Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

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VOICE AND THE VICTORIAN STORYTELLER

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form preeminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses’ tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early and mid century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Bronte¨, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli, and Gaskell, Kreilkamp reevaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers’ preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This innovative study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories. is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University, where he is co-editor of Victorian Studies. He has published in such journals as ELH, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Novel.

IVAN KREILKAMP

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, Columbia University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Queen Mary University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, polities, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘‘background,’’ feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

VOICE AND THE VICTORIAN STORYTELLER IVAN KREILKAMP

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521851930 © Ivan Kreilkamp 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page vii

1 ‘‘The best man of all’’: mythologies of the storyteller

1

2 When good speech acts go bad: the voice of industrial fiction

35

3 Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing

69

4 ‘‘Done to death’’: Dickens and the author’s voice

89

5 Unuttered: withheld speech in Jane Eyre and Villette 6

‘‘Hell’s masterpiece of print’’: voice, face, and print in The Ring and the Book

122 155

7 A voice without a body: the phonographic logic of Heart of Darkness

179

Notes Bibliography Index

206 236 249

v

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank those faculty in the English department at Brown University who helped me as this project began, particularly Nancy Armstrong, Ellen Rooney, and Bob Scholes. I am especially grateful to Nancy for her rigorous reading, shrewd counsel, and unwavering support both during and since my time at Brown. I’d also like to thank other friends from Brown, including Julie Couch, Jared Green, Tom Juvan, Caroline Reitz, and Garrett Sullivan; thanks to Jennifer Ruth and Jennifer Fleissner, in particular, for help on early drafts and formulations. Thanks to Jonah Siegel and other members of the late-1990s Harvard graduate Nineteenth Century Literature workshop, who welcomed me as part of their group for a couple of years. John Plotz smuggled me into that workshop and has been a great friend and a big influence on this book, some sections of which he’s read many times. Thanks to, at the University of Chicago, colleagues in the Society of Fellows and members of the British Romantic and Victorian workshop, especially Elaine Hadley, Beth Helsinger, Mary Helen McMurran, and Katie Trumpener. Too many colleagues and friends to name in the English Department at Indiana University welcomed and supported me over the last few years, but I’d like to single out for thanks Judith Brown, Ed Comentale, Mary Favret, Susan Gubar, Ellen Mackay, Steve Watt, and the great graduate students I’ve worked with at Victorian Studies and otherwise. I’m especially indebted to Pat Brantlinger and Deidre Lynch, who each read several chapters of the book and offered crucial advice, and, particularly, to Andrew Miller, who read and commented acutely on the entire manuscript and who has been a great friend and mentor at I.U. and Victorian Studies. I’m grateful to Linda Bree, Gillian Beer, Maartje Scheltens, Lucy Carolan, two insightful anonymous readers, and others at Cambridge University Press for having faith in this book and for helping me improve it; to Leah Price for assisting with the process of finding a publisher; to Allen Salerno for some editorial help; and to the National Endowment for the vii

viii

Acknowledgments

Humanities for a summer fellowship used to complete revisions. Earlier versions of part of chapter 5, chapter 7, and chapter 3 have been previously published in Novel: a Forum on Fiction, Victorian Studies, and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, ed. Leah Price and Pam Thurschwell (Ashgate), and I’m grateful to the editors for permission to use this material. I‘ve been sustained throughout work on this book by too many other friends generous with time and attention to mention, but I must single out Samuel Baker, Daniel Itzkovitz, Jane Katz, Michael Scharf, and Alex Star; particular thanks to George Boulukos for countless hours of conversation and shoptalk going back to high school days. I’d like to thank my family, especially my parents Tom and Vera Kreilkamp, who’ve always made reading and writing seem an essential and pleasurable part of life; my brother Jake Kreilkamp; my parents-in-law Suzy and John Pearce; and my grandmother Sadie Kreilkamp, who at age ninety showed up uninvited at a presentation I gave at the Harvard Humanities Center and asked me a tough question about my definition of dramatic monologue. Finally and most of all, my thanks to Sarah Pearce for everything (including especially humor, creativity, and optimism), and to our highly vocal daughters Celeste and Iris, born just in time to slow down final revisions on this book with their shouts, shrieks, and chortles.

CHAPTER

1

‘‘The best man of all’’: mythologies of the storyteller

This book questions and hopes to trouble a well-entrenched commonplace concerning the relationship of speech to writing. It is no exaggeration to say that contemporary criticism is haunted by the paradox that speech is both extremely powerful and doomed to cultural obsolescence. ‘‘Writing is the destruction of every voice,’’ Roland Barthes famously proclaims in ‘‘The Death of the Author,’’ articulating a half-triumphant, half-guilty belief concealed at the heart of contemporary print culture.1 Most of us assume that orality is an attenuated relic of an era before the rise of modern print culture – and at the same time, a force latent in suppressed groups and indeed parts of our own selves, capable of disrupting writing with all the force of a resurrection. Contemporary literary criticism takes it for granted that members of pre-novelistic cultures relied on modes of oral communication exemplified by communal storytelling, and that the advent of print displaced the spoken word as the glue holding modern societies together – thereby driving speech into obsolescence. Studies of modern print culture have too often either neglected voice, speech, and orality entirely or romanticized the vocal as a remnant of a lost and mourned pre-modern past. The distinction between a pre-modern ‘‘oral culture’’ and a modern print culture thus becomes a narrative of the fall from an idealized folk to a degraded mass culture.2 Walter Benjamin provides the classic articulation of the longing generated by the supposed displacement of voice in his melancholic 1936 essay ‘‘The Storyteller.’’ With the diffusion of print culture and the rise of the novel, Benjamin writes, ‘‘storytelling began quite slowly to recede into the archaic.’’ Those who have been influenced by Benjamin’s argument tend to regard ‘‘voice’’ as a single, unitary thing we have lost or are on the way to losing. This is not what my reading of Victorian fiction, and of the contemporary criticism that has inherited many of its structures and presumptions, suggests. I want to insist, on the contrary, that voice is heterogeneous and thriving within modern print culture. And if one legacy of Benjamin’s essay has been a tacit agreement that where the novel 1

2

Voice and the Victorian storyteller

rises, the oral storyteller falls, my readings show that, on the contrary, the much-lamented storyteller came into being as a fiction within the very medium that is accused of having killed him off. The relationship between speech and writing – from Saussure’s first lectures on general linguistics through Jacques Derrida’s work and beyond – has provided the basis for the twentieth century’s most important reflections on language, but it has been less often recognized that this relationship was also a topic of recurring and urgent concern throughout the Victorian period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, competing forms of speech put the lie to any unitary (and apocalyptic) history of the modern decline of oral culture.3 Between the ancient bards and communal storytelling of historical memory, and the mechanically reproducible spoken word of the phonograph, radio, and telephone, lies the often-misunderstood territory of nineteenth-century vocal and aural experience.4 Here a nationally circulating print culture coexists and competes with different circulating systems of speech. Indeed, even if we accept the argument – made by theorists from Benjamin through Benedict Anderson – that modern print relegates any speech-based community to the dustbin of history, we cannot ignore the simple fact that voice persists in the discourse of print culture, where it remains as trace and residue capable of giving rise to inchoate new forms. To understand nineteenth-century print culture we must take into account its coexistence and competition with what might be called ‘‘vocal cultures.’’ David Vincent offers a persuasive critique of contemporary accounts of the relationship between orality and print. Vincent claims that most historical conceptualizations of the relationship between orality and literacy propose the advent of literacy as ‘‘a new form of spiritual conversion,’’ a sudden and total transformation: Whether they attempt to explain the present or the past, these theories rest on a basic dichotomy between ‘‘oral’’ and ‘‘written’’ cultures, which can be located in every society in which the victory of print is incomplete. The encounter with books produced a fundamental change in the mind of the reader, who undertakes a one-way journey to a rational, purposive, participatory way of life. From being God’s chosen instrument, literacy comes close to replacing the role of religion altogether. We are presented with a new form of spiritual conversion, as profound and irresistible as any described by those who found salvation through reading the Bible. (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 8–9)

Vincent argues that the divide between ‘‘oral’’ and ‘‘written’’ cultures is never as complete and impermeable as such accounts imply – and suggests that the death of voice has become a modern mythology.5

Mythologies of the storyteller

3

Vincent criticizes conventional assumptions that capitalist print culture overwhelmed and did away with pre-modern forms of vocal culture in the nineteenth century. He argues that the commercialization and mass production of literature in the nineteenth century may indeed have eventually led to a monopoly on imaginative fiction by professionals, and to a diminishment in the public performance of literature. This process did not, however, follow a direct path from the eighteenth-century public singing of broadsides to the atomized private reading of modern texts. Instead, Vincent insists, in the early ‘‘encounter with print by the newly literate,’’ [a]t every level, the sound of the human voice was magnified rather than quelled by the mass production and distribution of prose and verse. The simple relationship between the faceless publisher and the soundless reader was disrupted by men and women reciting, singing, shouting, chanting, declaiming, and narrating. (Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 201)

Vincent demonstrates the inadequacy of any notion of a unitary ‘‘oral culture’’ giving way to print culture in the Victorian era. Victorian print culture was also a vocal culture. My argument obviously calls for a questioning and rethinking of Benjamin’s account of the novel’s rise to hegemony. Where Benjamin cast the novel as the villain who overtakes and replaces the oral storyteller at one catastrophic historical juncture, I believe it is actually more accurate to describe the Victorian novel as a fabricated struggle between multiple and complex forms of speech and writing – one that plays out to the distinct advantage of writing. But this was no clean victory. It required fiction to turn on itself and invest extraordinary value in an idealized version of the speech community it had relegated to the past, a community for which the novel offered itself as both substitute and cultural memory.6 In this way an imaginary storyteller acquires symbolic power within Victorian fiction as that which redeems fiction from the guilt of participating in a bureaucratic modernity. Novels are mass-produced and distributed throughout the country to readers who cannot know or be known by the novels’ authors. Yet by defining a novel as the utterance of a powerfully authentic speaker, authors and critics can claim that novelistic language generates the same kind of community supposedly once defined by face-to-face oral exchange. From Dickens onward, then, the figure of the storyteller emerges within British fiction as the sign of endangered intellectual authority, charisma, and personal presence. Renato Rosaldo has termed ‘‘imperialist nostalgia’’ the attitude displayed by a triumphant imperialist culture toward a conquered people. Once the native has been effectively removed as a real danger, he emerges as

4

Voice and the Victorian storyteller

a mythologized figure who embodies a lost natural past. James Clifford, similarly, describes the ‘‘salvage operation’’ that modern cultures perform on the native cultures they have displaced – cultures formerly demonized but invested with moral nobility once they no longer pose a threat.7 The figure of the storyteller might be understood to be analogous to that of the native in these arguments. Like the ‘‘noble savage,’’ the storyteller is a backformation, an idealized agent deployed to anchor a regretful story of origins for a modern culture seen as oppressive.8 We might even say that as the noble savage or innocent native is to culture, the storyteller is to print culture.9 But whereas the innocence of the native is invented once he has been successfully displaced and rendered harmless, there is little evidence that the redemptive storyteller ever really existed in the first place. Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire identifies the bard as a major cultural icon haunting late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature – an ambiguous embodiment of a lost pre-print vocal world. In Trumpener’s compelling study, the forces of a ‘‘London-centered, print-based model of literary history’’ struggle with ‘‘a nationalist, bardic model based on oral tradition’’ (Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 70). Trumpener charts a tug-of-war between two rival visions of the bard: For nationalist [Celtic] antiquaries, the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English poets, in contrast, imagine the bard (and the minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated, and peripatetic figure . . . [H]e represents poetry as a dislocated art, standing apart from and transcending its particular time and place. (Bardic Nationalism, p. 6)

