Victorian Soundscapes

by Picker, John M.

• ISBN13: 9780195151909
• ISBN10: 0195151909
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	xi
Introduction: The Tramp of a Fly's Footstep	3	(12)
Hearing Things	3	(4)
An Auscultative Age	7	(4)
Nuisance and Resonance	11	(4)
1 "What the Waves Were Always Saying": Voices, Volumes, Dombey and Son	15	(26)
Babbage and Dickens: A Library of Air	15	(5)
"Away, with a Shriek, arid a Roar, and a Rattle"	20	(14)
Forever and Forever through Space	34	(7)
2 The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professional Identity and Urban Noise	41	(41)
Scatterbrain London	41	(4)
"Blackguard Savoyards and Herds of German Swine"	45	(7)
Writers' Block	52	(13)
Embodying Noise: The Leech Case	65	(12)
"Great Facts"	77	(5)
3 George Eliot's Ear: New Acoustics in Daniel Deronda and Beyond	82	(28)
On the Other Side of Silence	82	(2)
Helmholtz and Eliot: Sympathetic Vibration	84	(16)
"On the Verge of a Great Discovery":Talking Cures	100	(10)
4 The Recorded Voice from Victorian Aura to Modernist Echo	110	(37)
Tennyson's Talking Machine	110	(3)
"Send Me Mr. Gladstone's Voice"	113	(13)
Sinful Speech	126	(7)
Sound Bites	133	(9)
Coda: The Victor Dog	142	(5)
Appendix: Dickens's Prospectus for the Cheap Edition (1847)	147	(4)
Notes	151	(42)
Bibliography	193	(18)
Index	211