Special Interest Area Review Essay
Aurality and Literacy: Listening to Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain
When Margaret Hale, Gaskell’s middle-class heroine, moves from England’s rural south to the northern industrial town of Milton, she makes friends with a factory worker and his invalid daughter, Bessy. In the novel, Bessy and her father Nicholas Higgins function as Margaret’s and the reader’s access to the town’s working-class community, as well as reminders of the consequences of an unjust factory system. Margaret visits the dying Bessy regularly to read the Bible aloud to her, hoping to save not only Bessy, but also the hardened and skeptical Nicholas, through her oral readings. Bessy proves an enthusiastic but somewhat irreverent listener. Bessy sees the sounds of Margaret’s voice, so different from the “wranglin’ and the loud voices” of the city streets, as her salvation: “if I could just hear her voice, reading me some words o’ peace and promise, I could die away into the silence and rest o’ God” (197). And yet, Bessy finds the lessons of the readings less important than the affective experience of Margaret’s voice. Bessy implores Margaret to read a chapter, but admits she “shan’t listen to th’ sense” until Margaret comes “to words I like—to th’ comforting texts—it’ll seem close in my ear, and going through me as it were” (197). Bessy desires to feel physically affected by the spoken word, to feel the words she likes close to her ear and “going through” her body.Though nineteenth-century fiction abounds with scenes of reading aloud like this one, critical work on oral reading has focused on the Margarets, not the Bessys—the orators, not the auditors. This review essay aims to lay out the theoretical and critical groundwork for a dissertation that tunes in to the nineteenth-century’s often silent but significant reader/listeners. I seek to bring into conversation key theoretical debates—like Ong and Derrida’s conversation on the voice, presence, and the relationship between speech and writing—with recent publications in sound studies and histories of oral reading in the nineteenth century. Through mapping and connecting these critical discourses, I hope to demonstrate the need for and potential of attending to those listening. This involves, in part, reconceptualizing the listener not as an empty receptacle for words of a speaker, but rather as an active agent in the experience and interpretation of texts.
Take, for example, Gaskell’s Bessy. Margaret’s reading does not turn out to offer the palliative Bessy craves. Instead, Margaret’s choice of chapter (unspecified in the novel) causes her to toss to and fro, and if she “by an effort…attended for one moment,” her attempt to listen convulsed her into “double restlessness” (197). After demanding that Margaret stop reading, Bessy explains that she cannot concentrate because she keeps “thinking angrily on what canna be helped”—the unrest in Milton, the suffering of the factory workers, and, most specifically, the recent riot at Marlborough Mills, a factory owned by Margaret’s soon-to-be love interest. Bessy’s and Margaret’s roles reverse as Bessy explains her frustration with the belligerent rioters who taint, like a small amount of “physic powder in th’ jelly” (198), the reputation of all workers wanting better conditions and wages. Only after she “spit[s]…out” her story does she ask Margaret to continue reading, in order to take the “weary taste” of her world “out o’ my mouth” (199). She tells Margaret to read her “not a sermon chapter, but a story chapter.” Read, she instructs, “about the New Heavens, and the New Earth; and m’appen I’ll forget this.” Here, Bessy refers to the prediction of a New Jerusalem in her favorite book, Revelation, portions of which she repeats to herself “just for the sound…as good as an organ” (137). When Margaret begins reading this time, she can tell Bessy truly listens, as “the moisture of tears gathered heavy on her lashes” (199) before she finally falls asleep. While Margaret intends to read the Bible as a method of spiritual instruction, Bessy wants to hear the Bible as a corporeal comfort and an imagined escape from Milton, a place where paradise seems very lost indeed.
What I find most striking about this scene of oral reading is the degree to which Bessy, the listener, controls her own experience of the text. Margaret, as speaker/reader, is powerless in the face of Bessy’s inattention, an inattention caused by both her illness and her preoccupation with the pressing disorder and instability of her life and world. Bessy tells Margaret when to stop and start, where to read and why. She openly admits that she’ll only listen to the “sense” of passages she likes. And it is Bessy who transmits the moral lesson of this scene. In her account of the injustices of the Milton factory system, Bessy asks Margaret (and Gaskell’s readers) not to condemn workers and workers’ unions because of a few hostile members. In this scene, the attention and inattention of Bessy’s ear serve to critique the middle class’s patronizing condemnation and sermonizing of the lower class (as demonstrated by her distaste for “sermon chapters”). The scene also asks Gaskell’s (largely middle-class, Protestant) readership to, like Margaret, become listeners themselves. Bessy claims she is “blaspheming all the time in my mind” (197) because her thoughts of the riots and political unrest distract her from Margaret’s reading. Yet the scene and the novel at large suggest that reading the Bible without considering the injustices of the surrounding world is what is truly blasphemous.
