Heya,
Currently taking a class on Victorian Britain, and I wanted to do some research on a somewhat niche subject in relation to it because I had philosophical interests. I wanted to do a study on the phenomenology of the technology in Victoria Britain. Basically, how the emergence of newer technologies -- sanitation, infrastructural"spaces", factory jobs -- any form of technology -- and how it changed the attitudes and every day lives of Victorians. And I do mean how they rationalized things in accordance to technology. My overall interests are related to thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Marx, and the other Frankfurt school thinkers.
It's a shot in the dark, but does anyone have any great resources with respect to technology in Victoria Britian? It doesn't have to be philosophical, pre'se, but if anyone does have that also in addition to it I'm looking into the concept of technological rationality, repressive desublimation, etc -- these sort of things.
This is outside my area of expertise to offer a formal lit review, but, check out the bibliography in Paul Fyfe, By Accident Or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis. I don't think this book itself will be much use to what you have in mind (although it's a really interesting read and might give you some pointers on the "affect people's lives" part!). But just skimming through right now, there are some entries in the bibliography whose titles, at least, look really promising to me. (Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (eds.), The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble? and so forth!)
:)
Given that your interests are theoretical in nature, you might find Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) — my recollection (from grad school) is that a lot of it is about photography and technologies of attention in Victorian England. Heavily theory-influenced.