Movement and mobility in Patrick Hamilton

This article uses ideas of mobility and movement to demonstrate the interconnections between geographical and social mobility, and between mobility and materialism, in the work of Patrick Hamilton. Drawing on ideas from mobility studies in human geography and sociology, it examines continuities between the past and the future, and the ways that a combination of mobility studies and literary studies can re-imagine modernities through the work of an author whose later work has received little critical attention. Using the dystopian novel Impromptu in Moribundia as a link between his earlier novels and the later and more explicitly Marxist work, it draws together themes of movement and mobility through Hamilton's portrayal of the automobile as a symbol of fascism and a destructive and careless capitalism.