Two roads diverged

Tristram Shandy's realisation of the different directions his writing could take, inspired by travelling in a racing post-chaise, is confirmed by the sight of a ponderous wagon labouring in the opposite way. This collision between fast and slow, present throughout the long eighteenth century, intensifies as a result of ‘flying’ coaches, John Palmer's mail-coaches, which started plying major routes from 1784, and the lighter, faster gigs, curricles, and sporting coaches that became increasingly popular. Britain became patterned by speed; proximity to a good road allowed rapidity and a greater connectivity, while poor turnpikes and country byways created pockets of slowness. Writers responded to this multi-speed nation in various ways. Ramble novels flourished when the transit system still enjoyed a ‘holiday’ ethos, while in it-narratives the speed of exchange is paramount. In novels such as Humphry Clinker, the dangers of the tour (from tornus, ‘describing a circle, a turner's wheel’) are investigated, with the lifeblood trope of circulation descending into a more dangerous circular motion, the ‘vortex’ and the ‘whirl’ of hurry. Towards the turn of the century, radical pedestrianism (as evidenced in William Wordsworth's poetry, or Robert Bage's Hermsprong) questioned the desirability of moving quickly by coach roads, Gothic fiction investigated liminal spaces, while picturesque travellers avoided coach roads, often using an older, winding road to join their compositions. Thomas Love Peacock's Headlong Hall (1815) is structured around the moment the fastest mode of transport in Britain, the mail-coach, arrives in one of the ‘slowest’ areas of Britain, North Wales. It is a prolonged meditation on what happens when a ‘headlong’ society meets that most immobile of structures, the ancient ‘Hall’. The creation of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ realms is also important for the regional novel, which appears circa 1800, with Josephine McDonagh neatly arguing that the new genre ‘made it possible for the reader to inhabit an anachronism, to live life at different paces’.

At different historical moments, writers responded to this new patterning of the landscape in specific ways. Laurence Sterne, not only the first to consider the kinetic experience of speed, was probably also the first to theorise the rival attraction of slow travel, valorising the benefits of ‘sentimental’ journeys. Sterne's move away from the Scriblerian mode in Tristram Shandy is rendered in much more emphatic form in his next work, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).