Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)

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 texts has become equally canonical: the collection of stories and poems by telegraph operators Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes (1877), Ella Cheever Thayer's Wired Love (1880), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and Henry James's "In the Cage" (1898). Perhaps the most frequently cited writer in this burgeoning field is Friedrich A. Kittler, but valuable contributions have been made by some twenty-five other scholars, most of whose names can be found in Laura Otis's comprehensive bibliography. Finally, the fruits of this research have been popularized in two successful trade books, Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (1998) and John Steele Gordon's A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable (2002).

The rapid codification of this area of interest (one hesitates to call it a field) throws into relief both what is original about Laura Otis's valuable new study and what has already become overly familiar. The most important contribution of Networking comes in the first half of the book, where the author explores the rich connections among sciences of the body and the invention of machines during the whole course of the nineteenth century. In the introduction and the first three chapters, Otis draws on her expertise in neurobiology to establish three large claims: first, that discoveries in biology inspired technological developments in the field of telegraphy; second, that the telegraph network returned the favor by providing metaphors or cognitive models for research into the human nervous system; and third, that the concept of communication operated across the entire spectrum of intellectual inquiry during the period to link developments in neurobiology, technology, literature, philosophy, and politics.

Few scholars other than Otis could have attempted this project, much less accomplished it with such authority. Author of two previous books on biology and literature—Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1994) and Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (1999)—Otis is well versed in the scientific literature not only of England but also of France, Germany, and Spain, and she provides her own translations of passages from many important nineteenth-century scientific texts. The accounts of well-known figures such as Charles Babbage, Claude Bernard, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, George Henry Lewes, and Emil DuBois-Reymond are lucid and succinct, while the long-running debate between the neuroanatomist Camillo Golgi (1843-1926) and the neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) receives detailed treatment.

The discussion of these last two figures exemplifies Otis's ability to use her broad learning to probe beyond commonplace assumptions about the role of metaphor in science. In a chapter titled "The Metaphoric Web," she explores the interesting dispute among scientists such as Golgi, who argued that nerve cells were part of an interconnected nerve net (the reticular hypothesis), and Ramón y Cajal, who believed that neurons were independent cells (the neuronist position). Regarding this debate, Otis makes the surprising point that the metaphor of the network, and particularly the telegraph network, could be used to support diametrically opposed arguments. Eschewing the...