Atdtda22: [42.1i] Gas, 607

[Paul Nightingale]

[607.13-14] The population who communicated by Gas, who indeed were
unwilling to communicate in any other way appeared pretty substantial ...

The obvious reference, perhaps, in COL49:

For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to
communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of
defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic,
from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate,
indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this
withdrawal was their own, unpublicised, private. Since they could not have
withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate,
silent, unsuspecting world.

1974 Penguin ed, 94. And so to:

[607.17-19] ... and the system expanded, net-wise as if destined soon to
cover all Britain. For those blessed with youth, money and idle time it
amounted to little more than a faddish embrace of the Latest Thing ...

[607.21] ... the post office ...

Cf. the reference above to "the Gas Office" [607.6]. If the Gas Office is a
police department, the post office is, in the first instance, a public
service: "the bureaucracy of bureaucracies. In 1914 its staff accounted for
almost one third of all the men and women employed in the civil service."

From: C.R Perry, The Victorian Post Office: The Growth of a Bureaucracy,
Boydell Press, 1992, 3.

On the role of the individual in a bureaucracy, cf. the introduction of "the
real 'Inspector Sands'" on 445.

The opening page or so has introduced one kind of imagined community based
on national identity. The bureaucracy is another. The reference to COL49
reminds us of resistance to state power.