Simone Fari's Victorian Telegraphy before Nationalization offers an institutional survey of the companies which ran the first British telegraph service up to its nationalization in 1869. ‘Many studies’, Fari tells us, ‘describe the origins of the service, others the players, while still others take into consideration telegraphs over the long term in Britain. This monograph presents instead an analysis of the technological and entrepreneurial features of the service’ (p. 1). Fari achieves this by going right back to the start of the telegraph service, before introducing the main companies, their challenges and their changes up to 1869. Fari takes a strictly chronological approach and his description is informed by substantial primary archival research, uncovered from the British Telecom library and the archives of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Fari begins by looking at the origins of the electric telegraph, with an introduction to Charles Cooke and William Wheatstone. The early years, where Cooke promoted the telegraph to various railway companies and founded the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) in 1846, are also described. The account places Cooke as the central protagonist in the initial phases of the electric telegraph, arguing that he was ‘the driving force’, ‘the main player’, and that he possessed ‘visionary power’, ‘long-sightedness and lucidity of analysis’ (pp. 42–43). Cooke may well have been all these things, but the validity of this unfettered praise is challenged as soon as you consider the sources used. In the first few chapters, Fari relies almost entirely on extracts of letters written by Cooke to his mother, quoting them verbatim in the footnotes. The other main sources he relies on heavily are Cooke's own publications on this topic. Unfortunately, there is no acknowledgement of this, and the limitations of looking for answers in sources of these particular types are never admitted.

After a description of the early years of the ETC up to 1850, where it was the only telegraph company, the story introduces the three main rivals: the British Electric Telegraph Company, the Magnetic Telegraph Company, and the European & American Electric Printing Telegraph Company, bringing us up to 1855. Following this, we learn about the next stage in the chronology of the telegraph, where the free-market competition of many burgeoning companies rivalling the ETC was replaced by a so-called ‘duopoly’ of the ETC and the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. Then we learn that the United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company joined the ‘duopoly’, turning it into an ‘oligopoly’ before the whole service was nationalized in 1869 following user discontent and detailed political processes.

Fari appears to draw on the Hughesian methodology of the evolution of technological systems at times, yet this seems unintentional, fleeting and superficial. He also fails to engage with the well-founded historiography on the social construction and shaping of technology (after Trevor Pinch, Wiebe Bijker, Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman), preferring instead to align his approach with an economic history, business history and what he calls ‘media studies’ that will strike most historians of technology as outdated. The biggest influence from the latter is the concept of ‘constitutive choices’. This is borrowed from Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (2004), which assumes that initial political and economic choices influence the long-term trajectory of a technological system. Championing this as his tool for enquiry, Fari argues that the decisions taken during the first fifteen years of the telegraph service were ‘destined to influence the mechanisms of development in British telecommunications right well past the end of the century’ (p. 4). The word ‘choices’ in this concept, however, is misleading and it is not how a cultural historian of science or technology would understand it. Rather than identifying the historical contingency of events and recognizing how they might have easily unfolded differently, ‘constitutive choices’ implies that the actions of historical actors had far-reaching effects, imbuing a sense of predetermination and inevitability.

There is a consistent and persistent overuse of long, expansive footnotes. The secondary sources he references are a bit sparse, if anything, but the personal letters, company reports and local newspaper articles reproduced in their original, mostly unedited form are excessive and detract from the argument. It feels at times more like an annotated book of letters and articles, rather than a history of technology. Fari's justification for the inclusion of quite so many extracts – that they provide a historical reconstruction, filling in numerous gaps and grey areas, so that ‘historical facts’ can be interpreted with greater objectivity and accuracy – is unfounded because the letters and newspaper accounts that fill up to three-fourths of each page are no more ‘historical fact’ than this review.

Fari has managed to provide a brief and simplistic account of the first thirty years of the electric telegraph service, without really talking about the technology or the people involved. With such a rich vein of primary material unearthed covering a topic of great technological importance, this account of the early years of the British telegraph gives little incisive analysis and simply fails to deliver in a sophisticated or readable way. I was desperately seeking to get to the crux of the new insights that were being put forward and discern how this story contributes to the wider historiography on the topic, but alas I could not find it. Maybe you will do a better job.