Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes.
Also published in 2003, Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes could be considered a lit crit companion to Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past. Like Sterne’s monograph, Picker’s book 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 and compelling 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 (ostensibly) 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, seemed less about noise/sound in the public sphere, and more about the metaphor of audition 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, whose novel Daniel Deronda, Picker argues, reflects the idea “separateness with communication” 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 towards the recorded voice. Picker’s conclusion, I argue, is subtler and more historically specific (though perhaps less innovative and exciting) than Sterne’s and 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 learned critical and theoretical background, as well as a rigorously research and creatively assembled archive of primary documents. My only substantive critique—before I go too green with envy—is that the chapters don’t seem to all point back to a unifying, specific, and compelling argumentative arch—except his claim that Victoria’s reign was “marked by an increasing volume and an increased awareness of sound” (112). To me, this argument seems a) untrue (the Victorians seemed differently, not more aware of sound than other eras, and b) boring. 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 and audition, not an argument he traces from beginning to end. This is probably because Picker hit sound studies early, and this book is still exemplar in its strategies of rigorously researched literary criticism.