Read SPUR researcher Iain Spillman’s final blog, exploring telephony in the work of Mark Twain…

In his invaluable book, Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks uncovers how quickly the telephone and telephony impacted upon literary culture. He notes that as early as October 1877 the London Telegraphic Journal was moved to comment that, ‘The telephone seems to have established a literature of its own. The comic papers have employed it as a vehicle for their wit […] poets have eagerly welcomed it as a new image […] and there have not been wanting preachers who have hailed it as a new symbol.’[1] Brooks argues the first significant piece of telephone literature was Mark Twain’s ‘A Telephonic Conversation’, first published in The Atlantic in June 1880.[2]

While Twain was an early subscriber to the telephone, and obviously not opposed to it, he displayed a light-hearted antagonism towards the invention, telling the engineers who installed one in his home in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1877 that ‘if Bell had invented a muffler or a gag, he would have done us a real service.’[3] It is a stance he maintained in his 1890 Christmas message published in the New York World: ‘It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us – the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage – may eventually be gathered together in heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss – except the inventor of the telephone.’[4]

However, notwithstanding his frustrations with the telephone, Twain displayed a high degree of prescience in identifying which aspects of telephony would influence both culture and behaviour. The aforementioned essay, ‘A Telephonic Conversation’, was quick to identify both the initial allure and the ultimate dissatisfaction in hearing only one side of a telephone conversation, ‘and not taking any part in that conversation,’ Twain wrote, ‘is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life.’[5] Twain also added his delicate sarcasm to how it affected his work by adding, ‘I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by.’[6] It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Twain would find it both alarming and amusing that over a hundred years later the greatest cliché of the digital telephone age would remain the frustration at overhearing telephone calls, but now people carry on their conversations in public spaces across mobile networks. Furthermore, Twain had recognized how to employ the ‘telephone monologue’ to comic effect. Hearing just one side of a conversation allows the opportunity for an author to humorously juxtapose words and phrases. Here an example would be; ‘”Visitors?” Pause. “No, we never use butter on them.”’[7] Additionally, it allows an author to disclose just enough information to keep their readers curious without ever revealing the complete story (‘”Who did?” Pause. “Good-ness gracious!” Pause. “Well, what is the world coming to? Was it right in church?” Pause. “And was her mother there?”’)[8]

The ‘telephone monologue’ would remain a significant technique for over fifty years, particularly on stage where it would be taken into darker places by Noel Coward’s sketch, ‘Sorry You’ve Been Troubled’ (1923), where a misidentified corpse reveals a loveless marriage and, in particular, by Jean Cocteau’s ‘The Human Voice’ (1930). Here, a woman awaits a pre-arranged call from her former lover who is to wed the next day. Her desperation is accentuated by lost connections, wrong numbers and callers hanging up.  Here, the mystery (and psychology) of a ringing telephone and its resultant tension is heightened: Will not answering the call mean a missed opportunity of an unlikely reconciliation? Or will answering the call mean a final, shattering separation? This tension and the dynamic of the ‘telephone monologue’ is famously twisted and reversed by Dorothy Parker in her short story, ‘A Telephone Call’ (1930). In this instance, the monologue derives from a telephone that does not ring as a woman waits in vain for a telephone call from her lover who never arrives. The telephone’s refusal to ring provokes in the woman a wheel of hostility, hope, frustration, and anticipation. As she circles the ‘damned, ugly, shiny thing’ she wishes her lover dead (‘If he were dead, he would be mine’), she wants to smash the telephone (‘I’ll pull your filthy roots out of the wall’), and she would even welcome a call of rejection (‘If he says he can’t see me tonight, I’ll say, ”Why that’s all right dear.” […] I’ll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he’ll like me again.’)[9] The woman’s relief from her anxiety never comes and she is left counting in fives. If her lover has not rung by five hundred she is resolved to ring him herself.

