In the eighteenth century, many writers and thinkers believed firmly, although not without contestation, in the utopian potential of trade as a means of transcultural exchange and dialogue between vastly different communities across the globe. This consideration of global cooperation most often assumed, at the centre of its operations, a distinctly human agent (an individual or a company) in charge of directing the global flows of trade that would, hopefully, lead towards a better world. Yet the eighteenth century was also an era that displayed, at least in European societies of the Global North, a distinct fascination with objects, particularly those from distant lands. Traded as commodities, exchanged as exotic gifts or studied as scientific items and museum pieces, these objects became dis-placed and re-placed things, facilitating the narrativisation of both European and non-European cultures, accruing shifting meanings and recordings of their value as they moved across geographical and temporal zones. 

In this paper, I will look at two instances of the mobility of objects in literature, specifically the peculiar eighteenth-century vogue for the genre of literature known as ‘it-narratives’. Scholars have shown that the it-narrative needs to be seen in the context of commodity fetishism and the objectification of the human subject. However, my examination of these narratives foregrounds the various geographical and cross-cultural journeys undertaken by the object-narrator-protagonists as a mapping of global and worldly space-time. I read the it-narratives as forms of ‘material fictions’ in which the temporal mobilities of objects mediate between differences. My analysis utilizes Brian Massumi’s concept of ‘enactive cartography’ (2002, 2014), as well as Catherine Malabou’s notion of ‘plasticity’ (2008, 2010), which are remodelling relations within spacetime and the relations between things (human/nonhuman) that make up the world. Both Massumi and Malabou articulate notions of space and time that are contingent, local, embedded and provisional, and provide a theoretical framework to enable the movements of objects as creating culturally-specific locations of meaning in spacetime. I ask to what extend the affects created by the ‘material fictions’ can be seen as mobilising the possible by experimenting with conventional literary forms. The affective cartography created by the material excess of the objects contests binaries such as human/nonhuman and material/imaginary, pointing to a wider world that escapes our mapping and meaning-making efforts. As such, this process reconfigures spacetime as multi-layered, in which temporalities of the human and the nonhuman overlap and become entangled.

George Scharf, who was German-born and migrated to London in 1816, was an artist who worked primarily as a lithographer for the Geological Society and other scientific institutions.   He was also responsible for over a thousand sketches, drawings and watercolours, now in the British Museum, that documented a rapidly changing London between the 1820s and 40s.  Scharf's interests are idiosyncratic, particular and local -- the backyard of his home in Francis Street off the Tottenham Court Road, for example, the laying of pipes for gas lighting and mains water, or pavements in the rain.   He also depicts the metropolis's street hawkers, performers, signboard carriers, and delivery workers as well people on the move, engaged in their own unknowable business.  In this paper I discuss one drawing, from 1841, entitled 'Dinner Time, Sunday, One O'Clock' which shows men, women, and children getting take-away food as many lower class dwellings did not have kitchens.   The drawing features a well-known type in late Georgian-early Victorian society, the pot-boy, who delivered beer in tankards, carried in numbers in a rack.  Scharf's drawing shows the 'boy', who is clearly a child, carrying his rack in one hand with his delivery list in the other.  The pot-boy was a ubiquitous figure in early nineteenth century, comparable with others who were part of a communications infrastructure -- the newsman who delivered newspapers and the bill-sticker who posted notices on walls (both of whom are also depicted by Scharf).  I compare Scharf's drawing with John Keats's view from his sick-room in Hampstead on a Sunday on February 8 1820 where he 'descried' a 'Pot Boy' and 'conjectured' that it was the 'one o'clock beer' and ask what does it mean to 'conjecture' time and sociality from such busy passers-by.

This paper draws from a larger interdisciplinary project that seeks to establish the influence of British Romanticism on the way early colonial authors envisioned and theorised child development, teaching, and education in Australia. We introduce the work of Louisa Anne Meredith (1811-1880) as a case study of the way Romantic preoccupations such as sympathy and reason emerge within a latent colonial logic in writing for and about colonial Australian children. Meredith published a range of books for children exploring the island of Tasmania from her colonial perspective. Her work was printed in Australia and England, in multiple editions and widely circulated. In this paper, we focus on two of her works: Loved and Lost! The True Story of a Short Life (1860) and Waratah Rhymes for Young Australia (1878) to argue that Meredith’s contribution to the history of Australian children’s literature rests in her desire to author a contextualised account of ‘island life’ for the white Australian colonial child. Meredith’s project is to encode a new genre that reconfigures familiar English modes such as the ‘moral tale’ which was developed by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Lamb, amongst others, while also advancing a distinctive aesthetic of the miniature that finds expression in the island of Tasmania and the child as inquisitor. There is limited work on the migration and subsequent development of Romantic-era British pedagogy and children’s literature across colonial lines. This paper reads the status of the colonial child in Meredith’s works as the idealised mini-colonialist whose discovery of the landscape through fictional encounter positions them to craft the nation in their image.