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26 - ‘The annihilation of space and time’: literature and technology

from PART IV - MATTERS OF DEBATE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Kate Flint
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six inside, and making a two days’ journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month; – but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a little, sharp sentence, which well-bred folk would think too abrupt to be spoken.

(Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ (March 1859))

The narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1859 story, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ is rattled and deafened by her accelerated entry into a technological age. Railway speed shrinks both distance and time and two days contract into two hours. She is baffled by a synaesthetic overload of speed, sound, and light: ‘a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle’: the history of technology is symbiotically linked to the history of perception. In her retrospect, the new technologies have affected the very way in which people communicate – letters have become ‘short jerky notes … without beginning or end’.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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