Communications in the Strand Magazine, September 1896

The September 1896 number of the Strand Magazine begins with a startling image: a daring escape from certain death made by telegraph wires (figure 1). In this wood engraving, a gargoyle sneers on as a wild-haired professor and an angelic-looking young woman leap away from a rooftop engulfed in flames. Suspended in mid-air, they stretch their arms toward a swath of telegraph lines below, anticipating the landing that will reveal whether the cables will give way or sustain their weight and save their lives. A crowd looks on from the street far below, shouting words of encouragement or warning to the two figures. The caption reads, "They sprang from the gable and struck blindly against the wires."

This opening illustration foregrounds a theme that appears throughout the September 1896 number of the Strand: communication. The image illustrates a pivotal moment from the first piece in the magazine, a short story by W. Buckley titled "After Many Days." Opening an issue with an illustration was a familiar convention of Victorian illustrated monthlies, and accompanying that graphic with a short story or serial instalment was standard practice for the Strand. But this full-page illustration is notable for its unusual use of telegraph technology, one that signals a preoccupation with communication evident particularly in this number but persistent throughout the Strand's publication history. The telegraph wires in "After Many Days" simultaneously embody the traditional and emerging conceptions of communication that interacted in journalism and other avenues of cultural discourse in 1890s Britain. In accordance with the older sense of the term, the telegraph lines support the distribution of physical phenomena—in this case, not sound, heat, or air, but human bodies. At the same time, the swath of three dozen or more wires stretched high above the street invokes the emerging concept of "communications" in the plural form: a system for imparting information.

Figure 1.

Fitzner Davey and P. H., "They Sprang from the Gable and Struck Blindly Against the Wires." Wood-engraved illustration for "After Many Days." Strand Magazine 4 (September 1896): 242.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a quotation from 1907 as the first usage of the term "communications" to signify "the science, practice, or system of transmitting or imparting information, esp. of doing so over a distance."¹ Taken in this sense, communications, as Bruce Clarke points out, encompass both the social and material, using physical structures and phenomena to circulate individual expressions within a networked system.² The OED's definition identifies electronic and digital media as specific objects of the science of communications, suggesting a twentieth-century orientation. Similarly, John Durham Peters argues that during the Victorian period, the term "communication" signified "a state of shared understanding" between people; it was not until after World War I that the notion of communication as information exchange gained traction.³ However, the 1907 usage documented in the OED suggests slippage between notions of "communication" and "communications" in the social imagination at the turn of the century. Indeed, many modern communication systems originate in the nineteenth century.⁴ Richard Menke contends that "over the course of the Victorian era, the sense of communication shifted" in response to new networks, such as the Penny Post and telegraphy, that "dramatically increased" communication's "speed and reach."⁵

I argue that the systematic, medium-focused approach to knowledge circulation encapsulated by the plural term "communications," though naturalized in the twentieth century, was shaped by nineteenth-century media and culture. Changing conceptions of communication reflected the late-Victorian shift toward forms of knowledge transmission that were increasingly technologized, systematized, mass in scale, and consumerist in orientation. It is no coincidence that the modern usage of "communications" emerged around the same time that other words associated with knowledge production and circulation—such as medium, media, and information—gained their current meanings. Menke has chronicled how the nineteenth-century concept of information came to refer to an "industrialized" stream of data, decontextualized and parsed into fragments for circulation in technologized systems such as the electric telegraph network.⁶ However...