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Imperial Media IMPERIAL MEDIA IMPERIAL MEDIA Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 AARON WORTH THE OHIO STATE UNIVERsitY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Worth, Aaron, author. Imperial media : colonial networks and information technologies in the British literary imagination, 1857–1918 / Aaron Worth. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1251-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1251-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9355-3 (cd-rom) — ISBN 0-8142-9355-7 (cd-rom) 1. Literature and technology. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Mass media and literature. 4. Information technology in literature. I. Title. PR468.T4W67 2014 820.9'008—dc23 2013034228 Cover design by James A. Baumann Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI 29.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments • vii Introduction • 1 Chapter One Imperial Cybernetics • 9 Chapter Two Imperial Projections • 36 Chapter Three Imperial Transmissions • 60 Chapter Four Imperial Informatics • 80 Coda Post-Imperial Media • 114 Notes • 119 Bibliography • 134 Index • 142 AcKNowLEDGMENTS Portions of this book were initially presented as papers at the Victorian Lit- erature and Culture seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center; at the Modern Language Association, Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and North American Victorian Studies Association confer- ences; and as part of the faculty lecture series at Boston University’s College of General Studies. On each occasion I received valuable feedback. Indi- viduals who read parts of Imperial Media and provided criticism, sugges- tions, and/or support include Richard Menke, Chris Keep, John Picker, John Plotz, Ivan Kreilkamp, Eugene Goodheart, Laura Quinney, Aviva Briefel, Michael Booth, Vanita Neelakanta, Gillian Pierce, Duncan Bell, and Rae Greiner, as well as several anonymous readers. I am grateful to the editors of Victorian Studies and Journal of Colonial- ism and Colonial History for permission to reprint material originally appear- ing in those journals, and to Sandy Crooms, Malcolm Litchfield, Eugene O’Connor, and the entire staff at The Ohio State University Press for all their labors on Imperial Media. My sincere thanks go as well to the many colleagues, friends, and fam- ily members, particularly my mother and sister, who provided support and encouragement along the way. The book is dedicated to Michelle Worth and to Charlotte Worth, who entered the world while it was in press. vii INTRODUCTION Among the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010 was Tom McCarthy’s C, a self-proclaimed avant-gardist’s foray into the realm of histori- cal fiction. C follows the fortunes (to quote the book’s jacket copy) “of Serge Carrefax, a man who—as his name suggests—surges into the electric moder- nity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him.”1 As this précis might indicate, one of the novel’s most note- worthy (and, to this reader at least, most attractive) elements is its sheer besot- tedness with late Victorian information technologies: among other things, it constitutes a scrupulously researched, even recherché, reconstruction of an extinct media ecology. In the novel’s first fifty or so pages, McCarthy manages to introduce every iconic information technology of the Victorian period, including radio, telegraph, telephone, phonograph (in both cylinder- and disc-playing incarnations), and photograph, as well as a “Projecting Kineto- scope” (McCarthy, C, 45) and, later, the cinema proper (there are more recon- dite devices on offer as well, including “manometric flame and typesetting machines, phonautographs, rheotomes, [and] old hotel annunciators”) (ibid., 35).2 Moreover, Carrefax’s personal history and the history of contemporane- ous information technologies are (designedly) difficult to disentangle: born in 1898 to a father performing early radio experiments, he goes on to serve in World War I, ultimately perishing in 1922 in Egypt, while engaged in the 1 2 • INTRODUCTION construction of a global communications network in the service of Britain’s empire. The present book is about the media which so decisively shaped the world inhabited by the Carrefaxes, both père and fils (the former, fortyish in the late 90s, would have witnessed firsthand the birth of the telephone, phonograph, and cinema as well as, of course, wireless telegraphy); more specifically, it is about the role such media played in helping Britons to conceptualize impe- rial systems during McCarthy’s characters’ lifetimes. Accordingly, its primary documentary evidence will take the form of fiction, chiefly novels, written during the late Victorian and (in the case of John Buchan) Modern periods. But I begin with—and mean to linger a moment upon—McCarthy’s post- modern performance first of all because it strikes