"The Harmless Pleasure of Knowing": Privacy in the Telegraph Office and Henry James's "In the Cage"

In his study George Eliot and Blackmail, Alexander Welsh makes an ancillary reference to an important scene from “In the Cage,” in which the nameless protagonist imagines what it would be like to use to her own advantage information that she has deduced about an affair between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. James describes the fantasy: “she quite thrilled herself with thinking what, with such a lot of material, a bad girl would do. It would be a scene better than many in her ha’penny novels, this going to him in the dusk of evening at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it. ‘I know too much about a certain person now not to put it to you—excuse my being so lurid—that it’s quite worth your while to buy me off. Come therefore; buy me!’” The telegraphist, however, would never ask for anything as vulgar as money since “she was not a bad girl” (IC 176). Instead, the telegraphist swears to Everard that “I’d do anything for you” and renounces any desire that she might have to blackmail the Captain (IC 196).

“In the Cage” represents blackmail, Welsh argues, as a temptation on all levels of society, though it is made easier by communication technology: “blackmail is an opportunity afforded to everyone by communication of knowledge at a distance. The communications are exposed—more so by the electric telegraph than by the post—to agents who have no personal relation to the sender or receiver and hence no personal reason to guard their secrets” (58). It may be said in response, however, that the telegraph office of the novella does not encourage employees to form personal relations with the customers in order to ensure privacy. Anonymity ensures the secrecy of the telegrams. In the telegraph office of Cocker’s grocery store, the “law of the place” is that the postal workers “were never to take no notice, as Mr. Buckton said, whom they served” (IC 144). James’s narrative points to the principle that information is best kept secret when public service is rigorously professionalized.

The nameless woman telegraphist of the novella is one of the few working-class protagonists to be found in James’s fiction. Besides being tremendously clever, the imaginative telegraphist is able to piece together and to infer details about the customers of the post office. As she counts the number of words in each telegram in order to calculate the charge, the telegraphist thrills to read about and to discover the “horrors” of the upper class—what she calls their “extravagances,” “selfishness,” “immorality,” and “crimes” (IC 197). It is in reading about these horrors that the telegraphist discovers what seems to her to be an affair between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen.

The telegraphist, in response to her romantic feelings for Captain Everard, resolves to remain at the post office in order to assist the Captain rather than resign her job and marry Mr. Mudge. She continues to work in the telegraph office until she finally has the chance to help Captain Everard. One day the Captain comes to the telegraph office and asks her for the message form Lady Bradeen had used several months earlier to send a message (it was common procedure in the nineteenth-century post office to keep used telegram forms for three months, “during which time the Post-Office will produce them to the sender and receiver, but to no one else” [“Post-Office Parcels and Telegraphs” 750]). Although the telegram is no longer in the post office when Everard asks for it, remarkably the telegraphist remembers the message, which is a series of numbers. Learning that his affair is no longer in danger of being discovered, Captain Everard leaves the post office in relief.

There are, however, certain critical details the telegraphist could not learn from the telegrams—that the Captain had “compromised” Lady Bradeen and that he had serious debts (IC 239). Ironically, the protagonist learns these facts from her friend Mrs. Jordan, who had learned them from...