Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England by Julia Grella O’Connell

Author:Julia Grella O’Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Wordsworth the Romantic here makes an uncharacteristic apologia for the new, nature-marring technologies which, he predicts, will be unjustly

dismissed by his colleagues. Indeed, he suggests that these machines are even a logical outgrowth of nature, and that, by allowing time to transcend the demands of distance, they will impart to man a greater inspiration, a heightened sense of sight—the poetic power of vision and prophecy.

The telegraph harp and the voice of god

On the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Morse was conducting his own telegraphic experiments, culminating in 1844 with the transmission of the first written message to be sent by electric telegraphy, an apt quotation from the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought?”30 In the meantime, American naturalist Henry David Thoreau, like his older contemporary Wordsworth, was also falling under telegraphy’s spell.31 Unlike the work of his friend and supporter Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s work was scarcely known in Britain, and indeed, as Emerson remarked in his 1862 eulogy on Thoreau’s death, “No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.”32 Nevertheless, Thoreau, himself “a connoisseur of the effects of … sounds”33 which occurred in the natural world, was so galvanized by the idea of telegraphy that he (like Wordsworth) correlated the new invention with a heightened ability to communicate with the sublime—an ability that he believed was conferred by the constant low-pitched humming of the telegraph wires strung along the railways. In his record of an 1839 trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in Massachusetts, Thoreau described an experience of mystical audition engendered by an encounter with a humming telegraph wire:

Traveling on foot very early one morning … when I reached the railroad at Plaistow, I heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by gods. Perchance, like the statue of Memnon, it resounds only in the morning, when the first rays of the sun fall on it. It was like the first lyre or shell heard on the sea-shore,—that vibrating cord high in the air over the shores of earth. So have all things their higher and their lower uses. I heard a fairer news than the journals ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.34

Throughout his life, Thoreau continued to refer to the hum of the telegraph wire as “the telegraph harp,” mentioning the phenomenon in his journal some thirty times.

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