Unstoppable force meets immovable object: Peacock’s Headlong Hall and the autonomy of infrastructure

Abstract

Thomas Love Peacock’s first novel, Headlong Hall (1815), investigates the effect of infrastructure at a moment when the concept was first being crystallized. Peacock asks what it means when the “headlong” momentum of large technological systems starts to invade more traditional and immovable structures, such as the manorial hall of Squire Headlong. Peacock’s novels are often regarded as inconclusive; Headlong Hall starts with a debate between the passengers on the Irish mail about progress, and ends with the statu-quo-ite Mr Jenkison stating he cannot tell if humanity is advancing or regressing. This doubtful progress is mirrored by Peacock’s description of the improvements wrought by the mail-coach, with the road to Ireland, in the process of being improved by Thomas Telford, also the subject of a contemporary debate about where the nation was heading. Peacock’s novel is, however, unambiguous in the way it describes what Brian Larkin has called the “politics and poetics” of infrastructure, and the way it has a symbolism and an effect that goes far beyond the purely technical. While many of his contemporaries were celebrating the “March of Mind”, Peacock points out the changes to cognition as infrastructure alters ideas of temporality, agency, and space. At the centre of the novel, Mr Cranium is turned into a projectile and fired off the top of a tower, with Peacock suggesting that even the casing of the brain can no longer provide protection against the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of progress. The novel, however, counters this by suggesting the autonomy of infrastructure is illusory. It shows how different systems interact and interpenetrate, and that local structures are not as powerless as infrastructure often makes them seem.