Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (review)

Toward the end of Richard Menke’s lively, informative, and compelling book, we learn that his title was actually anticipated by Joseph Kirkland, a nineteenth-century American editor and novelist, who argued for a technological standard and model for literary production: “Photographic exactitude in scene-painting—phonographic literalness in dialogue—telegraphic realism in narration—these are the new canons for the art of fiction” (216). Rather than a sign of his work’s belatednesss, this (genuine) coincidence points to its real value. He unveils a discourse of technological realism carried over a vast network of diverse but interconnected nineteenth-century thinkers. Perhaps most impressive is the way in which Menke repeatedly and effortlessly links his theoretical and conceptual points both to material and discursive histories; he explores biographical links between Victorian realist writers and information technology, while pointing to the rhetorical and conceptual overlap between Victorian discourses of realism and information networks.

Menke’s interdisciplinary approach and argument for the central links between technology and realism convince not only because of clever argumentation (it is clever) and theoretical sophistication (it is sophisticated) but because his subject is a Victorian interdisciplinarity and a Victorian discourse that links telegraphy and realism. For example, quoting from Dickens’s private memoranda book, Menke shows how Dickens modeled his narrative technique on the telegraph: “Open the story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted sets of people, into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of an electric message. Describe the message—be the message—flashing along through space—over the earth and under the sea” (qtd. in Menke 90). In fact, we already know from the beginning of the book that Dickens was involved in a scheme to lay underwater telegraph wires across to Europe.

For Menke, Dickens’s proposed connection between disparate places and peoples is the trope that most characterizes the link between the project of realism and the discourse of Victorian information networks. Both literary realism and information systems offer to “reconcile uniformity, universality, and order with a sense of openness to life itself, an assumption that the flows of life were orderly yet unbounded” (41); they share an apparent ability to “overcome limits of time, space, or individual perspective” and to offer unforeseen and broad connections (161); both promise to act as a “tool” for “intersubjectivity” and sympathy (93); and both claim to transcend the medium of writing and offer the world without a filter. At the same time, Menke points to the way in which both realism and technology were associated not only with the concrete and the particular but also with the invisible and even the impossible (151). Both realism and information technology produced a kind of “objective access to real things unavailable to bodily perception” (105). This, to my mind, is one of Menke’s most useful interventions in how we think about literary realism and its link to technologies of reproduction—a point that could have even been developed more or stressed more frequently. While others have noted this relationship between realism and the unseen, Menke argues convincingly for the ways in which new media and technology bring new things “into visibility” while also “extend[ing] our perceptions to things that never attain visibility at all” (100).

While Menke briefly addresses the photograph and the phonograph, the majority of the book is focused on transmission systems that incorporate writing, especially the promise of “electric information” embodied (or rather disembodied) in the telegraph. Menke devotes his first chapter to the development of the penny post, its role in popularizing the notion of information flow, and its claims to represent both the most private of communications and the entire national body. This is even embodied literally on the front-pages of the Victorian realist novel. Menke reads William Mulready’s design for the new prepaid envelopes and stationery (which pictured both the reach of the postal system and the reach of the British Empire) as a version of Dickens’s...