Post roads and rural roads

Tobias Smollett wrote five novels between 1748 and 1771 that all take, as their central theme, people on the move. Over the 23 years, these journey texts change subtly, in turn modifying the random schema of the Continental picaresque, the broad comic incidents of the ramble novel, the Quixotic adventure tale, and the travel narrative. In the process, they respond to one of the great periods of road development in British history, the turnpike mania of the 1750s and 1760s. In Smollett's first novel, Roderick Random (1748), when Roderick travels from Scotland to England, there ‘is no such convenience as a wagon in this country’ and he has to travel with a pack-horse train. This proves so uncomfortable he decides to walk instead, toys with taking a collier from Newcastle as his quickest route to London, only to be persuaded by his friend Strap it is better to go 300 miles by land than risk a winter sea journey. Some 20 years later Smollett's final novel reverses this route; Matt Bramble and his party in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) take the Great North Road, speeding from Bath to London to Harrogate, and only the still imperfect roads of the North-East and Scotland slow their progress. While Roderick Random travels out of necessity to find his fortune, Bramble's journey is an extended holiday. Instead of on foot, Bramble travels in a hired, luxury coach attended by a party of family, friends, and servants. Within two decades, the routes Roderick had to explore are now so well mapped they are part of a tourist itinerary and Bramble has to travel hundreds of miles to seek out the undiscovered (his ultima thule is the Highlands of Scotland).

It is a period of remarkable change in transport within Britain, dubbed the ‘turnpike mania’ by the historian William Albert, which helped usher in a new, networked Britain (Map 3).