Two other texts by Twain are also closely associated with telephony; ‘The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton’ and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The first is of particular interest as it predates ‘A Telephonic Conversation’ by two years, being published in the March 1878 edition of Atlantic Monthly. The four chapter short story tells of a telephone romance (reinforced by the exchange of photographs) conducted between Alonzo in Eastport, Maine, and Rosannah in San Francisco. This was pure speculation by Twain as the first trans-continental phone calls did not take place until January, 1915. Their plans are temporarily interrupted by Sidney Algernon Burley, who upsets the relationship by impersonating Alonzo on the telephone. Twain also uses Burley to warn of the dangers of the potential lack of privacy when telephoning: ‘at present […] a man may go and tap a telegraph wire which is conveying a song or a concert from one state to another, and he can attach his private telephone and steal a hearing of that music as it passes along. Suppose that instead of music that was passing along and being stolen, the burden of the wire was loving endearments of the most private and scared nature?’[10] Later, in his search for Rosannah, Alonzo would use his own wire-tapping equipment to locate her: ‘So he took his carpet-sack and a portable telephone, and shook the snow of his native city from his articles, and went forth into the world.’[11] Ultimately, the lovers would reunite but would not meet until after they were married – via the telephone.

Published in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court tells of an engineer thrown back in time of King Arthur who used technology to convince the citizens of the era that he has magical powers and to modernize the past (‘I could set up a little enchantment of mine which I call the telephone, and he could not find out its secret in a hundred years’).[12] Unlike ‘The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethleton’, there is only a hint of the connection between telephony and romance, but it is significant as it introduces the female telephone operator or ‘hello-girl’. While the telephone operator romance was already a staple of late nineteenth-century short stories and emerged during the telegraphic age, here was an early use of the colloquial term that originated from the greeting subscribers received when seeking a connection through the central switchboard.[13] While savouring the response to his achievements (‘I was […] kissing my hand to the storm of waving kerchiefs and the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!’) the engineer could only think ‘of a certain hello-girl of West Hartford, and I wished she could see me now.’[14] Twain, clearly held hello-girls in high esteem (‘the humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur’s land’) and regretted any previous discourtesy towards them: ‘it’s a new kind of girl; they don’t have them here; one often speaks sharply to them when they are not the least in fault, and he can’t get over feeling sorry for it and ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years, it’s such shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked; the fact is, no gentleman ever does it – though I – well, I myself, if I’ve got to confess -’.[15] The greeting to a switchboard operator (hello central) is also prominent within the text. The engineer, Hank Morgan has married Alisande (Sandy) and during a dream says ‘hello central’ which Sandy, not knowing its true meaning, believes it to be a mystical phrase and a good enough name for their child: ‘She never found out her mistake. The first time she heard that form of the salute used at the telephone she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must always be invoked in that reverent formality, in perpetual honour and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake. This was not true. But it answered.’[16]

The novel also allows Twain to discuss one of his chief frustrations with the telephone; its inefficiency and its particular potential for misunderstanding. He writes: ‘Confound a phone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense.’[17] This chimes with reasons for Twain’s belief in ‘mental telegraphy’, the subject of two essays published between 1891 and 1895 although much the material written as early as 1874. He argues that ‘the telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs. We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance; then, if we need to put into words, we can do that tedious work at our leisure.’[18]  The seeds for Twain’s theories lay in his numerous observations of letters or telegrams ‘crossing’. He writes, ‘We have the instinct a dozen times a year that the letter we are writing is going to ‘cross’ the other person’s letter. We call it ‘accident,’ but perhaps we misname it.’[19] Here, Twain demonstrates that not only had he perceived the importance of the telephone to literature but he also understood the early theories of telephony and the concept that all telecommunications could be interchangeable (Alexander Graham Bell’s original notion for the telephone was not to transmit sound but to make speech visible as an aid for deafness).[20] Twain’s belief in messages crossing is also in sympathy with an early demonstration on acoustics made by Bell to Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard. ‘”Do you know,” he said to Hubbard, “that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, that the G-string will answer me?”’[21] Bell concludes that is evidence that one day ‘we will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on that piano.’[22]

 

[1] John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp.65-66.

