This chapter considers intersections between the histories of literature and of telecommunication technologies – telegraph, telephone, radio – in the first decades of the twentieth century. Early in the century, some readers might have encountered ‘Hertzian waves’ for the first time when Kipling drew on them as figures for determinism, invisible influence, and the unconscious. Technologies of telecommunication also offered a reference point for a modern sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection in the works of authors technophilic (Wells), technophobic (Forster, Eliot), or more conflicted (Ford), as well as those whose attitudes towards technology were at times even harder to parse (Joyce, Woolf). The cryptic codes of telegraphy, the decoupling of the voice from body on the wire and the airwaves, the emergent possibilities of a mass culture broadcast into the air in real time: all of these helped reshape not only the media ecology in which print works had value and meaning, but also some of the most urgent questions facing authors in the century’s opening decades, questions of the relationships between culture and subjectivity, fragmentation and totality, signal and noise.

Today, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is the best-known literary work that highlights the late nineteenth-century’s panoply of print and non-print media. This chapter analyzes how this focus allows the novel to set up a dialectic that has gone unremarked in previous critical accounts of it. In Dracula, gaps, losses, and incomplete translations between media become a source of uncanniness, producing the effect of the unreal and the paranormal. Yet the novel also presents the richness and particularity of multiple media giving way to the typewriter, a device that is supposed to yield that quintessentially modern substance, demediated information. With its vampiric power to feed on original media while converting and occulting them, the typewriter allows the novel to liquidate their aura of originality while keeping it hauntingly available, even undead.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.

In 1881, the United States President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, an insane man partly inspired by criticism of Garfield in newspapers. From the parallel histories of Guiteau and Garfield as vernacular media theorists, to the involvement of Alexander Graham Bell in the search for the bullet in Garfield’s body, to Walt Whitman’s memorial poem “The Sobbing Bells,” the incident and its representations were thoroughly enmeshed in the media systems of the era. By the time Garfield died weeks later, journalism, sermons, biographies and other tributes proclaimed a shared grief such as the world had never known, a mourning that seemed to exceed the bounds of history and of the nation—mistaking the convergence across an astonishing array of old and new media for the sentimental unification of all humanity.

Critics have often recognized George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) for its rich treatment of late-Victorian authorship and publishing. Moreover, it is particularly notable for its self-consciousness about the social and cultural determinants of its own production as a three-volume novel and a work in print. This chapter argues that the novel’s bracing and disenchanted account of print culture emerges from the prospect of a media ecology in which print becomes just another -graphy. In this world of mediated distraction and disposability, print’s material dimensions would become intrusively noticeable, even as different formats tweak the affordances of print to target different readerships. The vision of print among other media haunts New Grub Street, but it was fully embraced by George Newnes’s wildly successful Tit-Bits, the real-life journal that (as “Chit-Chat”) inspires the novel’s most cutting satire of mass publishing.

Marie Corelli wrote bestselling supernatural romances and detested the New Woman, while George Paston wrote realistic New Woman novels that cultivated a small, intellectual readership. Yet in the wake of the three-volume novel, both authors produced fiction about the writing life that makes the case for the codex book and the single-volume novel as bulwarks against the circular, self-contained system of other media—a system maintained by men. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) puts forward the bestselling novel as a means of direct, sanctified connection between celebrity author and adoring audience. Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) looks to the future work, the novel unwritten, as a repository of truth and meaning. Together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, Octave Uzanne’s essay “The End of Books” (1894) portrayed the arrival of newer media as the fin of print culture. In this account, books are heavy and slow, newer media are light and liberating, and modern culture is an area of obsolescence and obliteration. A richer consideration of the varieties of print formats and the relationships between print and nonprint media might help us avoid the inclinations that come together in such accounts and their many modern successors. Uzanne’s vision of a post-print culture actually illuminates the late nineteenth century’s cultures of print. A contemporary image of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab offers a more illuminating figure for the relationships between literature, print and nonprint media, and new technology.

In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), the encounter between a skilled Yankee mechanic and the novel’s fanciful Middle Ages becomes a confrontation not simply between America and Britain, or between progress and stasis, but between oral and literate cultures. The novel’s perspective and even its origins bear out its connections to a late-nineteenth-century American anthropology that anticipated twentieth-century theories of orality and literacy. Twain’s own aspirations and experiences as a would-be new-media magnate, especially his sponsorship of James Paige’s mechanical compositor, inform his treatment of media history as a realm of antagonism and supersession. In the novel’s chilling final scene, techno-cultural rivalries expand into warfare and mass annihilation, a vision in which electricity and the Gatling gun figure as the doubles of the era’s new media technologies.

This chapter reexamines the Victorian three-volume novel and its disappearance in the mid-1890s as an event in the media history of fiction. The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it or because readers suddenly rejected it. But its disappearance had important implications for the form and content of fiction, and it provoked widespread discussion of late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media and to others. Building on the work of the book historians who have told the economic story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a different way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers in an information empire, that tied the distribution of fiction to its material form, and that aligned novels with other print genres such as periodicals that didn’t center on the single codex book.

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.