Early on in Mrs. Dalloway, the
narrator follows a very special motor car on its journey through London for a
little bit. The people of London are portrayed as having a far more significant
reaction to its passage than people would now to any car, even a Bentley or
Lamborghini. The relative recency of the emergence of the widespread presence
of cars in London likely contributed to this intensity of reaction. Car usage
was pervasive by 1923, when Mrs. Dalloway was set, but as recently as 1895
there were only a dozen or so cars in the United Kingdom. Mrs. Dalloway, and
others her age, would have grown up without even seeing cars in all likely
hood, and witnessed their coming to prominence as adults. Any new technology as
significant as the car that comes to prominence while one is an adult is likely
to still strike them as new and a little bit alien, even if the technology is
already wide spread. In 1923 horse drawn cabs and bicycles were still fairly
broadly used, although the internal combustion engine had clearly proven itself
the dominant method of vehicle propulsion.
While the presence of any old car
would have been of little significance to a typical Londoner, the focus on a
car (and on the airplane) displays the modernity of Mrs. Dalloway. The car
featured in Mrs. Dalloway however, is not any old car. If it was in fact driven
by royalty, it was likely a Daimler like the one pictured. It is easy to see
how a car like this would stand out from the Model T’s and other cars of the middle
class. Even given the apparent splendor of the car and the mysterious nature of
its occupants, I find it hard to picture rumors spreading about the car and its
occupant, and rumors spreading as described. Then again, the intensity of
feeling that the characters of Mrs. Dalloway possess seems to me to be magnified
by the style of the writing, and by the fact they are written about in depth at
all, so maybe it should come as no surprise that the feelings of the people of
London about the passage of a single car should be similarly magnified.
I guess this post is mostly a
response to my reaction while reading the sequence where the narrator follows
the car. With all of the attention the car received, I at first thought that
these Londoners had seen very few cars, and later, when I realized that cars
were fairly common in London when the novel was set, the focus that the car received
seemed unnatural. I set about trying to see how common cars would have been and
what the car would have looked like in order to justify the attention that it received
and came to the conclusion that if I had been a witness to the scene I would
have not perceived the car as receiving as much attention as I did after
reading about it in the novel, and that the attention that it received was a
result of the style of writing and as a vehicle to enrich the novel.
