Letteratura Vittoriana, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Letteratura

Scarica Letteratura Vittoriana e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Letteratura solo su Docsity!   1   TIME AND SPEED IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE Speed can be regarded as the “keynote of modern existence”1. Modern society relates speed to success: the length of time taken to accomplish a purpose is considered to determine the extent of success: needless to say, the faster the more successful2. This modern obsession with speed can be traced back to the nineteenth century: it can in fact be attributed to the introduction and diffusion of the machine. The nineteenth century, in England especially, was an age of great technological advancements. England was at the highpoint of the industrial revolution - that in a few decades would radically transform the country. In 1845, in his text The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels commented: “Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like any other, with small towns, few and simple industries (...). Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and half million inhabitants, with vast manufacturing cities”3. Factories had replaced much of the manual craftsmanship in the manufactory industry, and new inventions were brought into everyday life, from electricity to the telegraph, the train, and so on. Technology was pervading all aspects of Victorian society. The machine introduced a new pace to life. Before the nineteenth century, life was paced to either natural rhythms, for example the change of seasons and the weather, or to human choice. Men would generally be able to determine their daily routine and the pace of their work on the basis of their preference and feeling4. Besides, nothing could go                                                                                                                 1 Patrides, Aspects of Time, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976, p.73 2 Ibid. 3 Kane, Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction, Hants: Palgrave Macmillian, 1997, p.16 4 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, pp.58-63   2   faster than man could make it go, until the machine was introduced. Because of the machine, pace is not constrained by human and natural limitations, and thus time can be more efficiently employed. As a consequence, the way time was perceived underwent a radical change. Nineteenth century men went from a time dimension that they determined and understood to one that was regulated by the machine. Naturally, speed was the defining feature of the new time dimension. The following essay will consider three ways speed impacted the nineteenth century, that are: speed of production, speed of information and speed of travel. Literary works will be used to illustrate how speed was represented in the contemporary discourse. In general, literature presented two contrasting attitudes in regard to the machine. While many texts avoided the subject considering it undeserving of high literature, realist and sensationalist literature focused quite overtly on technological developments and their consequences on people’s lives: the factory and the railway, in particular, feature quite prominently throughout these works, and thus their impact on Victorian society is directly addressed5. The present investigation will refer to the novel Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell and the short story Wireless by Rudyard Kipling as examples of how speed and its implications are represented. The nineteenth century witnessed the Britain’s mass industrialisation - process that had already begun in the eighteenth century, but only then acquired its mass proportions: industrialisation introduced a new dimension of time, that of the factory. Manual manufactory was paced on the speed of the individual. The artisan would attend to each stage of production, and the time employed for the completion of the task was dependent on his choice. Industrialised economy, on the opposite, was paced on the                                                                                                                 5 Sussman, “Machine Dreams: the Culture of Technology”, pp.197-202   5   allowed for a semi-instantaneous exchange of information regardless of distance13. In short, information could be easily shared throughout Britain, as well as at all ends of the expanding colonial Empire. Documents and literary works of the time show that the Victorians’ initial reactions to the telegraph were of exceptional wonder. What appeared most surprising was that the telegraph liberated information from its material dimension. Information could be circulated as electricity, or later radio waves, and lacked therefore a tangible presence until it was deciphered. It seemed to be simply floating around, as a disembodied voice, and to defy the temporal and spatial limitations that constrain material objects. For this reason, the Victorians often regarded the new technology as an inexplicable, even magical instrument14. In Kipling’s short story Wireless, for example, the telegraph is juxtaposed to psychic powers. One of the characters, whilst waiting to receive a telegraphic signal, is suddenly taken by a drugged trance-like state, and becomes a medium for the voice of the deceased poet Keats. Kipling constructs a parallel