Studies in the Novel

Kyoko Takanashi's new book examines transportation metaphors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels in order to track how writers of the period understood readers' "limited access" to fictional worlds. Takanashi argues that barriers to reading—such as misunderstanding, forgetting, boredom—were frequently rendered in depictions of messy, bumpy, noisy travel. Her work explores these authors' awareness of their texts' mediations and how such mediation might hinder readers' ability to access "textual meaning, understanding, and pleasure" (22). Limited Access is thus a useful source for scholars of media studies, book history, and reader or reception studies. While its focus on texts from Henry Fielding to George Eliot also offers valuable insights to eighteenth-century and Victorian-studies scholars, its broader historical scope is of particular use to historians of the novel at large. Indeed, though Takanashi doesn't make the connection explicitly, her work finds fascinating points of contact with early fiction as well (Chaucer's pilgrims, who are at once both messy travelers and storytellers, come to mind).

In the book's opening chapters, Takanashi takes on a triumvirate of eighteenth-century canonical writers in her examination of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker. The richer of these chapters is the first, which is at its best when applying Stewart Sherman's study of eighteenth-century notions of temporality to a reading of Fielding's stagecoach metaphor as a parallel to the early newspaper: "they both possess a form, a container, that needs to be filled and delivered regularly" (30). In asking us to view the metaphor not only spatially but temporally, Takanashi asserts that the narrator's defense of Tom Jones belies an anxiety about a growing commercial print culture that confuses time into a "false sense of substance" (37). When newsmongers await the arrival of a new issue, what they wait for is form, not substance. To position his novel as a new kind of text, then, Fielding uses the stagecoach to bring diverse readers together in a more realistic "shared community" (54) than the newspaper. This is a clearer and perhaps more portable argument than that of Chapter 2, which studies failures to communicate sentimental feelings in Sterne and Smollett. Most fascinating here is Takanashi's discussion of the "vehicular state" (58) that combines eighteenth-century medical, philosophical, and literary understandings of the human body as an imperfect vehicle for the soul. Takanashi brings the transportation metaphor inward into the most intimate spaces of human emotion to explore how sentimental writers viewed unmediated expression as a paradox or ironic impossibility. [End Page 358]

The remainder of Takanashi's book turns to the nineteenth century with studies of Walter Scott's The Tales of My Landlord (Chapter 3), Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (Chapter 4), and William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Chapter 5), along with a rumination on George Eliot's Felix Holt in the conclusion. In Chapter 3, Takanashi persuasively examines how the metaphor of a national mail-coach helps reveal pockets of exclusion in "a mediating process that distorts local narratives as they enter national circulation" (92). Chapter 4 has the most indirect engagement with transportation metaphors, yet it still offers an interesting reading of Pickwick as a static character who by his travels across England is overloaded with information but unable to turn it into useful knowledge. Here Takanashi effectively applies John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business Review Press, 2000) to position Sam Weller's analogical thinking as an alternative model to Pickwick's unchanging and incomplete view of the world. Finally, Chapter 5 explores shifting transportation technologies as a metaphor for preserving and transmitting memory across generations in Vanity Fair. Most compelling in this chapter is Takanashi's assertion that, by the mid-nineteenth century, the stagecoach reached mythological status and...