as well as prophylactic, and he advised those who experienced symptoms of the dreaded fever to get up and move about. One of the effects of the malarial “fever poison” was that it turned its victims “languid and indisposed to bestir themselves”, but a suitable amount of “excitement” was nevertheless required to aid recovery (186). Although hunting, botanising, walking, and paddling were all deemed healthy activities,

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they could leave travellers susceptible to perceived causes of fever, including becoming wet, chilled, or exposed to malarious miasma, and a number of writers acknowledged the need to find a balance in this respect (Livingstone and Livingstone 1865; Buchanan 1885; Waller 1893).7 Of course, travellers were not simply free to move whenever and wherever they pleased. In the pre-conquest period, explorers usually required permission from African rulers, who would also often provide crucial support in the form of carriers, guides, and food (Fabian 2000, 34–35; Kennedy 2013, 222–223). However, decisions to allow, support, prevent, or delay travellers may not always have been made by kings or chiefs alone. John Speke described with disdain the influence that could be exerted in the kings’ courts by East African diviner-healers, claiming that their predictions of calamities befalling the land were an effective strategy to obstruct travellers for their own purposes (1969, 7). A less contemptuous interpretation might suggest that in such cases, European explorers’ mobility could be blocked or slowed by African ideas about communal health, as well as by political calculations or because negotiations failed. The question of whether, or to what extent, Europeans could become acclimatised to the conditions of tropical Africa was central to plans for commercial trading, the founding of mission stations, and the establishment of formal colonisation (Livingstone 1992, 232–241; Hokkanen 2017, 56). Explorers were primarily concerned with surviving their travels, but given that expeditions could last for several years, the difference between exploration and settlement was not always clear cut. Frederick Elton, a naval officer and British consul in Mozambique in the 1870s, was an adventuring explorer who emphasised mobility and hard work as being essential to living healthily in Central Africa. Elton believed that European acclimatisation in the region was possible but was adamant that the difficulties encountered by the Portuguese were partly due to what he dismissed as their laziness and sedentary lifestyle (1879, 149–156). Elton himself, however, was to succumb to illness during his longest journey, a thousand-mile land trek from Livingstonia to Zanzibar. Another British lay advocate of the health benefits of activity and mobility in the Zambesi and Shire regions was Buchanan, a Scottish mission horticulturalist who had been expelled from the Blantyre Mission for his violent treatment of Africans and became the first British planter in Malawi. In 1885, he published The Shire Highlands as Colony and Mission, in which he considered the economic and colonial potential of the area (then still under African rule). By this time, Buchanan had lived in the region for

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almost ten years, which afforded him the status of a lay authority on travel. In his discussion, he focused on his experience of the river route on the Zambesi and the Shire from the Portuguese town of Quelimane on the coast up to the Shire Highlands, a journey that, in 1885, could take anything between 17 days and 4 weeks (Buchanan 1885, 2–11; Hokkanen 2017, 62–63). Buchanan maintained that “a melancholy person, or one of choleric temperament” (1885, 2–11) was especially vulnerable during long river journeys. The use of canoes required travellers to spend extended periods in a cramped position with only limited opportunities to land on the muddy riverbanks, a situation that could cause some to worry excessively to the point of depression after which, according to Buchanan, fever would often follow (2–11). Healthy exertion was advocated as a preventative measure, with Buchanan stating that travellers ought to paddle “vigorously till the sweat pours out”, but not during the worst heat of the tropical sun, another source of colonial fear (20–24). A certain kind of fatalism ran through Buchanan’s health advice. While he considered carelessness to be outright dangerous folly, a journey was ultimately always a test of one’s individual constitution: no matter how prepared, travel through malarious zones might prove to be fatal (24–25). Buchanan’s own continued survival made him a rare British pioneer by the mid-1890s when much of the area was incorporated into British Central Africa Protectorate under Commissioner Johnston (McCracken 2012, 57). Buchanan embarked on his last trip down river with some trepidation: he had not been well and had been afraid of travelling. He never made it to Quelimane. He was the second of the three Buchanan brothers to die: four years earlier, in 1892, David had died of blackwater fever, while Robert was to outlive John by only a few months. The loss of these brothers who had been hailed as energetic pioneer planters, strong men in the prime of their lives, was felt keenly in the British Central Africa Protectorate. The high levels of morbidity and mortality suffered by the relatively small group of colonialists (less than 300 planters, missionaries, and officials in total) led to ongoing and strongly contested discussions about the rules for healthy living (Hokkanen 2017, 64, 71). The three or four days it took to paddle through the Elephant Marsh were considered some of the deadliest of the Shire journey. The anxieties associated with lowlands, marshes, and river journeys eased during the ascent to the Shire Highlands, with many travellers describing the climb as exciting, exhilarating, and energising (Buchanan 1885, 34–37; Hokkanen

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2017, 63). Walking could be mentally as well as physically stimulating. Waterston described the experience of an ideal “African March” on foot from Blantyre to Matope. The group of African carriers and three Europeans set out from the highlands in the afternoon, stopped for a rest in the evening, and continued walking in the moonlight after one in the morning. Waterston “soon gave up to be carried, it was such a glorious night” (quoted in Bean and van Heyningen 1983, 160), clearly feeling uplifted by the physical exertion of walking. Writing to James Stewart on 10 November 1879, Waterston recounted that the march had restored “the Glamour” of African travel that she had first felt during her steamboat journey up the Shire, a sensation that had been lost during her demoralised time at the mission station in Blantyre (160). The healthiness of travel was often associated with particular seasons. Travellers brought with them the common belief that getting wet could predispose or contribute to fever. When applied to malarial fevers, this meant that the rainy season from November to April in South-Central Africa was considered unhealthy by many. On the other hand, the colder dry season (June and July were the coldest months) and the hot dry season in September to October were also believed to have their dangers. Young held that April and May were the unhealthiest months: at the end of the rainy season, the nights suddenly got colder, and evaporation increased. For those fearing miasma, moist fog and morning dew were deemed especially dangerous, and some travellers used mosquito nets in part to keep miasma out (Young 1877, 153; see also Dobson 1883; Buchanan 1885). The gradual compilation of meteorological and European morbidity and mortality statistics (generally African health was not considered a colonial concern until the 1900s) seemed to support the idea that the rainy season was particularly unhealthy for travelling. Although this was a widespread view by the early 1890s, Commissioner Johnston nevertheless believed that in fact May and June were the most dangerous months for resident colonialists and that the rainy season was only dangerous for those travellers who allowed themselves to get wet and catch a cold (Hokkanen 2017, 64). British ideas about healthy moving and living in Africa were influenced by the earlier experiences of explorers and officials who had spent time or served in India (Curtin 1992, 235–238).8 One example was the idea of healthy hill stations, which served as sites of European recuperation and retreat during the hottest months. Well established in India by Livingstone’s

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time, hill stations were built wherever possible; however, for logistical reasons, the first mission and trade stations in Central Africa usually had to be situated alongside waterways. In time both the commercial and administrative centres of colonial Malawi, Blantyre, and Zomba, respectively, were purposely built on higher ground (Hokkanen 2017, 37–39). Further afield, Kirk, by the 1890s, a senior advisor for British interests in tropical Africa, was one among a number of influential figures to advocate for the value of the highlands of colonial Zimbabwe and Kenya, partly because of their perceived healthiness (Hokkanen 2014, 80–81). In West Africa, there were plans to elevate headquarters in the 1880s and 1890s, but the altitudes reached could be modest: in Lagos, just 50 feet could be gained (Curtin 1992, 236).