[2] Brooks, Telephone, p.75.

[3] Mark Twain cited in Brooks, Telephone, p.65.

[4] Brooks, Telephone, p.95.

[5] Mark Twain, ‘A Telephonic Conversation’, The Atlantic, June, 1880, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1880/06/a-telephonic-conversation/306078/

[6]  Twain, ‘Conversation’.

[7]  Twain, ‘Conversation’.

[8] Twain, ‘Conversation’.

[9] Dorothy Parker, ‘A Telephone Call’ [1930] in The Penguin Dorothy Parker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 117-124 (p.120-121, 122).

[10] Mark Twain, ‘The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton’ Atlantic Monthly, March 1878, http://www.online-literature.com/twain/3266/, pp.1-19 (p.7).

[11] Twain, ‘The Loves’, p. 9.

[12] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), p.187.

[13] Early texts include Justin McCarthy’s ‘Along The Wires (1870), Josie Shlofield’s ‘Wooing By Wire (1875), and ‘The Thorsdale Telegraphs’ by Barnett Phillips (1876).

[14] Twain, Connecticut Yankee, p. 375.

[15] Twain, Connecticut Yankee, p. 111.

[16] Twain, Connecticut Yankee, p.375.

[17] Twain, Connecticut Yankee, p. 215.

[18] Mark Twain, ‘Mental Telegraphy’ [1891] in The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories, ed. by Shelly Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 45-76 (pp. 65-66).

[19] Twain, ‘Telegraphy’, p. 47.

[20] Robert MacDougall, The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p.61.

[21] Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone [1910] (North Charleston: CreateSpace, 2015), p. 4.

[22] Casson, Telephone, p.4.

Iain Spillman, a SPUR undergraduate researcher at Nottingham Trent University, updates us on his recent work at the BT Archives. Here, he writes about Anthony Trollope, novelist and clerk at the General Post Office, and his short story, ‘The Telegraph Girl’.

One of the most abiding topics of the early Post Office magazines Blackfriars and St. Martin’s-le-Grand was the life, career and work of Anthony Trollope. The anecdotes published exhibit ‘a certain degree of gratitude and affection’ and as Tristram Crutchley writes: ‘there have been, and are, other distinguished writers among the servants of the Post Office, but Trollope was one of the first to achieve the measure of success that spells fame, and we have not forgotten it.’[1]

Memories are shared of Trollope’s schooldays (described by Sir William Gregory as ‘without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met,’) as well as his physicality and appetites (the first remark he made was ‘I have walked up from Cardiff’ – a distance of 24 miles. ‘Any hotels here; which is best?’ I directed him; and, as he marched out, still at a six mile-an-hour-stride, he said, ‘back soon, going to have a raw beef steak.’)[2] The reminiscences also show Trollope continually in trouble with his superiors for insubordination and unpunctuality, ‘which he seems to think was fairly compensated by his energy when he set to work,’ and, interestingly, glimpses into his method of writing.[3] Over dinner Trollope explained to James Russell Lowell how he rises at five (at four on hunting mornings) and completes the same number of pages before breakfast every day, writing ‘just like a shoemaker (works) on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stiches.’[4] It was Trollope’s ability to write anywhere and at any time that indirectly brought him into conflict with his superiors and nearly led to him to be summarily dismissed.

His most autobiographical work, The Three Clerks (1857), was principally written by Trollope in railway carriages when travelling on G.P.O. business.  Of all the characters in the book, Trollope is most closely associated with Charley Tudor. Not only do their early, unpromising careers mirror each other but there are also specific incidents identical to both. Mrs. Davis, the guardian of Charley’s admirer, Norah, appears in his office to challenge him to ‘settle something … when do you mean to marry her?’[5] Similarly, there is an account of Trollope’s discomfort at his office ‘invaded’ by ‘the mother of a girl to whom he had been paying innocent attentions … and addressed him in a loud voice: ‘’Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?”’[6] Charley was ‘deeply, inextricably in debt’, while Trollope, with money problems of his own, formed ‘that intimate acquaintance with the habits of bill-discounters which is written large on half a score of his books.’[7]

