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)

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