‘The Electric Constable’: Telegraphic Language and the Capture of John Tawell, 1845-1854

Abstract

Uses the example of the capture of a murderer to examine the phenomenon of the electric telegraph. Describes how the telegraph eliminated boundaries between suburb and city – and between the “respectable” and “dangerous” classes. Reviews several contemporary accounts of electric telegraphy that equate the negotiation of these political dichotomies with the oscillation between writing and speech that characterizes the various paradigms of telegraphic writing; if the telegraph’s social role is to police boundaries, these authors suggest, its rhetorical role is to puncture them, producing a new form of writing that works by the substitution and displacement of words over distance. Believes the revolutionary claims made for telegraphic language are finally undermined, however, by these authors’ conservative retreat from transformations of language and praxis, a retreat exemplified by Elizabeth Gaskell’s adaptation of Tawell’s story in North and South.