This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.
