Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital by Katie Hindmarch-Watson, and: Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 by Robert J. Topinka (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital by Katie Hindmarch-Watson, and: Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 by Robert J. Topinka Mark W. Turner (bio) Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, by Katie Hindmarch-Watson; pp. xi + 270. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020, $29.95, $29.95 ebook, £25.00, £25.00 ebook. Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900, by Robert J. Topinka; pp. xii + 182. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020, $85.00, $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook, £71.00, £30.00 paper, £30.00 ebook. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone to learn that race, gender, and class were deeply imbricated in the forms and technologies of communication in the nineteenth century. More surprising, I think, is how little extended work there has been that teases out in granular ways the implications of that imbrication, considering the significance and impacts of a range of rapidly developing communication technologies across the century. Both Katie Hindmarch-Watson's Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital and Robert J. Topinka's Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 offer important new insights into the topic and deepen our understanding of a technologized society. Their focus is not the histories of specific technologies (though there is some of that in both books), but the social implications of a society quickly adapting to those technologies. As a historian, Hindmarch-Watson provides a deeply researched, archive-driven account of the labor forces behind the telegraph and the telephone in particular; hers is a labor history of one branch of the nineteenth-century service economy. As a media studies scholar, Topinka brings together a media archaeology approach and actor-network theory to argue that race was a key technology in mediating the proliferation of material things in the urban world. While they explore the concept of technology in distinct and even divergent ways, both studies lead to a consideration of biopolitics in the center of the globalizing, imperial, and highly networked world: London. Hindmarch-Watson's study focuses on the "information conduits" who acted as mediators in the electronic communication systems that came to define the modern, [End Page 306] urban world, from roughly the 1870s to the beginning of World War I (1). As the infrastructure of new communications systems were rolled out—telegraph lines and stations in the city and telegraph poles alongside railways, for example—new occupations emerged, such as telegraphists, telegraph messengers (the infamous "telegraph boys"), and telephone operators (12). The quickly growing workforce became central to the expansion of the industry; this new labor was "crucial to liberal aspirations for ever more efficient streams of movement" and therefore also key to the expansion of empire (3). Hindmarch-Watson develops what she calls a "bodied-labor history," one that attends to "the active negotiations between workers and the powers they are subject to" and "foregrounds human engagement" (4). The telegraphist in Henry James's In the Cage (1898), a curious go-between mediating messages who has been much discussed by literary scholars, might be an example of this bodied labor, but Serving a Wired World is concerned with the real rather than imagined lives of the information economy. A chapter on "Bodied Telegraphy," for example, explores the gendered dynamics (and tensions) between male and female telegraph workers in the industry. There is a fascinating discussion of "electric harassment" and the ways telegraphists might infer the gender of the messenger through discerning the "individual styles of signaling, such as the timing of Morse code sounds" (78). "Much of this telegraphic metacommunication," she writes, "was predicated on fantasies about the individual at the other end of the wire" (79). A number of other chapters explore the role of telegraph boys in the network of people and locations that emerged in London. The Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which telegraph boys moved across "the telegraphic city" of London not only as telecoms...