Taking the nationalisation of the telegraph in 1870 as a starting point, this chapter considers how information was understood as immaterial yet depended upon a complex material infrastructure. The first section addresses telegraphy as a technology of the present, enabling people to experience new kinds of contemporaneity, while, at the same time, ensuring that it remained stubbornly uneven. The second turns to text, exploring how it was made suitable for transmission by new information technologies and the new kinds of workers employed to process it. The third looks at the print archive. To ensure the right information could be readily retrieved, systems of bibliographic control were developed to manage the material from which it derived. Throughout, I return to Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novel is deeply interested in the contemporary, attending to the technologies that structure the moment and those that make that moment pass.

Responding to critics who argue that telegraphy is an analogy for style (or at least for realism) in Victorian fiction, in this chapter David Trotter argues conversely that it is in fact inimical to style. Telegraphic communication, while hard to represent, or distasteful in its crudeness, could not be ignored. The novelists understood that it could be essential to human intercourse and, on occasion, oddly romantic. Daniel Deronda is the example par excellence.

This chapter considers intersections between the histories of literature and of telecommunication technologies – telegraph, telephone, radio – in the first decades of the twentieth century. Early in the century, some readers might have encountered ‘Hertzian waves’ for the first time when Kipling drew on them as figures for determinism, invisible influence, and the unconscious. Technologies of telecommunication also offered a reference point for a modern sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection in the works of authors technophilic (Wells), technophobic (Forster, Eliot), or more conflicted (Ford), as well as those whose attitudes towards technology were at times even harder to parse (Joyce, Woolf). The cryptic codes of telegraphy, the decoupling of the voice from body on the wire and the airwaves, the emergent possibilities of a mass culture broadcast into the air in real time: all of these helped reshape not only the media ecology in which print works had value and meaning, but also some of the most urgent questions facing authors in the century’s opening decades, questions of the relationships between culture and subjectivity, fragmentation and totality, signal and noise.

This chapter examines how the law, and especially litigation, played an important but paradoxical role in both holding the Bandmann Circuit together and also threatening to destabilize it as disputes erupted with almost predictable regularity. Enacted in the public ‘theatre’ of courts and trials, these disagreements impacted not only on labour relations, but also on the ‘intimate relations’ of marriage and reproduction; they affected artistic production and were influenced by cultural differences and media reporting. Maurice E. Bandmann’s many and often highly publicized court cases generated a secondary stage, where his artists had additional appearances. In ANT terms, the stage and the courts thus became linked, acting on one another in a mutually reinforcing activity that ultimately strengthened the network. The legal disputes centred on two main kinds of breaches: copyright and of labour contracts. Both elements constituted crucial assets in the Bandmann Circuit. Copyright protected the network’s intellectual property, whereas contracts regulated the deployment of human capital.

Chapter Four focuses on the experimental approaches of physical-psychical scientists to psychical phenomena.It focuses on four key examples from the 1870s-1890s: William Crookes’s investigations of ‘psychic force’ ; Crookes and Cromwell Varley’s electrical tests of mediumship; the SPR’s studies of Reichenbach’s ‘od’ ; and Oliver Lodge and Benjamin Davies’s ideas about and experimental tests of telekinesis.The chapter shows the extraordinary lengths to which physical-psychical scientists went to achieve greater control over, to measure and record psychical effects, and to turn domestic seances into sites of experimental physics.The limited effectiveness of this work was partly due to perceived flaws in experimental design, a lack of suitable experimental subjects (mediums), and because physical-psychical scientists believed their professional and intellectual goals were better served by focusing experimental research on purely physical topics.