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Reviewed by:
  • Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000
  • John M. Picker (bio)
Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000, by Nicholas Daly; pp. viii + 161. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £45.00, $65.00.

With Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000, Nicholas Daly completes a one-two punch he began with Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (1999). As the dates in the titles would suggest, his new book is both a sequel and a prequel to his first, moving further back into the Victorian period and forward into postmodernism, North American and British cultural studies, and film and drama as well as fiction. Analyses of Victorian and modern machine culture abound, from the classic 1960s works of Leo Marx and Herbert Sussman to more recent books like Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992). Daly provides a different, but equally compelling, kind of literary genealogy of human-machine relations that emphasizes speed and collision, moments when the body is most threatened by the machine and when the difference between body and machine is most threatened with collapse. Five chapters lead readers from the looming presence of the railway as a force to be reckoned with—and adapted to—in literature of the 1860s; through responses in the 1890s and early 1900s to the cinematograph, or the "Boerograph," as some of the early British press reports and advertisements referred to it; on to a more focused study of the cinema's "invention of sex appeal" in the 1920s; and conclude with an extended reading of J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash and David Cronenberg's 1997 film of it.

These focal points at first seem idiosyncratic and chronologically diffuse, but the chapters unfold with unexpected coherence. The first two chapters are especially well paired, zeroing in as they do on the 1860s, the decade, as Daly reads it, of the acceleration of the subject, and also the decade Alain Corbin and others have identified as the pivotal transitional period for modernity. These chapters offer a wide-ranging and succinct treatment of sensation drama and sensation novels as expressing anxieties about, as well as accommodations toward, the railway age.

Dion Boucicault's After Dark (1868), with its notorious staging of a barely averted underground railway accident, figures centrally in Daly's discussion of melodrama as a form aligned with the modern, and in which modernity is made visible. Daly does a marvelous job of placing the once shocking, seemingly impersonal spectacle of After Dark in historical, urban, and even biographical contexts (Boucicault's father, we learn, was a railway engineer, and his son was killed in a railway accident). The play's icons of modernity are not only the railway but also the Jewish villain Dicey Morris, who embodies "all that middle-class Victorians disliked about the urban commercial culture that sustained prosperity" (28). In one of many such moments of temporal and generic cross-reference, Daly observes that the rat-like Jew in the underground sewer of After Dark is a xenophobic portrait anticipating the worse-than-rat Jew "underneath the lot" in T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitic 1919 "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" (31).

For Victorianists, perhaps the most useful chapter will be the second, which [End Page 597] concerns the conditioning function performed by the sensation novel in the service of an accelerated, mechanized society. Books such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) operate, Daly suggests, to train the body to function in sync with the train. Daly is especially good on the way railway travel induces new kinds of nervous conditions, such as shock, in tandem with the experience of the breathless reading of the sensation novel, and the ways the sensation novel is concomitantly obsessed with the state of "being on time," with Bradshaw timetables, telegrams, deadlines, all the symptomatic apparatus of the railway age. To those of Collins's critics who claimed his plots were mechanical, Daly compellingly responds that that is precisely the point: Collins and his cohort turned the novel into "a suspense-machine...

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