Gaskell’s North and South portrays reading aloud as a dialectical process, one in which reader and listener collaborate in the navigation and experience of a text, in this case, the Bible. This scene—like many others in Victorian fiction—portrays the auditor not as a passive recipient, but as an active agent in meaning making. Yet studies of oral delivery and reading practices in the nineteenth century tend to focus on the speaker exclusively and often assume the role of speaker/reader to be synonymous with power, agency, and recognition as a political subject. This focus on voice and speech has led to a scholarly neglect of the century’s listeners in an age when the ear gained center stage in discourses surrounding science, medicine, and technology. I propose we turn our attention toward the practice of listening to reading aloud, as well as its depiction in the Victorian novel, in an effort to better understand Victorian attitudes toward sound and audition, as well as to more comprehensively examine Victorian reading practices and the era’s attitudes towards literacy, education, and textual authority.
A consideration of listening to reading aloud presumes that the word “aloud” carries some import, presumes that reading aloud is significantly distinct from reading silently--culturally, experientially, or otherwise. Yet the philosophical question of the difference between the word heard and the word seen has sparked one of the most contentious intellectual debates of the last half a century. What is the difference between this sentence as written and this sentence as spoken? Gaskell’s Bessy seems to consider spoken words as corporeal, intimate, and embodied; she anticipates that Margaret’s reading of the chapter will feel “close in my ear, and going through me as it were.” The aural experience of scripture, she feels, has the power to both comfort and redeem her; in just hearing Margaret’s voice, she could “die away into the silence and rest o’ God.” For Bessy, listening to God’s word invites God to come through her and allows her access God’s presence. Bessy’s description of the affective experience of hearing speech reflects longstanding assumptions about speech’s privileged relation to embodiment, interiority, and presence. Speech—rather than writing—seems the idealized expression of an individual’s (or God’s) consciousness. Hearing rather than reading another’s thoughts seems a purer access to his or her self.
Jacques Derrida’s 1967 Of Grammatology radically challenged this “phonologism of metaphysics” in critiquing the assumption that writing is a record or transcription of speech. The grapheme is not posterior to, nor a mere container for, the phoneme as the pure expression of meaning and presence. This critique provides the grounds for Derrida’s deconstruction of the voice in his essay “The Voice that Keeps Silence” published in his 1967 collection Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. In this essay, Derrida puts the value of the voice on trial, the voice, that is, in “its transcendent dignity with regard to every other signifying substance” (77). Why, he asks, does Western metaphysics associate the voice with interiority? What are the intellectual flaws and consequences of this assumed connection between speech and self-presence? The idealization of the phoneme, he claims, stems from the seeming immediacy of speech; we speak and hear ourselves speak in apparent simultaneity. In speaking, therefore, we seem to affect ourselves in a distinctive way: without seeming to make contact with the world outside ourselves.
Speech’s unique type of “auto-affection” makes comprehensible an ideal, purely interior “self.” According to Derrida, other ways of auto-affection—touching oneself, looking at oneself in the mirror—involve the surface of the subject’s body making contact with “what is not his own.” Hearing oneself speak, however, seems purely interior; the subject “can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces, without passing through an external detour, the world” (78). This is what makes speech seem “alive”—the apparently pure, simultaneous interiority of speaking and hearing oneself speak. More importantly, this experience makes a conception of consciousness possible. The “voice is consciousness” because the voice allows for a signifying act that does not seem to make contact with anything outside of the body and, hence, seemingly with anything outside of interiority.
This deification of the voice, however, relies on a problematic metaphysical myth that Derrida holds responsible for the widespread assumption that writing is a supplement to speech, an inscription or record of utterance, a “word in the body of a letter” (81). Derrida challenges this assumption in his often mistranslated, and consequently often misunderstood, claim in Of Grammatology: “there is no outside-text.” Written words do not have outsides; graphemes are not merely bodies or casings of utterances. For the privileging of speech in relation to interiority relies on a faulty conceptualization of immediacy, of presence. Any concept of the living present, Derrida claims, is itself constituted by what is other to it. Any sense of self-presence, of immediacy, is always already engaged in the movement of différance, the temporal deferring or spacing from what is not “now.” The presentness of presence is always already a “trace,” springing forth from what is outside of it, exterior to it. Speech is not safe from “outsides,” from external detours, because the “present” of hearing oneself speak is constituted by the not-present external to it.