Regimes of Care in British Central Africa The men who die, as a rule, are those who think that to rough it as much as possible is the correct thing. (Waller 1893, 48)

In his slim guidebook to health in Central Africa (published in several editions in the 1890s), Waller outlined a regime detailing how to live and move carefully within the region. Although he was neither a qualified doctor nor had he been back to the area since 1864, he nevertheless skilfully leveraged his personal experience, his close association with Livingstone, and deferential reference to British doctors who had practised in Central Africa to establish his status as a credible health authority. While most of the medical authorities he referred to were dead, correspondence with Robert Laws, who had even more experience than Buchanan, played an important role in Waller’s book. Waller’s book drew heavily on Laws’s experience and advocation of careful travel (1893, 7–8). Laws had buried many missionaries (including medical colleagues), treated countless cases of fever and other illnesses, and had himself suffered from several serious bouts of malaria. He trusted in quinine as a prophylaxis and cure for fevers and believed that careful and regulated hard work was the cornerstone of health (Livingstone 1921; Hokkanen 2009). For both men, mobility was preferable to “staying idle” (Waller 1893, 12–13), but only when travel was planned meticulously and undertaken as slowly and comfortably as possible.9 The guidebook recommended hunting and botanising as healthy activities, emphasising that travellers ought to keep both mind and body active (12–15). Malaria was thought to cause

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and be worsened by psychological factors such as worry, fears, and irritation, and Waller explicitly warned that quarrels among European travellers could be a sign of malarial poison taking hold (43–57). Wet feet were considered very dangerous, too, and Waller held Laws up as a model with his claim that the missionary had managed to keep his feet dry for at least seven years while travelling thousands of miles by land and waterways. The contrast between the careful Laws and the mud-wading Livingstone is notable, even though Waller chose not to make an explicit comparison in his pamphlet. Moist malarial emanations from the soil were also seen as harmful: sleeping on the ground was condemned as fatal practice. Instead, travellers were advised to bring tents, mattresses, and preferably “light iron folding bedsteads”, instructions that would of course necessitate the employment of more African workers (43–57). It should be clear by now that more careful mobility, particularly overland, was dependent upon a large number of African workers carrying sufficient supplies and materials, as well as (in most cases) shouldering the weight of European travellers. The machila was a hammock slung between two poles designed for this purpose, which was most likely used in East and Central Africa by coastal Swahili-speaking traders and the Portuguese long before Livingstone’s time. It was eagerly adopted by the British in the 1880s and 1890s and became a mainstay of careful travel. Without machila carriers repeatedly wading across rivers, streams, and swamps, Laws could not possibly have kept his own feet dry (Hokkanen 2017, 66–67). An increase in comfort required an increase in African labour. Securing sufficient labour became easier after the colonial conquest, when indigenous rulers and healers could no longer exert much control over European mobility. A longer trip would require 16 men per machila, working in four teams of four. In the late 1890s, the African Lakes Company and other transport businesses employed thousands of men between the coast and the Shire Highlands. In 1900, the African Lakes Company had 64,000 men working for them, of whom 1603 were specialised machila men. These seasoned and fit men could move at speeds of up to six miles per hour, it was estimated (Mandala 2006; Hokkanen 2017, 66–67). Machila work was generally resented and was later singled out as a particularly hated colonial practice. Those employed as carriers suffered from various illnesses: jigger infestations (caused by a skin-burrowing sandflea that spread to Malawi in the 1890s) were common as were colds, coughs, and lung ailments believed to be the result of becoming chilled while in

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the highlands. Protests and strikes by these men were not unknown, and in at least one report, a missionary was deliberately dropped onto a rock (Chiume 1982, 83; Hokkanen 2017, 66–67). While Europeans were very worried about getting wet or cold, health advice (like Waller’s handbooks) typically made little or no reference to the health of Africans employed to facilitate European travel. Waller’s suggestion that carriers should be vaccinated was an exception that was grounded in the danger that smallpox could pose to European travellers (1893, 56). Overwhelmingly, the men employed as carriers seem to have been taken for granted (Hokkanen 2017, 62, 67). The same was true of the usually nameless boatmen who manned small canoes as well as crewing steel riverboats. However, because personal servants were absolutely crucial workers for early colonialists, first-hand accounts were more likely to mention these (often young) men. British official R. C. F. Maugham wrote approvingly about a servant who acted as cook, steward, valet, and personal attendant: at 13 or 14 years of age, he was able to authoritatively organise a kitchen in a steel boat during Maugham’s first trip “up country” (1929, 94). Africans who travelled as associates would also frequently look after sick European travellers. Laws, in one of his earlier journeys, was allegedly saved from the consequences of suicidal delirium during a malaria attack, thanks to his companion’s calm refusal to provide the raving doctor with his revolver (Livingstone 1921, 110–112, 224). Not all Europeans approved of the machila: a healthy man being carried in a hammock was a poor fit with the earlier image of the heroic, muscular explorer. Neither could such a form of travel be portrayed and justified as a healthy exercise. Both Dr. William Affleck Scott (Blantyre Mission) and Maugham condemned the machila, preferring and advocating for brisk walking instead. Others simply found travelling by machila an unpleasant or discomforting experience. However, Scott’s death from blackwater fever in 1895 prompted criticism of his fearless muscular Christian habits, particularly the suggestion that he had swum across the river to treat an African patient (Rankine 1896). By the late 1890s, proponents of the earlier energetic explorer-tradition were fewer in number, with some having died of the dreaded fever. As the colonialist population of the Malawi region and elsewhere grew, careful and comfortable mobility became increasingly desirable and possible. Johnston certainly appreciated comfort when travelling. As Commissioner, he sought to improve conditions of travel on the steamers, complaining to the Foreign Office

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that the poor accommodation on the Zambesi steamers was a “considerable danger” to health (Hokkanen 2017, 65, 78–79). Large-scale European conquest and colonisation in Africa elevated the perceived importance of increased permanent settlement of European families. In the 1890s, African regions were generally considered to fall into one of three categories: regions considered suitable for permanent, large-scale European colonisation (including South Africa, large parts of today’s Zimbabwe, and the highlands of Kenya), areas deemed unsuitable for colonisation (the majority of the continent, including notably West Africa), and debatable zones (Curtin 1992; Hokkanen 2014). Belonging to the third category, the Shire Highlands of Malawi were generally considered to be healthy, but the journey to reach them was particularly difficult. In 1895, the editor of the Central African Planter, a settler newspaper published in Blantyre, made the case that because European women were now living comparably safely in the area, the protectorate could be considered healthy (Gelfand 1964, 235). However, this view was not universally shared; it seems that the prevailing opinion of the mid-­1890s was that British Central Africa could not be “white man’s country” like southern parts of Rhodesia (Hokkanen 2017, 70–71). Large numbers of men died of malaria and blackwater fever in South-­ Central Africa, and these losses prompted official investigations at the turn of the century (193–199). European mortality rates in the region gradually began to decrease in the early years of the twentieth century, with the recognition of the mosquito as a malarial vector and the more systematic and regulated use of quinine. Additionally, medical services became more available, travel connections became faster, and housing and living conditions improved. By contrast, African health conditions were probably deteriorating due to the spread of epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, introduced by migrant workers returning from South African mines (Worboys 1993, 512–520; Hokkanen 2017, 38–39).10 While quicker and more regular routes and communication made it easier for sick Europeans to be evacuated to South Africa or Europe, the same routes also enabled more rapid transmission of diseases to more vulnerable populations. As such, the urban mobility of Africans eventually became a matter of concern for colonial health authorities. As Curtin and others have argued, hygienic ideas generally, and attempts at malaria control in particular, were to contribute to policies of sanitary segregation between Africans, Europeans, and Asians in colonial towns and cities (Curtin 1992).11

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Female Explorer-Hero in West Africa: Mary Kingsley on Mobility and Health Kingsley undertook her journeys at the same time as the British protectorates and colonies in South-Central and East Africa were being established. By contrast, West Africa, as Kingsley noted, was not, and would not be, a “white man’s country”. However, British commercial interests required a presence in the region, and this led to inevitable losses among officials and company agents (Kingsley 2007, 396–397). Kingsley observed that the flags in fronts of factories in Bonny were frequently flown at half mast, as someone was “dead again” (47). She also quoted an “old Coaster” who, although defensive when Kingsley referred to a river as “Styx”, told her about a yellow fever epidemic that had killed “nine [white] men out of resident eleven” (47–48). Kingsley, herself a doctor’s daughter, did not spare her readers and informed them that an estimated 85 per cent of “West Coasters” would die or “return home with their health permanently wrecked” (395). She described “the old Coasters” as men of the type “who goes to his death with a joke in his teeth” (39). Similarly, her own writing is suffused with dark, dry humour about living and travelling under a constant shadow of death, and she adopts a sceptical tone when describing those who present themselves as fever experts: You will always find lots of people ready to give advice on fever, particularly how to avoid getting it, and you will find the most dogmatic of these are people who have been singularly unlucky in the matter, or people who know nothing of local conditions. They tell you, truly enough no doubt, that malaria is in the air, in the exhalations from the ground, which are greatest about sunrise and sunset, and in the drinking water, and that you must avoid chill, excessive mental and bodily exertion, that you must never get anxious, or excited, or lose your temper. (389)

