The English novel since Defoe has oriented itself toward new technologies and media. It has thrived on the social relations sustained by shifting communications networks, whether they have been the epistolary habits and private couriers of the eighteenth century, the nascent print capitalism and circulating libraries of the imperial nation state, or the solidifying technological matrix of Victorian Britain's Penny Post, telegraphs, and railroads. The conventions of literary realism perhaps had to do more with the novel's formal accommodation to adjacent systems of communication (the postage stamp, the telegraph) and transportation than with any progressive attainment of truth. Beyond realism, the “sensation” novels of the later nineteenth century are, according to Nicholas Daly, “the first subgenre in which a Bradshaw's railway schedule and a watch become necessary to the principal characters … The pleasures of fictional suspense and the anxieties of clock-watching appear as part of the same historical moment.” And from the telegraphic era to the computer era, the “effort to describe … in a far more ‘life-like’, complex, and detailed way than literature had ever done before becomes an attempt to incorporate, mimic, or co-opt the achievements of competing electric media.” The novel has absorbed these technologies into its substance through aesthetic trial and error, a process that argues the primacy of “refraction” over “reflection” in the novel's relationship to its rivals.