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Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.

Many of the best-loved Victorian novels take place not in the railway era in which they were published, but in the very recent past of a world moving by stage and mail coach. Most of the works of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are in this sense historical novels, set, like Walter Scott’s Waverley sequence, in the ‘just’ past of a generation or so ago. This book explores the historical consciousness of such novels of the ‘just’ past and argues that they convey an idea of a national belonging that can be experienced through a sense of local place. The journey by public coach was an analogy for the form of the novel as it took shape in the eighteenth century; but by the later 1840s the end of the stage coach was assured and it became a figure of a lost national modernity. With halts, relays, inns, and turnpike network, coach transport offered a different experience of mobility and being-in-place—passages of flight and anchoring points—from the technological vectors of the railway that radiated out from industrial and urban centres. In turning to the ‘just’ past of the stage coach imaginary, nineteenth-century literature imagines a nation knitted together by strongly felt local belonging, delivering readers and protagonists to local places, thick with the presence of history writ small. Such fictional, portable, sense of place serves as a potential cure for the nineteenth-century disease of nostalgia: acute homesickness in an increasingly unrooted mobile world.