However, the chief concern of The Three Clerks was to satirize and denounce the Civil Service competitive examination system. In the novel, Mr Jobbles (jobless?) was ‘enthusiastically intent on examining the whole male adult population of Great Britain’ and opposed patronage only for the reason that it ‘limits the number of candidates among whom his examination papers would be distributed.’[8] Trollope’s condemnation of the examination scheme was evidently too much for his employers, as he had already criticised it in his first paid article which was deliberately ‘intended to be very savage in its denunciation.’[9] He compounded his offence with his lecture ‘The Civil Service’ made at an early meeting of the Post Office Literary Association and subsequently published in the Cornhill Magazine. Trollope alludes to the speech in his autobiography, describing how it ‘advocated the doctrine that a Civil Servant is only a servant as far as his contract goes; and that beyond that entitled to be as free as a man in politics, as free in his general to be as free in his general pursuits and as free in opinion as those who are open professionals, and open trades.’[10] The incident prompted the Postmaster General to send for Trollope and inform him that the Secretary recommended his dismissal. When Trollope confidently ‘asked his lordship whether he was prepared to dismiss’ him, the Postmaster General ‘only laughed. The threat was no threat to me, as I knew myself to be too good to be treated in that fashion.’[11]

The Post Office magazine’s colourful caricatures of Trollope almost obscure the fact that he was, as described by A. M. Cunynghame (the first Surveyor of the Metropolitan District) ‘an excellent man of business, (who) wrote splendid reports, and was an indefatigable worker.’[12] Additionally, it denies the small but significant contribution Trollope made to telecommunications in literature. During the writing of The Prime Minister, Trollope composed and published the essay, ‘Young Women at the London Telegraph Office (June 1877), and the short story, ‘The Telegraph Girl’ (December 1877); the latter is particularly notable for several reasons.[13] Firstly, it serves as a ‘social artefact that registers the effect of technological work for women in the Victorian period,’ encouraging increased autonomy and self-reliance.[14] When it was suggested to Lucy Graham that she should leave ‘the Telegraph Office and seek the security of some household, her spirit rebelled against the council. Why should she not be independent, and respectable, and safe?’[15] She ‘had to think of her independence.’[16]

Trollope also highlights the potential dilemmas women faced that threatened their independence. As Lucy discovers, female telegraph operators were notoriously low paid and her ‘three shillings a day, though sufficient for life, would hardly be more than sufficient.’ She decides to share lodgings with her co-worker, Sophy Wilson, in an attempt to stretch their resources and to avoid the solitude of living alone, an aspect of ‘her independence which almost terrified her.’[17] It has also been noted that of the limited civil service opportunities available to women, only in telegraphy was it ‘found unavoidable to mix the staff of male and female clerks.’[18] This is clearly illustrated in ‘The Telegraph Girl’ as Trollope describes how ‘as no girls were employed there after eight there would always be on duty in the afternoon an increasing number of the other sex, some of whom remained there till late at night – some indeed all night.’[19] The cultural conventions of gendered behaviour of the period create a tension with the ‘certain amount of intimacy’ developed in the work place and the desire for female independence (‘she knew that a young woman all alone could not go to the theatre with propriety.’)[20] By introducing a marriage plot, Trollope diffuses these threats, acting as a ‘safety net’ for Lucy and Sophy and is an early example of a device frequently found in ‘operator’ fiction.[21] Additionally, by acting as an intermediary between Sophy and Abraham Hall, Lucy becomes a ‘transmitter in her personal life’ requiring her to make judgements (‘she…could not be the medium of sending on presents of which she disapproved.’) [22] This contrasts with her employment which was to count words and not to interpret them or, at any time, allow them to be interfered with. This divide is punctured by Trollope when he allows Hall to succeed in speaking to Lucy during her shift despite regulation that forbid staff ‘who are engaged in sending and receiving messages … (to be) kept during the hours of work as free as possible from communication with the public.’ [23] The interpretation of communications, romance, and the blurring of public and private worlds are themes that would later be found in another significant contribution to ‘telegraph’ literature: ‘In The Cage’ by Henry James, published in 1898.

