• Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

    Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures


In this issue of 19 we examine how Victorian thinkers grappled with the creative challenges and opportunities bound up with infrastructural innovation, expansion, and upheaval during the period. From the midst of an interdisciplinary ‘infrastructural turn’ extending across humanities and social sciences, we provide vital insight into what infrastructure meant before the term infrastructure bundled transport and communication technologies, public works, and state-devised institutions into a shared category. By interrogating the imaginative and practical margins of multifaceted public systems, the articles that follow provide new insights into conceptual, social, and geopolitical parameters of Victorian infrastructure. These articles make the most of the period’s historical range, from understanding ‘net-working’ via early nineteenth-century Irish Sea crossings to tracing system vulnerabilities within local and imperial railway and telegraph lines. Our contributors recognize the continuities that Victorians perceived between institutional and technological development, from parish and print infrastructures to local modes of resistance to distantly devised expressions of state control. This issue speaks to the imaginatively rich ways in which infrastructure made and unmade Victorian life. Whether imagined or built, nineteenth-century infrastructure leaves a complex legacy for international collaboration and dislocation today, as evident in research methodology as it is in the material traces of large-scale Victorian technologies.


Cover image: View of the Britannia Tubular Bridge (opened 1850) over the Menai Strait, with the Road Suspension Bridge of 1826 in Background (detail), c. 1850, Lithograph, coloured. Science Museum Group Collection Online, 1943-168, CC-BY-NC-SA.

Editors: Nicola Kirkby (Guest Editor), Joanna Hofer-Robinson (Guest Editor)

Introduction


Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures before ‘Infrastructure’

Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures before ‘Infrastructure’

Nicola Kirkby

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

Article


Net-work: Irish Sea Crossings with and beyond Infrastructure

Net-work: Irish Sea Crossings with and beyond Infrastructure

James L. Smith, Claire Connolly and Daniella Traynor

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

Restructuring with Anthony Trollope: Managing Change in Chronicle Provincial Fiction

Restructuring with Anthony Trollope: Managing Change in Chronicle Provincial Fiction

Ruth Livesey

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

‘The great event of modern history’: The Victorian Press Visualizes its Infrastructure

‘The great event of modern history’: The Victorian Press Visualizes its Infrastructure

Caroline Sumpter

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

‘I was not know for sure what be the Queen, Evan; was you?’: Fictions of Development in Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter

‘I was not know for sure what be the Queen, Evan; was you?’: Fictions of Development in Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter

Karin Koehler

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

Railways, Disjointed Mobility, and National Decline: Navigating George Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’

Railways, Disjointed Mobility, and National Decline: Navigating George Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’

Alicia Barnes

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

Around the Wire: Telegraphic Infrastructure and Gothic Energies in Late Victorian Britain

Around the Wire: Telegraphic Infrastructure and Gothic Energies in Late Victorian Britain

Kameron Sanzo

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures

Afterword

Afterword

Susan Zieger

2023-11-08 Issue 35 • 2023 • Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures