Jay Clayton - Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review) - Victorian Studies 45:4 Victorian Studies 45.4 (2003) 775-777 Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, by Laura Otis; pp. x + 268. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, $49.50. Over the last decade, nineteenth-century communications technology has become the focus of interdisciplinary investigation for an increasing number of scholars whose home disciplines range from literature, history, and science studies to communications, media studies, and (in one notable case) engineering. This body of research has grown rapidly, energized no doubt by today's information society to which the nineteenth-century networks are sometimes compared, and the outlines of the subject have already become clear. Three nineteenth-century networks dominate: the post office, the railroad, and the telegraph (both semaphore and electric). Other nineteenth-century networks, such as the telephone and the wireless, seem to have become the purview of modernist scholars, a division of labor that Victorianists should challenge. A group of literary...