Chapter 2 - Fictions of the Victorian Telephone

Summary

Although Alexander Graham Bell introduced the electric telephone to Britain soon after its invention, it was not quickly adopted there and remained less than ubiquitous in Victorian daily life and literature. But in the 1890s, three fictional tales of young writers—Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (1891), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898)—all invoke the telephone as they treat the obstacles to literary production. These texts highlight not the device’s technical properties so much as its unexpected ability to embody a new concept: the idea of a media system that fused new communication technologies with print forms created for a mass audience—a version of what would later be called mass media.