In critical conversations on the voice, speech, and even sound more generally, scholars position Derrida’s critique of the voice and the metaphysics of presence against Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy. In his most famous work, titled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Ong charts the transition from primarily oral to primarily literate cultures, considering how writing and print restructure consciousness. While he is careful not to say so explicitly, Ong clearly finds much to mourn in writing’s cognitive restructuring. While Derrida complains that Western thought perceives writing only in terms of (and secondary to) the orality it records, Ong claims that we, now, only discuss orality in terms of literacy. The coinage of the term “oral literature,” for example, is, for Ong, evidence of “the relentless domination of textuality in the scholarly mind” (10), even though writing is a relatively recent development in human history. For Ong, writing is precisely what Derrida claims it is not—a visual representation of an oral signifier. Written texts, Ong holds, “all have to be related...to the world of sound” (8). The reading of a text, even silently, “means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination.” For Ong, “written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit” (11). Orality and Literacy is, in essence, an exploration of the stickiness of textuality’s residue, the way writing clings on to and colors our perception, cognition, and language.
Ong devotes the first half of his monograph to cultures of “primary orality,” cultures comprised of “persons totally unfamiliar with writing” (6). He summarizes modern research and scholarly debate on the oral cultures of antiquity and lists some “psychodynamics” of orality. Orally-based thought and expression, Ong claims, is additive rather than subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, redundant, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, situational rather than abstract. The demands of verbatim memorization can explain all of these characteristics. Without textuality as a preservation mechanism, “you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence” (34). Additionally, the centrality of sound fosters communality rather than individualism and introspection. “Sight isolates, sound incorporates” (71), Ong argues. The transition to a culture dominated by text—a visual signifier—then changes the way we think, as well as the way we relate to human beings.
The second half of Orality and Literacy concerns the effects of this transition, the ways in which writing “more than any other single invention…has transformed human consciousness” (77). One of the most important differences, according to Ong, is writing’s ability to distance the originator of a thought from its receiver. Writing, as an “autonomous discourse,” cannot be directly questioned or contested. The text—which Ong describes as dead, artificial, and fixed—is removed “from the living human lifeworld” (80) and makes possible “an increasingly articulate introspectivity” (104), as writing severs the interior self from an “external objective world.” Print only enhances the fixity and closure of thought introduced by writing. With print, words become things; words are “made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute” (116). Hence, print embeds “the word in space more definitively” than writing and also creates a new sense of privacy and private ownership over words, texts, and thoughts. Even so, Ong does point towards the possibility of a “secondary orality” with the advent of electronic media. The telephone, radio, and television, he argues, recreate in some ways the participatory mystique, communal sense, and focus on the present characteristic of primary orality. This secondary orality, however, creates a very different kind of community—a much larger “global village”—that still bears the influence of our essentially literate culture. The old orality is “gone forever” (134).
The Ong-Derrida debate, often reductively portrayed as a contest between an Ongian phonophilia and a Derridean phonophobia, finds its way into almost every book on sound published after the 1980s. Yet despite its centrality, many scholars see the debate as biased or irrelevant. Jonathan Rée, for example, calls the conversation “inane,” claiming that both sides take as a foundation “a congeries of shadowy metaphysical prejudices” (6) about the separation of the senses and the difference between vision and hearing, prejudices that have affected attitudes toward and treatment of the Deaf. Scholars have also critiqued Ong and Derrida as Eurocentric, though, in their defense, they are explicitly so—each describes his project as concerned with Western philosophy and metaphysics. Perhaps most troublesome for scholars interested in reading aloud, especially reading aloud in the nineteenth century, is the debate’s tendency to encourage a consideration of speech and writing as oppositional. As Andrew Elfenbein observes in book on elocution and the standardization of English in the Romantic period, the influences of Ong and Derrida have led to an “overvaluation of the literacy/orality binary” (111) misleading for Romantic and Victorian scholarship. For eighteenth-century elocutionists, for example, “mere speech was of little interest.” The trained reading voice was valuable not independent of writing, but rather because of its “unique capacities for realizing print” (113). By the Romantic period, Elfenbein argues, the opposition between speech and writing was “beside the point” (113).
