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In 'The Fiddler of the Reels', published in 1893, Thomas Hardy's narrator notes that the year 1851 marked not only the opening of London's Great Exhibition but also the opening of 'the new railway into South Wessex'. It was, he attests, a critical historical moment:
For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit-line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in Time. As in a geological 'fault', we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact.1
1851 was also the year in which Wilkie Collins published Rambles Beyond Railways: or Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot. As did Hardy some forty years later, Collins figured train travel in oppositional relation to the geography of the West Country in order to suggest historical disjuncture. So what Collins alluded to his title, and what he elaborated in his text, was the idea of Cornwall as the locus of embodied, anachronistic time and space, set apart from the mechanisation of modernity; or, to use his words, 'emancipated from the thraldom of railways'.2 And as Collins suggested at the beginning of his study, when he spoke of 'the grand and varied scenery; the mighty Druid relics; the quaint legends; the deep, dark mines; the venerable remains of early Christianity; and the pleasant, primitive population' of 'one of the remotest and most interesting corners of our old English soil' (2-3), Cornwall could be conceived as a Gothic location.
This essay discusses how mid-nineteenth-century Gothic discourse can be understood to inform a scalar opposition between localised place and globalised space, drawing as it does so upon the idea that a Gothic location 'is perceived to harbour unreasonable, uncivilised, and unprogressive customs or tendencies'.3 More specifically, it will utilise the notion that the Gothic serves to compromise 'the Enlightenment project of rationally calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours', a project historically bound up with the attempt to co-ordinate the world according to the dictates and demands of industrial capitalist modernity. 4 Famously illustrating the way in which an orientalised Gothic geography might be held to disrupt the steam-powered, timetabled, global realisation of this Enlightenment project, Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with Jonathan Harker lamenting 'that the further...