The ethic of mobility

The development of the road network in the long eighteenth century fostered a generation of novels fascinated by mobility, such as Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless and her heroine's career through the urban sites of sociability, the so-called ‘domestic’ novel (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, where the restriction of mobility is central to the plot), and above all in a series of texts based on journeys, following the success of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). These novels, named after their protagonists, are evidence of a new interest in an individual's life choices. People had always found ways to move through Britain, whether via the pilgrimages of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or the proto-novels of John Dunton and John Bunyan, while a post-horse network and carriers’ routes predated the turnpikes. However, by the early 1700s there was a dramatic change in how mobility was conceived. If the subtext of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) was that all travellers were unfortunate, there was a shift to what Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has called ‘the ethic of mobility’, where ‘people have to recognise that their identity depends upon themselves and their actions, rather than on family, class, or some such “mark” of identity’. Travel, instead of being thought of as ‘travail’, became fundamental to how an individual progressed. Journeys also started to become active ingredients in the plot. Fielding, resistant to describing the natural world, and claiming he was ‘not particular’ about the routes his protagonists took, still imbues the world of transit in Tom Jones with a sense of agency. Critics have described his spaces as ‘de-realised’, and yet the central road section allows the landscape Tom moves through, and his shuttling between road and inn, hill and vale, to pattern the novel. Instead of moving through ‘empty’ space, one of the features of Tom Jones is that the physical journey (the post-roads, the country byways, the hills on the fringes of society), rather than functioning as a backdrop, adds its own contours to the narrative.