Nineteenth-Century Communications

This volume foregrounds the close, and mutually informing, relationships between mediated communication and technological innovation during the nineteenth century. It draws attention to the fact that communication was a driver of innovation, but also considers how communication practices adapted to new media and technologies. The following themes and subjects are covered:
- The development of the telegraph, from the semaphore in the late eighteenth century to the wireless in the late nineteenth.
- Rhe shift from privately owned to nationalised telegraph infrastructure and services.
- Mail trains, travelling post offices, and accelerated public communication.
- The development of and cultural responses to steam-packet technologies and infrastructures, and accelerated international communication.
- The development of and cultural responses to submarine and transoceanic telegraphy.
- The beginnings of telephony.

Karin Koehler is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Bangor University. Her research explores the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and connective infrastructure, focusing on Anglophone and Welsh-language material.
Nicola Kirkby held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, London (2019-2023), investigating nineteenth-century infrastructure and literary culture. Her works include Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
Kathleen McIlvenna is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Derby. Her research focuses on histories of work, health and retirement in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Ellen Smith is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol. Her work explores communication cultures in colonial South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Harriet M. Thompson is Visiting Research Fellow in nineteenth-century literature and culture in the Department of English, King's College London. Her research explores the relationship between communications technologies and print culture.
Eleanor Hopkins is a Senior Policy Adviser in Higher Education & Research at the British Academy. She provides strategic oversight of the Academy's Research & Development (R&D), innovation and skills policy.