The storyteller can be seen as the attenuated form taken by the English bard once he has been thoroughly incorporated into the industrialized print culture of the 1830s and 1840s and into the Victorian novel. The storyteller, like the bard, embodies a prestige associated with an endangered voice within modern print – yet the storyteller has been stripped of the political specificity the bard possessed for Celtic nationalists. If the Romantic-era bard is alternately a thoroughly political embodiment of historically rooted cultural nationalism and an emblem of a transcendent, English aesthetic, the Victorian storyteller is an apolitical – indeed, anti-political – product of a print culture that understands itself to be hegemonic. Trumpener criticizes as culturally insensitive and imperceptive Samuel Johnson’s mockery of the ‘‘cult of the bard as a deluded, retrojecting fantasy’’ (Bardic Nationalism, p. 79) and his claim that ‘‘neither the ghost nor the

Mythologies of the storyteller

5

bard had ever had an existence’’(quoted in Bardic Nationalism, p. 77). Yet such dismissals might be more justly made of the storyteller, who lacks the bard’s basis in cultural history, and only retains a faint aura of the bard’s defeated prestige. James Macpherson’s collection of poetry purporting to be by the bard Ossian, Trumpener writes, ‘‘offered English readers new possibilities for sympathetic identification with a defeated people and a dying culture’’ (Bardic Nationalism, p. 76). Having acquired a taste for ‘‘this myth of survival in destruction’’ (Bardic Nationalism, p. 8), English literary culture in the Victorian period invented a new means of gratifying it in the figure of the storyteller. One emblematic site for a consideration of Victorian culture’s nostalgia for a pure orality would be Francis James Child’s famous five-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). As John D. Niles explains, Child, who ‘‘assumed that the great creative period of ballad making began during the Middle Ages and ended before the close of the eighteenth century’’ (Niles, Homo Narrans, p. 150), was guided by a fundamental suspicion of print culture’s influence on oral forms. ‘‘Child assumed that the bulk of recent oral balladry of his day was corrupted by print, and hence of little worth’’ (Homo Narrans, p. 151). ‘‘He had equal disdain for the sensational or sentimental products of the nineteenthcentury broadside press, as well as for songs relating to industrial society’’ (Homo Narrans, p. 150). Child’s project of purifying and isolating a proudly native, folk-based, oral ballad tradition from the corrupting and ‘‘contaminating’’ forces of a novelistic modern print culture, Niles concludes, was ‘‘doomed from the start’’ (Homo Narrans, p. 152). Child’s monumental project typifies a self-doubting quality of Victorian print culture: its guilty conscience about its own participation in the displacement of a native orality believed to have expired around the turn of the nineteenth century, and its quixotic desire to use print forms, methods, and technologies to recover and sanctify an obsolete pre-print voice. The Victorian novel offered itself as a form performing much the same work as Child’s ballad collection – that of preserving and reproducing a charismatic voice. From the Victorian era to our own, the double gesture of lamenting the loss of the oral speaker, on the one hand, and figuring a regenerated storyteller, on the other, produces a self-interested critique from within a print culture that the novel itself represents as mindless, bureaucratic, and given to repetition (think, for example, of the Gradgrind schoolroom in Dickens’s Hard Times). To re-imagine the storyteller is to mourn the loss of a time when intellectual work seemed like real manual labor, and

6

Voice and the Victorian storyteller

narratives were not yet commodities within a disenchanted bureaucratic system, but the auratic wisdom of sages. The figure of the storyteller served as a fetish – a way of simultaneously acknowledging and disavowing this change – for intellectuals confronting what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘‘decline of the intellectual artisan in favor of the salaried worker’’ (Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, p. 130) in modernity. Fiction combats speech that resists the authority of print culture, in order to come to the rescue of speech that produces and marks the highly individuated novel reader. The most valued forms of speech are those that at once subordinate themselves to print and, simultaneously, offer the promise of redeeming or humanizing that print.10 Critics have remained curiously blind (or perhaps deaf?) to the functioning of myths of orality within a disenchanted print culture in which voice operates as a wishful form of re-enchantment. If the novel seems, in one sense, all of a piece with modern industrial culture, it is also invested with the power to salvage and conserve pre-industrial voices. Indeed, some forms of speech appear capable of restoring charisma and humanity to the mass culture that had destroyed them. Victorian print culture grants special authority to forms of writing that pay homage to, or even pass themselves off as, transcriptions of that voice whose death knell was supposedly sounded by print. Affect, no longer primarily generated, as in eighteenth-century novels, by an exchange of confidences through letters or the revelation of private journals, instead becomes the product of vocal exchange. Speech, increasingly, becomes the sign of the human and the humane. And where print tended to open more positive vistas for those earlier intellectuals who, like Samuel Johnson, saw it as a means of controlling speech or, like Wordsworth and Scott, who thought of it as the safe and rational repository of indigenous oral cultures, print – following the exponential explosion in the amount produced in the 1830s – became newly problematic.11 Without underestimating the complexity of earlier conceptualizations of voice’s relationship to print, it seems safe to generalize that from Johnson through Wordsworth, English intellectuals displayed some confidence in print’s capacity to appropriate voice without either destroying voice or undermining print’s own authority.12 Even if the print/vocal relationship was always a complicated one, prior to the early decades of the nineteenth century we can at least find a pervasive belief in the possibility that a bourgeois public sphere and its print culture might be able to control orality in a benign manner. For a number of reasons, among them the industrialization and massification of print and the emergence of an

Mythologies of the storyteller

7

oppositional and literate working-class culture, even any such tentative faith in a harmonious relationship between print and voice began to falter in the early Victorian period. The figure of the storyteller emerged as both a symptom of and an attempt at a solution for this perception of cultural crisis: the Victorian storyteller steps forward as a cure for dangerous speech and as a stable source of good speech. And this Victorian construction proves surprisingly resilient and adaptable, going on to play a major role in twentieth-century criticism of the novel. As analysts of Victorian fiction, we have become seduced by one of that fiction’s own inventions. Modern novel criticism has not simply failed fully to recognize the mythology of the storyteller, but has perpetuated it in new forms. BENJAMIN’S STORYTELLER

Benjamin’s ‘‘The Storyteller’’ stands at once at the end of a nineteenthcentury literary tradition and at the beginning of an ongoing critical practice. His essay gathers a cluster of tropes from the nineteenth century and condenses them into a figure of enormous persuasive power for subsequent scholars and critics of Victorian literature and the British novel more generally. I examine the essay as both typical of and foundational to the logic I am explaining. Benjamin argues that the practice of storytelling has been gradually displaced by the effects of a modern print culture. Benjamin’s storyteller is a charismatic but fragile figure who retreats into the pre-modern past before the implacable advance of print. Though silenced, his voice revives in an ecstatic scene of recovery, as Benjamin explains how the righteous man emerges from between the lines of print. Here we find a story of voice’s separation from a damaged man and the subsequent restoration to him of that lost voice. The storyteller’s archaic nature lends heroic drama to the scene of his recovery in print. Writing, figured as an imaginary voice, acquires the moral force of ‘‘wisdom’’ or ‘‘counsel,’’ that is to say, of language that cannot be ignored. In the process of its fabulous death and resurrection, storytelling acquires all the prestige of an honorable but archaic form of production.13 By investing voice with all the pathos and power of an archaic practice, and regretfully asserting the absolute hegemony of a print and information culture, ‘‘The Storyteller’’ establishes what becomes a standard line within twentieth-century criticism. Yet this hegemony invariably reveals sudden gaps and opportunities for voice to re-emerge. Print culture is alternately posited as all-powerful, and as not quite so dominant as to prevent the heroic recurrence of storytelling and voice. Benjamin’s lament for the

8

Voice and the Victorian storyteller

decline of the storyteller should be understood in part as a symptom of dismay at the perceived diminution of the authority of the individual cultural producer. Bourdieu argues that ‘‘the emergence of large collective production units in the fields of radio, television, cinema and journalism as well as in scientific research, and the concomitant decline of the intellectual artisan in favor of the salaried worker’’ brought about a ‘‘demystification of intellectual and artistic activity’’ accompanied by the pathos of lost status. ‘‘Intellectual labor carried out collectively, within technically and socially differentiated production units, can no longer surround itself with the charismatic aura attaching to traditional independent production’’ (Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, pp. 130–1). Thus, in regard to ‘‘voice,’’ the intellectual looks back with longing on what he or she imagines as a vanishing source of charismatic power, one freed from all the binds and compromises of bureaucratic knowledge. I believe the myth of the decline of storytelling and of oral culture more generally emerged out of a form of this longing. Accordingly, modern assertions regarding the attenuation of voice – and its resurrection within print culture – can be understood as motivated in part by regret over a cultural shift toward rationalized and demystified ‘‘collective production’’ in intellectual practice. Even as Benjamin discusses the shift from communal vocal story-telling to solitary novel-reading, his essay mourns the diminishing power of the autonomous culture producer in modernity. ‘‘The Storyteller’’ narrates the decline of the powerful individual voice that, we are to believe, once unified and defined a community that sprang up around him. Benjamin’s nostalgia for a community of listeners cannot be disentangled from his longing for the solitary speaker whose voice centered that community. Storytelling and voice become highly charged emblems of loss, overdetermined by the desire for a mode of literary and critical production in which the ‘‘charismatic aura’’ of the solitary intellectual might still inhere. To tell a story is a means by which the intellectual might stand alone and speak out within a modernity unfriendly to sages. Benjamin’s prestige in our current critical scene is such that it is tempting to think of him as an instance of precisely the storyteller he describes. To offer a critique of his account of storytelling may in fact be to perform just that operation on his language that his status as a storyteller would seem to prohibit. For what distinguishes a story told from one merely written, in Benjamin’s essay, is that an oral performance, possessing all ‘‘that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him,’’ accrues the charisma of martyrdom. The tale of Benjamin’s own death at the German–French border grants his essays a moral resonance

Mythologies of the storyteller

9

that has rendered them almost beyond criticism.14 Writing that attains the stature of storytelling may not be refused, much less critiqued. Reimagined as storytelling, writing becomes a moral tale that can be received into one’s life as ‘‘experience’’ but cannot be otherwise consumed. It becomes a kind of language that determines its own reception as ‘‘wisdom’’ and defines any alternate form of reading as misreading, even as disrespect for the dead. The story of the storyteller is a moralizing narrative of weakness and recovery, of the near-extinction of voice and then of its subsequent recovery. It is a story of the transformation of weak or wounded men into eloquent sages, teachers who transmit and reproduce culture on an individual basis and who render an abstract and bureaucratic language as a sensuous physical reality. According to Benjamin, the rise of the novel marks the death of storytelling, but in Victorian fiction we see its resurrection. That fiction may always threaten to suppress voice, but it does so in order to return voice to the site of its former evacuation. The novel subsumes, transcends, and reproduces speech. The crisis of storytelling in the representation of its diminution functions as a declaration of cultural emergency that justifies extraordinary procedures. Once the storyteller has been declared nearly dead, special measures must be taken to resuscitate him. This emergency consists of a perceived loss of individualized intellectual authority: the diffusion of cultural power, via print, away from self-possessed, authentic speakers into multiple and shifting sites of the production and distribution of language. In so mourning the storyteller, Benjamin positions this figure in the pantheon of print culture. The representation of the death of the storyteller becomes, paradoxically, the means of defining him as the imaginary source of writing. And the state of emergency declared by the story of the storyteller justifies unusual means to restore the intellectual to his proper place as the charismatic center of society. The usual right of a listener to choose not to listen to a speaker is withheld in the case of the storyteller, whose speech is defined as, in effect, compulsory wisdom. Benjamin’s essay begins by marking the disappearance of its analytical object: Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83)

With every moment, Benjamin implies, insistently sounding a note of regretful loss, the storyteller and his vocal utterance are receding into the past.

