Breaking the Network:

Prof. Claire Connolly and Dr James Louis Smith, “Net-work: Making and Breaking Irish Sea Stories”

This collaborative lecture considers how both physical objects or actions and dematerialized forms of connectivity inhere within our understanding of networks. Taking the Irish sea as a case study, we consider the history of Irish sea crossings as a collection of interrelated places, people and things; part of a wider colonial system that is knitted together by political history, facilitated by infrastructure, disrupted by weather and other contingencies and routinely remade via countless crossings. The lecture combines cultural history with spatial and digital humanities approaches in order to consider the potential and challenges of shaping Irish sea stories. 

Dr Nicola Kirkby, “Novel Infrastructure in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)”

‘Infrastructure’ was not part of the vocabulary used in nineteenth-century Britain to describe the myriad communications networks, transport systems, and public services designed and built during the period. Falling under the purview of ‘civil engineering’, such utilities could only operate effectively through public cooperation, and a shared baseline understanding that the structures underpinning such systems would expedite the mechanisms of daily life.

Set in the 1860s, George Eliot’s 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda takes full advantage of transport and communications infrastructure in mobilising its two mainline plots. Yet Eliot’s final novel upsets realist conventions of narrative unity in a way that confused contemporary readers. Throughout, Eliot associates infrastructure – from dingy waiting rooms, and an un-consulted Bradshaw railway guide, and to telegrams relaying old news – with stasis and regression. Even where they advance the plot, such sites and media draw the narrative back in time in ways that upset the novel’s overall infrastructure.

With an emphasis on railways, this paper investigates why Eliot reroutes fictional form so drastically in her final novel. Scientific development of the period exposed what Sarah Alexander has described as ‘imponderable’ new insights into entropy, deep time, and macro and microscope modes of perception. Yet as manmade systems including the railways remained within imaginative reach. As Eliot argues in 1857, however complex, specialists can identify all “essential facts in the existence and relations” of the railways, and even ‘unlocomotive’ thinkers can outline the form. Like novel form, nineteenth-century railways were materially and imaginatively reworkable.

In Daniel Deronda, Eliot reconceptualises the novel as a system – one previously rooted in the railway’s principles of timeliness and destination. In doing so, she rethinks the capacity and purpose of both forms. If literary form and railway infrastructure do not neatly align in Daniel Deronda, then what is the significance of their close, inconsistent entanglement?

Prof. Ruth Livesey, “The Death and Afterlife of the Parish:  Civic Infrastructure and Provincial Fiction”

In their exhaustive history, English Local Government (1906), Beatrice and Sydney Webb saw one date as pivotal in shifting towards centralisation. With ‘the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834’, they concluded, over 60 years before the Local Government Act of 1894, ‘the parish, as a unit of local government in the England outside the Metropolitan area, came virtually to an end’.[1] For centuries the parishes of the Church of England had served a dual role, combining the spiritual and the spatio-temporal. The parish was the organising unit of the old poor law, levying and administering rates at a super-local level. The 1834 Poor Law swept much of this away with the establishment of larger combined Poor Law Unions and elected Boards of Guardians.

Just as these legislative reforms started to – as the Webbs’ put it- ‘strangle the Parish’ unpicking ideas of settlement, customary obligation, and locality within English government, the parish and the parochial became the organising structures of some of the most enduring fiction sequences of the mid-nineteenth century. Parishes, clergy, the vestry and laity determine the imaginary geographies and plots of Trollope’s Barchester novels, (1855-1867), Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford (1861-1876), Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871).

Provincial fiction is a genre that by the very nature of its setting, draws attention to the uneven development of nineteenth-century infrastructures. These works play out the effects of a society moving at variable speeds from centre to periphery such as Gaskell’s contrast of Cranford and Drumble. The narrative work of roads, rails, postal and telegraphic communications in these novels has received welcome attention – in particular from participants at this conference. But we have been more hesitant when it comes to reflecting on the infrastructure and institutions of religion in these works, despite them being – so often self-declared – parochial literature.

The resolutely temporal approach to the structures of the established church in the provincial fictions of Eliot, Oliphant, and Trollope, I argue, foregrounds the function of the parish as part of civic infrastructure. In recent considerations of localism and citizenship, the term ‘civic infrastructure’ has come to denote a range of local networks and community groups.[2] The capacity of communities to benefit from a more participatory approach to decentralised government and local activism is to a great extent determined by a locality’s existing ‘civic infrastructure’ of residents’ associations, voluntary organisations, and religious associations. In precisely those decades when the local governmental role of the parish faded from view, provincial fiction presents – and problematises – the provincial parish as a knowable community for localised decision-making. In Trollope’s The Warden, and Barchester Towers, the established church and its networks of power from parish to Canterbury and Westminster are teased open through the instance of Hiram’s Hospital and the role of church and state in the care of the poor.