Abstract
‘Transatlantic Transmissions: Telegraphic Literature in Britain and the United States, 1851-1898’ explores nineteenth-century texts preoccupied with the electric telegraph as a new form of labour and communication. Victorian writers frequently dealt with the creative possibilities enabled by the electric telegraph as a site of human-machine relations. Beginning with the voyages to install the Atlantic Telegraph Cable at the bottom of the ocean, I consider the ways in which telegraphic communication and its emergent labour and workforce were shaped in and by forms of literary production. By the end of the nineteenth century when Henry James published In the Cage, telegraphic labour, and consequently telegraphic literature, was on the decline as it made way for newer forms of technological mediation.This thesis explores literary representations of the electric telegraph and its operators in Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. It traces the conceptualisation of telegraph technology and its associated labour in a transatlantic context, using the undersea cable as a conduit to open productive ways of thinking about the mutually constitutive relationship between literature and media. This thesis argues that the cultural imaginary associated with the electric telegraph is embedded in scientific discourses, conceptions of gender, and understandings of labour and landscape. The examples I consider reveal a marked distinction in the conceptualisation of telegraphic labour in the United States and Britain, especially for women workers. In the United States, literary depictions reveal how telegraphy offered social and sexual mobility for female telegraphers, whereas in Britain, the narrative is one of containment and rigidity as well as displacement within a government-run telegraph service where women telegraphists were often regarded as imposters in the male-dominated Civil Service. I uncover these narratives, in particular, through a study of telegraphic trade journals which were written by and for members of the profession. I examine periodicals written by telegraph operators, which reveal how many operators conceived of themselves as literary workers and how–in the United States particularly–trade publications imagined the telegraph office as a kind of literary and editorial world.
| Date of Award | 1 Dec 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Seb Franklin (Supervisor) & Clare Pettitt (Supervisor) |