10

Voice and the Victorian storyteller

[T]he art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly . . . It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest of our possessions, were taken from us. (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83)

Having announced that storytelling ‘‘is coming to an end,’’ he then shifts tense to explain that ‘‘[s]torytelling began quite slowly to recede into the archaic’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 88, emphases mine). When exactly was the powerful art of storytelling lost? Is that loss an imminent threat to be staved off, or a fait accompli to be mourned and regretted? Benjamin prefers to leave the exact moment of loss unspecified and thus capable of floating through his essay as a kind of open threat. His story of loss and decline emphasizes what he calls ‘‘the tiny, fragile human body.’’ But there are actually two bodies in his essay. One is a fragile body that stands ‘‘under the open sky . . . in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 84). The other is the robust body of the storyteller, a figure of ‘‘full corporeality’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 84). The damaged body is the product of its separation from the oracular body, whose absence diminishes the entire culture: ‘‘experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness . . . it has reached a new low’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 84). Benjamin implies that the storyteller’s demise entails the splitting off of a vital part of the human body. The loss of voice means the end of ‘‘full corporeality,’’ leaving us to inhabit a body that is exposed to an overpowering modernity. Discussing the work of Leskov, Benjamin notes, ‘‘There are a number of his legendary tales whose focus is a righteous man, seldom an ascetic, usually a simple, active man who becomes a saint apparently in the most natural way in the world’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ pp. 85–6). We might say that Benjamin’s essay is itself such a ‘‘legendary tale,’’ one describing the revitalization of the intellectual within modernity, the healing of his ‘‘fragile body’’ and restoration to ‘‘full corporeality.’’ Speaking for and to intellectuals who understand the loss of ‘‘aura’’ in the modern work of art as a diminishment of their own status, Benjamin adopts the language of a dispossessed owner: ‘‘It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83). Voice becomes newly defined as possession. It becomes conceptualized as that which we never knew we owned until it was taken away – at which point its loss becomes seen as a devastating dispossession. When voice is removed from the body, what had seemed a secure whole splits off into partial fragments. The storyteller is not only a simple man who becomes a sage, he is also a laboring man whose very voice is a form of manual craft. Leskov plays this

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role in Benjamin’s account, because, in his words, the Russian author ‘‘felt bonds with craftsmanship, but faced industrial technology as a stranger’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 92). Storytelling, he continues, is a form of craft labor in which ‘‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 92). ‘‘[S]oul, eye, and hand are brought into connection . . . [S]torytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays a part which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 108). As Fredric Jameson comments approvingly, the tale or story is ‘‘the product of an artisanal culture, a handmade product like a cobbler’s shoe or a pot’’ (Jameson, Marxism, p. 80). Imagined as the utterance of an honorable sage, writing subsumes the manual labor of folk culture. It appropriates that labor for itself in the figure of an author whose speech is productive work. If writing has come to seem a means of participating in a wholly disenchanted and abstract modern economy, storytelling offers the promise of transforming intellectual work, and specifically the transmission of narratives, into a satisfying form of labor. ‘‘Seen in this way,’’ Benjamin concludes, ‘‘the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages . . . The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.’’ In contrast with the novels read by ‘‘solitary individual[s]’’ who are themselves ‘‘uncounseled’’ and who ‘‘cannot counsel others,’’ every ‘‘real story’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 86) will contain a ‘‘moral,’’ ‘‘practical advice,’’ ‘‘a proverb or maxim.’’ Benjamin’s essay offers examples of ‘‘righteous men’’ in an effort to explain how a written narrative might possess the same value as the speech of such men. While writing in and of itself is morally neutral and may be ignored, left unread, the imagined utterance of ‘‘righteous men’’ brooks no such indifference: its counsel must be heeded. The obsolescent storyteller provides the site at which an intellectual ‘‘encounters himself ’’ as the sovereign subject of an idealized oral past. Fiction may well threaten to suppress voice, but it does so in order to restore a revitalized voice at the very site of its evacuation. THE STORYTELLER IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

Benjamin’s tale of voice’s heroic return within print culture, just in time to rescue intellectual work from ‘‘information’’ and bureaucracy, becomes a familiar paradigm within later twentieth-century criticism. If we examine some of the foundational stories of recent criticism, we see a recurring structure in which the novel or the critic kills off voice or speech – but never once and for all, never absolutely. Benjamin’s essay has, of course, been

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influential on later criticism and theory, but my point is less about direct influence than about a broader cultural and literary inheritance. Some of our most consequential critical narratives are underwritten by just such a powerful mythology about the relationship of the vocal or spoken to the written or printed. As the story goes, print – and the novel in particular – killed speech in order then to resurrect it within its own universe, as our hope or salvation. Stories of literacy repeatedly project backward fantasies of innocent and endangered embodiments of pre-literate or oral culture in order to indict modernity as oppressive or inhuman. As Walter Ong puts it, ‘‘oral cultures . . . produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche’’ (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 14). We long for the power, beauty, and ‘‘human worth’’ of that vulnerable ‘‘oral culture’’ that we fear we ourselves, using our modern tools of print and writing, have rendered obsolete or even destroyed. Michel Foucault, for example, invokes a distinctly Benjaminian tale of a ‘‘simple’’ man associated with a ‘‘bucolic’’ lost era of a whole ‘‘village life’’ in order to dramatize the coercive imposition of rationalized print culture on Europe. Foucault, of course, is not generally prone to sentimentalize speech. Much of his work trenchantly analyzes the ‘‘incitements to speak’’ (Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 32) in modernity. His influential ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’ argues that it is less accurate to say that ‘‘everything’’ – everything illicit, perverse, proscribed, sexualized – had to be repressed in Victorian culture than that ‘‘everything had to be told’’ (History of Sexuality, p. 19). A broad imperative to confess, to put into speech, Foucault argues, has organized modernity far more thoroughly than the impulse to repress and interdict. At the same time, however, in his story of the simple-minded village pederast, Foucault himself represents the transfer from a local, oral culture to a rationalized, national print culture as a fall from innocence. Like Benjamin, Foucault offers an exemplary fable of the fate of a ‘‘righteous man’’ within an oppressive print culture. ‘‘One day in 1867,’’ Foucault begins – adopting the cadences of the narrator of a ‘‘legendary tale.’’ This ‘‘one day’’ signals a simpler time that can only be experienced today through the language of a charismatic storyteller: One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living handto-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. (History of Sexuality, p. 31)

This character seems to be a close relation to the ‘‘simple’’ laboring man of ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ the ‘‘poorest wretch’’ who, in his death, becomes

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exemplary. In this tale of a ‘‘farm hand’’ living ‘‘hand-to-mouth,’’ the man becomes the very signifier of manual labor.15 ‘‘Employed here then there’’ according to the rhythm of the seasons, this man is a figure from a pre-industrial era when labor occurred unsystematically, by happenstance, governed not by the strict law of clock and calendar but by nature. Even if this farm hand performed ‘‘the worst sort of labor,’’ Foucault makes that debased labor seem enviably un-alienated and spontaneous. Foucault draws his anecdote from history to dramatize the fall of a simple, innocent man into the snares of ‘‘the world of learning.’’ This simple-minded fellow had ‘‘obtained a few caresses from a little girl,’’ for which crime he was passed on from authority to authority to the hands of a judge, ‘‘who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published.’’ ‘‘[U]p to that moment,’’ Foucault writes, this man ‘‘had been an integral part of village life,’’ but as a reprisal for his ‘‘inconsequential bucolic pleasures,’’ he was ripped out of his rural idyll, submitted to a series of scientific studies, and finally ‘‘made into a pure object of medicine and knowledge – an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mare´ville, but also one to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis’’ (History of Sexuality, pp. 31–2). What is most striking in this account is the villainy of literacy, expertise, and publication. ‘‘Up to that moment,’’ a ‘‘village life’’ allowed a ‘‘simpleminded’’ and lustful yet fundamentally harmless laboring man to find and take his ‘‘bucolic pleasures’’ where he might. On our side of this historical divide, we find a brutally efficient cadre of experts – ancestors of the contemporary academic – writing, studying, and reporting, effectively ending this wretch’s life by transforming him into an object of discourse dispersed among the circuits of a ‘‘world of learning.’’ He is transported from a ‘‘village’’ to a ‘‘world,’’ from innocent pleasure and manual labor to global expert knowledge. Foucault’s depiction of the incarceration and objectification of a man who had been an ‘‘integral part of village life’’ recalls Benjamin’s description of the ‘‘full corporeality’’ of the storyteller. Each insists on the damage inflicted by modern forms of knowledgeproduction on an organic way of life symbolized by the laboring body.16 Benjamin’s and Foucault’s type of lament gains special currency in modern criticism of the novel, a literary form that serves as a crucial site of Anglo-American culture’s anxiety about print’s displacement of speech. Novel criticism wavers between dismay at the effacement or overwhelming of voice by writing, and pleasure at the sound of voice ringing out from print – as if the successful conjuring of speech in writing were the novel’s

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ultimate self-realization.17 One might think that Derrida’s powerful critique of phonocentrism in Western culture would have put an end once and for all to the habit of idealizing voice as a cure for print or writing – yet voice retains the power of a fetish. Contemporary criticism may too quickly have decided it had learned all it needed to know from that Derridean or deconstructive critique; in spite of our theoretical recognition that presenting the voice as prior and essential is a dubious gesture, we continue to do so in practice. Why is this so? Voice became attached to the figure of the storyteller – seen as the embodiment of, alternately and simultaneously, self-expression, the pathos of cultural obsolescence and marginality, and intellectual authority and charisma.18 Once Derrida’s arguments regarding voice’s relationship to writing in Western metaphysics were criticized – fairly enough – as sweepingly universalist and unattuned to historical and cultural specificity, it was easy enough for a historicist criticism to put aside his critique. On the one hand, I am arguing that the contemporary critical scene requires ‘‘more Derrida,’’ a further dose of his debunking of the very old story of ‘‘the corruption of speech by writing’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 41). We currently inhabit a post-deconstructive critical scene: one which believes itself to be beyond the deconstructive critique of traditional accounts of the voice/writing relationship when it would perhaps benefit from a deeper consideration of that critique. I offer my own argument not as a return to Derridean methodology, however, but as a culturally and historically grounded reconsideration of some of the issues his work brought into view. What cultural critics found most difficult to swallow in deconstruction was its tendency toward sweeping accounts of ‘‘Western’’ thought, history, and metaphysics. My aim is more modest in its historical claims. Where Derrida addresses Western metaphysics, speech, and writing, I consider the emergence, in the Victorian period, of a new set of attitudes toward industrialized print culture. What I am calling the mythology of the storyteller overlaps with what Derrida calls the phonocentric narrative of a pure and innocent voice and a corrupting writing. Yet translated into the terms of nineteenth-century print culture and of Victorian fiction, these themes generate a more particular fantasy of what critics like Benjamin later codified as the storyteller, the culturally regenerating voice that is projected as the origin of novels. The mythology of the storyteller protects literature and particularly fiction from the mechanization and inhumanity of industrial print. What Judith Butler calls ‘‘the idealization of the speech act as sovereign action’’ (Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 82) recurs in some of the most