The practical impossibility of fully implementing most of these kinds of precautions was not lost on Kingsley, whose exasperation was evident: “[H]ow are you to do without air from 6:30 PM to 6:30 AM? or what other air there is but night air, heavy with malarious exhalations, available then?” (390). Nevertheless, she recommended the use of robust preventative measures as much as realistically possible (390–394). She would boil her

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drinking water “hard for ten minutes at least and then instantly pour it into a jar with a narrow neck, which plug up with a wad of fresh cotton-­ wool—not a cork” (394). Like Waller and Laws, Kingsley was a strong advocate for the use of prophylactic quinine, recommending a daily dose of five grams in malarious districts to be supplemented with an extra dose when chilled or overtired. Likewise, she had found calomel, alcohol, and opium useful in some circumstances. However, she did warn against taking large, uncontrolled doses of quinine and arsenic without medical advice (394–395). While noting that the comparative study of diseases in West Africa could be a major scientific research subject, Kingsley acknowledged that it would require the collection of massive amounts of data as well as the survival of a male medical scientist (391). Arguably, writing as a laywoman traveller, she was able to take a somewhat ironic outsider position, while not being unsympathetic to the plight of the resident men. It was on a sombre note that she acknowledged in her introduction to Travels in West Africa that by 1897, many of the official and traders who had assisted her were dead (n. pag.). Kingsley stated that “[t]ravel in West Africa is very hard work, and very unhealthy” (346). Nevertheless, she was constantly on the move and travelled by canoe through mangrove swamps that would be considered extremely dangerous according to prevailing medical opinion. Like Buchanan, she would sometimes paddle a canoe herself (96–97). Kingsley’s exploration was in some ways more reminiscent of Livingstone than Laws: she certainly got drenched in the mountains of Cameroon and while travelling by canoe (337–338). As Blanton has noted, “wild travel” is prominent in Kingsley’s text, particularly her journeys along West African rivers (2002, 49–50). Danger and risk were arguably part of the “charm” of West Africa to Kingsley (2007, Preface, n. pag.), and certain risk-taking was part of Kingsley’s self-fashioning as author and explorer. Kingsley clearly favoured a more careful approach when securing safe drinking water and medication. She also used mosquito nets whenever possible as a means of “avoiding night air” (71–73, 390). Although she mentions the discomfort caused by mosquitoes and other insects repeatedly (e.g. 45, 53–54, 118–119), Kingsley was writing just before it was determined that mosquitoes carried malaria. Insects, for her, were a real discomfort but were not seen as potentially deadly. Kingsley’s descriptions of colonial outposts and trading stations where small white communities could be decimated by sweeping disease

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outbreaks make her own constant mobility seem healthy by comparison.12 The value of mobility as exercise and activity for health is clear in the discussion of disease in West Africa that concludes her book: “The great thing in West Africa is to keep up your health to a good level, that will enable you to resist fever, and it is exceedingly difficult for most people to do this, because of the difficulty of getting exercise and good food” (395). As was the case in Central Africa, explorers and colonialists in West Africa usually relied on African servants to prepare their food. In Kingsley’s view, there was a social dimension to healthy mobility. She recommended that for reasons of practicality and health, it was wise for travellers to try to get on well with others, including African carriers and associates. Kingsley herself travelled without any European companions, and she named some of the African agents who enabled her exploration, including Obanjo (“Captain Johnson”) and interpreter Ngouta (194). In her introduction, she also thanked a number of “cultured men and women” who had helped her: Charles Owoo, Mbo, Sanga Glass, Jane Harrington, “and her sister” (n. pag.). Despite her ironic tone when commenting on the health advice of certain experts, Kingsley nevertheless subscribed to the principle that losing one’s temper in tropical conditions could be downright dangerous. Comparable to Buchanan, Kingsley placed considerable emphasis on individual constitution: she claimed that some were immune to malaria, others had strong “powers of resistance” which could be “renewed from time to time in a European climate” (396), but a proportion would succumb to malarial poisoning sooner or later. Kingsley believed that the strength of a constitution could not really be determined in advance, but she advocated that prospective British “West Coasters” should assume that they belonged to the first two groups and then “take every care short of getting frightened”, as fear was “as deadly as taking no care at all” (396). She maintained that constitutional and psychological factors played an important part in survival, speculating that “full-bodied, corpulent and vigorous” men who would get into “funk” would probably die, but “energetic, spare, nervous but light-hearted” might stand a better chance (390). A mobile, active, and fearless lifestyle along with suitable health precautions (above all quinine prophylaxis and careful boiling of drinking water) was Kingsley’s recipe for survival for the British in the West Coast.

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Conclusion: From Transit to Settlement and Back Again—Mobilities, Contacts, and Colonial Health Mobility offers certain kinds of power through kinetic energies to individuals, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have noted (2009, 336). As this chapter has shown, writers such as Livingstone, Kingsley, Buchanan, Young, and Waterston provide insights into the appeal of mobility and vigorous movement in Africa. Despite the risks, drawbacks, and periods of inertia, in their accounts, travel itself seems more healthily energising than enervating. These Victorians were willing to take notable risks partly, I would argue, because moving about in Africa gave them exhilarating feelings of being alive and in their full powers. Quite possibly, a sense of risk and danger augmented these feelings. Moreover, when causes of malaria were unclear and the subject of considerable debate, survival was often seen as a question of fate, providence, or simply luck of the draw. In addition, healthy mobility while travelling had a social component. Waller and Kingsley both highlighted the need for harmonious relations with fellow travellers for health as well as social reasons. While interpersonal conflict, fear, and loss of self-control could be an indication of ill health, they were also seen as very real threats that could, in some circumstances, even contribute to life-threatening illness. Afro-European relations were usually not explicitly mentioned in the discourse of healthy travel, but they underpinned it. However, the traces of those African agents who enabled much of exploration, missionary, and colonial activity need to be teased out from ethnocentric and biased European written sources, and historians have still much to do to uncover their agency and perceptions. In the early period of heroic exploration, Europeans were more vulnerable and dependent on their African allies and associates than they were often prepared to admit. The demands and conditions of colonial settlement reduced the necessity for exploratory travel: in one sense, mobility as a mode of being (as embodied by explorers) gave way to a more functional mobility in the form of regimented exercise and necessary travel. At the same time, the revelation that the mosquito bite was the one thing to be most scared of increasingly led the British in Africa to turn inwards, feeling most secure in small, segregated enclaves. In this context, Africans and their mobilities, particularly in urban settings, increasingly became a concern of colonial hygiene. Improvements in transport and hygienic precautions enabled the

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British to travel faster and more safely (using mosquito nets and regular quinine prophylaxis). The mobility of early twentieth-century colonialists was more likely to take the form of movement on tennis courts or golf courses than arduous travel by canoe or trekking. European colonisation of tropical Africa was arguably a comparably short-lived failure as far as European settlement and direct political rule was concerned. Modern independent Africa again became a zone of transit rather than settlement for most Europeans. Systematic medication for air travellers was such by the late 1940s that Laurens van der Post could complain that he “had already inside me all the medicine that I could ever need” when he flew from Britain to Malawi, going on to nostalgically hark back to the older era of explorer-travellers (1953, 23–24). By this time, Africa was “a night’s fly away” from the West, close yet still frequently portrayed as the “Dark Continent” marked by disease, poverty, and war (Dowden 2008, 1–9). Twenty-first-century Westerners in tropical Africa can be seen to continue some of colonial hygienic traditions. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upturned at least briefly some colonial era patterns: Europeans, alongside Chinese, were explicitly seen as potential carriers of a new disease, and the very hubs and nodes of transnational mobility that connect Africa, Europe, and global mobile networks became danger zones and hotbeds of disease, rather than safe enclaves for mobile, privileged travellers.

Notes 1. This chapter is based, in part, on my monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–1960 (Manchester University Press 2017), especially Chap. 2. I remain grateful to Manchester University Press for the kind permission to republish these sections in a revised form. The open-access publication of this chapter has been supported by the Academy of Finland research project “Mobile healers, politics and development in sub-Saharan Africa” (project. no. 324388). I would like to thank the editors of this collection. Many thanks also go to Liz Eastcott, as well as the group of health historians at the University of Oulu. 2. For medical traditions in South-Central Africa, see Hokkanen (2017). For the use of Koranic verses as medicines and medicinal “talismans” brought by pilgrims from Mecca to the Abyssinian border, see Baker (1886, Chap. 4). On West African travellers’ divinations for good fortune on the road in the 1790s, see Park (2005, 53, 79). On travelling and canoeing “charms” in West African coast in the 1890s, see Kingsley (2007, 220–221).

