Canals in nineteenth-century literary history

This chapter deals with the hydrological turn in Humanities research to address the absence of canals in transport-, industry- and economic-related literary research. The canals’ technology ‘freed them from the tyranny of natural hydrology that limited the value of rivers’. The ostensible purpose of the Household Words article’s broad horizon is to extol the virtues of exploring home territory, corner of the nation, but its effect is to connect the placidity of the Grand Junction Canal to the feared Atlantic. Leaving the basin, the canal moves through the Islington tunnel, ‘between the silent houses of Camden Town’, past London Zoo and ‘to the termination of the Regent’s Canal, and the commencement of the Grand Junction Canal’ at Paddington. While both are interested in mobility and industry, trains in nineteenth-century literature are symbols of speed, change, modernity. Railways as a nineteenth-century literary trope are fascinated by water in the form of steam, while approach to canals in nineteenth-century literary history prioritises the liquid.