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influential and foundational work within modern literary criticism and theory, particularly novel criticism. Raymond Williams’s classic The Country and the City, for example, culminates in the ‘‘discovery’’ in Joyce of a ‘‘positive flow of . . . human speech’’ that had, until now, been shut out of prose: It is a paradox that in Ulysses, through its patterns of loss and frustration, there is not only search but discovery: of an ordinary language, heard more clearly than anywhere in the realist novel before it; a positive flow of that wider human speech which had been screened and strained by the prevailing social conventions: conventions of separation and reduction, in the actual history. The greatness of Ulysses is this community of speech. (Williams, The Country and the City, p. 245)

Here Williams’s insistence that novels are, or should be, ‘‘knowable communities’’ (The Country and the City, p. 165) reveals itself as a desire that they be speech communities. Williams’s rich literary history reveals a teleology that progresses from the suppression or incomplete representation of voice he associates with pre-modernist fiction to the emergence of authentic voices in the avant-garde fiction of the twentieth century. He identifies his task as critic as that of uncovering of a ‘‘wider human speech,’’ a charismatic utterance of the sort that contemporary literary and ‘‘social conventions’’ repress. One must feel some skepticism at Williams’s narrative, moving from the ‘‘screened and strained’’ language of artificial writing to the ‘‘discovery’’ of a vocal writing linked to freedom or social justice. That ‘‘wider human speech’’ is the endangered voice whose return or resurrection will redeem us. Even if we sympathize with Williams’s politics and his desire to find ‘‘ordinary language’’ within the literary canon, we should, I think, question any such longing for an obsolete ‘‘full integrity’’ of utterance. Such nostalgia, as I am arguing, tends to be closely linked to intellectuals’ unexamined yearning for authority.19 My argument to this point has pointed to a masculine storyteller. Such critics as Benjamin and Foucault use such a man to represent an era of idealized speech communities that precedes the rise of modern print culture. Yet this charismatic figure has been appropriated by contemporary feminist critics as well. Indeed, much of the pioneer work of feminist literary criticism sought to recover what were persistently identified, in a metaphor that became almost invisible, as suppressed female voices. If Williams’s socialist criticism targets as its object of recovery the ‘‘ordinary language’’ that has been systematically excluded from canonical literature, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, for example, privileges the bursting out of autonomous female voices into agency from

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within a patriarchal culture. In this narrative, the novel serves at once as a constraining cage for women’s voices and the form in which women find a voice of their own: If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she ‘‘talk back’’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? We believe these are the basic questions feminist literary criticism – both theoretical and practical – must answer . . . (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 46)

Gilbert and Gubar’s celebration of ‘‘her own timbre’’ reveals the enduring link between vocal expression and the full possession of language which stands as the sign of individual autonomy. Literary language, figured as voice, is taken to stand as the sign of the entry of the marginalized into effective agency. Gilbert and Gubar gender the paradigm such that the bureaucratic structure becomes masculine, the thwarted speaker feminine, but they otherwise retain the basic terms of Benjamin’s model. Intellectual autonomy – in a formulation that became enormously influential on the novel criticism of the past two decades – becomes figured in the emergence and speaking out of a suppressed and threatened voice.20 Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and AfricanAmerican Voices, which establishes a link between Mark Twain’s representation of Huck Finn in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his description of a young black waiter named Jimmy in a New York Times article, offers a more recent example of the thematics of vocal liberation. Fishkin’s general project of demonstrating the influence of African-American language on mainstream nineteenth-century white culture – including Twain’s novel – is certainly a worthwhile one. But it is notable that Was Huck Black? needs to enlist the metaphor of authorial ‘‘voice’’ for the cause of restoring literature to a promised former glory. Arguing against parents and educators who object to the use of racist language in Twain’s novel, Fishkin insists that if Twain’s character Huck can be linked through patterns of speech to a young African-American boy about whom Twain wrote in a newspaper article, then Twain’s novel cannot be racist. Thus in Fishkin’s evocation of Twain’s appropriation of the voice of the boy, ‘‘Sociable Jimmy,’’ the boy’s agency – figured as speech – anchors Twain’s own status as something like a Benjaminian ‘‘righteous man’’: ‘‘It was a voice that Twain contained within himself, a language and set of cadences and rhythms he could generate fluently on his own, having been exposed to many such voices in his youth.

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Jimmy triggered his recollection of those voices, and sparked his apprehension of the creative possibilities they entailed’’ (Fishkin, Was Huck Black? p. 15).21 A celebration of the emergence of voice within a hostile cultural context emerges as a trump card, winning the hand for literary value and the power of literary charisma. Like James Joyce for Raymond Williams, or Charlotte Bronte¨ for Gilbert and Gubar and the many feminist critics influenced by their work, Mark Twain for Fishkin becomes the authorial speaker of a voice that might be able to redeem an oppressive culture.22 Perhaps the clearest demonstration of our enduring attachment to ‘‘voice’’ as authentic vocal expression is the boom in personal memoir within academic writing of the last two decades.23 Stephen Greenblatt’s 1988 essay ‘‘The Circulation of Social Energy,’’ a landmark statement of the New Historicism, provides not only an analysis but also a good example of this trend. ‘‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead,’’ reads the essay’s famous first sentence. This statement boils down the paradigm I am analyzing here to one neat epigram. ‘‘This desire,’’ Greenblatt continues, is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans. If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1)

Greenblatt’s self-scrutiny dramatizes the persistent desire on the part of critics to understand their writing as speech, to give voice to what has been ‘‘unvoiced.’’ He evokes an undercurrent of narcissism and self-interest in the longing of critics to hear silent voices suppressed by history. At the same time, Greenblatt’s candid self-analysis reveals a familiar nostalgia for a nonprofessional and authentic intellectual practice, as he evokes the ‘‘thick layers of bureaucratic decorum’’ that scholarship has become. I certainly do not want to critique lightly the important work that was initiated within a project of what we could call novel criticism as vocal recovery. I cite the work of such scholars as Raymond Williams and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, as illustrating the ways many of the most consequential accounts of the English novel over the past several decades have depended on an unexamined thematics of voice: of voice’s suppression, voice’s silencing, and ultimately voice’s ecstatic escape and speaking out. It can seem churlish to critique a conceptual framework that enabled such important critical work – but I believe it is now time to

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rethink and, perhaps, abandon the metaphor of literary writing as a suppressed or silenced voice. To do so might, among other things, lead us to a more forthright understanding of our own role as knowledge producers and as writers within a modern information culture. CARLYLE AND DICKENS: REGENERATION, REVOCALIZATION

This chapter has taken Benjamin’s ‘‘The Storyteller’’ as one point of origin for a contemporary critical discourse in which the figure of a virtuous oral storyteller promises to rescue print culture from itself. My subsequent chapters will trace the emergence of a similar problematic of voice in the nineteenth century, when the disappearance of the storyteller was first proposed. Benjamin’s lament for the storyteller follows an earlier tradition that invoked vocal sages for the purpose of resisting the inevitable encroachment of modern industrial culture. Indeed, the same narrative of decline and resurrection that Benjamin codifies as critical doctrine provides a mobile reserve of the rhetoric, plot, and imagery that characterize many works of Victorian literature. The work of Thomas Carlyle offers particularly clear insight into the emergence of such a cultural logic. Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History authorizes print by figuring it as a ‘‘voice’’ produced only in writing – not in actual speech – and for an abstracted, dispersed audience; in so doing, he establishes a new way of figuring the relationship between print culture and speech. In this work Carlyle describes the ideal form of language as speech that has not only been rendered obsolete but also made available in writing. Discussing, in succession, the hero as ‘‘Prophet,’’ as ‘‘Poet,’’ and as ‘‘Man of Letters,’’ Carlyle offers a genealogy that may at first appear to be a story of decline but turns out to be an ascent toward the gradual sublation of voice in writing. Carlyle’s book is in fact the transcription of a vocal presentation – although the term ‘‘transcription’’ does not do justice to the complex negotiations between speech and writing that went into its production. From 1837 to 1840, he performed four lecture series concluding with On Heroes. He passed through several stages during the course of public lecturing. Initially experiencing profound disgust at the idea of giving voice to his ideas, he came to feel that lecturing might give new power to his role as author. Reluctantly driven to take the stage by financial need, Carlyle triumphed as a lecturer but eventually turned away from performance to a form of ‘‘voice’’ attainable only in and as writing.

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At first, Carlyle considered his own public speech a ‘‘false impotent scrawl’’ (quoted in Carlyle, On Heroes, p. xxiv) in comparison to his writing. He found his voice to be a relatively powerless form of inscription. Writing to Emerson in 1838 of the ‘‘bayonets of Necessity’’ that drove him ‘‘into that Lecture-room,’’ he complained that ‘‘my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue,’’ and fretted that his ‘‘only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering’’ (Carlyle, Collected Letters, vol. X, p. 52). Forced by material need to leave writing for speech, he worried that he would make a public spectacle of himself by producing not language but hysterical fits. In speaking, he was troubled by the body and described the experience of lecturing in terms of acute physical discomfort: ‘‘I was wasted and fretted to a thread, my tongue let me drink as I would continued dry as charcoal: the people were there, I was obliged to stumble in, and start. Ach Gott ! But it was got thro’’’ (Collected Letters. vol. IX, p. 215). In this very same letter, however, Carlyle hazards that ‘‘it seems possible I may get into a kind of way of lecturing or otherwise speaking direct to my fellowcreatures; and so get delivered out of this awful quagmire of difficulties in which you have so long seen me struggle and wriggle’’ (Collected Letters, vol. IX, p. 215). The lectures which later made up On Heroes were a great public success, and if Carlyle continued to describe his oral performance in grotesquely embodied terms, he also acknowledged that performance’s power over a responsive audience: ‘‘the people seemed greatly astonished and greatly pleased. I vomited forth on them like wild Annandale grapeshot. They laughed, applauded, &c’’ (quoted in On Heroes, p. xxix). As this equation of speaking with vomiting makes clear, Carlyle never was fully reconciled to the role of embodied public performer. After this public lecture series, he retired from the stage and used the experience to reconceptualize authorship as a form of virtual speech. Having first rejected lecturing as an ‘‘impotent scrawl’’ and then briefly embraced it as a way of ‘‘speaking direct,’’ as he said, to an appreciative audience, Carlyle finally arrived at a concept of the lecture that he could effectively transform into writing. One observer of Carlyle’s triumphant final lecture series noted that the charisma of his performance resided in the effect he conveyed of having much to say that would necessarily remain unuttered: ‘‘His manner is very quiet, but he speaks like one tremendously convinced of what he utters, and who had much – very much – in him that was quite unutterable’’ (quoted in On Heroes, p. xxx). When he ceased delivering lectures, Carlyle achieved precisely this charismatic effect. He described how, as he began turning his lectures into a book, he had learned to produce something on the order of speech by writing: ‘‘I am

