Arrested movement: Telegraphy disruption of illicit travel in nineteenth-century news and narrative

Abstract In January 1845, John Tawell was arrested for murdering his mistress Sarah Hart. The sensational case captured the imagination of the press, not least because Tawell’s escape to London was undone by a prototype telegraph that sent information of his deed ahead of his physical travel. Proponents of the new technology publicized this case, and others like it, to popularize telegraph use, and soon the trope of telegraphically disrupted travel was a new site for both narrative and discourse formation. This article explores the discursive representation of the telegraph as a tool of law enforcement, focusing in particular on the moral implications and authority structures that attached to telegraph communication when it was used to disrupt travel in the first decades of its use. When this law enforcement application was expanded to tracking eloping couples, the authority of telegraph communications was punctured. Because of the competing discourse around elopements more broadly, the authority of the telegraph to identify individuals accurately or authoritatively halt their progress was undermined. Analysing the mechanisms of this layered discourse reveals both persistent dominant discourses about technology and vulnerable authority structures that deserve scrutiny rather than unquestioned acceptance.