‘You’ve Got Mail’ Page 1 of 13 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 10 October 2014 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 19th Century Online Publication Date: Sep 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199593736.013.20 ‘You’ve Got Mail’: Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature Elizabeth Meadows and Jay Clayton The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Forthcoming) Edited by Juliet John Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords Although the Victorian period gave birth to a strong tradition of critique of technology and industrialization, it also fostered a counter-tradition: a new and generative technological imaginary. In recent years, scholars of Victorian culture have begun to map out this technological imaginary in readings of canonical Victorian novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. This chapter surveys this recent critical work, then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864) as an example of how technologies of communication and transportation become vehicles for rich intersubjective exchanges, generating narrative structures that link characters and novels to one another in complex webs mimicking Victorian Britain’s network of rails, wires, and postal routes. Keywords: technology, machines, communication, railway, telegraph, realist novel The letter box was the first visible and public sign of the age of modern communications. The letter box and its close relation the pillar box are rather low-tech harbingers of our modern era of communications, which is now characterized by the promise of instantaneous transmission of information to any corner of the globe. Yet these unassuming structures were but the limbs and outward flourishes of a sophisticated communications network undergirded by the technological and industrial transformations that marked the Victorian period. Sir Rowland Hill’s Uniform Penny Post revolutionized the postal system upon its introduction in 1840, and Hill’s reformed system of postage depended upon a series of innovations both procedural and technological. The rapid and reliable collection, sorting, and delivery of the mail within and between the cities and countryside of nineteenth-century Britain were facilitated by complex interactions of railways, telegraphs, and rationalized postal procedures. Anthony Trollope, novelist and postal worker, played a major part in extending the reach of this Victorian communications network: in the course of his work for the Post Office, he suggested the adoption of the pillar box—the free-standing receptacle for the collection of letters that became nearly ubiquitous in the urban landscape. While the letter box attached to a private residence indicated that its inhabitants were connected to the world through the mail, the pillar box provided a multitude of anonymous entry points where mobile users could access the postal network that blanketed the country. Although the pillar box provided access to a technologically advanced communications network, its immobility and simplicity effaced its technological nature. Similarly, Trollope’s Barsetshire novels attest to the efficiency and scope of the extended networks he helped create, even as they elide the presence of technological innovations through their lack of overtly mechanical themes and images. Until recently, Trollope generally flew below the radar in assessments of technology and its impact on Victorian literary culture, perhaps because many of his novels ignore the cotton mills, coal smoke, and industrial upheaval that are the focus of Condition-of-England novels by Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell. But the growth of critical interest in the British postal system in tandem with the railway system as modern communications networks has brought to the fore Trollope’s importance in the nineteenth-century communications 1 2 3