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3. Besides medical tourism in Cape Colony, lengthy sea travels to Australia were also increasingly promoted by medical authorities, as Sally Shuttleworth demonstrates in her chapter of this volume. 4. On gender and empire, see Levine (2004). For norms of bodily movement, posture, and masculinity, see also Monika Class’s analysis of Tom Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in this volume. 5. On practicalities and logistics of caravan travel, see Fabian (2000, 39–51). 6. See also Chadwick (1959) and Jeal (1974). 7. Ursula Kluwick’s chapter in this volume discusses how bodily contact with aquatic matter resulted in fevers and how such processes were represented in nineteenth-century fiction. For a discussion of Max Nordau’s related concept of “feverish restlessness”, see Chap. 8 by Stefanie John. 8. For example, Speke, Burton, and later Frederick Lugard had all been officers in India. 9. For the concept of idleness, slow mobility, and health tourism, see also Chap. 5 by Heidi Lucja Liedke. 10. See also King and King (1997). 11. On Cape Colony, see Deacon (2000). 12. On West Coast mortality in trading stations, see Kingsley (2007, 40–41).

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Kingsley, Mary. 2007 [1897]. Travels in West Africa (Congo Francais, Corisco and Cameroons). Abr. ed. Moscow: Dodo Press. Levine, Philippa, ed. 2004. Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingstone, David. 1863. Extract of a Letter to Sir Thomas Maclear 1 May 1863, published in the Cape Argus. 21 October 1863. Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Archives. AEX/2/1/39. Livingstone, David. 1992. The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, David, and Charles Livingstone. 1865. Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, Vol. II. London: John Murray. Livingstone, W. P. 1921. Laws of Livingstonia. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Mandala, Elias. 2006. “Feeding and Fleecing the Native: How the Nyasaland Transport System Distorted a New Food Market, 1890s–1920.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32 (3): 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03057070600830474. Maugham, R. C. F. 1929. Africa as I Have Known It. London: John Murray. MacAlpine, A.  G. n.d. “Biographical Account of Life & Work in Bandawe, 1893–94.” Edinburgh University Library. MS. 308.5. McCracken, John. 2012. A History of Malawi. Woodbridge: James Currey. McKenzie, Precious. 2012. The Right Sort of Woman: Victorian Travel Writers and the Fitness of an Empire. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Nambula, Katharina. 2020. “Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899).” In Handbook of British Travel Writing, edited by Barbara Schaff, 411–431. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Park, Mungo. 2005 [1860]. Travels in the Interior of Africa. Dublin: Nonsuch Publishing. Rankin, John. 2015. Healing the African Body: British Medicine in West Africa 1800–1860. Columbia: The University of Missouri Press. Rankine, W. 1896. A Hero of the Dark Continent: Memoir of Rev. Wm. Affleck Scott. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Rockel, Stephen J. 2006. Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-­ Century East Africa. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Speke, John. 1969 [1863]. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile. London: Dent. Van der Post, Laurens. 1953. Venture to the Interior. London: Hogarth Press. Waller, Horace. 1886. Letter to Robert Laws 8 April 1886. National Library of Scotland. Acc. 9220 (3)(v). Waller, Horace. 1893. Health Hints for Central Africa, with Remarks on ‘Fever’, Its Treatment, and Precautions to Be Used in Dangerous Localities. London: John Murray. Worboys, Michael. 1993. “Tropical Diseases.” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, edited by W.  Bynum and R.  Porter, 512–536. London: Routledge.

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Index1

A Abjection, 158, 159 Ablow, Rachel, 88 Addington Symonds, John, 48n7 Adey, Peter, 11, 12 Aestheticism, 168, 179, 181 See also Decadence Aesthetic(s), 122, 161n8, 165, 167, 169, 177, 179, 183, 184n8 See also Kinaesthetic Aetiology, 17, 146, 148–150, 154, 159, 222, 236 Affect, 5, 87, 136, 171 Affleck Scott, William, 269 Africa, 18, 19, 48n4, 231n1, 235, 236, 240, 252n8, 259–262, 264, 266, 267, 270, 274, 275 African, 6, 238, 240, 251n1, 259–275

Agency, 15, 69, 79, 122, 124, 146–148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158, 160–161, 274 Aguiar, Marian, 12, 46 Ahmed, Sara, 133 Ailments, 2, 4, 10, 15, 76, 82, 84, 87, 93, 166, 170, 182, 246, 268 See also Disease(s) Air change of, 4, 83 pollution of, 34, 180 purity of, 33 ventilation of, 247 Alcoholism, 76, 86, 194 Allen, Michelle, 4 Ambulance, 8, 38 American, 55, 70, 78, 79, 170, 201, 202, 238 See also United States of America (USA)

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1

281

282 

INDEX

Anaesthesia, 3 Anatomy, 3, 14, 215, 221 Anderson, Benedict, 40 See also Imagined communities Antisemitism, 15, 63, 65, 69 Antisepsis, 7 Anxiety(ies), 4, 6–8, 11, 34, 92, 99, 147, 168, 176, 178, 189, 214, 229, 230, 265 Appadurai, Arjun, 237, 244 Arlidge, J. T., 243, 247–249, 252n10 Art, 13, 166, 169, 171, 172, 178, 184n8 Artist, 36, 168, 169, 178 Asylum casebooks, 188, 191, 204n2 Asylum(s), 3, 4, 16, 17, 20n5, 114, 150, 188–203, 204n2, 204n3, 204n4, 204n6 See also Mental, illness(es) Austen, Jane, 58 Northanger Abbey, 58 Persuasion, 58 Australia, 14, 15, 29, 32–41, 43–46, 197, 202, 262, 276n3, 49nnull Automobile, 232n10 See also Mobility(ies) B Bacteria, 33, 151, 261 Baden-Baden, 8, 100, 101 See also Spa(s), towns Bad Gastein, 215 See also Spa(s), towns Bailin, Miriam, 13 Baker, Samuel White, 262, 263 Ballantyne, Tony, 274 Barad, Karen, 147 Barbeau, Alfred, 56 Bath (city), 8, 56–58, 86 See also Spa(s), towns Bath chair, 10 See also Wheelchair

Bathing, 31, 53–61, 68, 70, 217 Baudelaire, Charles, 173, 181 “Danse Macabre,” 173 The Flowers of Evil, 173 Beauvoir, Simone de, 125, 137, 138 Beckson, Karl, 166, 172, 173, 178, 180 Bichat, Xavier, 54, 55 Bicycle, 7, 9, 10, 172, 219, 232n10 See also Mobility(ies) Birth(s), 42, 63, 65, 68, 90, 91, 93, 201, 203, 245 Blackpool, 8 See also Spa(s), towns Bloodletting, 4 Blue humanities, 17, 147–149, 151, 160 Boat(s), 2, 6, 138–140, 195, 269 Body(ies) boundaries of, 54, 77, 230 docile, 102, 122, 123, 135, 136 female, 63, 76, 125, 134, 138, 219 fragile, 16 and mind, 9, 47, 57, 92, 100, 101, 110, 135, 170, 171, 182, 193, 222, 240, 267 movement, 75–78, 80, 82, 93, 121–141, 158, 170, 172, 215, 217, 260, 276n4 relation to/with, 77, 125, 139, 151 Bournemouth, 8, 42 See also Spa(s), towns Boyhood, 131 See also Girlhood Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 15, 54, 59, 216, 217, 225 Aurora Floyd, 225 Lady Audley’s Secret, 15, 54, 59 British Journal of Tuberculosis, 45 British Medical Association (BMA), 20n4 British Medical Journal, 32, 34, 35, 45

 INDEX 

Brontë, Charlotte, 216, 217 , 222, 224 Shirley, 222 Buchan, William, 4, 8, 9, 19n3 Domestic Medicine, Or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases, By Regimen and Simple Medicines, 4 Buchanan, John, 18, 260, 263–267, 272–274 The Shire Highlands, East Central Africa, as Colony and Mission, 260 Buchanan, Robert, 168–169, 267 Bulkley, Lucius Duncan, 217, 221, 222, 225 Burton, Antoinette, 274 Butler, Weeden, 56 Buzard, James, 100 Byerly, Alison, 6, 154–156 Byssinosis, 248 See also Disease(s), of the lung C Capitalism, 5, 107, 240, 245, 250, 252n11 Carriage(s) (horse-drawn), 8 See also Mobility(ies); Stage coach Chambers’s Journal, 10, 33 Change of air, 4, 83 Charteris, Matthew, 114 Childhood, 62, 79, 122 Cholera, 4, 8, 14, 154, 162n10, 193 Citizenship, 62 City(ies), 45–47, 56, 63, 64, 78, 79, 85, 107, 111, 155, 156, 173, 174, 176, 179, 180, 190, 192, 194–196, 203, 251n3, 270 See also Urban, mobility Civilisation, 155, 171, 261 Clairmont, Claire, 57, 58

