Abstract
It may be well doubted whether upon the whole the telegraph has not added more to the annoyance than to the comforts of life, and whether the gentlemen who spent all the public money without authority ought not to have been punished with special severity in that they had injured humanity, rather than pardoned because of the good they had produced. Who is benefited by telegrams? The newspapers are robbed of their old interest, and the very soul of intrigue is destroyed.1
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Notes
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1874–75, Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995), 380–1.
M. E. Grant Duff, ‘Letters’, Cornhill 1.4 (October 1896): 464–83, 464.
Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1980), 67.
Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 172.
Frederick L. DeNaples, ‘Unearthing Holmes: 1890s Interpretations of the Great Detective’, in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s, ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 215–35
Peter Thoms, Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in 19th-Century Detective Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998)
Jaya Mehta, ‘English Romance; Indian Violence’, Centennial Review 39.3 (1995): 611–57
Joseph W. Childers, ‘Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth’, in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 201–21
James Wilson Hyde, The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1885), 249.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890, London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 16.
Andrew J. Moody, ‘“The Harmless Pleasure of Knowing”: Privacy in the Telegraph Office and Henry James’s “In the Cage”’, Henry James Review 16.1 (1995): 53–65
Charles Lee Lewes, ‘Freaks of the Telegraph’, Blackwood’s Magazine 129 (1881): 468–78
W. J. Johnston’s Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes (1877) — a collection of fiction written by American and British telegraph operators — concludes with numerous pages of advertisements for similar book collections and journals carrying tales of and by telegraphists; W. J. Johnston, ed., Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit, and Wisdom (New York: Johnston, 1877).
See Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Company, 1998), 50.
Robert N. Brodie, ‘“Take a Wire, Like a Good Fellow”: The Telegraph in the Canon’, Baker Street Journal 41.3 (1991): 148–52
Iwan Rhys Morus, ‘The Electric Ariel: Telegraphy and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 39 (Spring 1996): 339–78
Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph and a History of the Great Atlantic Cable (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1858)
J. Henniker Heaton, ‘An Imperial Telegraph System’, Nineteenth Century 45 (1899): 906–14
J. Henniker Heaton, ‘Postal and Telegraphic Communication of the Empire’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Trust 19 (1888): 171–221
On first glance, KyoungMin Han appears to counter my claim. Han’s article, like my discussion here, focuses on Holmes’s refusal of emotional and ideological involvement in the Morstan case; it turns at the end to assert that ‘in spite of the inhuman aspect of his “scientific” methods and his utter contempt for any kind of emotional attachment Holmes himself can be seen as an object of emotional engagement’; KyoungMin Han, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four: More than a Story about a Machine?’, Nineteenth-Century Literature in English 12.2 (2008): 155–69
See Robinson, British Post Office, 425–6, and Daunton, Royal Mail, 259–68, for discussions of an 1890 postal strike, the issues precipitating it, and its consequences. H. G. Swift devotes three chapters to the discontent among telegraph workers during the 1870s through the early 1890s when they suffered from low and unevenly distributed salaries, long work hours, and excessive punishment for menial errors; see chs 12, 13, and 17 in H. G. Swift, A History of Postal Agitation: From Eighty Years Ago Till the Present Day, Book 1, new, rev. edn (Manchester: Percy Brothers, 1929).
Alan Clinton, Post Office Workers: A Trade Union and Social History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984).
See Simon Potter, ‘Communication and Integration: The British Dominions Press and the British World, c. 1876–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30 (2003): 190–206
Christopher Clausen, The Moral Imagination: Essays of Literature and Ethics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 64.
Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 147.
Mortimer Menpes’s 1901 autobiography recounts a conversation with Doyle in which Doyle reportedly said’ sherlock Holmes was merely a mechanical creature, not a man of flesh and blood, — and easy to create because he was soulless’; Mortimer Menpes, War Impressions: Being a Record in Colour (London: Charles Black, 1901), 123–4
Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1924), 103.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘My First Book’, McClure’s Magazine 3.3 (August 1894): 225–8
Ed Wiltse, ‘“So Constant an Expectation”: Sherlock Holmes and Seriality’, Narrative 6.2 (May 1998): 105–22
Qtd in Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle: His Life and Art (London: Methuen, 1943), 96.
Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77.3 (2005): 523–62
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 1
Recognizing interconnections between domestic and international issues but failing to put that knowledge to use is the problem that Caroline Reitz asserts that detective fiction, like that of Doyle, was attempting to overcome. Claiming that Holmes’s entries into foreign territories are not the aberrations most critics deem them, Reitz posits that these tales forward ‘an argument for the necessity of better authority through a centralized system of local knowledge. The systematization of knowledge requires constant forays into the domain of the local and peripheral, not an insulated surveillance from the center’; Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 76.
Considering Doyle’s exploration of political issues, see John McBratney, especially 153 and 157–8, who suggests Doyle’s language mimics many contemporary imperial narratives based on nineteenth-century work on the ‘criminal type’, census materials, and ‘Indian gazetteers [that] were vast, alphabetized summaries of geographical, historical, and ethnographic information about the subcontinent’; John McBratney, ‘Racial and Criminal Types: Indian Ethnography and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 149–67
Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1903), vii–ix.
John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green have edited a collection of Doyle’s 1879 to 1930 ‘Letters to the Press’. Their categorized index of the letters includes Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Literary, Military, Religion and Spiritualism — hardly the subjects of one who has lost faith in epistolary power in moral, social, and political debate; Arthur Conan Doyle, Letters to the Press, ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986).
Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley’s Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (New York: Penguin, 2007)
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© 2013 Laura Rotunno
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Rotunno, L. (2013). Telegraphing Literature in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. In: Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323804_5
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