Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes.
Published in 2003, Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes could be considered a lit crit companion to Jonathan Sterne’s 2003 monograph The Audible Past. Like Sterne’s book, Victorian Soundscapes concerns changes in sound and listening in the nineteenth century and constructs an archive—like Sterne’s—delightfully stuffed with strange scientific treatises, forgotten inventions, and amusing periodical cartoons and illustrations. Picker too sees the Victorian era as one characterized by “a rise in close listening” (6), and he aims to investigate the roles that hearing—both as “a physical stimulus and as a metaphor for the communication of meaning” (7)—played in Victorian culture and literature. While all chapters consider major, canonical authors and their works in relation to contemporaneous discoveries in sound and sound technology, Picker’s first two chapters concern “outside” (12), public sounds, while the latter two move into the private, domestic sphere. The first chapter on Dickens’s authorial career and sound receptivity in Dombey and Son, however, is less about noise/sound in the public sphere, and more about audition as a metaphor for literary transmission and dissemination. Picker is true to his promise in his second chapter, however, as he discusses noise and the professional writer, focusing on Carlyle’s hatred for organ grinders and his creation of a soundproof study. His third chapter considers sound in the work of that ardent reader of Helmholtz, George Eliot. Her novel Daniel Deronda, Picker argues, reflects the idea of “separateness with communication” (109) made possible by the telephone. Finally, his fourth and final chapter surveys a wide range of poems and texts from Tennyson to Conrad as a way to trace attitudes toward the recorded voice. I think Picker’s conclusion about Victorian response to the phonograph is subtler and more historically specific (though perhaps less innovative and exciting) than Sterne’s or Kittler’s: early users (like Tennyson) found the in the recorded voice a source of “enduring presence” and authenticity, even after death. For Conrad and many modernists after him, the machine “only appeared to subdue, diminish, and isolate speakers and listeners alike” (143).
I wish I had written this book. Picker brings to his smart, nuanced close readings impressive critical and theoretical backing, as well as a rigorously research and creatively assembled archive of primary documents. My only substantive critique is that his chapters do not cohere around a specific and compelling argumentative arch. He does, I suppose, argue that Victoria’s reign was “marked by an increasing volume and an increased awareness of sound” (112). To me, this argument seems a) untrue (I think Victorians were not more aware of sound, just perhaps differently aware), and b) not very interesting. That is not to say that Picker’s arguments are boring. No, he happens to make a complex, fascinating, and convincing argument in every single chapter. It’s just that the chapters are unified by Picker’s methodology and an interest in sound, not by an argument he traces from beginning to end. This is probably because Picker hit sound studies early, and this book is still exemplary in its strategies of rigorously researched literary criticism.