Embodying Telegraphy in Late Victorian London

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Upon the nationalization of the British telegraph system in 1870, a set of processes at work inside London's Central Telegraph Office that was dictated by the bodily and spatial ordering of the era and combined with competing modes of Victorian class-inflected respectability produced gender-specified information labor. One of the effects of this process on telegraphy in London's Central Office in the first decade of nationalized telegraphy was the creation of high-status circuits catering to the state, international trade, sporting life, and imperial business and low-status circuits directed toward the local and the provincial. These distinct telegraphic orbits were connected to different types of telegraph instruments operated by differently gendered telegraphists. The human components of the telegraph system embodied the stratifications of the ascendant telecommunications era.