In addition to (and perhaps because of) the debate’s focus on speech and/versus writing, the Ong-Derrida conversation has also excited scholarly interest in the phonograph. This machine makes explicit the relation between speech and writing as it writes sound, turns sound frequencies into a legible trace. The phonograph seems to enact Derrida’s critique of voice’s tie to interiority as it severs speech from human source. Some have even argued that the invention made possible Derrida’s suspicion of the voice and its tie to presence. This is a compelling argument, but a careful historian would remember the many other sound technologies invented in the nineteenth century, technologies just as (if not more) culturally salient to Victorians (the microphone, telephone, player piano, and aural telegraphy to name a few). The phonograph, however, appears over and over again as both sign and cause of sound’s secularization and speech’s divorce from personhood.[1]
Jonathan Sterne, for example, frames his 2003 study of the “cultural origins of sound recording,” The Audible Past, as a Derrida-inspired critique of Ong and his (as Sterne terms it) “iconoclastic and antimodernist Catholicism” (9). Sterne reads Ong’s claims in Orality and Literacy in conversation with his more explicitly spiritual texts, in which Ong describes the usurpation of sound by sight in modernity as “a certain silencing of God” (The Presence of the Word 288). Sterne sees Ong as building upon and perpetuating assumptions about the difference between sight and hearing, a list of differences he terms a “litany” due to its “theological overtones” (15). His critique of this litany reads like an attack on Ong’s chapter on the psychodynamics of orality: hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective; hearing is concerned with interiors, vision with surfaces; hearing is temporal, vision spatial. The primary consequence of this “audiovisual” litany, Sterne argues, is the idealization of hearing as “manifesting a kind of pure interiority” (15). For Sterne, there is no “innocent” way of describing sound’s nature; we can better understand sound and sound’s history only through studying people’s reactions and responses, people’s attempts to record, manipulate, describe, and come to terms with sound in various historical and geographical situations. In other words, we can study sound by studying the history of listening, the history of sound’s reception.
Sterne’s definition of sound recording reflects both this methodology and his focus on sound reception rather than production. Sterne wants to move beyond what he calls “acoustic or schizophrenic” definitions of sound recording. These definitions fetishize the notion of an “original sound” by defining reproduction as a copy that separates sound from its source. He offers a reception-centered alternative: modern technologies of sound reproduction are those that use devices called “transducers,” devices that “turn sound into something else” and then turn “that something else back into sound” (22). The phonograph, for example, changes sound by a form of inscription on tin foil or wax before the stylus transduces the inscriptions back into sound in playback. Sound reproduction is not an act of copying a fetishized original source, but rather an act of translation.
This definition of sound recording is an ear-, rather than mouth-centered definition, and the ear is, in fact, its inspiration. Sterne historicizes the ear as the ur-transducer, a prototype for the tympanic mechanisms used in sound reproduction. An understanding of the ear vibrating in sympathy with sound vibrations—an idea articulated in treatises on hearing as early as 1788—allowed inventors like Alexander Graham Bell to conceptualize the mechanized reception, tracing, and reproduction of sound frequencies. Sterne makes Bell’s indebtedness to the ear’s physiology explicit by devoting a chapter to his obscure, now-forgotten invention: the phonautograph. This device, invented by Bell and his collaborators in 1857, used the ear to vibrate a small stylus tracing speech onto smoked glass. For Sterne, the phonautograph is synecdochal of a “new regime” in which “the ear displaced the mouth in attempts to reproduce sound technologically” (33).
This new orientation toward the ear, Sterne claims, occurred not only in the bowels of the Bell and Edison labs, but also in wider sociocultural approaches to, attitudes toward, and techniques of listening. Sterne devotes his second and third chapters to a genealogy of “audile technique”—practices of and orientations toward listening—in modern medicine and sonic media (sound telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and radio). In his exploration of auscultation and medical listening, Sterne recounts the history of listening as a skill, one requiring tools like the stethoscope, as well as expertise and practice. The notion of listening, he claims, played a key role in developing media transmitting sound. Sterne takes sound telegraphy and the headset-wearing telegraph officers of the mid-nineteenth-century as examples of audile technique’s broader privatization, commodification, and commercialization. The advent of the headset—a technology facilitating careful listening—allowed for sound’s segmentation. Consequently, acoustic space, as well as listeners’ control over that space, became marketable. Careful listening became a profession and sound control became an industry.
