The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation―in principle, they were ‘for everyone’―they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms―from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings―and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
Author(s): Elizabeth Amann
Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 375
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Snails on the Omnibus
Cultural Representations of Urban Transit: Metaphors and Variants
Chapter 2: Between Modernity and Regression
Innovation, Competition, and Monopoly
‘Chariots of Progress’ or ‘Antediluvian Phenomena’?
Omnibus Aesthetics
Chapter 3: Comic Commonplaces
From Alphabet Soup to ‘Assault’
Acrobatics and Compression
Fares and Filous
Sights, Sounds, and Smells
‘An Eighth of Permanent Cholera’
Notes
Chapter 4: The Social Experience of the Omnibus
Non Licet Omnibus
‘Inside Out’
Large World or Small?
Public or Private?
‘An Element of Civilisation’
Chapter 5: The Omnibus as Political Metaphor
The Ministerial Omnibus
The August Omnibus
Omnibus Revolutions
The Omnibus as Leveller
The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
Man as Number
Notes
Chapter 6: Streetcars of Desire
Vehicles of Venality
‘Providence of Lovers […] Inferno of Husbands’
Dangerous Electricity
Driving Desires
The Fleeting
The Illegible
The Iterative
The Double
The Transactional
The Inverted
Chapter 7: An Observatory of Poverty
‘A Museum of Grotesques’
‘A Mater dolorosa of the People’
Silence Versus Speech
Explaining Poverty
Unequal Juxtapositions
Forging Community
Modelling Compassion
Chapter 8: Winged Coursers of the Mind
‘A Metropolitan Grand Tour’
Flâner assis
‘The Dickens of Vehicles’
‘Heard in an Omnibus’
‘Speculative Acquaintance’
‘The Fin de siècle Asmodeus’
Spaces of Memory
The Whimsical Eye
‘A Three-Sous Pegasus’
Chapter 9: Epilogue: The Omnibus and Its Others
Stagecoach Storytelling
‘Rolling Pornography’
Machines of Terror
‘The Moles’ Road’
Steamboat Romance
Index
