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

In this wide-ranging and richly rewarding study, Richard Menke presents literature as but one nodal point in a fluid and shifting array of cultural discourses, scientific developments, commercial enterprises, and government agencies that helped to define the ways technology was both used and understood in the nineteenth century. The realist novel, Menke argues, is a cultural practice that was shaped by its interactions with the penny post, the electrical telegraph, and the wireless receiver, and which, in turn, helped to shape public attitudes toward these innovations. Each chapter of the book thus offers itself as a kind of subset of the larger information system it describes, a local area network linking one or more literary texts with an inspired selection of inventions, personages, and organizations. The chapter on "The Lifted Veil" (1859), for example, draws together George Eliot's tale of clairvoyance, Henry Fox Talbot's experiments with calotype photography, and G. H. Lewes's studies of the human nervous system in order to illustrate the profound violence that lurks at the heart of the dream of narratorial omniscience. Featuring a first-person narrator capable of seeing into the minds of his family and friends, and, on occasion, glimpsing the future (including his own death), "The Lifted Veil" suggests the degree to which its author was concerned not only with testing the limits of the realist mode but with gauging the costs of such experiments in distinctly human terms.

The fine art of connection, whether in scholarly analysis or internet chat rooms, typically privileges similitude over difference, metonymy over metaphor. Things seem to come together more readily at the point at which they appear to have something in common, even if that something does not go much beyond a passing resemblance. Menke's desire to find what Charles Dickens calls "the connexion necessary for the story" occasionally also leads to links between texts, technologies, historical events, or theoretical concepts that feel forced or are not developed enough to be persuasive. An overly long description of a collection of photos of the Czech capital that Eliot may or may not have seen does not appreciably further the aforementioned reading of "The Lifted Veil," to take one instance, while a discussion of the representation of female telegraphers in a short story by Anthony Trollope never fully grapples with the complex ways that the gender codes of the period mediated the contradictory claims of the white-collar workplace and the desires of young middle-class women to lead independent lives. More often than not, however, Menke's ability to bring together disparate objects of analysis pays rich dividends, especially with regard to its chief interest, the changing attitudes of writers toward the capacity of language to represent the social world. Of particular note are the chapters in the book's first half that examine literary texts that, while not explicitly engaging with the dramatic possibilities of the new technologies, nonetheless bear the impress of the changes they wrought in the collective understanding of what it means to communicate. The chapter that concerns Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) is illustrative in this regard. Other critics have noted the degree to which the former governess's reaction to Edward Rochester's "mysterious summons" resembles the shocking sensation of being in direct contact with another mind felt by early users of the telegraph, but Menke follows its thread to a later scene in which the pair, now happily rejoined, recalls the moment of sublime sympathy. Menke notes that the former governess curiously refrains in this passage from confirming that she received Rochester's message. In one of the many such striking insights that stem from his abilities as a close reader, Menke notes that it is only to the reader that Jane relates this experience of absolute communication, preferring to share her private thoughts with her reader rather than her lover. The novel thus becomes "the ultimate long distance communication" (86), one that occurs not between...