So, the development of listening as a skill in white, male, middle-class professional spaces made possible the invention of sound recording (also in white, male, middle-class professional spaces). According to Sterne’s narrative, the “cultural origins of sound reproduction” lie in the professionalization and commercialization of science, technology, and medicine. There is nothing surprising or inherently wrong about Sterne’s focus on science, technology and medicine and the middle-class workplace. But I wonder: which “cultural origins” of sound recording does he leave out, and to what effect? What if he were to consider listening in to (notably feminized) domestic spaces? Listening to literature? Perhaps I am just a grumpy humanities PhD, weary of hearing about the increased funding, institutional attention, and job security in STEM fields. Perhaps I am just a book-lover, sick of people assuming literature resides outside of the real world, where Science (that enigmatic force with a capital S) makes change happen. Even so, I think it is worth asking: why do we hasten to explore how developments in science and technology affect literature (as I, in fact, do in my article), but rarely investigate how literature and reading practices affect science and technology? There is abundant scholarship on how literature reflects cultural attitudes surrounding the phonograph, but very little on how literature affected the phonograph’s invention and reception.
So, what does reading aloud in the nineteenth century have to do with the cultural origins of sound reproduction? A great deal. I would argue that nineteenth-century practices of oral reading were, in part, what made the phonograph seem a profitable and promising enterprise. The device was first advertised for its ability to record and replay text—books, poems, soliloquies, and speeches—literature read and recited in the Victorian home. The phonograph’s inventors and early users alike envisioned the phonograph as a convenient addition to existing domestic reading practices.
Alexander Graham Bell, crucial in the development of the phonograph and credited with the invention of the telephone, came from a family of elocutionists and was a celebrated professor of elocution himself, as well as an educator of the Deaf. When Edison explained his invention and its possible uses in “The Phonograph and Its Future,” he focuses on its ability to record not music, but texts recited or read aloud. He promoted the phonograph as an “elocutionary teacher” (533) and a “talking book,” marketing the machine as a way to enhance the reading practices of Victorian parlor culture. He anticipates audio books (though he overestimates their popularity) in his description of “phonographic books,” which would have advantages over printed texts, advantages “too readily seen to need mention” (534). First, the listener would receive greater enjoyment from a book “when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader” (533). Second, the phonograph circumvents the need for a literate, able-bodied reader in the practice of reading aloud. Books, he prognosticates, “may be read by the charitably-inclined professional reader” to be listened to “in they asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with the great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed” (533).
Perhaps most tellingly, however, Edison sees the phonograph as superior to the printed book because it would preserve “more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author” (534, emphasis mine). The phonograph, Edison claims, conveys the author’s immediate presence or character, as well as his/her thoughts. Edison marketed sound recording, then, through the very association of voice and presence that Ong champions and Derrida critiques. In his 2003 article “Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880-1920,” Jason Camlot argues that the phonograph inherits its claims to pure, transparent transmission of a speaker’s interiority from its cultural predecessor: Victorian recitation anthologies.
Camlot is the only scholar I have found who discusses early sound recordings in relation to reading practices and as “new media versions” of recitation anthologies. This is surprising, since the first commercially sold talking records were recitation recordings. This gap occurred, he claims, because scholars have tried to move beyond conceptualizations of the phonograph as a voice-capturing machine in order to challenge the supposed transparency of the medium, as mentioned above. Scholars like Lisa Gitelman see Victorian writing and inscription technologies as the phonograph’s predecessors.[2] Late Victorians, Gitelman claims, understood and appreciated the phonograph as the best of many efforts to “unify oral and inscriptive action” (Gitelman 86). Camlot agrees with and applauds such accounts, but urges his readers to consider the phonograph “not just in terms of inscriptive or writerly preconditions, but in terms of elocutionary ones” (150). Such an approach, he claims, also allows us to better understand and critique the invention’s promise to transmit a speaker’s authentic voice and self.