Trollope also conveys the changing nature of telegraphic data, how ‘pundits of the office were in favour of a system of communicating messages by ear instead of by eye.’[24] The familiar ‘dots and pricks’ of telegraph paper were to be replaced by a ‘system of tickling sounds,’ substituting the textual with the acoustic.[25] Richard Menke illuminates how Trollope relates his writing to this form of telegraphy, citing Trollope’s assertion that ‘[The writer’s] language must come from him … as the syllables tinkled out by little bells form themselves to the ear of the telegraphist.’[26]

[1] Tristram Crutchley, ‘Anthony Trollope’, in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Volume 17, 1907, pp. 160-164 (p.160).

[2] ‘Early Post Office Days: III, the Metropolitan District’, in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Volume 6, 1896, pp. 293-304 (p.295); G.G., ‘Anthony Trollope as a Post Office Surveyor’, in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Volume 4, 1904, p. 453.

[3] Stephen Gwynn, ‘Anthony Trollope’, in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Volume 10, 1900, pp. 207-208 (p.207).

[4] James Russell Lowell, ‘James Russell Lowell on Anthony Trollope, in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Volume 12, 1902, p.315, extract originally published in Life of James Russell Lowell, Vol. 2, 1861, p. 82; ‘Early Post Office’, p. 296.

[5] Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks [1857] (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), p. 292.

[6] Crutchley, ‘Trollope’, p.162.

[7] Trollope, Clerks, p. 211; Gwynn, ‘Trollope’, p.208.

[8] Trollope, Clerks, p. 295.

[9] Crutchley, ‘Trollope’, p.161.

[10] Housden, J.A.J., ‘Civil Service Institutions: The Post Office Library and Literary Institution’, in Blackfriars, Volume 5, September 1887 to February 1888, pp.91-100 (p. 94).

[11] Crutchley, ‘Trollope’, pp. 164-5.

[12] ‘Early Post Office’, p. 296

[13] Susan Shelangoskie, ‘Anthony Trollope and the Social Discourse of Telegraphy after Nationalisation’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 01/2009, Vol. 14(1), 72-93 (p. 72).

[14] Shelangoskie, ‘Anthony Trollope’, p. 73.

[15] Anthony Trollope, ‘The Telegraph Girl’ [1877], Later Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) pp. 354-385 (p.355).

[16] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 354.

[17] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 355.

[18] A Government Official, ‘Ladies as Clerks’, Fraser’s Magazine, September1875, pp.375-6

[19] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 359.

[20] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, pp. 357, 359.

[21] Shelangoskie, ‘Anthony Trollope’, p. 72.

[22] Shelangoskie, ‘Anthony Trollope’, p. 88; Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 377.

[23] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 379.

[24] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, p. 365.

[25] Trollope, ‘Telegraph’, pp. 365-6.

[26] Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stamford: Stamford University Press, 2008), p. 186.

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950)

‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’

George Bernard Shaw was born on this day (26 July) in 1856. An Irish playwright and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, Shaw’s most well-known works include Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). In his 1905 preface to The Irrational Knot, however, Shaw insists that the reader ‘must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living’:

My last attempt was in 1879, when a company was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison – a much too ingenious invention as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion. This was not what the British stockbroker wanted; so the company was soon merged in the National Telephone Company, after making a place for itself in the history of literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a job.

[George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface’ [1905], The Irrational Knot [1880] (London: Constable, 1924), pp.6-7]

Shaw goes on to describe the American artificers working for Edison as ‘deluded and romantic men’ who ‘adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time’ and ‘execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary’ (p.7). Despite his fellow workers’ repeated claims to be on the brink of some new telephonic invention of their own, Shaw asserts that ‘I was, I believe, the only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific explanation of telephony’ (p.8).

