This chapter extends the study of security from political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology to literary studies. To this end, the chapter puts into conversation Charles Brockden Brown’s urban gothic novel Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800) and the theorization of security offered by Michel Foucault. Brown’s fictional exploration of security and Foucault’s historico-theoretical approach both focus on political responses to infectious disease in urban spaces. While there are striking similarities between their perspectives, this chapter does not read Brown with Foucault. Rather, it shows how Brown’s literary treatment of the yellow fever epidemic that raged through Philadelphia in 1793 differs from what Foucault called the “security dispositif.” Brown proposes that the embrace of uncertainty in responding to the epidemic will have positive effects on the moral fiber of the republic. His republican security imaginary is irreducible to the Foucauldian program of critiquing the biopolitical regulation of individual and collective life, not least because Foucault’s target is a political order that is liberal rather than republican.

Though railways have been frequently depicted as icons of the progressive and the dynamic within British Victorian fiction, their secular and timetabled culture is, in fact, more often than not freighted with a disruptive Gothic presence. This chapter begins by noting how the construction of the railways in the nineteenth century literally impacted upon the built and cultural environments, laying waste to familiar landmarks and marking the bodies of those who travel as well as those who serve the engines of progress. The chapter considers the theme of physical violence and sexual interference within the closed space of the railway carriage, making reference to popular newspaper reportage and erotic fiction before engaging with the issue of psychological trauma and isolation, particularly among those whose task is as much to protect, as to transport, the travelling public.