Camlot sees Edison’s and others’ portrayals of the phonograph as a transparent medium—a “repository of the pure voice of nature”—as informed by the elocutionary art of “concealing the speaker’s artfulness” (150). He traces the trope of transparency and naturalness back to the Romantic dream of poetry as an unmediated expression of nature. He then explores how the idealization of “natural” voice and expression inform nineteenth-century delivery. Elocution manuals like Canon Fleming’s The Art of Reading and Speaking (1896) encouraged readers to “speak so naturally that your words may go from the heart to the heart, that people may forget the messenger when they listen to the message” (qtd. in Camlot 158). The conception of the phonograph as a “virtuoso elocutionist” (156) that was a “recording medium as no medium at all” (150) stems from the construction of naturalness in recitation practice. Phonograph cylinders of recitation pieces, then, paradoxically elucidate how the recorded voice was “already artificial” (150), already a performance or imitation of naturalness.
Camlot’s work reflects a (if not the) defining challenge for post-deconstruction scholarly work on sound and orality: how to recognize recitation and reading aloud as influential cultural forces without privileging speech in relation to authenticity, immediacy, and interiority. This can prove especially difficult because Victorians often did glorify speech and the voice, a trend Ong himself noted and attributed to the era’s “yearning for the old orality” (114) no longer fully accessible. Despite this challenge, however, the past three decades have seen plenty of scholarly monographs on nineteenth-century recitation, elocution, and oral reading practices. This body of literature speaks eloquently to the ubiquity of these practices in Victorian culture, as well as to the multiform effects that oral reading and recitation had on everything from the standardization of English grammar to women’s rights.[3]
In these conversations, however, I see two important biases. First, most studies focus (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) on the public performance of literature. Most study reading aloud in the lecture hall, the schoolroom, on the pulpit or on the orator’s platform, rather than in private, domestic settings. This is likely due to the greater accessibility of information and archival documents related to public performance. In addition and perhaps in consequence, critics also tend to forget those not orating, but still participating in the experience of literature read aloud—those who, like Bessy, are listening. Nineteenth-century sound scholars like Jonathan Sterne, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and John Picker claim that the 1800s saw a rise in close listening and audile technique. Yet work on oral reading has remained quiet on issues concerning the century’s auditors. The remainder of this review essay examines two examples of scholarship on oral reading—one relatively new and one quite old. I see the following monographs as historical treasure troves as well as methodological models, but also as indicative of the scholarly biases mentioned above.
One relatively recent and particularly exemplary monograph on nineteenth-century reading aloud is Catherine Robson’s Heart Beats (2012), an institutional and “emotional” (5) history of verse recitation in British and American education. Robson divides her book into two parts. The first, her “institutional” history, tracks the changing motivations and justifications for poetry recitation in American and British public schools. She begins in the late eighteenth century with the proliferation of “speakers” and elocution anthologies. In this period, educators saw recitation as primarily an exercise in vocal production and oral delivery. By 1850, however, after the rise of mass education and public schools, the motivations for verse recitation changed. As public education became associated with “improvement” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, recitation became a moral exercise, and the memorized lines were seen as strengthening the ethical condition of the individual. From 1910 to 1940, however, the memorization of poetry became instead “an important adjunct to the study of literature” (71). This shift towards recitation as a first step in literary study and interpretation, Robson claims, was the beginning of the end of verse recitation. The practice was then all but terminated by developments in pedagogical theory that questioned the effectiveness of “enforced drill” (76).
Robson is careful not to convey nostalgia for recitation practices, and in her second “emotional or internal” history of the practice—a history reporting and speculating on reciters’ experiences—she presents its problems and its beauties. She divides her book’s second part into three case studies, each centering on a popular nineteenth-century performance piece. She uses Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and Charles Wolf’s “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna” to ask how memorizing and reciting poetry could affect reciters, as well as the meter, reception, and the cultural value of the poem itself. These case studies, alongside her institutional history, provide grounds for her claims concerning the status of poetry in the history of English education. At the heart of her history lie questions like: why is poetry, once seen as a child’s gateway to literacy, now almost exclusively read in silence by university students? How is our relation to poetry different than that of those raised in the nineteenth-century? For Robson, the answer to both of these questions sits, of course, in the prevalence of verse recitation in the nineteenth century.
