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Despite loathing Scott’s Tory politics, the radical journalist William Hazlitt treasured his novels for delivering, as Hazlitt saw it, the very air of Scottish localities down the road in London thanks to the movement of print. For self-declared Cockney, Hazlitt, the second chapter suggests, the mail and stage coach promised a vision of ever closer touch between distant peoples across the nation and the world: a radical Romantic print culture mobilizing the marginal and peripheral to the centres of power. But for his fellow radical journalist, William Cobbett, the system of mail coach and turnpike roads was a symbol of a corrupt monarchy, Post Office spies, and government encroachment on the free movement of rural labour. The contrast between the two writers in the context of early-nineteenth-century radicalism makes clear how the stage and mail coach system was identified with an emergent British identity following the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Critics have long read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as an exemplary account of liberal individualism and self-expression. This chapter instead argues that the novel, written in the 1840s and depicting the 1820s, employs stage and mail coach communication as a Tory emblem of a Britain unified through the preservation of regional customs, against an increasingly dominant railway network. Radical though Jane Eyre’s claims to speak and feel may be from the perspective of liberal narratives of progressive individualism, they are best understood in this Tory context of anti-metropolitan regionalism and preservationism. Jane’s self assertions are momentary staging posts in a journey that preserves customary regional community. The stage coach knits the smallest, most remote places and persons into the nation while preserving their distinct identities. It is a resistant Tory mode of inscribing an alternative modernity in the era of progress.

This chapter recounts the events that commenced during a cold spell in January 1831, when Aurore made the three-day journey from Nohant to Paris via mail coach. Being the only passenger on the journey, Aurore slept stretched across the back seat of the coach, her head propped on a bag filled with three trussed turkeys en route from the provinces with provisions for a well-fed family of Parisians. Once in Paris, Aurore briefly occupied Hippolyte's apartment on the rue de Seine-Saint-Germain, while looking for work and rooms of her own. Blaming her for being unrealistic about the cost of living in the city, her half-brother predicted financial and professional failure. Life in the capital was sweetened, however, by the presence of Aurore's new lover, Jules Sandeau, whom she had met the previous summer while he was home from his law studies in Paris.