  Oliver Lodge (1851-1940)

Researching Oliver Lodge at the BT Archives

By Iain Spillman

During my research in the BT archives in Holborn, one of the most interesting finds was a long out of print biography of Sir Oliver Lodge.  The 1974 book by W.P. Jolly, Sir Oliver Lodge: Psychical Researcher and Scientist, sat uneasily among the heavily-bound volumes of technical and engineering data and aroused further curiosity as its title gives precedence to Lodge’s spiritualist interests, particularly telepathy, over his considerable contributions to telecommunications through electromagnetism and radio.

The concepts of extending telegraphic techniques to vision and to thought had been established since the telephone’s invention. Even Alexander Graham Bell had asked, ‘what is to prevent someone from discovering a way of thinking at a distance by electricity?’[1] While many, such as William Henry Preece, Engineer-in-Chief of the British General Post Office, dismissed Lodge’s logic as ‘fanciful speculation,’ telephony and telepathy remained culturally intertwined.[2] Both Lodge’s career and work reflected this association perfectly. Not only was he the second person ever to send a radio signal (after Tesla and before Marconi) but also became President of The Society for Psychical Research, succeeding Frederic W.H. Myers in 1901.

Lodge immediately introduced a rigorous scientific methodology to the Society’s experiments, principally in applying the same telegraphic logic that isolated a ‘wanted message amongst a background of electronic noise which is always received with any signal.’[3]  In psychical research, two different mediums (‘automatists’) provide scripts that are individually insignificant but achieve meaning when compared by ‘interpreters’ who search for the correspondence.[4] Jolly’s account of the experiment reveals that two of the ‘automatists’ originally participated under pseudonyms. ‘Mrs. Willett’ was a Mrs. Tennent and was related by marriage to Myers while ‘Mrs. Holland’ was an alias for Rudyard Kipling’s sister, Trix.[5] The timings of Lodge’s presidency, the Society’s experiments in ‘cross-correspondences’, and the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ in 1902 have already been noted  by Laurence Davis in his essay, ‘Science and Technology: Present, Past and Future’ but does not ‘claim that Kipling was influenced by Lodge, or that Lodge equated wireless transmission with spiritualism.’[6]

While it has been acknowledged that Lodge held Trix Kipling in high regard as a medium any further compulsion to speculate upon her influence should be resisted without reference to Rudyard Kipling’s earlier texts.[7] The Society for Psychical Research had come to Kipling’s attention the previous decade as he mentions it in his short story, ‘The Dreitarbund’ (1887). Here, the three principal characters (Houligan, Marlowe and Bressil) feign receiving telepathic messages in order to win the hands in marriage of Miss Norris, Miss Emmett and Miss Yaulton. Their scheme is prompted by the book Phantasms of the Living (1896), written by S.P.R. members Myers, Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, (the latter, at the time, held a senior post within the British General Post Office).  Kipling appears not consider the ideas of ‘thought transference, brain-waves, percipients and people of that kind’ too seriously as he concludes the story by asking, ‘if the Psychical Research Society pops a good notion into your head, why on earth shouldn’t you work it out?’[8]

The publication of ‘The Finest Story in the World’ in 1891 sees Kipling more receptive to the possibility of telepathic communication, particularly when it involves the creative process of writing. In the text, an unimaginative bank clerk, Charlie Mears, has ambitions to be a writer and asks the story’s narrator for advice. Mears is able to give lucid accounts of sea voyages in the ancient world, the increasingly intricate detail of which convinces the narrator that Mears is not creating these stories but remembering past lives. However, the narrator is prompted to curse ‘all the poets in England’ as they draw Mears from ‘direct narrative’ by spurring ‘him to imitate them,’ the result of which is described by Kipling as ‘a confused tangle of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in the busiest park of the day.’[9] ‘The Finest Story in the World’ certainly appears to be the foundation of ‘Wireless.’ Here, the dead John Keats is apparently summoned by the chemist’s assistant Shaynor acting as the medium, or perhaps the ‘automatist’? While the narrator (again, anonymous and maybe unreliable as in ‘The Finest Story in The World’), who had arrived at the shop to witness a telegraphic experiment, acts as the observer or ‘interpreter’.