between the telegraphic and psychic communication: both are unexplained phenomena and, more precisely, both allow the transmission of a voice that is disembodied from maker and material dimension: that seems, as Mr Cashell puts it, to be “coming out of nowhere”15. In a way, the telegraph is presented as no less magical than spiritualistic messages. From the beginning, the instrument is perceived as mysterious, and although later Mr Cashell attempts a technical explanation, the enchanted aura remains. Despite all the technicalities, in fact, Mr Cashell still calls telegraphic transmission magic and mentions some “Powers, whatever the                                                                                                                 13 Ibid. 14 Menke Richard, Telegraphic Realism, pp.2-15 15 Kipling, “Wireless”, in The Best Short Stories, Ware: Wordsworth, 1997, p.158   6   Powers may be”16 as the origins for the phenomenon. In addition, the technology is often referred to with a mystical vocabulary, as for example the terms “revelation” or “manifestation”17. What is presented as most astounding is the power of the telegraph to defy distance. The speed of transmission is such that it annihilates space. The characters mention this power a number of times. When explaining about induction, especially, Mr Cashell emphasises that telegraphic messages will be transmitted “everywhere in ten years” and then again “anywhere - it only happens to be Poole tonight”18. By the end of the story, the telegraph receives information not just from Poole, but also from the Isle of Wight. The distance, and thus speed, is even greater than expected: the protagonist, astounded, exclaims “we’re eavesdropping across half South England”19. Thanks to the speed of transmission, the telegraph was making the “world smaller and more immediately manageable”20. It was widely employed by the authorities - and for two main purposes. First, the telegraph functioned as a panoptic tool for surveillance and control21. The police used it to exchange information about crimes, in order to allow for a prompt intervention in the relevant area. The telegraph in fact most often appeared in the press in connection to the resolution of investigations: Iwan Morus reports, for example, the case of a fugitive murdered escaped in Slough was captured in London thanks to the                                                                                                                 16 Ibid, p.146 17 Kipling, “Wireless”, p.146 18 Ibid, p.150 19 Ibid, p.157 20 Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain”, p.456 21 Ibid, p.463   7   transmission of his profile, a case which gained a great popular attention22. This surveillance was extended to the overseas colonies, which were now under the control of the centre as never before. Until the nineteenth century, any exchange with the colonies would have taken days, possibly months, leaving to the officials in charge a relative liberty on their administrative choices. Through the telegraph, the margins of the empire were brought unprecedentedly close to the centre23. Britain could enforce any reform and receive immediate response, overall tightening the imperial grip over the overseas territories. The telegraph also became an instrument for the diffusion of Victorian culture and values. News and entertainment were quickly circulated throughout the Empire, and that created a new bond between British people outside Britain and the imperial centre. The telegraph had basically allowed for a cultural heritage that was universally available and that would identify all people in the Empire as British. As a result, it led to a heightened sense of Britishness, and to a greater attachment to the centre in the colonies24. In a way, the Imperial sovereignty that was preserved by a stricter surveillance was also pursued in a subtler manner through the creation of an extended community united by a common culture. In both cases, the speed of information reached by the telegraph played a central role: to a certain extent, the telegraph can actually be considered a key instrument for the imperial expansion achieved by Britain in the nineteenth century25. Despite the impact of speed of production and of information on society, the real icon of speed in the nineteenth century was the railway. For those who did not work in the                                                                                                                 22 Ibid, p.462 23 Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain”, p.455 24 Ibid, p.455 25 Ibid, p.474   10   countryside and the city, and so between the traditional and the modern ways of thinking and of living. The novel is set in the rural areas surrounding the villages of Eltham and Hornby, where a branch of the railway is under construction. The train is not only a symbol of speed: it is actually the catalyst that speeds up the process of transformation and the coming of modernity. A sense of speed, therefore, appears to be perceived more than in relation to travel, and permeates in fact all aspects of life. The gap between the old and the modern is reflected in Gaskell’s characters. These can be easily divided in two categories: those that come with the railway, the modern characters, and those that lived in the countryside before. The protagonist Paul Manning and his colleague Holdsworth are portrayed as