4 Extra Debut. Lucy Hawking charts the impact of the book Wired Love, on long distance love over telegraph wire, and the technology. From 2017.
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, published in 1879, was a groundbreaking book.
It’s all about a long-distance romance conducted over the telegraph wire - aptly termed The Victorian Internet.
Written by the previously unknown Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love's Manhattan publisher trumpeted it as "a bright little telegraphic novel" that told "the old, old story - in a new, new way".
But Thayer's story was grounded in Victorian reality. Men and women alike worked as telegraph operators, with predictable results. At least one wedding was conducted over the wires and Electrical World magazine even warned of "the dangers of wired love".
Lucy Hawking looks at how the invention of the telegraph led to social changes in the role of women - as well as providing the inspiration for this first on-line romance novel, published over 100 years before the internet.
Finding parallels in today's e-mail world she profiles the life of Ella Cheever Thayer and discusses the appeal of the novel.
She talks to Laura Otis, Britt Peterson and Thomas C Jepson, about the revolutionary technology and the social changes it encouraged.
Drama adapted by Danny Westgate.
Performers:
Samantha Dakin
Tom Bevan
Anna Farnworth
Producer: Julian Mayers
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in October 2017.
