Passengers on horse-drawn omnibuses and trams in European cities of the nineteenth century entered a new space of social encounter rich in both possibilities and uncertainty, Elizabeth Amann shows in The Omnibus: A Cultural History of Urban Transportation. A distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century French and Spanish literature, Amann applies a comparative perspective in interpreting Victorian London, probably the area covered by The Omnibus most of interest to readers of this journal. Unlike Paris, Madrid is not a city much discussed in Victorian studies, and Amann's promise to bring it into comparison with the French and British capitals is therefore appealing.

In her introduction, Amann proposes seven pairings as analytic tools for the material she presents, including between silent and auditory transport experience, “legible and illegible visions” of omnibus space, and, considering the constricted environment of the horse-drawn omnibus and what it travelled through, a distinction between the “small world” of known fellow passengers and the “large world” of vast, hard-to-comprehend urbanity (11–12). But while she returns to these pairings, above all in short chapter conclusions, Amann's chief method is to draw out a mass of examples from diverse nineteenth-century printed materials, including novels (for instance in chapters 6 and 7, covering romantic and sexual encounters between bourgeois observers and impoverished fellow passengers respectively), political cartoons (in chapter 5), and material published in periodicals, chiefly short stories but also journalism (notably in chapter 3).

Amann's characteristic means of treating her examples is to summarize the plot of a story in detail or to describe a visual image. Her tight and meticulous teasing out of how plot details relate to perspectives within and upon the omnibus pays dividends in readings of less well-known texts such as Annie French Hector's 1866 novel Which Shall It Be? But Amann has chosen breadth of coverage rather than selectivity, and the rationale for her choice of examples is not stated. Her coverage in chapter 5 of British and French political cartoons that used the omnibus as a new metaphor for the business of state from the specific context of the 1820s–1830s tells a coherent story. But elsewhere examples from different periods, sometimes decades apart, follow one another in sections which group them on the basis of a supposed similarity of content—for example, as falling into various categories of love affairs as initiated on public transport. Distinctions between sections of the literary marketplace or sub-periods within the nineteenth century are made, for example, between mass-market French fiction and naturalism aimed at a rarified audience, or in Britain between the era of Dickens's Mr. Pickwick in the 1830s and that of the “New Woman” in the 1880s. However, Amann does not explicitly compare these differences of literary genre and period with different categories of omnibus encounters or changes in the material environment being narrated. There are many more examples drawn from the French context than the British; the less familiar (at least to me) and highly intriguing Spanish context of Madrid-based tales appears only sporadically. When Madrid does appear, for instance in a brief discussion of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 1890 short story “En tranvía,” it is largely without explanation of its differences in topography and the legal organization of urban transport there, compared with Paris and London.

One can draw conclusions about the comparison between London omnibus representations and Paris ones based on Amann's treasure trove of material, but questions remain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the examples used in chapter 6, on omnibus eroticism, are nearly all from French writing. But while what was publishable differed in nineteenth-century France and Britain, the imaginative literatures of the two countries shared a preoccupation with involved plotting driven by potentially illicit romance: what does adding omnibus travel to this picture give readers, other than a space in which encounters with strangers of varying social backgrounds can plausibly happen? A picture of omnibus experience as narrated chiefly by middle-class writers emerges from The Omnibus that is highly distinct from the more familiar characteristics of long-distance railway travel as transformative experience, as delineated by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977) and in the work of other scholars, in which the passenger is separated from a landscape typically viewed as if it were a picture. Still, confining oneself to sources from imaginative literature and the popular press tends to exclude the experience of working-class travelers in a way that could have been problematized, either in analysis or by considering other categories of sources. There are occasional references to staff experiences but the laboring horses themselves are almost entirely absent. And while the horse-drawn tram is included under the title The Omnibus, it did have specific characteristics that made it suited to some cities rather than others, notably the expansive grid-plan cities of the United States but also some in Central and Eastern Europe. One could also have longed for the comparison between cities to be taken up in an overall conclusion.

Amann shows the magnitude and complexity of the omnibus as a cultural force in nineteenth-century cities. If some of the observations in the last chapter comparing omnibus representations with narrations of travel by stagecoach, private coach or horse-drawn cab, train, underground railway or metro, and pleasure steamboat had appeared earlier, for example straight after her context-led chapter 2, readers would have been better able to comprehend its specificity as a zone of experience. As it is, Amann has provided readers interested in nineteenth-century urban transport not just with a wealth of examples, but with the valuable hypothesis that closes her text. Omnibus literature voices “concerns” typically related “to the threat of being contaminated or somehow declassed or to a feeling of awkwardness and alienation” on the part of bourgeois observers who “struggle to decipher one another based on physical clues” (346), themselves uncertainly placed in the bewildering vastness of the nineteenth-century metropolis. Rather than showing travelers, isolated with one another in small groups, pictures of a landscape as long-distance trains did, or taking them into a new underground zone redolent of science fiction and the gothic, as the metro did, omnibus experiences linked riders to the sudden changes of the cityscape, offering “a whimsical ricocheting between internal and external stimuli and from one image to another” (347).