distinctively modern men, accustomed to the speed of machines and the modern economy of time. Both of them work as engineers in the construction of the railway, and for this purpose they travel from the city to the countryside, which they have never visited before. In the first pages, Manning relates his work routine - “at my desk by eight o’clock, home to dinner at one, back at the office by two”32 - and, even though his work is not synchronised to a machine, as in factory, it is clear that it abides to the same mechanical management of time. The protagonist’s routine is compared to Mr Holman’s. Contrary to Manning’s, his time is not subjected to a precise work schedule: he does have work to do, he is a farmer and works in the fields, but he has not schedule to keep to. In short, he can choose how to manage his time. He wakes up at three in the morning, and by half six he has already performed a wide range of activities: only then he starts his work in the fields. The long list of Mr Holman’s morning activities suggests that his time is actually busier and more efficiently managed than the protagonist’s one. All that Manning does is work, and in fact he complains of the                                                                                                                 32 Gaskell, Cousin Phillis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p.261   11   little variety that characterises his life. He is so busy, he says, that he has no time to read - and he seems to pride himself in his industriousness and his efficiency. For him, in fact, speed and efficiency are achievements well deserving of appreciation, because it entails the effort of keeping to a timed routine imposed upon him by his job. Without the work obligation to comply to, he is unable to manage his time. He perceives his leisure time as empty - “I did not make the most of the leisure time I had”33, he in fact admits, showing how he evaluates his leisure time by the same standards of efficiency of his work time, yet does not manage to find a purpose to it. Manning, overall, provides an example of a modern, obsessive perception of time. He feels that he has no control over it, and is constantly struggling to keep up to the standards of speed and efficiency that are imposed upon him. Mr Holman, on the opposite, is in control of his time. When Manning asks “what has he to do?”, Phillis replies “what has he not do?”34: to her, as to her father, commitments are not obligations imposed by external authority, but responsibilities that the individual takes upon himself. There is no clear distinction between work duties and leisure occupations. To Mr Holman and his daughter, reading and learning Latin are as important as farming: personal pleasure, so to say, is as valued a purpose as work and productivity. Their lives, in general, are not dominated by speed. Contrary to the modern man, they live in a dimension of time that is suitable to and controlled by the person, instead than by the machine, and therefore have no obsession with time waste or time passage. This way of living is very appealing to the protagonist and to Mr Holdsworth, that enjoy the tranquil time spent with the Holman family, yet it will be finally disrupted by them -                                                                                                                 33 Gaskell, Cousin Phillis, p.270 34 Ibid.   12   foreshadowing the effect that the railway will have on a larger scale on the countryside. Not only do they explain the new technological inventions, the turnip-cutting machine for example: they encourage the modern business-oriented mentality that values efficiency, speed and money. Mr Holdsworth finally departs for Canada after the prospect of a higher salary, and abandons the love-struck Phillis. The illness that she consequently develops has been compared by critics to the malady of urban modernity35 . Her transformation reflects the change that will eventually destroy the traditional and peaceful ways of living. At the end of the novel, in fact, she decides to leave the countryside and move to Birmingham: and although she concludes that she will later go back to her rural town, the reader is left to wonder whether that will ever be possible. In an alternative ending that was not published in the final edition, Phillis returns to her parents’ village, but has become an example of modernity herself. She is dedicated to further modernising the village infrastructures, and quite symbolically she is putting in practise “what she has learned from Holdsworth”36. Gaskell, having celebrated the traditional ways of living throughout the novel, seems to deny that they could be maintained any longer: change finally appears as inevitable. All the technological inventions above-mentioned and the new speed connected to them amounted in fact to a sense of radical transformation. Never before had society been revolutionised at such a fast pace: in a way, a society that was functioning in a faster manner could also be transformed faster. For the first time, the “time-span (of social change) was considerably shorter than that of human life”37. Before the 19th century,                                                                                                                 35 Matus, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 36 Gaskell, Cousin Phillis, p.364 37 Patrides, Aspects of Time, p.73