283

Clark, James, 9, 31 The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases, 9 Class(es) middle, 7, 8, 58, 122, 126, 137, 156, 157, 191, 202, 204n8, 216, 222, 230 upper, 65, 132, 135, 138, 139, 176, 248 working, 6, 7, 57, 139, 248, 250 Climate cold, 252n8 tropical, 67, 240, 246, 261, 262 warm, 8, 83 Clothing, 18, 38, 214, 219, 237, 239–241, 243–247, 250, 251, 251n3, 251n4, 251n5, 252n7, 252n8 tropical, 18, 237, 244, 246, 250 Coach, 5, 14, 103 See also Carriage(s) (horse-drawn); Stage coach; Train(s) Collins, Wilkie, 16, 17, 97, 98, 103–109, 113, 114, 146, 148, 150, 151, 160, 232n9 The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, 16, 97–98, 104–106, 113 The Woman in White, 17, 146, 148, 150–154, 160, 161, 161n6, 232n9 Colonial, 6, 8, 14, 19, 47, 65, 69, 70, 94, 189, 236, 237, 239, 240, 244, 250, 260, 264–268, 270, 272, 274–275 Colonisation, 19, 238, 264, 270 of Africa, 270, 275 Colonialism, 6, 63, 65, 67, 69 Combe, Andrew, 225, 226 Commodity culture, 18, 235–251 See also Health

284 

INDEX

Commodity(ies), 8, 18, 63, 231n1, 235–251 Confinement, 34, 83, 166, 195, 198–200, 202, 204n2 Conrad, Joseph, 156 Heart of Darkness, 156 Constructivism, 174 Consumerism, 5, 238 Consumption, 15, 18, 31, 33–35, 37, 46, 47, 87, 156, 158, 237, 245, 247, 250 See also Tuberculosis Contagion anti-, 146, 159 theory of, 146, 159 Contamination, 34, 149, 154, 162n10, 230, 243 Corbin, Alain, 59 Cotton, 18, 239, 241, 243–246, 248, 249, 251–252n7, 252n10 See also Fabric(s) Cough, 176, 268 See also Consumption; Tuberculosis COVID-19, 45, 114, 161n1, 275 Cresswell, Tim, 11, 13, 124, 146, 171, 172, 183 Critical medical humanities, 13 See also Medical humanities Cross, David Kerr, 251n1 Cultural studies, 12, 93, 141n1, 250 Cure for fevers, 267 for the ills of modern life, 34, 37, 46 water, 9 Curtin, Philip, 235, 251n1, 260, 266, 267, 270 D Dally, Eugène, 67 Dance(s), 17, 80, 84, 94, 101, 165–183 See also Movement, bodily

Davos, 48n7 See also Spa(s), towns Dean, Teresa H., 131, 227, 228 Debility, 33, 35 Decadence, 16, 17, 60, 62, 70, 165–168, 172, 178, 179 De Certeau, Michel, 108–111 Degeneration, 168, 169, 240 See also Nordau, Max De Maupassant, Guy, 15, 54, 63–70 Bel-Ami, 65 Mont-Oriol, 15, 54, 63, 65–67 Dementia, 197, 204n7 Depression, 99, 191, 193, 265 See also Melancholy Dermatology, 18, 216, 217, 219 Deterioration cultural, 168 mental, 204n7 Diary(ies), 3, 15, 30, 38, 39, 41, 150, 153 Dickens, Charles, 16, 97, 98, 103–109, 111, 113, 114 Household Words, 104 The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, 16, 98, 104–106, 113 The Uncommercial Traveller, 105 Dietetics, 122 Disability, 14, 19 Disciplinary power, 16, 123, 125, 128, 141 Disease(s) dangerous, 260 epidemic, 192, 193, 270 infectious, 4, 43 of the lung, 249 (see also Byssinosis; Disease(s), pulmonary; Disease(s), respiratory; Tuberculosis) pulmonary, 4 respiratory, 4, 247, 248 of the skin, 222, 231n2 transmission, 4, 231n8, 270

 INDEX 

Disinfectants, 243 Distance, 6, 11, 81, 82, 86, 88, 105–107, 109, 110, 129, 130, 152, 182, 221, 222, 226, 249, 252n9 See also Proximity Doctor(s) Doctor’s Ships, 15 mobility of, 8, 19 travelling, 8, 37, 269 Doyle, H. M., 35, 43, 48n10 Dutton, Thomas, 35 Dyspepsia, 36 See also Indigestion; Phthisis E Ecocriticism, 147, 148 Elder, A. Vavasour, 45, 47 Eliot, George, 15, 16, 54, 62, 63, 69, 71, 121, 122, 124–141, 216–218, 222–224, 227–229, 231n3, 276n4 Adam Bede, 223 Daniel Deronda, 15, 54, 62, 229 Middlemarch, 222, 227, 231n3 The Mill on the Floss, 16, 121–141, 276n4 “The Natural History of German Life,” 121 Scenes of Clerical Life, 223 Elmslie, Archibald Gordon, 37, 47n2 Elmslie, Christopher Tatham, 47n2 Elmslie, Walter, 261 Elton, Frederick, 263, 264 Embodiment, 75, 80, 83 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 168 Empire British Empire, 3, 236, 241, 243 Victorian, 238 Ennui, 170, 182 Environmental health, 248, 250

285

humanities, 148, 248, 250 materiality, 151 medicine, 45 Environment(s), 10, 45, 60, 64, 103, 112, 125, 149, 151, 153, 160, 194, 236, 247 Epidemic, 4, 7, 192, 193, 270, 271 Eugenics, 169 Europe, 6, 8, 57, 66, 69, 71, 76, 77, 79, 84, 91, 166, 229, 261, 270, 275 European, 6, 53, 61, 62, 67, 84, 165, 166, 168, 236, 238, 240, 243, 246, 251–252n7, 259–262, 264, 266, 268–270, 273–275 Evaporation, 148, 216, 217, 266 Ewers, Chris, 14 Exercise(s), 4, 9, 10, 14, 19, 78, 84, 129, 156, 215, 217–222, 224–228, 230, 231n5, 260, 269, 273, 274 Exhaustion, 79, 82, 170 Exploration(s), 18, 75, 80, 86, 126, 150, 155, 174, 179, 225, 239, 240, 252n8, 259–275 See also Explorer(s) Explorer(s) hero, 260–262, 269, 271–273 tradition, 262, 269 F Faber, C. B., 32, 33, 43, 48n6 Fabric(s), 174, 237, 240–245, 248–251, 251–252n7 See also Cotton; Linen; Wool Factories, 18, 243, 246, 247, 250, 252n12, 271 See also Cotton mills Factory Acts, 246 Farrer, Richard Ridley, 107 A Tour in Greece, 107 Fell, Charles Yates, 38, 39, 41, 48n14

286 

INDEX

Femininity, 17, 124, 125, 133, 137, 140 See also Gender; Masculinity Fever(s) blackwater, 265, 269, 270 malarial, 14, 261–263, 266–274 Field, Michael, 17, 166, 167, 172, 179–183 “A Dance of Death,” 179 “The Iris Was Yellow, the Moon Was Pale,” 167, 179, 181 Poems of Adoration, 179 Underneath the Bough, 167, 179, 182, 184n7 Fin de siècle, 17, 94, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178–180, 182, 183, 232n10 Fitch, Samuel, 55 Flânerie, 98, 175 Flâneur, 175, 176 Folger Fowler, Lydia, 218, 220, 229 Food, 39, 101, 102, 147, 218, 229, 239, 243, 247, 263, 264, 273 Foucault, Michel, 102, 123, 127, 136, 138 See also Body(ies), docile Foxwell, Ernest, 213, 214, 216, 228, 229 Frazer, James, 107 The Golden Bough, 107 G Galen/Galenic medicine, 122, 221 Galvanism, 9 See also Therapy(ies), electric Gaskell, Elizabeth, 1, 2, 13, 16, 19n1, 20n8, 94, 216, 217, 222, 224, 225, 248 Mary Barton, 2, 16, 94 North and South, 222, 224, 248

