THE man named C and the woman named N have never actually met. They only know each other by their online handles. C isn’t sure how old N is, or what she looks like; N is equally in the dark about C. But they have a crush on each other, and they talk online every day.
N (short for Nattie) can’t even be sure that C is a man. She admits that their online romance is almost certainly hopeless: “In all probability we shall never meet. I think I should be dreadfully embarrassed if we should… Face to face we would really be strangers to each other.”
It’s the old story about online romance, but it’s older than you think. Much older.
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Wired Love: A romance of dots and dashes came out in the spring of 1879, the first and perhaps only book about a long-distance romance conducted over the telegraph – or what Tom Standage, author and science writer for The Economist, has 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”.
Equal parts old-fashioned romance and newfangled online novel, Wired Love follows the infatuation of two telegraph operators in unspecified American frontier towns. Other operators listen in and “flame” them. “Picture a hippopotamus, an elephant,” one interloper snipes when C wonders what N looks like. At one point Nattie is even deceived by an impostor of C, sporting bear-greased hair, stinking cologne, cheap jewellery and “teeth all at variance with each other”.
When the real C – Clem – moves to Nattie’s town, they are terribly shy of each other. “I had more of your company on the wire,” Nattie complains. So they string telegraph wire between their apartments, and stay up half the night wiring each other. Add an ISP and lattes, and it might as well be 2002.
Yet 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. Electrical World magazine even warned of “the dangers of wired love”. When one Brooklyn woman used a telegraph to carry on a secret affair with a married man, her father “threatened to blow her brains out, and she therefore had him arrested”, the magazine reported.
Thayer herself was a trained telegraph operator. Born in 1849 in Saugus, Massachusetts, the first child of apothecary George Thayer and teacher Mary Cheever, Thayer was hit hard by her father’s death in 1863. Thayer and her sister Mary eventually moved to Boston to seek work. Mary became a teacher and Thayer took up work as a telegrapher at the Brunswick Hotel, one of the finest in the city.
“The telegraph offered a great opportunity to young women,” says Standage in, fittingly enough, an email. “Learning Morse was rather like learning to type or use Microsoft Office, or (for a while there) knowing HTML.” Laura Otis of Hofstra University in New York, who studied Thayer’s work for her book Networking, concurs: “Telegraphy provided exhilarating opportunities for women when there were few jobs available, and gave the dignity of earning income.” But the limited opportunities women had for advancement must have chafed on the ambitious Thayer. Otis points out that when Henry James needed a resentful worker for his novella In The Cage, he chose a woman telegrapher.
Perhaps to satisfy her ambition, Thayer turned to writing. She had already published fiction in children’s magazines after an 1869 debut with an inauspicious poem in a pamphlet published by her piano teacher. But no one could have expected the extraordinary novel that she wrote while working at the Brunswick Hotel.
Wired Love came out at the high-water mark of telegraphy. “There was probably only a small window where such a novel would have been, er, novel,” Standage says. Indeed, the book’s characters already marvel over the latest novelty – telephones – and speculate about faxes. “Isn’t there a – a something – a fac-simile arrangement?” one character asks.
Even more extraordinary is Thayer’s prediction of wireless love. “We will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but that some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? Something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of ‘That beloved voice’, they will only have to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! Blissful lovers of the future!”
After Wired Love, Thayer moved on to an even bolder vision of the future. Her next work, The Lords of Creation, was America’s first suffragist play. It was published in 1883, but never performed.
Thayer never published another book. And yet there are many other “Wired Loves” on our shelves now. The explosive growth of email generated a burst of fiction in the late 1990s that tapped into similar ideas: from Nan McCarthy’s trilogy Crash, Chat and Connect (1996), to Astro Teller’s Exegesis (1997) and Matt Beaumont’s E (2000). Even mainstream fare such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the movie You’ve Got Mail got in on the act. Email is now a humdrum part of everyday life, like the telephone, the telegraph and the penny post before it. But when the Next Big Thing comes along, short-lived fictional offspring will be sure to follow.
The genre’s godmother remains a shadowy literary figure. Thayer went on to children’s magazine hack work, and then settled into newspaper work in Boston. She never married, but stayed close to her sister in the city. Two decades after her last book she still defiantly listed her occupation as “author” in the Boston directory. But what little reputation she had as an author or journalist was quickly forgotten. When she died in 1925, not a single Boston newspaper bothered to run a death notice for their late colleague.
Wired Love has now been out of print for well over a century. There is not even a copy in the libraries at Saugus and Boston. No picture of America’s first online novelist and first suffragette playwright is known to exist and there is no commemorative plaque in her home town. The Hotel Brunswick is no more.
But there is one surviving monument to Thayer’s life. The Boston apartment where she wrote Wired Love, a three-storey brick building at 283 Shawmut Avenue, is still standing. The day I made a pilgrimage to it, a man down the street was half-yelling into a cellphone – pleading, perhaps, with his girlfriend.
Ah! Blissful lovers of the future!
