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Guide, of “network” as a term applied to communication by rail (218). The network concept takes us towards significantly different understandings of connection and place. But Livesey’s work has powerful resonances for later developments, including our own present. While she refrains from lengthy extrapolations towards the twentiethor twenty-first centuries (having enough to do already), she sends out hints that will set many readers thinking. In the case of Dickens, for example, she economically brings out the afterlife of Dingley Del, including its perversion into Noel Edmonds’s “Crinkly Bottom” (113)—How England got from Mr. Pickwick to Mr. Blobby would surely make a significant book in itself!—and then develops an account of the different perceptions of place and time in England and America, inChuzzlewit, which clearly resonates in transatlantic differences, conflicts, and mutual frustrations, to this day. Livesey does an exceptionally good job of projecting the relevance of humanities research for contemporary social and political debates, and in particular for the understanding of technology and its cultural and economic impact. Most importantly, she does this not only through thematic readings, but also in ways that take account of narrativity, metaphor, and other formal and aesthetic properties of literature, so that the payoff requires not just mining literature for content but understanding how it works. The most powerful idea is that realist prose is a socially and politically significant technology that works, in some respects, similarly to systems of physical transportation, and is equally consequential. This is a way of looking at literature that has built up over the last thirty years or so (as Livesey makes clear in many generous references to other critics and theorists), but this book takes it significantly further, and therefore it deserves to be read well beyond the specific field of nineteenth-century studies.