Gaze male, 137, 138 medical, 9 romantic, 100 tourist, 100 Gedge, Edith S., 38, 39, 42, 43, 48n15 Gender, 7, 12–14, 16, 20n8, 122, 124, 126, 137, 138, 140, 141, 214, 220, 237 See also Femininity; Masculinity General Medical Council (GMC), 20n4 General paralysis of the insane (GPI), 166, 183n2, 194, 200 Genre, 19, 69, 70, 150, 154 Geography, 11, 18, 235–251 German, 62, 66, 71, 101, 165, 193, 199, 241, 243, 252n9 Germany, 61, 93, 99, 141n1, 182 Germ theory, 4, 7, 17, 33, 88, 146, 150, 154, 243 Gilbert, Pamela, 4, 15, 88, 141n3, 157, 160, 218, 222 Gilchrist, Ebenezer, 31 Girlhood, 132, 134, 135 See also Boyhood Gissing, George, 16, 98, 107–113 By the Ionian Sea, 16, 98, 107, 108, 113 Graham, Harold John, 43, 44, 49n19 Great Irish Famine, 189 Gymnastic(s), 5, 37, 122, 123, 129, 134, 135, 141 See also Movement, bodily H Hardy, Thomas, 15, 16, 75–93, 141n2, 214, 215 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 214 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 15, 75–93, 141n2

 INDEX 

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 226 Harley, David, 56 Headache(s), 99 Health advice, 265, 269, 273 advice pamphlets, 19, 260 culture, 14, 18, 235–251 officers, 45, 247 resort(s), 15, 31–36, 42, 48n7, 58, 260 tourism, 14, 104, 260 See also Medical officer(s) Heath, William, 154 “Monster Soup,” 154 Heazle Parke, Thomas, 238, 239, 243, 251n1 Helm, Elijah, 245, 249 Hereditarianism, 34, 86, 194, 197 History (academic discipline), 11 Hokkanen, Markku, 7, 8, 18, 19, 94, 162n11, 204n12, 261, 263–270 Home Chimes, 154 Homeward Bound, 41, 49n17 Homoeopathy, 5 Horrocks, Ingrid, 14, 76, 79 Horseback riding, 18, 81, 215, 218, 225–230, 232n10, 251n6 See also Mobility(ies) Horton, James, 241 Hospital(s), 4, 8, 33, 35, 46, 190, 216, 231n2 Howell, Jessica, 236 Hugo, Victor, 130 Notre Dame de Paris: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 130 Humanities, 12, 13, 248 See also Blue humanities; Environmental, humanities; Medical humanities Humidity, 240, 246, 247, 251n1 Hunt, S. Leigh, 236, 239, 242, 243, 251n1, 251n3

287

Hydrotherapy, 9, 160 See also Cure, water Hygiene colonial, 274 moral, 134, 236, 251n2 tropical, 236 Hypochondria, 136 Hysteria, 5, 136, 139, 168–170 See also Degeneration; Gender; Neurasthenia I Ibsen, Henrik, 168 Ideology, 10, 11, 135, 172, 245 Idleness, 46, 98, 101–106, 108–110, 112–114, 167, 173, 179, 180, 276n9 See also Idling Idling, 16, 97–113 See also Idleness Illness(es), 2, 4, 7–9, 13–16, 18, 20n8, 33, 34, 47, 53, 56, 76, 78, 83, 85–88, 90–93, 99, 112, 146, 150, 151, 154, 204n5, 225, 232n9, 243, 247, 248, 262–264, 267, 268, 274 intestinal, 262 See also Mental, illness(es) Imagination, 55, 108–110, 112, 113, 130, 216, 237, 252n12 Imagined communities, 40 See also Anderson, Benedict Immobility and confinement, 166 feminine, 132 See also Femininity; Gender; Mobilit(ies); Stasis Imperial, 6, 8, 171, 235–251, 263 Imperialism, 18 Impressionism, 184n8 India, 201, 202, 266, 276n8

288 

INDEX

Indigestion, 105 See also Dyspepsia Industrialisation, 5, 16, 106, 108, 174, 238, 245 Inertia, 108, 112, 274 Infrastructure, 6, 8 Ingold, Tim, 99 Insanity, 188–190, 193, 197, 199–202 See also General paralysis of the insane (GPI), Mania Institutionalisation, 3, 4, 15, 196, 245 International Red Cross, 3 Invalid, 10, 15, 29–35, 38, 39, 41–46, 83, 84, 87, 93, 174 Ireland, 166, 187, 189–192, 194–199, 201, 202 Irish, 17, 56, 187–203 Irony, 101, 107 Isolation, 4, 79, 122, 191, 198, 203 See also Mental, asylum(s); Rest cure J Jaeger, Gustav, 241–243, 251n7, 252n8 James, Henry, 15, 16, 75–93, 141n2 The Portrait of a Lady, 15, 75–93, 141n2 Jameson, Thomas, 56 Jerome, Jerome K., 17, 146, 148, 150, 154–157, 159, 160 Three Men in a Boat, 17, 146–148, 150, 154–161 Jewish, 61–63, 65–67 Jewishness, 15, 54, 66 Jigger infestations, 268 Johnson, James, 8, 67 Change of Air or the Pursuit of Health and Recreation, 8 The Influence of Tropical Climates, 67

Johnston, Harry, 261, 265, 266, 269 Journey(s), 2, 6–8, 12–14, 43, 76, 79–81, 84–86, 88, 90, 93, 103, 108–110, 155, 175, 197, 235, 236, 239, 243, 250, 263–266, 269–272 transcontinental, 261 K Kennedy, Meegan, 2, 14, 216 Kenny, Alexander S., 236, 239, 242, 243, 251n1, 251n3 Kinaesthesis, 124 See also Aestheticism Kinaesthetic, 125 Kinetic, 166, 173, 274 Kingsley, Mary, 18, 260–262, 271–274 Travels in West Africa, 260, 272 Kirk, John, 263, 267 Kissingen, 99, 101, 102 See also Spa(s), towns Koch, Robert, 34, 154 See also Tuberculosis Kristeva, Julia, 158, 159 Kyphosis, 130 See also Posture L Lancashire, 17, 114, 187–203 Lancashire Archives, 188, 191, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203n1 The Lancet, 32, 230 Landscape, 60, 63, 64, 100, 108–111, 146, 151, 155, 180 Latour, Bruno, 160 Lavoisier, Antoine, 147 Leech, John, 154 “A Drop of London Water,” 154

 INDEX 

Leisure, 54, 57, 82, 91, 98, 99, 102–104, 114, 155 institutionalised, 99 Lewes, George Henry, 123, 124 Limbs, 2, 10, 71, 153 Linen, 241, 244, 245, 252n10 See also Fabric(s) Literary studies, 12, 93, 148 Liverpool, 1, 2, 5, 187, 189–203 Liverpool Mercury, 192 Liverpool Record Office, 187, 195, 203n1 Livingstone, Charles, 263, 264 Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, 260 Livingstone, David, 18, 259–264, 266–268, 272, 274 Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, 260 Livingstone, Mary, 262, 263 Livingstone, W. P., 267, 269 London, 7, 8, 29, 30, 42, 78, 86, 105, 154, 155, 166, 173, 176, 180, 184n8, 214, 219, 220, 224, 231n2, 252n7 Lubbock, Basil, 47n2 Lunacy, 194, 196 M MacAlpine, A. G., 261 Malaria, 14, 261, 262, 267, 269–274 Malawi, 260, 261, 263, 264, 267–270, 275 Mangham, Andrew, 14 Mania, 170, 187, 188, 196, 199, 200 See also Hysteria; Insanity; Nervous disorders

289

Marriage, 59–62, 65, 67, 71, 79, 80, 85, 89–93, 133, 137, 138, 150, 189, 228 Masculinity, 60, 122, 124, 126, 131, 139, 140, 241, 252n8, 261, 276n4 See also Femininity; Gender Materiality, 18, 65, 124, 146, 149, 151, 161n2, 180, 240, 244 See also Ecocriticism (material) Maternity, 76, 77, 89–92 See also Mortality Mathieson, Charlotte, 6, 7, 9, 14, 46, 76, 81, 82, 214, 215, 231n1 Maugham, R. C. F., 269 McLarren Caldwell, Janis, 14 Medical climatology, 31 Medical humanities, 3, 11–14, 215, 237 Medical officer(s), 35, 36, 45, 238, 248, 249, 263 Melancholy, 98, 109, 111, 265 Melbourne, 29, 30, 35, 36, 39, 41–43, 48n5 Melville, Herman, 107 “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” 107 Mental asylum(s), 4 breakdown, 166, 190, 195, 200, 203 fatigue, 35 health, 17, 97–113, 194, 195, 198, 204n5 illness(es), 102, 188, 195, 197, 200, 204n8 (see also Hysteria; Insanity; Mania) suffering, 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 86, 91, 124, 130, 139 Merriman, Peter, 6, 12 Metaphor(s), 167

