One fantasy of modernism is telling all there is to tell about the most ordinary of lives. On a train journey from Richmond to Waterloo Station, Virginia Woolf watched “an old lady in the corner ...

Clare Pettitt
Clare Pettitt is Professor of 19th-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. She is currently finishing two books; one called “Distant Contemporaries: Revolution, Time Lag and Form 1815-1848” and “The Digital Switch: Literature and Compression 1850-1920.” She is a Director of ‘Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857–1900’, an interdisciplinary project about the laying of the Atlantic Cable: http://www.scrambledmessages.ac.uk/