In short, this is a book about poetry more than a book about reading aloud and orality; Robson sees verse recitation as transforming poetry’s canonization and its incorporation into educational curricula. Fiction, she argues, has undergone no such transformation. Readers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can easily conceptualize the experience of Victorian novel-readers, for instance. We too, she claims, “alternate between periods of happy, isolated immersion is satisfying fat books and necessary stints in the bustle of everyday affairs” (113). While it may be true that the reception of poetry has undergone a more radical transformation in the last two and a half centuries, she paints a reductive portrait of both twenty-first and nineteenth-century prose reading.
To say that Victorians consumed fiction only in “happy, isolated immersion” is simply incorrect. This statement assumes that, while Victorians performed poetry orally in public, they read fiction silently and alone. Yet novels, as well as other prose texts including the Bible, newspapers, essays, and periodicals, were often read aloud, sometimes even rehearsed and performed, in and outside of the home. An admirer of George Eliot once wrote her to say he knew “whole families” that had read the three-volume Felix Holt “chapter by chapter and line by line,” rereading and reciting them like “the stanzas of In Memoriam.” Inquiry into the effects of nineteenth-century oral reading on literacy and English literature education cannot and should not end with verse recitation alone. Robson’s history of poetry recitation demonstrates the potential of a project on how oral reading of a different form has affected literacy, education, and canonization, as well as the relationship between literature and daily life.
The “different form” I am most interested in is what Philip Collins calls the “family-reading habit” (10): the reading aloud of a text in a private household, not the practiced memorization and performance of a text for a public audience. Despite the undeniable popularity of this practice in the middle and upper class Victorian home, there are very few sustained, monograph-length studies of domestic reading aloud in the nineteenth-century.[4] Even Philip Collins’s 1972 book—with its misleadingly general title Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier–focuses primarily on authors’ lecture circuits and recital tours. This book, old enough to speculate that perhaps “tape-recording will replace the book” (28), is best described as a collection of fascinating anecdotes and stories about the century’s most famous readers, Dickens and Tennyson being two of his favorites.
Collins’s short monograph seeks to answer the question: why was reading aloud so popular? His answer reflects his focus on public readings by “authors of established reputation” (18). He ties the popularity of Dickens’s Readings and other famous authors’ lecture circuits to Victorian celebrity and the “cult of personality” (17) attached to certain authors. He attributes the success of what seem to us bizarre practices—Reverend John Chippendale Montesquieu Bellew’s orating Hamlet while actors silently mime the parts—to Victorian anti-theatricality. Public readings, even those as absurdly close to theatre as Bellew’s performance, were “regarded as permissible by many respectable people who objected to theaters as immoral.” Clergymen like Bellew commonly served as practitioners to help “confer respectability upon the event” (22). Clergymen and amateur readers, he notes, were also the mainstays of the mid-century Penny Readings movement, which offered cheap public readings for the “improvement” of the working classes.
These are all, however, public performances of literature, usually read by a celebrity author or an otherwise established, well-known reader/orator. Collins does note that much of Victorian literature was apprehended through reading aloud in the private household, and “was indeed written with such a reception in mind” (10). He discusses family reading practices as a reason for the “sentimentality” of Victorian literature, claiming that authors writing with an eye to family reception would have to self-censor or face editorial censorship. These, however, are observations about how the “family reading habit” affected Victorian novels, not observations about the sociocultural history of the practice itself. This is because Philip Collins is a Dickensian and a scholar interested in authors. I take interest in private, domestic reading aloud because of my focus on listening. Novelists’ portrayals of reading aloud in the home, like that of Margaret Hale reading to Bessy, often place both the speaking reader and the listening reader at the center of the action. These more intimate scenes of reading are more likely than scenes of public reading to portray listeners as interactive agents in the experience of the text. Consequently, these scenes are more likely to showcase the techniques, troubles, and unruly behavior of the Victorian ear.
That being said, I am not praising reading aloud in the private household as an inherently subversive or liberating activity. Goodness no. The “family reading habit” is in many ways a Victorian version of 1950s family dinner table iconography. Both are scenes of ostensible bourgeois domestic bliss with a veneer just barely masking Dad’s alcohol problem and Susie’s depression, not to mention society’s systemic class, gender, and race inequities. Yet the fact that depictions of the “family reading habit” falsely constructed a utopian and politically expedient image of Victorian domesticity—one that served to perpetuate assumptions of patriarchal and bourgeois hegemony—makes the practice more compelling, not less. In a longer examination of the Bible-reading scene in North and South, for example, I would more thoroughly critique the class implications of Bessy as a listener. For, in Bessy, Gaskell creates a working-class listener carefully crafted for middle-class Victorian sensibilities. Bessy is eager to learn and develop spiritually, reveres her middle-class patron/educator, and despises violence and revolt. Due to her illness, she will die before she is old enough to participate in acts seen as threatening or immoral to middle-class Victorians (disruptive union activity, sex or prostitution, drinking). Her rebellious intention during Margaret’s Bible reading is made palatable by her deference and refusal to rebel in all other contexts.
