Information Systems, Victorian Fiction, & Media Technologies

Richard Menke’s Telegraphic Realism explores the intersections between information systems, Victorian fiction, and media technologies from the Penny Post to the wireless. It is a timely book, not only because it comes in our own era of media saturation and new digital technologies, but also because it develops a distinct theoretical approach that combines media theory, cultural history, and literary studies to resituate canonical texts by Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, James, Kipling and others within a framework of Victorian information systems. Offering thoroughly researched and original readings of classic texts, Telegraphic Realism is an important study for scholars interested in the exchanges between fictional realism and the history of information and media technologies in the nineteenth century.

Unlike many other critical studies of Victorian media history that tend to focus on visual and auditory novelties such as photography, the telephone, and cinema, Telegraphic Realism is principally concerned with exploring technologies associated with the written word, including the Penny Post, electric telegraph, and wireless telegraphy. This focus allows Menke to draw striking parallels between information systems and fiction and to track the growing awareness of writing as a mode of technology that stored, disseminated, and queried forms of human expression and knowledge. Moving smoothly between media theory and media history and drawing on the works of Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler, Telegraphic Realism charts the development of a new “media ecology” in the nineteenth century that both shaped and reflected fictional realism. Menke’s term usefully underscores media’s technological and social aspects by placing media in relation to human thought and experience and illustrating how societies both shape and are shaped by their media and communication systems.

Through close readings of an impressive array of texts from the mid-to late-nineteenth century, Menke shows that realist authors formed their own information systems through their fiction by becoming active participants in both the conceptualisation of new media technologies associated with the written word and the social networks generated by these technologies. He offers anecdotes about Dickens’s interest in building an underwater telegraph cable connecting Britain to continental Europe and Trollope’s invention of the pillar-box during his years as a postal surveyor in order to draw connections between these authors’ real-life interactions with media technologies and their fictional representations of information. Arguing that Victorian realism became “a part of a world of new media,” Menke demonstrates that realist fiction engaged directly with ideas about “reading” the inner thoughts of others much as the electric telegraph communicated information between members of society. Studied in this way, fascinating links emerge between fiction and the realities it worked to encode.

Telegraphic Realism is divided into three parts: part one concerns the early histories of the Penny Post and the electric telegraph, part two explores how new media technologies “embodied” information, and part three moves ahead to the developments in cable and wireless communication in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The book begins with a cultural history of “the new post age” ushered in by Rowland Hill’s postal reforms in 1839 and shows how the Penny Post’s perceived ability to construct an egalitarian social network uniting the entire British Empire was imaginatively translated in fictional realism of the period. This is an engrossing start, but Menke veers away from detailed discussions of the postal system for much of the rest of the study, arguing that despite the slowness with which it caught on in Britain, the telegraphic system had more of an impact than the postal system on conceptions of subjectivity and fictional realism. While the postal system was based on material transmission, with its stamps, envelopes, and stagecoaches, electric communication effectively separated information from materiality by allowing messages to travel great distances almost instantaneously, thereby complicating the connections between communication systems and the human mind and body. Telegraphy’s mysterious and almost ghostly qualities linked it to spiritualistic discourses of telepathy and mesmerism, yet the telegram was simultaneously heralded as a repository of...