ABSTRACT
In The Atlantic Telegraph (1865), the journalist W. H. Russell called the laying of the transatlantic cable an effort to ‘establish a new material link between the Old World and the New’. The artist Robert Dudley, accompanying Russell on the 1865 Great Eastern cable expedition, made over sixty watercolours commemorating this ultimately unsuccessful attempt: twenty-four of them were turned into lithographs illustrating The Atlantic Telegraph. This chapter asks how visual representation depicted the labour and the immense geographic scale involved. It considers how Dudley’s lithographs, emphasising the Cable’s materiality and physical and mental human labour, engage with Russell’s text. They speak to the uncertainties of early cable transmission and the difficulty of knowing what is happening under the Atlantic’s surface. In contrast to Dudley’s documentary work, Russell employs figurative language and mythological references, animating both the deep sea and the Cable itself. The energy and agency of humans and Cable creates a hybrid force that collapses animate and inanimate – echoing the hybrid nature of The Atlantic Telegraph, made up of both text and image. Ultimately, the emphasis falls on the importance of cooperation between disparate parts – as brought home in Dudley’s oil paintings representing the Cable’s successful 1866 landing.
