ABSTRACT
Wire, wires and wiriness were as arresting to the nineteenth-century imagination as wirelesses would be to the modernists-and as the Internet is today. When, in the Mausoleum Book, Leslie Stephen tried to describe the physical prowess he had enjoyed in his student days, he placed the perfectly respectable and elderly word ‘wiry’ in scare quotes as if conscious of a certain modish slanginess. ‘Wiry’ captured for him the surprising paradox that he had been spare, even frail, in body, yet capable and commanding where stamina was required: ‘I could walk and run long distances and I coached the boat till it became head of the river’ (Bell [1895] 1977:6). Today we take it for granted that something as fragile as a wire can conduct electricity and can communicate over long distances, enabling things to happen at great remove. For Stephen it was remarkable.
