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The British Press and Turn-of-the-Century Developments in the Motoring Movement

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vpr.2006.0016

1712-526X

Jennifer Shepherd,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

The British Press and Turn-of-the-Century Developments in the Motoring Movement Jennifer Shepherd (bio) In his book Racing Voiturette, car historian Kent Karslake claims that the year 1910 marked the "pa[yment]" of a transportative "debt to the past," with the "replace[ment] of the horseless carriage ... by the true motor car" (Flower & Jones 59). Avid readers of literary history might be excused their suspicion of the year 1910 as the starting point for anything, considering the fact that Virginia Woolf pinpointed December of that same year as the point when modernity began, when human character supposedly became modern (4). Karslake and Woolf's denial of cultural and technological continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth century not only impoverishes the historical richness of modernism itself, but also promotes a sense of cultural inevitability that the literary historical record does not support. Late Victorian journalism, a remarkable compendium of opinions on the major questions of the period, provided a fairly extensive discussion of the motoring debate of the late 1890s, a debate which, according to Osbert Sitwell, divided "[t]he whole world" into "two halves, those who believed that motors would in the end oust other equipages, and those who regard[ed] them as a temporary whim, a swift path that led nowhere except to damnation" (64). Transportation in the 1890s had become a stage set for competition and conflict, "the established order" – the noble and long-suf-fering horse, the now familiar railway, and even the recently introduced bicycle – jockey for position with the modern arriviste motor car on the English highway. The benefits of the car were many. Its purely practical capacity to transport drivers to new and unexplored territory was, of course, the car's most apparent feature.1 More surprising, perhaps, were the therapeutic properties with which it was attributed: "[t]he fact that motor-car driving exerts an extremely beneficial influence on the health of those engaged in it is one that is obvious to all who have any experience of the matter," wrote Dr. F. W. Hutchinson in 1902 (Flower & Jones 82). [End Page 379] Indeed, at least one passenger experimented with motoring as a cure for insomnia.2 Certainly its sensual properties also recommended it: in a letter to A. B. Filson Young on 20 June 1904, motoring apologist Lady Jeune cited the "endless variety of scenery; the keen whistle of the wind in one's face; the perpetual changing sunshine and shadow" as just a few of the car's allurements (qtd in Filson-Young 272). Of course, the alleged benefits of the car were matched by the complaints of its detractors. Charges against the new form of transport included noise pollution – cars apparently sounded to one commentator like "an avalanche of tea trays" – as well as air pollution: a Royal Commission on Motoring held in Britain in 1905 recorded complaints that the dust generated by motorcars on roadways was responsible for an increase in throat and eye infections, the ruination of crops, the inability to hang washing to dry, and even the irritating clogging of at least one lady novel-ist's typewriter (Brendon 54; Flower & Jones 64). The debate between motor enthusiasts and their opponents offered great copy for contemporary newspapers and related periodicals. Turn-of-the-century journalism was not just a record of daily life, however; it sought to be a force in daily life as well. As Martin Conboy points out in his book The Press and Popular Culture, the rise of the New Journalism in the 1880s and the evolution of a mass circulation popular daily newspaper close to the end of the century lead to the increasing role of the newspaper in the formation of public consensus not only on socio-political issues, but also on matters of commercial consumption and national self-conception (100–108). This role could not be more salient than in the case of the motoring debate, in which the press was deeply implicated in moulding public opinion. Motor cars were frequently represented as inherently anti-social. For instance, the 14 November 1896 Sunday Times warned against auto car drivers' "arrogant ... claim to the middle of the road" and on...