ABSTRACT
The mail-coach period still has a firm, and possibly increasing hold on the public mind, but the officials and others who actually took part in the work of that stirring time-whether on the highroads or within the walls of the post-offices-are rapidly passing away. No mode of transport in the Romantic period was more freighted with national feeling than the King's Royal Mail. Because of its unique ability to transport the reader, "The English Mail-Coach" has recently been brought under special focus in light of critical discussions about Romantic mobility. For Alan Bewell the modernity of the text lies in its rhetorical investment in speed and the juggernaut pull of modernization in nineteenth-century England. Dislocation from the past is an abyss that De Quincey bridges by reproducing the phenomenological experience of mail-coach transport as a means of revisiting and re-experiencing the past.
