Anne Chapman researches the interplay of cultural and social forms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with interests in periodical culture, short fiction and the confluence of the visual and the verbal. She teaches at Glasgow Caledonian University London.Natalie Hume is an independent art historian whose research interests include medium, material culture and the politics of visual representation. Her PhD, awarded by the Courtauld Institute of Art, investigated nineteenth-century transatlantic relations through the lens of commercial art.

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• Introduction 1ANNE CHAPMAN AND NATALIE HUME1 To Be Connected: Perspectives on Autonomy and Risk from the Electric Age 7MANU LUKSCH AND MUKUL PATEL2 Cyborg Imperium, c. 1900 48DUNCAN BELL3 Universal Visual Languages in the Age of Telegraphy 71GRACE BROCKINGTON4 Plotting Passengers at a Metropolitan Station: Paddington in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 96NICOLA K IRKBY5 ‘Some Sentient Creature’. The Cable Body and the Body of Labour: Robert Dudley, William Howard Russell and the 1865 Voyage of the Great Eastern 114KATE FLINT6 Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism 137CAROLINE ARSCOTT AND CLARE PETTITT7 ‘Recoding the Sea’: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the Work of Allan Sekula (Telegraph Version) 161GAIL DAY AND STEVE EDWARDS8 random international 189INTERVIEW BY ANNE CHAPMAN AND NATALIE HUME