Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T06:52:04.472Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×