My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office ... - Monoskop

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WOMEN TELEGRAPHERS IN LITERATURE AND CINEMA
courts, the Times opined that “ministers who lend themselves to such a
mockery of law and morality as a marriage by telegraph . . . are lending their
aid to enable foolish people to live in a state of concubinage.” 15
In the Cage
Henry James’s novella In the Cage, published in 1898, deals with issues of
class and society in late Victorian England. On the surface, the story is reminiscent
of “Along the Telegraph Wires.” It is the story of a telegraphist in
the Mayfair district of London who begins to involve her telegraphic customers
in an elaborate fantasy world which she weaves out of the messages
they send. She remains curiously nameless and enigmatic throughout the
story—James refers to her as “our young woman.” 16
For “our young woman,” the cage, the post and telegraph office she occupies
in the corner of Cocker’s, a grocer’s store in a fashionable part of
London, does not represent a chance for social advancement; rather, it is a
sign of how far she has fallen socially. She must work to support her widowed
mother, who has taken to drink and with whom she shares a dingy flat,
which is only referred to and never seen; there are suggestions of earlier
family misfortunes. Her only confidante is a Mrs. Jordan, a vicar’s widow
who does floral arrangements for wealthy homes; “our young woman”
trades gossip about the scandals of her telegraph customers for Mrs. Jordan’s
descriptions of the interiors of great houses.
Although fascinated by the seemingly carefree and scandalously immoral
lives of her rich and profligate customers, “our young woman” is realistic
about her own prospects. She keeps company on Sundays, her day
off, with a Mr. Mudge, who manages a similar office in Chalk Garden, a less
fashionable neighborhood in the northwestern part of the city. She has resigned
herself to marrying the practical but unimaginative Mr. Mudge, although
she seems less than enthusiastic about it.
“Our young woman’s” fantasies center around the person of Captain
Everard, a handsome and dissolute young rake who regularly comes to her
office to arrange liaisons with his lover via the telegraph; he belongs, she
notes, “supremely to the class that wired everything, even their expensive
feelings.” Lady Bradeen, the object of Captain Everard’s attentions, was
“the handsomest woman she had ever seen”; she came to the telegraph of-