The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Snails on the Omnibus.- Chapter 2: Between Innovation and Regression.- Chapter 3: Comic Commonplaces.- Chapter 4: The Social Experience of the Omnibus.- Chapter 5: The Omnibus as Political Metaphor.- Chapter 6: Streetcars of Desire.- Chapter 7: An Observatory of Poverty.- Chapter 8: Winged Coursers of the Mind.- Chapter 9: Epilogue.

The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation—in principle, they were ‘for everyone’—they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms—from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings—and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
Elizabeth Amann is Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. She is the author of two books, Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (2015), and the co-editor of three edited volumes, the most recent of which is Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770-1850 (2021). She has written numerous articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Paints a ‘big picture’ of the cultural impact of the omnibus in the nineteenth century Examines cultural differences in the representation of urban transit among three cities (Paris, London and Madrid) Explores differences between representations of the omnibus and those of other modes of public transportation