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endeavouring to write down my Lectures somewhat in the style of speech; as they were, or rather as they might have been, and should have been, and wished to be, delivered to the people’’ (Collected Letters, vol. XII, pp. 167–8). He did not consider speech that had simply been transcribed to be successful as written prose or, for that matter, as speech. What Carlyle learned, in his experiment with vocal performance, was that writing gained a special power when it imitated spoken words ‘‘as they . . . should have been, and wanted to be.’’ When actually spoken, words were so closely linked to the body as to be painful at worst and unsustainable at best. Speech acts seemed to him doomed to become corrupted and to fail to signify – to become, in J. L. Austin’s term, ‘‘unhappy.’’ But in writing a prose that aspired to the purely imaginary ideal of disembodied voice, Carlyle hit upon a style of literary language that possessed both the charisma of speech and print’s power to circulate to a national readership. That is to say – and ironically so, considering his disdain for fiction – Carlyle found the language that became characteristic of the genre of the Victorian novel. This language may be understood in the context of media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s argument about the emergence of what he calls the European ‘‘discourse network’’ of 1800 – a new ideology of childhood pedagogy that defined a maternal voice as the source of language acquisition. Within this discourse network, ‘‘a kind of speech ar[o]se that can be thought of as an ideal of Nature’’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 28); the ‘‘mother’s voice’’ – not the actual voices of real mothers but a fantasy of idealized vocality – translates ‘‘everything written’’ into ‘‘pure Spirit and Voice’’ (Discourse Networks, p. 54). The point is that writing becomes redefined as an embodiment of an impossible voice that could never actually be uttered.24 ‘‘The silent or even dead marks of writing accomplish what the sound of the lips – the colloquial, animal, or at any rate empirical play of voices and mouths – is unable to do’’ (Discourse Networks, p. 64). Writing aims to conjure up a transcendent voice that at once suppresses and appropriates ‘‘colloquial, animal’’ or ‘‘empirical’’ voices. Speech acts always fail because of their link to the animal or material body, but a writing that offers itself as a purified speech act serves as an antidote for such a dilemma. We may see Carlyle, understood in the context of Kittler’s argument, as engaged in an attempt to transform both unsatisfactory writing and over-embodied, physical speech into ‘‘pure Spirit and Voice’’ – what he calls spoken words ‘‘as they wished to be’’ uttered. Whether uttered by a masculine ‘‘sage’’ figure or by a maternal or otherwise pure woman, such imaginary language functions as a powerful fetish for Victorian print culture.

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A century later, Benjamin would begin ‘‘The Storyteller’’ on a note of regret by defining the storyteller as ‘‘by no means a present force’’ but ‘‘already . . . something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83). Carlyle too begins ‘‘The Hero as Man of Letters’’ by assigning charisma and ‘‘Heroism’’ to ‘‘the old ages’’: ‘‘Hero-gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages.’’ They ‘‘make their appearance in the remotest times,’’ he continues, and ‘‘some of them . . . cannot any more shew themselves in this world’’ (On Heroes, p. 133). Thus he, too, describes modernity as loss, absence, cessation – in other words, as disenchantment. Yet, having made this point, Carlyle proceeds to argue that it is possible for modern writing, even print produced for the marketplace, to become heroic when it presents itself as a prophetic voice. Carlyle’s hero speaks wisdom: ‘‘He is uttering forth,’’ in the author’s words, ‘‘the inspired soul of him’’ (On Heroes, p. 134). The language of the hero, here described almost as a breathing in and out, ‘‘inspir[ing]’’ and ‘‘uttering forth,’’ is nothing other than the extension and transcendence of voice. Carlyle defines modern writing as linked to the sanctified institutions of the church and pulpit, which he defines as locations and opportunities for ‘‘the speaking of man to man.’’ But where speech must always be uttered in a single place to a specific audience, writing in the form of print allows an address to a dizzyingly unlocalized listenership: Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilised world there is a Pulpit . . . that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men . . . But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching, not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? (On Heroes, p. 137)

The language of the hero, a production of ‘‘the tongue,’’ is not diminished by writing but given unimaginably broader powers. On Heroes becomes, in ‘‘The Hero as Man of Letters,’’ a panegyric to writing as a preservation and amplification of the aura of voice even in the death of speech. A century later, Benjamin describes both writing and modernity as similarly impoverished and damaged by the absence of ‘‘the speaking of man to men.’’ He then reveals that a certain form of writing may resurrect that vocal experience. So, too, Carlyle redefines ‘‘a Book’’ as a form of unlocalized ‘‘preaching’’ that provides a happy ending for what had seemed a gloomy jeremiad. Vocalized print produces a new kind of mass audience that is at

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once transcendent and personalized. Figured as voice, print communicates to a mass readership as if speaking individually to each of its members. ‘‘[T]he Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectively to learn it!’’ (On Heroes, p. 139). That which is printed in a book is still ‘‘speech,’’ still bears the charisma and presence of the ‘‘hero.’’ One does not read a true book, in Carlyle’s definition, but listens to it: ‘‘In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream’’ (On Heroes, p. 138). Writing becomes the reincarnation of voice. That utterance that ‘‘has altogether vanished like a dream’’ is reborn in immaterial form, as writing that is effortlessly transmittable, defying the localism of voice. That vanished utterance can, in other words, be resurrected in print as infinitely extended presence. Here Carlyle writes not of the material voice in which he painfully delivered these lectures, but of a virtual voice within writing that turns speech into a ‘‘vanished dream’’ – of some full presence lost to us but partially revivified in literary production. Carlyle stages a scene of the resurrection of vocal performance in writing, the release of voice from its artificial bounds – a scene which also articulates a fantasy of sovereign power for the intellectual. Speaking before a reverent Victorian audience, Carlyle imagines a time when writer-speakers will attain real, ‘‘palpably articulated . . . power’’ and gain substantial respect for the ‘‘work’’ they perform. This passage not only invokes the carnal reappearance of the crucified Christ but also the revelation of the cadaverous body in a mummy-unwrapping ceremony: If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognised unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. (On Heroes, pp. 142–3)

Much like the contemporary professor who imagines himself as a ‘‘middleclass shaman . . . buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum,’’ Carlyle would have us think of the ‘‘Man of Letters’’ as a figure of limitless social power presently obscured in ‘‘wrappages, bandages’’ – evoking the pages and sheets of print culture as an enveloping shroud – who will ‘‘step forth one day’’ to reveal his true stature.25 Exclaiming over the good sense of the Chinese, who ‘‘do attempt to make their Men of Letters their

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Governors!’’ (On Heroes, p. 145) and put ‘‘the man of intellect at the top of affairs’’ (On Heroes, p. 146), Carlyle fantasizes a form of speech capable of transforming an ‘‘unrecognised’’ intellectual into a ‘‘Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler!’’ (On Heroes, p. 153). In a manner that has since become familiar, Carlyle’s valorization of a hitherto occulted and suppressed speech permits a fantasy of a sovereign language that must be obeyed: ‘‘The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world . . . It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed’’ (On Heroes, pp. 165–6). Such sovereign language heals the community, induces unanimity, and restores the damaged individual body to wholeness. In another essay, Carlyle assigns his ideal of triumphant voice – a voice capable of redeeming a dead print culture – to a ‘‘new man’’ who happens to be a laboring man. In Carlyle’s praise of Ebenezer Elliot, author of the lyrics collected in ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes’’ (1831), Carlyle depicts the workingclass poet as the speaker of a profound utterance emerging from the scene of manual labor: ‘‘Here is a voice coming from the deep Cyclopean forges, where Labour, in real soot and sweat, beats with his thousand hammers ‘the red son of the furnace’ . . . an intelligible voice from the hitherto Mute and Irrational, to tell us at first hand how it is with him’’ (Carlyle, ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ p. 161). Elliot’s voice, according to Carlyle, is like a piece of metal ‘‘hammered’’ at the forge: ‘‘He says in Vulcanic dialect, his feelings have been hammered till they are cold-short ’’ (‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ p. 171). Carlyle scoffs at the notion that ‘‘it were by universities and libraries and lecture-rooms, that man’s Education, what we can call Education, were accomplished,’’ associating the institutions and habits of bureaucratic routine with a ‘‘dead letter.’’ Instead, he suggests, Elliot’s laboring man’s speech will be the means by which ‘‘a new man were to be awakened, enkindled and purified into victorious clearness!’’ (‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ p. 165). A dead print culture and rote habits of expression will be ‘‘awakened’’ and ‘‘purified’’ by a charismatic, authentic voice that can only be heard by reading a book of poems. And this voice must be heard, cannot be ignored: ‘‘To which voice, in several respects significant enough, let good ear be given’’ (‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ p. 161); ‘‘Whom else should we attend to but such?’’ (‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes,’’ p. 168).26 Carlyle’s dream of the death of the oral voice and the return of sovereign speech reverberates through Victorian fiction. It becomes the novel’s task to present the death of the speaker as a resurrection in print. By reincarnating the charismatic speaker as the author, the novel promises to reconstitute a society of dispersed and isolated readers as a community on the order of an

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earlier organic speech community. In his famous readings almost two decades later, Charles Dickens followed Carlyle’s example by redefining his professional identity as a novelist on the model of a vocal storyteller (as I discuss at length in chapter 4). It is in a novel Dickens published several years prior to beginning his career as a public reader, however, that he first takes up the task of depicting the heroic, vital, yet wounded storyteller as the salvation of a society damaged by industrialism. Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) begins with a unnamed ‘‘government officer’’ lecturing a group of schoolchildren on ‘‘Facts’’ in a voice ‘‘which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.’’ One of the novel’s primary tasks proves to be to find a substitute or antidote for that ‘‘dry’’ voice. Dickens seems to ask whether a living voice can possibly speak out from within such a world ruled by ‘‘Fact,’’ a category very similar to Benjaminian information: ‘‘Fact’’ is knowledge without imagination, or language without expressive voice. As the officer explains in the novel’s first pages, We hope to have before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it . . . You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets . . . You must use . . . combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. (Dickens, Hard Times, pp. 5–6)