While there appears to be a correlation between the detail of ‘Wireless’ and Sir Oliver Lodge’s experiments, the extent of any influence can only be determined through further detailed investigation of The Society for Psychical Research’s work and additional research into Kipling’s life and writing.

[1] Moffet, Cleveland, ‘The Edge of the Future: An Interview with Professor Alexander Graham Bell’, McClure’s Magazine, 1, 1 (June, 1893), 39-43 (p.41).

[2] Preece, William Henry, ‘Electricity in the Service of Man’, Blackfriars: The Post Office Magazine, January 1989, 1-7 (p.2).

[3] Jolly, W.P., Sir Oliver Lodge: Psychical Researcher and Scientist (London: Constable, 1974), p. 167.

[4] Jolly, Lodge, pp.167-8.

[5] Jolly, Lodge, p.168.

[6] Davis, Laurence, ‘Science and Technology: Present, Past and Future’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. by Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 52-63 (p. 60).

[7] Lee, Lorna, Trix: Kipling’s Forgotten Sister (Peterborough: Pond View, 2011), p.57.

[8] Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The Dreitarbund’ [1887], in Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy (Cambridge: Pegasus, 2011, pp. 99-103 (pp.100,103).

[9] Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The Finest Story in the World’, The Contemporary Review, Jul 1, 1891, 60, 9-31(pp.15-16).

 

Iain Spillman is a second year student at Nottingham Trent University studying for a BA (Joint Honours) in English and History. Prior to returning to university, Iain had an accomplished and varied career within entertainment retail. In June 2016, Iain was awarded a ten-week SPUR bursary, assisting Sarah Jackson with her research on literature and telephony. During this placement, Iain will be blogging about his experience and research findings at the BT Archives in London.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPUR is Nottingham Trent University’s Scholarship Project for Undergraduate Researchers.

 

More on my research on telephony and telepathy in this article from BT.com.

On Tuesday 7th June, I recorded my essay on frostbite and snow candy for BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking series. This was my first commission as one of the ten 2016 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The programme was presented by Matthew Sweet and broadcast later that night, along with a discussion with the Icelandic writer Sjón. My essay was included in Ian McMillan’s ‘Pick of the Week‘ on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 12th June. You can listen to it in full on BBC Radio 3 SoundCloud.

I’ve just returned from presenting a paper entitled ‘Echographic Whispers: Picturing Derrida on the Phone’ at the fifth Derrida Today conference at Goldsmiths, London.  The telephone echoes in and across a number of Jacques Derrida’s works, and in this paper I offered a close up of his remarks on the remains of a telephone in the photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme in Athens, Still Remains (2010)….

On Friday night, I was driving from Nottingham to the Peak District with my daughter and partner for a few days away. Twelve hours later, I was on a train from Buxton to Abergavenny, on the lookout for nine other confused academics. After a night in Crickhowell, during which I located the nine (easily distinguishable from the football team also staying at the hotel), and an awkward hour of trying to look ‘natural’ for a photographer, we were on our way to the Hay Festival where we found ourselves in the BBC tent being unveiled as the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. It’s an honour to be selected to take part in the scheme – and especially exciting to be named alongside such a fantastic bunch of fellow researchers.

Now I’m back in the Peaks, thanking my family as always for their unending patience. Loitering near the neighbouring farm in the hope of picking up a wifi signal, I find myself loving the quiet, the glorious hills, and all these sheep.

New Generation Thinkers 2016-2017

Doris Lessing became a telephone operator in Salisbury (now Harare) in 1937. In ‘My Mother’s Life’, part 2 (Granta 17, 1985), she writes: ‘My mother experienced this as a final defeat: her daughter was a common telephone operator. The life she was leading … was “fast,” cheap and nasty’.