There are many theories about why the novel emerges (or re-emerges) as an important literary form in the long eighteenth century. Ian Watt argued the novel was the result of a demographic shift, creating a desire for what he dubbed ‘formal realism’ among a rising ‘middling’ class. A number of notable studies have followed, including the work of Margaret Doody, Nancy Armstrong, William Beatty Warner, Michael McKeon, Homer Obed Brown, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, Clifford Siskin, and J. Paul Hunter (to name but a few). These have greatly informed our knowledge of the period, but in all these studies the effect of mobility on the novel has never been given its due. This study has aimed to rectify this; my view is that the extended prose narratives of the 1700s mirror the extended range of spatial experience that accompanied the transport revolution. The energy that characterises the early novel is that of expanded horizons and new possibilities, exemplified by Denis Diderot's Marquis des Arcis, who admits that ‘sometimes I feel I want to jump into a post-chaise and keep on going for as long as there's road to drive on’. The life-as-a-journey trope dominates so many early narratives precisely because mobility was no longer an extraordinary event (as in The Odyssey, or chivalric quests) but had become a common part of everyday experience. To describe someone's life in the detail demanded by the novel, it became necessary to consider not just the arrival at key scenes, but the process of each step in between. This is not just true of a journey text like Tom Jones, but of ‘domestic’ novels like Pamela. One of the central experiences of reading about Samuel Richardson's protagonists is that their every move is detailed and examined. To do this, writers had to develop a poetics of movement, to find a way to describe and represent the experience of people in motion.

The importance of in-between spaces also became paramount. Tristram Shandy celebrates his ‘plain stories’, which are interested in the process of travel, not just the set-piece descriptions of cities and major sights. The novel is notoriously hard to define, but one of its key characteristics in the eighteenth century is the way the journey becomes part of the story.