me as an unusually reflexive and erudite, but by no means unique, example of the present-day survival, and continued relevance, of characteristically Victorian topoi associated with media, and their relation to imperial systems in particular. To adduce one episode among many: recruited by his cryptographically obsessed godfa- ther Widsun (a mysterious, darkly avuncular servant of empire who would not seem out of place in Kipling’s Kim, or in a novel by Buchan or Erskine Childers), Serge is sent to Egypt to aid in the construction of the “Empire Wireless Chain,” a prospective worldwide web centered in the Middle East, with a proposed “eight stations . each two thousand miles apart, relaying from here to every corner of the Empire” (ibid., 243). Upon arrival in Alex- andria, however, his first task is to see to the state of the empire’s landlines, by assessing the havoc wreaked by the natives upon “His Majesty’s commu- nication network” (ibid., 244) as it is presently embodied (its telegraphic and telephonic cables). Serge’s arrival in Egypt coincides with the beginning of the end of British hegemony in the region, and in depicting the aftermath of years of native unrest leading to this moment of (nominal) independence, McCar- thy foregrounds the violence done to communications systems, along with the symbolic resonances associated with such an assault. As Serge’s superior, Major Ferguson, puts it: “After we deported [Egyptian nationalist Saad] Zaghlul, the Egyptians chose to vent their anger not just on our businesses and residencies, but also on telegraph wires, phone lines and the like. Even the poles some- times: hacked them down with a real vengeance, like a tribe of Red Indians wreaking sacrilege against enemies’ totem posts. Which they were, in a w ay.” “How so?” asked Serge. “Way I see it,” Ferguson said, picking up a salt biscuit from a bowl on his desk, “a phone box is sacred. No matter how shoddy, or in what obscure INTRODUCTION • 3 and run-down district of which backwater it’s in, it’s still connected to a substation somewhere, which is connected to a central exchange, which itself forms one of many tributaries of a larger river that flows straight to the heart of London. Step into a box in Labban or Karmouz, and you’re joined in holy trinity with every lane in Surrey, every gabled house in Gloucestershire.” He slipped the biscuit into his mouth like a communion wafer, then continued: “You’ve been attached to us . to assess the impact of these acts of telecommunicative blasphemy.” (ibid., 244) Given the novel’s high degree of historical erudition, it is curious that McCar- thy does not have Ferguson mention the event that would have leapt imme- diately to the mind of any Briton at that time and in this context, namely, the destruction of British networks during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (the Major substitutes “Red Indians” for East Indians, but it is the traumatic mem- ory of the Mutiny that would really underlie any such musings). Nevertheless such episodes as this one bristle with Victorian and post-Victorian clichés about imperial media: the ostensibly disproportionate significance attached to native assaults on the imperial network (a theme which I explore in detail in the following chapter),3 the metaphoric collapse of imperial communication with quasi-religious communion, and so on. According to this criterion alone C is hardly unique, to be sure. To judge by the representations of empire to be found within many works of neo- Victorian fiction and film, and other contemporary revivifications of the nineteenth century, modern authors, and audiences, remain largely in thrall to the media-inflected conceptual templates created by the Victorians them- selves. The reason McCarthy’s novel particularly appeals to me as a way of framing my study stems from its imaginative reconstruction, late in the text, of a historical moment at which the links—conceptual as well as practical— between the British Empire and the information technologies with which it was associated first began to be dissociated. Once installed at the Ministry of Communications in Cairo, Serge learns that the Empire Wireless project is, after numerous false starts, finally moving forward. Unfortunately—as the following exchange, shot through with anxious feelings of both imperial and technological inferiority, between Serge and his superior Macauley makes clear—the empire itself is not long for this world: “So, finally [says Macauley]: the pylon at Abu Zabal is to be completed. It’ll be switched on in May, they say. About eight years too late—eight years in which the nation that had radio before all others has slipped hope- lessly behind. The French alone have high-powered transmitters in Beirut, Bamako and Tananarive; America has five times more foreign stations than 4 • INTRODUCTION we have; even the Germans match us kilowatt for kilowatt worldwide.
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