This prohibition of figurative expression suggests how thoroughly this world has been rationalized in order to subject all language to the proof of ‘‘verifiability’’ and the ‘‘plausible’’ that Benjamin describes as anathema to storytelling. The opening of Hard Times sets out the problem that the rest of the novel tries to solve. By discrediting the industrialist Bounderby, redeeming the schoolteacher Gradgrind, and ritually sacrificing and then sanctifying the manual worker and ‘‘factory hand’’ Stephen Blackpool, Dickens suggests the only means by which this culture of information might become one dominated by ‘‘righteous’’ individuals. The initial public condemnation of Blackpool – for a robbery he did not in fact commit – occurs through an intertwined process of writing and public speech, of violently denunciatory written proclamation and of oratory in the inflammatory Chartist mode, as Dickens figures a social world deformed by a corrupt system of language in which guilt and innocence cannot be justly assessed. Bounderby prints up the charges against Blackpool ‘‘in great black letters on a staring broadsheet; and he caused the walls to be posted with it in the dead of night, so that it should

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strike upon the sight of the whole population at one blow’’ (Hard Times, p. 187). This is writing that is at once public and furtive, violent and ostentatious. But the full dissemination of the slander is brought about only with the vocalizing of this writing. First, the broadsheets are read aloud, much as Dickens’s own work was read aloud by readers: ‘‘These people, as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud – there was always some such ready to help them – stared at the characters which meant so much with a vague awe’’ (Hard Times, p. 187). Secondly, the contemptible demagogue Slackbridge makes a freshly printed copy of the broadsheet as the prop for a slavering, rabble-rousing speech in which he condemns Stephen as ‘‘A thief ! A plunderer . . . a fester and a wound upon the noble character of the Coketown operative’’ (Hard Times, p. 188). ‘‘Gnashing and perspiring after a prodigious sort . . . demonstratively panting’’ (Hard Times, p. 189) at his credulous audience of factory hands, Slackbridge becomes a figure of over-embodied demagogic speech. Management’s unfair condemnation of Stephen Blackpool as a thief thus demonstrates the negative power of the Victorian public sphere when speech operates in cahoots with print to suppress the truth. Vilified in the mutually reinforcing media of printed broadsides and vocal accusation, Stephen is the victim of a social system in which language fails to identify or honor ‘‘righteous men.’’ At stake in Stephen’s redemption, then, is nothing less than the redemption of print culture as well. To this end, Dickens offers a tale very much like Benjamin’s account of the storyteller; he sacrifices Stephen in order to resurrect him as a wounded speaker whose barely audible voice conjures up the spirit of a compassionate preindustrial society. ‘‘Day and night again, day and night again,’’ Dickens writes. ‘‘No Stephen Blackpool. Where was the man, and why did he not come back?’’ (Hard Times, p. 194). Accused of theft, he has vanished and is presumed to have fled the long arm of the law. That question – ‘‘where was the man?’’ – sets the stage for the necessary reappearance of ‘‘the man’’ that will, in one stroke, establish Stephen’s honesty and, in his death, imbue his final words with an incontestable ring of truth. Thus this drama of the regeneration of masculinity in Dickens is also the drama of the storyteller’s emergence. This figure acquires authority, paradoxically, from a story that proves his obsolescence in a world given over to print. The only two souls left in the community who still believe in Stephen – his wife Rachael and Sissy Jupe – happen upon his hat next to ‘‘the brink of a black rugged chasm hidden by the thick grass’’ (Hard Times, p. 202). The name of this chasm, ‘‘Old Hell Shaft,’’ serves as a glaring reminder of the violence committed by

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industrialism upon this community, and sets the scene for Stephen’s exoneration – an exoneration that will magically rehabilitate the entire community. When Sissy runs for help, for example, one of the men she encounters was in a drunken slumber, but on his comrade’s shouting to him that a man had fallen down the Old Hell Shaft, he started out to a pool of dirty water, put his head in it and came back sober . . . [Sissy] hurried swiftly back, accompanied by half-a-dozen labourers, including the drunken man whom the news had sobered, and who was the best man of all. (Hard Times, pp. 203–4)

This incidental redemption of a dissolute laborer offers in microcosm one of Dickens’s most powerful figures of transformation, namely, the metamorphosis of a bad man into ‘‘the best man of all.’’ This same figure of regenerated masculinity governs his depiction of Stephen’s physical death and its reenactment on a psychological plane, as Gradgrind, the heartless utilitarian, suddenly becomes a loving father. The trauma of Stephen’s fatal accident is culturally regenerating. Authority itself has become thoroughly corrupt and coercive under the sway of industrial capitalism. As a result of Stephen’s sacrifice, however, the otherwise unruly populace welcome a newly charismatic power. This is how Dickens chose to depict the moment of collective submission to this benign force: ‘‘There being now people enough present to impede the work, the sobered man put himself at the head of the rest, or was put there by the general consent, and made a large ring round the Old Hell Shaft, and appointed men to keep it’’ (Hard Times, p. 204). Just who has this power and what it does becomes blurred in this happy hegemony. Whether the man ‘‘at the head of the rest’’ acquires his authority by his own volition or ‘‘by general consent’’ is impossible to tell. But we are told that once Stephen’s fatally damaged body is drawn up from Old Hell Shaft, a new kind of community emerges with him. In contrast with the fractiously vocal labor union, the new community speaks with one voice and shares a single burst of feeling: [A]ll eyes were fastened on the pit. The sobered man was brought up and leaped out briskly on the grass. There was a universal cry of ‘‘Alive or dead?’’ and then a deep, profound hush. When he said ‘‘Alive!’’ a great shout arose and many eyes had tears in them. (Hard Times, p. 205)

Dickens hauls Stephen out of the grave alive simply in order that his death may save the community. As the rope that draws Stephen to the surface reveals ‘‘the figure of a poor, crushed, human creature,’’

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A low murmur of pity went round the throng, and the women wept aloud, as this form, almost without form, was moved very slowly from its iron deliverance, and laid upon the bed of straw. At first, none but the surgeon went close to it. He did what he could in its adjustment on the couch, but the best that he could do was to cover it. That gently done, he called to him Rachael and Sissy. And at that time the pale, worn, patient face was seen looking up at the sky, with the broken right hand lying bare on the outside of the covering garments, as if waiting to be taken by another hand. They gave him drink, moistened his face with water, and administered some drops of cordials and wine. Though he lay quite motionless looking up at the sky, he smiled and said, ‘‘Rachael.’’ (Hard Times, p. 206)

Benjamin similarly locates his isolated novel reader ‘‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 84). His description of the ‘‘tiny, fragile human body’’ of a modern individual adrift in a world devoid of storytelling cannot but recall the poignant death and resurrection of Stephen Blackpool. Stephen, too, represents the voice that achieves power only in death. Surfacing in order to die, he simultaneously revives the lost, ‘‘full corporeality’’ on which voice depends, and marks the loss of that body. Uttered in the short span of time he remains on earth, his words, turning his own dying body into an articulate exemplum, acquire prophetic meaning: ‘‘See how we die an’ no need, one way an’ another – in a muddle – every day!’’ (Hard Times, p. 207). With this statement, Stephen becomes the spokesman for a broad reformation of the condition of the working class. Dickens kills him off, one might say, so that Stephen might be able to condemn his living conditions with a breath purified of all personal and political interest. In the words of the novel, ‘‘He faintly said it, without any anger against any one. Merely as the truth’’ (Hard Times, p. 207). Addressed not to ‘‘any one’’ in particular but ‘‘merely as the truth,’’ his speech becomes the irresistibly compelling language that Benjamin terms ‘‘wisdom.’’ In this way, the isolated and isolating experience of reading fiction is temporarily redeemed by an authentic and consensus-building voice. One of Stephen’s final speech acts is to pass on a ‘‘message’’ that recalls the process of transmission so crucial to Benjamin’s definition of storytelling. In his words to Gradgrind, whose dissolute son has in fact committed the robbery of which Stephen was accused, Stephen’s life ‘‘assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 94): ‘‘Sir, yo will clear me an’ mak my name good wi’ aw men. This I leave to yo.’’ Mr. Gradgrind was troubled and asked how?

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‘‘Sir,’’ was the reply, ‘‘yor son will tell yo how. Ask him. I mak no charges: I leave none ahint me: not a single word.’’ (Hard Times, p. 208)

Speaking with the ‘‘chaste compactness’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 91) of Benjamin’s storyteller, Stephen brings about his oppressor’s redemption as he goes ‘‘to his Redeemer’s rest’’ (Hard Times, p. 208). Having accepted his son’s guilt, Gradgrind is both damaged and regenerated: ‘‘Aged and bent he looked, and quite bowed down; and yet he looked a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days when in this life he wanted nothing but Facts’’ (Hard Times, p. 209). The conclusion of Hard Times describes a transfer of power – away from the schoolteacher Grandgrind and his inhumane use of print culture to squelch the individuality of his students, and onto a recalcitrant scholar who can ‘‘beautify . . . lives of machinery and reality with . . . imaginative graces and delights’’ (Hard Times, p. 226). Having killed off the representative of a betrayed speech community, Dickens offers us the language of the hearth and home, as if it were a memorial to an intimacy and authenticity that have been excluded from the public sphere. ‘‘Dear reader!’’ the novel concludes, shifting into a mimicry of vocal address.27 It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold. (Hard Times, p. 227)

Thus we see the Victorian novel endowing a martyred speaker with life and new authority by naming him as the source of all language that fosters community, even – especially – printed fiction. Rather than disappear, then, the voice and the body that figures its human origin become the lure that fiction dangles before its readership – as the means of sharing one’s solitude with another. Rather than a speech community, however, the novel creates a new kind of intimacy among readers who are willing to extrapolate or imaginatively perform speech from writing. The repeated murder of a storyteller or a doomed speaker, a figure that Victorian fiction in fact conjured up to authenticate itself, is the curious tropology by which fiction after Dickens lays claim to the authority to forge communities where mechanization had silenced speakers. A VOICE IN WRITING

I argue in this book that the Victorian novel indicates in many different ways that there must be a speaker – who is, paradoxically, at once a pathetic ‘‘poor, crushed, human creature’’ and irresistibly powerful and charismatic – at

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the origin of its language. I chart the development of a logic in which an imaginary voice-in-writing emerges as the sign of the redemption of print culture and intellectual labor. Even as I analyze the development of such an imaginary form of voice, however, I simultaneously aim in every chapter to demonstrate the scope, variety, and heterogeneity of what I call vocal culture in the Victorian period. What I have called the mythology of the storyteller strives to convince us that voice – or what Walter Ong calls ‘‘primary orality’’ – is a single thing we have lost and must attempt to resuscitate.28 But there were in fact many kinds of vocal cultures in nineteenth-century Britain, many manifestations of voice’s relationship to print. The fantasy of speech’s murder and displacement at the hands of print – a fantasy linked to a rhetorical strategy of self-authorization on the part of intellectuals who see themselves as ‘‘dispossessed’’ – blocks any less monolithic understanding of the vocal cultures of Victorian England (not to mention of our own). I have organized this book as a series of case studies aiming to delineate, illuminate, and analyze a broad and often unacknowledged cultural discourse and mythology concerning the relationship between Victorian print, writing, voice, and orality. Under investigation in one form or another in every chapter is a pervasive and often mystified aura of storytelling, of oral authenticity generated in the nineteenth-century regime of print literacy; a supposed falling off from the artisanal craft of storytelling into the technologies of modern print, copyright, and information culture. I have aimed to make the questions I ask regarding the mystifications of orality resonate – often simultaneously – at multiple levels or registers. (I take encouragement here from an exemplary scholar of aurality and the senses, Alain Corbin, who writes that ‘‘in order to write the history of the bell, one has constantly to shift levels of analysis’’ (Corbin, Village Bells, p. xi).) I will be examining voice and orality at the linguistic or semiotic level, in terms of the relation of stenographic code or alphabetic writing to spoken words; at the textual level, as represented speech acts and dialogue; at the narrative level, in depicted episodes of speaking and listening, and in the novel itself in its consumption; at the sociocultural level, in relation to public performance and the question of authorial property or control of the text; and finally at the technological level, in the consideration of literature in competition with, by the end of the century, the mechanical recording of sound and the inscription of voice in other media. The gain of such a broad-ranging approach lies, I hope, in an analytic purchase on a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon that, in its pervasiveness, itself tends to slide over and past divisions between different registers or cultural divisions.

