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190 Are We There Yet? in Victorian narratives, detachment is an important precondition for discerning an authentic reality, and the“best way to acquire knowledge is to be nowhere,”to be positioned, as reader, outside the story (149). In the next section, we will see that the railway network represents the possibility of being nowhere, and thus accessing information everywhere. 7. World Wide Web: Information Networks in Sherlock Holmes and Dracula By the end of the century, novelists would use the railway as both example of, and metaphor for, the increasing interrelatedness and complexity of life, particularly urban life, and the endless pressure for improved communication. Although the development of the railway preceded that of the telegraph, the two modes of technology expanded in tandem within the country, with railway lines being primary telegraph routes. In literature, the two are often thematically linked, showing that the capacity to transmit information rapidly was in many ways as important as the capacity to transport oneself bodily from place to place. Indeed, rail travel in late nineteenth-­century fiction is often figured not as a physical activity but as a mode of communication, a way of sending words or information over long distances. There is a surprising sense of disembodiment to many fictional representations of the railway. Though there is, as Jill Matus demonstrates, an important strain of commentary on railway accidents that reveals a deep anxiety about the corporeal dangers of the railway, very little is said about the ordinary physical experience of railway travel, or the visual experience of landscape during a railway journey. Instead, the emphasis is on the subjective experience of the train traveller, who is likely to be reading, talking with a companion, or even, as we see in Dracula, writing the very text that records the journey. We saw earlier that railway guides constantly negotiated the space between providing essential information and creating an information overload. Complaints about the “exfoliation” of Bradshaw (“An Old Guide,” 547) reflect a recognition that the untrammelled growth of railways was closely connected to increased speed in the circulation of news and other forms of information. This improved or accelerated circulation of information had a crucial effect High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 191 on business practices and also on social life. Tom Standage claims that“the information supplied by the telegraph was like a drug to businessmen,who swiftly became addicted. In combination with the railways, which could move goods quickly from one place to another, the rapid supply of information dramatically changed the way in which business was done” (156). The two technologies were seen as inextricably linked. By the mid-­ 1840s, “electric telegraphy was well on the way to being established as a commonplace feature of the railways” (Morus, 367), being used primarily to signal the movements of railway apparatus up and down the line. The telegraph provided, according to Iwan Rhys Morus,“a‘birds eye view’ that, by allowing the entire railway system to be seen as a whole, could allow the reliable regulation of its various components,” improving safety and efficiency (364). The concept of circulation has been recognized as a central metaphor in nineteenth-­ century England, and many critics have noted what Schivelbusch called the “biologization of social processes and institutions” that is reflected in the frequent use of circulatory metaphors to describe metropolitan life and the industrial economy in general (Schivelbusch, 187). Alexander Welsh has explored the prevalence of organic metaphors in descriptions of London’s networks of railway lines, sewer lines, and communication systems, which seem to imply that a healthy civic body is one in which things flow in a free and fluid manner. Richard Menke suggests that in Middlemarch the idea of the web or network serves to link “the natural structures of bodies to technological structures for communication” (15). Others have linked this organicist vision of the nation with an emphasis on the disease and contagion that threaten to undermine the health of the body politic.15 But it is important to note that references to the circulation of information in particular are often mechanical, rather than organic. There seemed to be some understanding that communication of information , ideas, and decisions between the far-­ flung places that now constituted the British Empire would require technological intervention. The railroad presented a powerful image for this new circulation of information .16 Its capacity to transport passengers, physical bodies, at a speed that matched or exceeded the speed of written communication made it possible...

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