290 

INDEX

Meteorology, 31, 32, 238, 266 Miasma, 4, 7, 146, 147, 150, 154, 159, 236, 261, 264, 266 theory, 236 Microscope, 249 Microscopy, 215, 221 Migration, 6, 17, 43, 188–199, 203, 235 Milton, John Laws, 215, 217, 219–221 Mission, 261, 263, 264, 266, 267 Missionary, 261, 265, 267–269, 274 See also Africa Mobile matter, 17, 146–150, 153, 160, 161 (see also Commodity(ies); Water) practices, 172 (see also Transport; Transport revolution) Mobility(ies) cultural, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 19, 167 as cure, 108, 263–267 embodied, 89, 93, 140, 274 global, 12, 189, 275 institutionalised, 97, 99 local, 12, 15, 79 medicine and, 1–19, 141n4 new forms of, 7, 9 pathologised, 13 production of, 11, 13 therapeutic, 9, 263 transformations of, 3, 12, 149, 150 tropical, 260 turn, 166 Mobility studies, 2, 3, 11–14, 29, 46, 69, 98, 100, 146, 150, 216 Modernity, 2, 7, 15, 46, 69, 82, 108, 124, 169, 170, 174, 176, 178, 183, 245, 249 industrial, 249 Morbidity, 176, 265, 266

Mortality, 16, 77, 89–93, 173, 179, 182, 260, 261, 265, 266, 270 Mosquito, 239, 266, 270, 272, 274, 275 Motor car, 7 Movement bodily, 16, 93, 122, 124, 125, 172, 215, 260, 276n4 freedom of, 78, 81 interrupted, 221 See also Cresswell, Tim N Narration, 69, 127, 140 Narrative form, 155 Nasmith, Joseph, 246 Nation(s), 6, 66, 69, 70, 155, 190, 236, 238 Nativism, 201 Nature, 6, 12, 34, 58, 63, 64, 66, 68, 100, 103, 129, 130, 146, 148, 151, 155, 183, 192, 222, 229, 230, 237, 252n12, 261 Nerves, 10, 58, 64, 101, 103, 170, 171, 176, 225, 261 Nervous disorders, 4, 15, 33, 35, 37, 47 See also Hysteria; Insanity; Mania Neurasthenia, 169, 170 See also Mental, illness(es) New materialism, 17, 146–148, 160 See also Materiality New mobilities paradigm, 11, 14, 69, 70, 145, 167, 216 See also Sheller, Mimi; Urry, John Newspaper(s), 15, 19, 29, 30, 34, 39–43, 48n11, 48n12, 48n16, 49n18, 106, 192, 199, 260, 270

 INDEX 

Noë, Alva, 124 Nordau, Max, 17, 165, 166, 168–173, 175, 178–180, 182, 183, 184n8, 276n7 Northern Daily Times, 201 Nymphomania, 5 See also Hysteria; Mental, illness(es); Nervous disorders O Orthopaedics, 16, 122, 141 Otherness, 65, 70, 172 Otter, Robert H., 34, 43, 48n7 Ouida, 61 Moths, 15, 54, 60, 61, 65 Overwork, 33, 34, 114 P Pandemic, 45, 97, 114, 145, 161n1, 275 Parasite(s), 79, 217, 231n8, 243, 261 Paris, 60, 63, 68, 79, 83, 103, 166, 229, 252n7 Park, Mungo, 275n2 Parkins, Wendy, 14, 76 Pater, Walter, 168, 183 Pathologisation of sexual identities, 166 See also Mobility(ies) Pathology, 3, 4, 168, 182 Patient(s), 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20n5, 33, 35, 36, 41, 46, 53, 56, 57, 59, 63, 69, 101, 102, 188–191, 194–198, 200–203, 203–204n2, 204n7, 204n8, 219, 269 Pearce, Lynne, 12 Pedestrian, 78, 88, 92, 93, 173, 174 See also Movement

291

Performance, 43, 80, 125, 128, 137, 139, 151, 173, 174, 176–178, 181 See also Dance(s); Movement Periodicals, 19, 35, 104, 114, 215–218, 226, 230, 260 Perspiration, 18, 53, 55, 134, 141n3, 216, 217, 221–226, 231n7, 240 See also Skin Phenomenology, 124 of perception, 124 Phthisis, 4, 36, 46, 248 See also Tuberculosis Pioneer(s), 62, 263, 265 Place, 1, 2, 10, 11, 15, 35, 37, 38, 43, 46, 53, 55–61, 64–67, 69–71, 77, 79, 88, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108–110, 113, 135, 136, 138, 146, 147, 149–151, 157–160, 161n7, 166, 180, 188, 190, 191, 193, 199, 201, 203, 217, 219, 239, 247, 262 Plane, 109 Pollution, 34, 147, 180 See also Air Polygenism, 67 Porter, Roy, 3–5, 9, 19n2, 20n4 Postmortem, 3, 37, 246, 249 Posture, 16, 17, 85, 121–141, 231n5, 276n4 Power, 4, 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 42, 70, 101, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 113, 123–125, 127, 128, 132, 135, 139, 141, 147, 153–155, 160, 170, 218, 237, 238, 244, 252n11, 262, 273, 274 The Practitioner, 32 Pratt, Mary Louise, 238 Pre-Raphaelites, 168 Preston Chronicle, 199 Prevention, 230 of diseases, 7

292 

INDEX

Prison, 17, 166, 188, 190, 194, 197, 200, 204n4 Prisoners, 200 Pröll, Gustav, 214–216 Prophylaxis, 261, 263–267, 273, 275 See also Prevention Propriety, 133, 226 Prosthetics, 10 Proximity, 40, 62, 229, 230, 246 See also Distance Psychiatry, 3, 169 Psychological, 37, 113, 121, 133, 171, 176, 184n4, 214, 268, 273 Psychology, 129, 169 Q Queen Victoria, 107 Quinine, 261, 263, 267, 270, 272, 273, 275 See also Cure, for fevers; Prophylaxis R Race(s), 6, 12, 13, 41, 67, 68, 81, 141, 190, 192, 196, 220, 231n4, 237 Racialised, 217 Racism, 231n4, 246 Railroad(s), 1, 66, 82, 86, 103, 110 Railway(s) compartment, 214, 216, 218, 230 stations, 79, 105, 106, 114, 214, 216 See also Train(s) Railway shock, 9 Railway spine, 9 Rain, 147, 150–154, 161, 221, 223, 232n9, 242 See also Blue humanities; Water Rankine, W., 269 Raspail, François-Vincent, 71n4

Reading Pathological Society, 36 Realism, 66, 216 Realist novel, 225 Regimes exercise, 218, 224, 227, 231n5, 274 medical, 5 skincare, 5 spa, 101 Relationship(s), 12, 13, 79, 83, 87, 97, 100, 106, 130, 174, 178, 195, 198, 225 Representation, 4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 54, 62, 63, 69, 71, 79, 81, 126, 129, 134–140, 141n4, 148, 149, 173, 188, 215, 238 Resort(s) alpine, 58 health, 15, 31–36, 42, 48n7, 58, 114, 260 seaside, 7, 8, 14, 15, 31, 53–61 See also Spa(s) Rest cure, 9 See also Femininity; Gender Restlessness, 165, 167, 169, 173–176, 179, 181, 182 Revill, George, 14, 86, 97 Rhythm, 66, 80, 91, 149, 173, 174, 178 See also Dance(s); Movement Ricoeur, Paul, 124, 141 Riverine Herald, 48n11 Road(s), 6, 12, 57, 67, 80, 88, 105, 275n2 Romantic, 14, 37, 58, 98, 100, 102, 107, 113, 182 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 168 See also Pre-Raphaelites Rothfield, Lawrence, 3–5, 13, 216 Routine(s), 3, 5, 83, 101, 107, 175, 177, 183 Running, 33, 134, 136, 223 See also Gender; Movement, bodily