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In chapter 2, I analyze several narratives of the 1840s – a celebrated memoir published by a veteran of Peterloo-era working-class politics, Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical, and two middle-class ‘‘industrial novels,’’ Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton – in order to trace the effects of an early Victorian ideology of speech and writing. In the Chartist 1840s, public oratory began to serve less as a means for elites to participate in the political order than as a noisy weapon in the cause of radical reform. In this context, speech was defined as a tangibly seditious threat to the world as represented by writing. Samuel Bamford’s memoir figures political speech as reversing the salubrious progress of mass literacy, transforming workers’ language from a cure for violence into violence itself. I show how novels by Disraeli and Gaskell attempt to resolve the problem Bamford raises. Both novelists represent such feminized forms of voice as singing and domestic storytelling as sublimations of the kind of political speech that might lead to mob violence. These novelists thus claim the power of a healing voice for their own writing. Isaac Pitman’s invention of the shorthand system of phonography in 1837 defined the Victorian period itself as phonographic – obsessed with print’s relationship to voice and with the effects of transcribing or writing voice. Voice began to be represented as the ideal to which writing aspired; oral utterance now became a signifier of the human in a culture in which language seemed threatened by industry and utilitarian system. In the third chapter, ‘‘Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing,’’ I analyze Dickens’s representation of David Copperfield’s apprenticeship in shorthand reporting in the context of a number of shorthand and phonography manuals from the 1830s and 1840s. I argue that if in the era of Johnson’s Dictionary standard English was thought able to correct the unregulated profusion of speech, in the early nineteenth century phonography manuals offered a new narrative in which shorthand proposed to reform the randomness, lack of planning, and inaccuracy of English. The grandiose claims made for shorthand in the early Victorian era signal a new way of thinking about writing and its relationship to human utterance. We may read Dickens’s fictional representation of a young man’s struggle to learn shorthand in David Copperfield, I argue, both as attempting to bring into the form of the novel the phonographic innovations in ‘‘voice writing’’ and as parodying and challenging the claims made by phonography and shorthand advocates. In my next chapter, I continue with Charles Dickens to demonstrate how he became the very embodiment of a new mode of literary reception,

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one that John Stuart Mill castigated as ‘‘public opinion.’’ Dickens’s success in the 1830s and 1840s signaled the advent of a new kind of reading public engaging in unruly performative practices of literary consumption. Ending with an analysis of the cultural work performed by Dickens’s famous public readings, the chapter argues that when Dickens finally took the stage to perform the role of the storyteller in 1858, he was attempting to return the power of performance to the service of a proprietary, individualist notion of authorship. Voice becomes an object of longing for Victorian novelists who struggle to present their writing as originating in a charismatic speech act. But Dickens’s attempt to represent his writing as speech ultimately proved the impossibility of controlling or owning the public energies of vocal performance once fiction such as his has called it into being. The work of Charlotte Bronte¨ provides a fascinating counter-example to Dickens’s effort to impersonate the storyteller. In chapter 5, I argue that Bronte¨’s novels, published in a literary culture demanding metaphorical alignments between writing and speech, sound a note of opposition to such connections. Observing Thackeray’s public reading performances on a visit to London in 1851, Bronte¨ was at once fascinated and appalled by his enactment of authorship as a public, vocal performance. Novel-writing in the 1840s and 1850s attained much of its cultural power by conjuring the illusion of having been spoken. Bronte¨ defies this convention by suggesting how female authors are ultimately short-changed by the assumption that contemporary writing derives from the historically obsolete speech of folk ballads, governesses’ tales, and mothers’ voices. Both Jane Eyre and Villette offer testimony to the effect that women can only attain professional success by turning away from speech to a new form of writing that simulates withheld, denied, or unuttered speech. Of all the authors I examine in this book, Bronte¨ is perhaps the most shrewdly aware of the mythological status of the storyteller. She at once invokes such a figure and reveals its limits as a figure for novelistic communication. I next turn from the novel to a different genre – the dramatic monologue – in order to demonstrate how the hegemony of the novel in this period made even poets resort to novelistic strategies of self-authorization through voice. Chapter 6, ‘‘Hell’s masterpiece of print’’: voice, face, and print in The Ring and the Book,’’ argues that early and mid-Victorian poets perceived the print culture in which they worked as thoroughly mechanized, disenchanted, and bureaucratized. The dramatic monologue, I argue, attempts to recuperate or redeem such a print culture, but it does so by means of two contradictory strategies: by way of an appeal to an imagined voice in print that appears to transcend the medium, and through

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a practice of inter-subjective, communal authorship and interpretation within that print culture. My aim in this chapter is to consider the paradoxical aesthetics of print that idealizes speech at its own expense. Robert Browning’s epic poem The Ring and the Book, I argue, has the effect of producing what might be termed a print-culture guilt in its readers, who are made to feel that their participation in the practice of textual interpretation makes them complicit in a historical displacement of virtuous voices and self-possessed speakers by a professional information culture. Yet ultimately Browning demonstrates his awareness that these idealized voices are in fact products of this very same information culture. I take The Ring and the Book to be in these ways exemplary of the dramatic monologue’s status as the prototypical poetic genre in a culture of the novel. The dramatic monologue as a genre resembles the novel in its depiction of an imaginary voice that can speak only silently on the printed page. The seventh and final chapter compares Joseph Conrad’s representation of voice in Heart of Darkness to the alarming vocal babble and murmur produced by Thomas Edison’s phonograph. The inscription of human voice in Conrad’s 1898 novel refigures sound and voice much as the phonograph – literally ‘‘sound writer’’ – and its successors did in the 1880s and 1890s; both the novel and the sound-recording device represent voices that seem to lack any connection to the bodies from which they first emerged. For Conrad, I argue, the perception of disembodied, phonographic voice both pointed the way to groundbreaking innovations in literary style and form and represented a grave danger to human agency and authorship. With Edison’s invention and its popularization in Great Britain in the 1890s, we see the close of an era – inaugurated by Pitman’s invention of phonography – in which print culture attempted to fulfill through other means a task the phonograph and other technologies of vocal inscription eventually took up. The various authors and works on which I have chosen to focus constitute a mere sampling of instances that demonstrate how Victorian literature makes voice both troubling and an object of desire as it represents it as both the obstacle to a print-based community and the ultimate basis of one. Not until the invention of the phonograph in 1877 do we see the literal mechanical reproduction of voice, but with Pitman’s invention of the phonographic shorthand system in 1837 the Victorian period was inaugurated with a new mandate to use print to capture, transcribe, and simulate voice. As the major literary genre of the phonographic Victorian age, the novel (along with the dramatic monologue, a novelized poetic

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form) served as a vocal technology and means of amplifying, preserving, silencing, and fantasizing speech. In consuming the silent or virtual speech of the novel, Victorian readers both subsumed and managed the heterogeneous array of voices that appeared to trouble the hegemony of print culture. And twentieth-century criticism, in turn, inherited many of its key desires, protocols, and presuppositions from Victorian fiction’s mythology of the storyteller. Stephen Blackpool’s disinterested, apolitical condemnation of the exploitation of industrial workers; Carlyle’s fantasy of a vocal writing speaking to ‘‘all men in all times and places’’ and of an intellectual taking his place as ‘‘sovereign Ruler’’; a young working-class woman’s entrancing singing of an old folk tune in Mary Barton; Walter Benjamin’s powerful tale of a dying storyteller redeeming a culture of information: these are only a few of the models from which contemporary literary criticism – especially novel criticism – has inherited a powerful set of paradigms. Modern novel criticism has often proceeded within a fantasy of, on the one hand, print’s omnipotence and, on the other, of print’s redemption and humanization by an endangered voice. In this book I attempt to demonstrate how that fantasy or illusion developed and to analyze some of its consequences. The question of the place of gender in this book deserves some explicit commentary. The myth of the storyteller permits either a female or a male storyteller; the speaker of the idealized voice in print is alternately a Carlylean masculine sage and what we might call a Kittlerian pure woman or mother figure. The storyteller takes either male or female form without fundamentally altering the ideological and aesthetic work it performs. Although I have chosen Dickens’s phrase ‘‘the best man of all’’ for the title of this introductory chapter, the ‘‘best man,’’ the speaker whose voice heals a fractured public sphere, may also be a woman – a maternal figure whose soothing speech creates consensus. As domestic ideology exerted a stronger influence after the 1830s and 1840s, the Carlylean sage figure could seem excessively authoritative, his power too openly brandished; a female speaker might generate comparable effects without making as blatant a show of force. Notwithstanding important differences between the male or female storyteller in particular instances, both do the same work of purifying a print culture perceived to have become corrupt and mechanized. Part of the strength and resilience of the ideology or myth of the storyteller, indeed, lies in its flexibility in regards to gender. At least since Carlyle’s vision of a charismatic voice casting off ‘‘its wrappages, bandages’’ and ‘‘step[ping] forth one day with palpably

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articulated, universally visible power’’ (Carlyle, On Heroes, pp. 142–3), authors and critics have generated a compelling – even irresistible – narrative featuring an endangered voice that yearns to be free. If we release voice from its role in this ongoing saga of martyrdom and redemption, we might accomplish several things. First, we can better understand the dynamism, heterogeneity, and cultural specificity of nineteenth-century vocal cultures: the ‘‘reciting, singing, shouting, chanting, declaiming, and narrating’’ that, in David Vincent’s description, played so important a role in Victorian culture.29 Contemporary attention to vocal culture, despite ground-breaking recent work, still lags far behind attention to print culture – and a failure to attend to the complexities and nuances of vocal culture must inevitably mean an impoverished understanding of print culture as well, given the inextricability of the two. The Victorian novel begins to look quite different when it is understood to have been produced and consumed within a public sphere in which newspaper and periodical journalism, for example, was no more important or influential than political oratory or fireside readings. Secondly, once we ourselves gain some critical perspective on what I’ve called the myth of the storyteller and the Victorian idealization of voice, we can begin to understand how that mythology developed in the nineteenth century and how twentieth-century criticism in turn inherited it. That is, we can better understand not only the historical reality of specific voices and vocal effects, but the effects of imaginary constructions of voice and orality: in particular, the ways invocations of a storyteller’s demise have become so central to jeremiads regarding the decline of intellectual autonomy or charisma. The voice of an endangered or wounded speaker became, in the Victorian period, a fetish and a myth – the nostalgically recalled sign of what was lost in the turn to an information culture. In this book I aim neither to release voice from its bounds nor to imprison it yet again, but rather to demonstrate the inadequacy of any such starkly melodramatic modes of conceptualizing orality.

