The Telegraph: Radical Transmission in the 1790s

摘要

Mary Fairclough's recent essay explores the political, social, and epistemological effects of the optical telegraph in late eighteenth-century Britain, focusing in particular on how telegraph imagery appears in conversations about reformist politics and global communication in the 1790s. Fascinatingly, as Fairclough outlines, the optical telegraph "appears to demand recourse to figurative or metaphorical expression in order to describe its effects" (26). To track the deployment of the telegraph metaphor, she focuses on how the aptly named anti-ministerial newspaper, the Telegraph, exploits the figurative implications of its namesake – namely the telegraph's speed, accuracy, and reach – in ways that mobilise radical politics and help mitigate the repression of dissent. First documenting how telegraphic technology moves from France to Britain, Fairclough goes on to discuss the Telegraph's implementation of the telegraph trope, as well as its skirmishes with the law and its connections with the London Corresponding Society. While the Telegraph employs the telegraph metaphor as a means of articulating the "radical aspiration to the swift communication of political information," conservative attempts to curb such aspirations similarly appropriate telegraphic imagery, and thus command over the telegraph trope becomes central to the political discourse of the period. Fairclough also examines the telegraphic metaphor in terms of both its promise (the possibility of "radical communication" across the globe [33]) and its limits (as in the case of exiled radicals in Australia). Despite the practical limitations of telegraphic technology, however, Fairclough concludes that the telegraph comes to demonstrate "the transformative political effects of communicative media" (Abstract).