While I do not aim to celebrate the practice of domestic reading nor the act of listening, I do think that the critical move toward attending to listening has political stakes worth celebrating. For one, literature’s listeners do not have to be literate themselves and, hence, my focus expands the study of Victorian reading to include those never taught to decipher written text. Reading aloud does, of course, require a literate speaking-reader, one who often (though not always) selected the material, as well as censored and explained the reading.[5] Since reading aloud functioned as a primary source of intellectual development for many women and working-class individuals denied a systematic education, a study of this type of listening also prompts inquiry into how the education of these populations was controlled and manipulated.
On the other hand, attention to listening to reading aloud can decenter and destabilize the figure of the Speaker-as-Authority. In his book Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2005), Ivan Kreilkamp argues that Victorian authors imagine themselves as charismatic oral storytellers and figure the novel as “the utterance of a powerfully authentic speaker” (3). Charles Dickens, for example, famously imagined his readership as an extended family circle, “before the fire in a virtual home” (Kreilkamp 106). Yet, depictions of unruly listening like Bessy’s can upset this assumed tie between speaking and authorship, as well as its associations with agency, persuasion, and control. Kreilkamp’s monograph begs for a companion volume, one that could bear the title Ears and the Victorian Listener, that attends to Victorian attention and takes as its project not reception history, but a history of receptivity in and of the nineteenth-century novel.
Finally, and perhaps most ambitiously, I hope that turning toward the listener prompts a study of literature’s effects. Listening to listening, quite simply put, requires us to consider how literature affects people and the worlds around them. Scenes like Gaskell’s show the act of reading in confrontation and conversation with everyday experience. Literature is leaky. Listeners like Bessy illustrate how life seeps into literature and literature into life—how bodies, sickness, factories, fathers, anger, and hope affect what and how we choose to hear, remember, and interpret. A study of listening to reading in novels allows us to hear more clearly how Victorian authors anticipated or hoped books would change their readers and their society. Such a project would consider not just what Victorians read aloud, but why, for what purpose, and to what effect. How early Victorians read the Bible aloud, for example, might teach us about pulpit oratory, church acoustics, Biblical exegesis, sectarian conflict, and confessional booths. In short, the reverberations of the texts heard and techniques employed by Victorian reader/listeners continue to resonate, within and beyond the history of English literature.
Works Cited
*Texts reviewed are in bold
Ablow, Rachel, Ed. The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2010.
Camlot, Jason. "Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880-1920." Book History 6 (2003): 147-73.
Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. U California P, 1990.
Collins, Philip. Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier. Lincoln: The Tennyson SocietyMonographs, 1972.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.
---. “The Voice that Keeps Silence.” Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. 70-87.
Donawerth, Jane. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900. SIU P, 2011.
Edison, Thomas. “The Phonograph and Its Future.” The North American Review 126.262 (1878): 527-536. JSTOR. 30 November 2015.
Elfenbein, Andrew. Romanticism and the Rise of English. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009.
Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. Clarendon P, 1995.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Print.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982. John Hartley, Ed. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2002.
---.The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
Pascoe, Judith. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2011.
Perkins, David. “How the Romantics Recited Poetry.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 3.4 (Autumn 1991): 655-71.
Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses: A Philosophical History. New York: Macmillan, 1999.
Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000.
Sterne, Jonathan. An Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2003.
Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
[2] See also Kreilkamp “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing” (2005).
[3] See Cmiel, Donawerth, Elfenbein, Griffiths, Johnson, Kreilkamp, Michaelson, Pascoe, Perkins, Wilson Kimber’s forthcoming The Elocutionists, and many more.
[4] There are, of course, many books on Victorian readers and reading practices more generally, including but not limited to Stewart, Flint, and Ablow.
[5] See, for example, Patricia Howell Michaelson’s discussion of the patriarchal practices of Frances Burney’s family reading circle in Ch. 4 of Speaking Volumes.