 INDEX 

S Sanatorium(s), 4, 45–47, 260 Sanitary reform, 16, 17, 146, 154, 162n9, 217 Sanitation, 4, 7 Sass-Baker, Florence von, 262 Satire, 225 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 97 Schreber, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz, 123, 134–136 Sclerosis, 36 Scoresby-Jackson, Robert, 31 Sea bathing, 31, 53, 57–60 voyages, 30, 31, 34, 45 Seaside resort, 7, 8, 14, 15, 31, 53–61 tourism, 47n3 See also Spa(s) Season, 66, 251n3, 266 Sedentarism, 4, 69–70, 87, 130, 133, 136, 247, 264 Sensation novel, 37, 60, 146, 150, 225 Senses olfactory, 151 Sexuality, 12, 13, 125, 138, 141 See also Femininity; Gender; Masculinity Sheller, Mimi, 11, 12, 14, 69, 70, 146, 167, 216 Shelley, Mary, 16, 57, 58, 71, 97–103, 105, 107, 111, 113, 114 “Letter to Augusta Trelawny, 24 February 1843,” 99 Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843, 16, 97, 114 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 175 “Ode to the West Wind,” 175

293

Ship(s) newspapers, 15, 29, 30, 38–43, 48n12, 48n16, 49n17 sailing, 5, 31–34, 36, 37, 46 steam, 5, 8, 12, 46, 47, 78, 84, 191, 192, 260 See also Doctor(s), Doctor’s Ships; Sobraon Shoemaker, John, 199 Sickroom, 2, 13, 84 See also Gaze, medical Simmel, Georg, 184n4 Sitting, 78, 85, 101, 137, 153, 229, 241 Skin care of, 3, 216, 217, 227, 230 cleanliness, 53 exfoliation, 215 rubbing of the, 215, 229 stimulation of the, 64 See also Perspiration Slavery, 69, 245 Slessor, Mary, 262 Smallpox, 3, 14, 269 Smollett, Tobias, 56–58 The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 58 Peregrine Pickle, 57 Snow, John, 154 Sobraon, 15, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35–39, 43, 47n2, 48n11, 48n12, 48n14 Sobraon Gossip, 39, 40, 49n17 See also Newspaper(s) Sobraon Mercury, 41, 49n17 See also Newspaper(s) Sobraon Occasional, 41–43, 49n17, 49n18 See also Newspaper(s) Social Darwinism, 169 Sociology, 11 Somnambulism, 37 South Africa, 270

294 

INDEX

Space(s) aquatic, 149 body in, 136 domestic, 226, 250 global, 46 liminal, 77, 82–89, 183 time and, 13, 46, 109, 110, 124, 171, 176, 179 Spa(s) alpine, 60, 61 towns, 8, 15, 53, 54, 56–59, 61, 62, 65, 69, 70 See also Resort(s) Speed, 32, 47, 103, 113, 149, 167, 170, 174, 268 Speke, John, 264 Stage coach, 14 Stanley, Henry Morton, 155, 236, 239, 261 Stasis, 2, 9, 13, 16, 47, 54, 69, 70, 78, 83, 90, 124, 167, 172, 176, 182, 183 See also Immobility Steam engine, 5, 33, 246, 247 Sterne, Laurence A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 99 Stethoscope, 3 Stigmatisation, 10, 130 Suicide, 37, 48n11 Sutherland, Alexander, 31 Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 168 Symbolism, 18, 48n4, 131, 138, 155, 169, 178, 179, 231n1, 237, 239, 240, 244, 246, 250 Symons, Arthur, 17, 165–168, 170–172, 176–179, 181–183, 184n5 Days and Nights, 167, 176 “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 165, 170 “La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge,” 178 London Nights, 167, 176–178

“Prologue,” 167, 177, 178 Silhouettes, 176 “The Street Singer,” 167, 176 “The World as Ballet,” 172 Syphilis, 14, 66, 194 See also Mental, illness(es) T Temporality, 83, 110, 183 Textile(s) industry, 246 mills, 246, 247, 250 production, 247, 250, 251 Thain, Marion, 179–181, 183, 184n7 Thames, 154–157, 160, 173 travel, 147, 154–156 See also Pollution Therapy(ies) electric, 9 traditional, 4 The Times, 191 Tissue theory, 54 Tomboy, 133, 134, 137 Tourism continental, 7, 8, 14, 15, 31–36, 53–62, 66–68, 99, 103, 111, 160, 260 domestic, 7, 14 international, 14 medical, 8, 14, 15, 76, 83, 85, 86, 98, 235, 276n3 See also Gaze; Health Train(s), 1, 2, 5, 6, 46, 58, 76, 79, 83, 84, 90, 93, 103, 105, 106, 108–111, 155, 175, 213, 214, 229 See also Coach; Railroad(s); Railway(s) Tramping, 39, 188–190 Transgression, 54, 175 See also Sexuality Transience, 171, 172, 179

 INDEX 

Transport, 1, 5–11, 14, 18, 20n6, 114, 150, 158, 166, 170, 215, 232n10, 268, 274 Transport revolution, 5, 6, 14, 15 Travel books, 19, 98, 107, 260 careful, 267, 268 for health, 8, 14, 31, 34, 46–47, 274 medicine for, 113, 259 modes of, 6, 46, 114, 260 and skin care, 3, 216, 230 slow, 8, 14, 15, 46–47 transnational, 77, 88, 90 writing, 71, 98, 272 Traveller(s), 15, 18, 32, 34, 77–82, 84, 89, 98–100, 103–105, 107–110, 113, 155, 156, 214–217, 229, 230, 231n1, 236, 239, 241–243, 248, 250, 251n3, 251n6, 259, 260, 263–269, 272, 273, 275, 275n2 Treves, Frederick, 241 Tropics, 18, 33, 235, 237–244, 246–250, 251n1, 251–252n7, 261 Tuberculosis, 4, 14, 34, 43, 45–47, 48n7, 83, 247, 260, 270, 49nnull See also Consumption; Contagion; Phthisis U Unconscious, 106 United States of America (USA), 14, 34, 77, 79, 84, 189, 192, 195–198, 201, 202, 220, 49nnull Uprightness, 60 Urban mobility, 166, 168–172, 270 Urry, John, 5, 6, 11, 14, 69, 70, 100, 146, 167, 214, 216 Uteng, Tanu Priya, 124

295

V Verlaine, Paul, 183 “Art Poétique,” 183 Victorian culture, 14, 122, 136, 139, 167–172, 235–251 era, 10, 18, 104, 230, 250 medicine, 18, 213–230 novel, 2, 15, 18, 60, 75, 93, 148, 216, 222, 224, 227 poetry, 17, 165–183 Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle, 10 Virchow, Rudolf, 67 Von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 169 Vrettos, Athena, 13, 76, 220 W Wagner, Richard, 168 Walking, 12, 14, 18, 59, 78, 80, 81, 86, 91, 105, 172, 173, 176, 215, 216, 218, 219, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 240, 251n6, 252n7, 263, 266, 269 as stimulation, 218, 266 See also Flâneur; Movement; Pedestrian Waller, Horace, 18, 259–262, 264, 267–269, 272, 274 Health Hints for Central Africa, 260 Wandering, 78, 82, 93, 106, 183, 188–190, 193–199, 202, 203 War, 19, 62, 70, 128, 131, 132, 275 Water and mobility, 17, 145–161 representations of, 69, 141n4 ‘taking the waters,’ 4, 15 See also Blue humanities; Disease(s); Rain Waterston, Jane, 262, 266, 274 Weber, Hermann, 46 Welfare, 31, 189, 192 provision, 190

296 

INDEX

Wheelchair, 10 Whitehead, James, 13, 70 Whiteness, 137, 140 See also Race(s) White superiority, 240 See also Racism Wilde, Oscar, 17, 166–168, 171–176, 179–183, 184n8 “The Harlot’s House,” 167, 173–176, 181 “Impression du Matin,” 180 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 171 Salomé, 173, 179 “Symphony in Yellow,” 173 Willis, Martin, 235 Wilson, Erasmus, 215, 217–220, 222 Wilson, William S., 31–33, 36, 43 Wood, Ellen, 15, 54, 60, 214, 216, 224, 231n7 East Lynne, 15, 54, 60, 214, 224, 231n7

Wool, 239–242, 244, 245, 248, 251–252n7, 252n10 See also Fabric(s) Workhouse, 188–190, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204n3 Workman, Francis, 36–38 Wrigley, Richard, 14, 86, 97 X Xenophobia, 15, 63, 69 X-ray, 3 Y Yeats, William Butler, 181 “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” 181 Young, E. D., 263, 266, 274 Young, Iris Marion, 124, 125, 134, 136, 137, 139