CHAPTER

2

When good speech acts go bad: the voice of industrial fiction

New developments in English culture in the first half of the nineteenth century demanded new ways of thinking about speech and voice. During the 1840s, as a consequence of working-class literacy and political action, the English language became charged with new political meanings as a site of class conflict.1 This chapter investigates three interrelated narratives of the era of Chartism and industrial fiction: a celebrated memoir by Samuel Bamford, a veteran of working-class politics of two decades earlier, and two middle-class novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and Benjamin Disraeli that draw on or allude to Bamford. These three texts reveal how early Victorian culture transformed previous assumptions that public speech necessarily emerged from and addressed itself to an educated readership defined by print culture.2 In the 1830s and 1840s new categories for imagining speech and voice emerged, categories that granted the speaking voice autonomy from norms of written English. An emerging national movement for universal workers’ suffrage developed new modes of political language. Print culture found itself besieged by voices that could no longer be successfully contained by those modes of expression permitted by written English; in response, the imagined figure of an authentic speaker, whose wise words serve as a balm for the wounds of modernity, emerged as a sublation of these discordant, uncontrollable voices. The function of voice and speech in English political and literary culture has been persistently undertheorized in part because critics so routinely reduce voice to a metaphor for writing. In doing so, they simplify voice and represent it as homogeneous. Consider, for example, the ‘‘critical debate’’ that Ju¨rgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, posits as defining a new public sphere in eighteenth-century England. Ostensibly a form of speech, such ‘‘debate’’ is, in Habermas’s work, always so closely linked to print as to become a synecdoche for desirable forms of print culture. The ‘‘critical debate’’ of the public sphere, ‘‘ignited by works of literature’’ (Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35

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p. 33), may be either speech in a coffeehouse or writing published in a periodical, but it is always measured by the standard of writing. Habermas sketches a diachronic history in which good speech – i.e. speech that reinforces print rationality – gives way to the degraded speech of twentieth-century mass culture, because an environment that fosters rational ‘‘debate’’ is replaced by one in which debate has become yet another commodity. This narrative of decline, however, might be better understood in terms of a synchronic or simultaneous competition between multiple speech forms, some of which challenged print rationality rather than reinforcing it. At any given moment during the nineteenth century, many different forms of voice struggled and interacted with English print culture. By turning ‘‘speech’’ into a place-holder for rational debate, Habermas renders it monolithic and homogeneous. He inevitably simplifies speech, so intent is he on proving its turn from good to bad. But speech in the nineteenth century can no more be reduced to critical debate and rational conversation than print culture can be reduced to essays in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Even if in the 1830s and 1840s one could indeed find examples of something very like the Habermasian ideal of rational debate, competing speech forms contested the bourgeois imperative that all vocal utterance should address a readership defined by print culture. Political speech before a crowd, for example, threatened to erase the difference between language and violence, between rationality and the performance of an undisciplined mob, between linguistic speech anchored in print and an embodied voice. In the 1840s, public speech delivered to an assembled mass embodied the threat that working-class language posed to middle-class culture and literature. Oratory, speech in public to assembled citizens, was an idealized rite of citizenship and public life within the eighteenth century’s doctrine of what J. G. A. Pocock and John Barrell term ‘‘civic humanism.’’ Writing about attitudes toward eighteenth-century history painting, Barrell observes that this most elevated of genres addressed a virtuous public ‘‘as an orator addresses an audience of citizens who are his equals, and persuades them to act in the interests of the public’’ (Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting, p. 1). But by the turn of the nineteenth century, he argues that there no longer seemed to be ‘‘a ‘public’ in Britain, in the sense of a body of citizens animated with the public spirit which alone could encourage a public art; the body of the public was now a corpse, corrupted by the luxury and commerce that the civic humanist discourse had so strenuously attempted to resist’’ (The Political Theory of Painting, p. 64). The word

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‘‘public’’ now signified, not an ideal of civic life, but simply ‘‘the country as an aggregate’’ and thus ‘‘the members of a community’’ (The Political Theory of Painting, p. 64). With the attenuation of the ideals of civic humanism came an increasing suspicion of oratory. Public speech to an assembled crowd, even when its content was benign, became linked to the threat of disruptive or dissident orality. If a virtuous crowd of citizens could no longer be imagined, then how could a noble orator hope to ‘‘persuade them to act in the interests of the public’’? This shift in the role of oratory bears upon the changing function of the novel in the 1830s and 1840s, a period in which speech became defined as no longer the medium of republican virtue but a dangerous and seditious threat to middle-class writing. Such writers of the 1840s as Bamford, Disraeli, and Gaskell engaged with the problem of dangerous speech: of speech linked to irredeemably local, individual bodies rather than to nationally organized systems of writing and education. These authors, speech-act theorists of a kind, wondered: where does speech, as a form of language linked closely to the body, cross over into action or even violence? Middle-class authors demonized certain speech acts – such as ‘‘curses’’ or ‘‘oaths,’’ political oratory delivered before a crowd or whispered Chartist strategies delivered to conspirators – as emerging from and directed to irresponsible and irrational bodies rather than circulating within a rational public sphere. Because working-class speakers refused to address themselves to a middle-class readership, their voices were perceived by that readership as tangible, even violent somatic performance. An emergent ideology of voice and print defined such seditious voice as part-object rather than whole, as threat to rational self-possession rather than as intelligible expression.3 Chartism placed particular strain on the middle-class fantasy that all language was, by definition, addressed to an educated readership. Chartist literary and political practices – combining newspaper journalism, poetry and fiction, and oratorical performance at mass open-air meetings – challenged a public sphere committed to the subordination of speech to the categories of writing. Nationally distributed reports of political speeches in Chartist newspapers, for example, seemed to reverse the priority of writing over speech and to define writing as subservient to vocal performance. To anxious middle-class observers, Chartism demonstrated the frightening transformation of speech into nothing more than physical expression: the utterance of bodies lacking that privileged interiority granted by education and literacy. Corrupted by its proximity to the body, speech threatened to become illegible and oppositional.4

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If Carlyle’s idealized voice was a kind of ‘‘vanished dream,’’ such political speech was all too tangibly present, threatening to disrupt a bourgeois public sphere. Middle-class novelists, producing in the 1840s what was later called ‘‘industrial fiction,’’ responded to the threat of such oppositional speech by formulating preferable representations of voice. They represented these healing voices as emanations of a private, expressive self speaking to a private listener enclosed in a domestic space. If Chartist practices had transformed rational speech and oratory into dissident and threatening utterance, then novels could redeem this degraded orality. In response to the challenge posed by working-class literacy and oratory, middle-class authors like Disraeli and Gaskell developed formal techniques by which means dissident speech might be translated into the silent authorial ‘‘voice’’ of lyric or novelistic discourse. The representation in novels of singing and feminine storytelling, for example, as voices directed to dispersed individual reading subjects rather than to a present audience, purified speech by attaching it to an explicit or implicit storyteller. In narratives of the 1840s, the transformation of intelligible speech to non-linguistic utterance alternately posed a threat to writing, and offered a cure for that threat. The ‘‘voice’’ of the middle-class industrial novelist – speaking to a dispersed readership as if to an individual listener, and categorized as an object of aesthetic discrimination – emerged as a cure for those oppositional English voices. Like Stephen Blackpool’s dying utterance – purified of the agendas and desires of actual speech, figured as ‘‘the truth’’ itself rather than any particular argument or statement – such printed utterance serves as a technology of disinterested address. Such an imaginary voice achieves at once the ethical purity of disinterestedness and the power of an irresistible charisma. BAMFORD AND RADICAL ORATORY

Appearing in weekly numbers in 1839–41 and subsequently published in book form, Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical not only represents the English radicalism of the period leading up to and following Peterloo, it also shows how that radicalism was folded into the dominant ideology of the 1840s, the period of Chartism’s apotheosis and collapse. Arrested and imprisoned after the 1819 Peterloo massacre at Manchester, Bamford was a central figure in early nineteenth-century workers’ politics. In later years he became a Manchester correspondent for London newspapers, at which point his poetry, prose, and journalism found a wide readership among

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such admirers as Carlyle and Gaskell. Not only did Gaskell know Bamford personally, but in her novel Mary Barton, as I discuss later in this chapter, she draws importantly on Bamford’s work and indeed renders Bamford’s writings a crucial element of her plot. I will be examining Bamford and his writings, then, not only for their own sake but for the role they would go on to play in the work of other authors. Martin Hewitt has suggested that Bamford’s writings provide an opportunity to consider ‘‘the transition from the turbulent years of working class radicalism 1815–1842, to the more quiescent decades of the 1850s and 1860s’’ (Hewitt, ‘‘Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class,’’ p. 878). Bamford’s memoir reveals how the cultural shift toward political ‘‘quietism’’ in mid-century was accompanied by, and implicated in, a transformation in the relationship between speech and writing. This transformation can be understood in terms of two different embodiments of proletarian political expression: first, the working-class orator Henry Hunt of the Peterloo period; secondly, the working-class journalist Bamford who himself becomes an emblematic figure – and even a character – within middleclass industrial fiction of the 1840s. Bamford’s fascinating memoir raises a number of questions. How, for example, could Bamford both participate in a program of working-class politics that was frequently depicted in the 1840s as ‘‘a movement of the subliterate, almost subhuman’’ (Janowitz, ‘‘Class and Literature,’’ p. 245) and write about that experience in terms that appropriately spoke to the interests of the middle-class readership? How could this working-class author and proponent of mass education depict Henry Hunt – known as ‘‘Orator Hunt,’’ the most celebrated radical public speaker of the Peterloo era – as an instigator of and figure for mass violence? Why, in Bamford’s memoir, does Hunt’s speech devolve into a ‘‘curse of indignation’’ and merge with the angry noise of a mob? Answers to such questions may be sought in the contradictions inherent in Victorian attitudes toward popular education. In the first half of the nineteenth century, mass literacy was understood both as a means of instilling middle-class values in the working class and of handing the discontented members of that class a means of resistance. Historians agree that literacy rates in England began to rise sharply at the end of the eighteenth century and continued to do so through the nineteenth century, long before the Education Act of 1870 mandated popular education. Lawrence Stone attributes the increase to, among other factors, ‘‘competition between Dissenters and the Anglican establishment for control over men’s minds and morals . . . to a hope to use education to inoculate the masses against the virus of radicalism . . . to

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the demand for a literate workforce for an industrializing society’’ (Stone, ‘‘Literacy and Education,’’ p. 137). He emphasizes the uses of literacy for ‘‘control,’’ discipline, the training of a proletariat for the needs of an industrializing state. Yet literacy can also work toward very different ends. E. P. Thompson demonstrates how a radical political culture that took root in the 1790s culminated in a literate, nationally organized working class in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. David Vincent argues that at the point when the State first became formally involved with education in the 1830s, ‘‘the final drive towards full literacy was already under way,’’ and that ‘‘the foundation for the eventual victory was laid not in the schoolroom but in the working-class family’’ (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 54).5 The relationship between workers’ speech and literacy was always an open question. Was speech positioned between ignorance and literacy? Was it a halfway point? Or was it, more troublingly, a corruption of the process of literacy – not a point on the way to full literacy and to the participation in citizenship such literacy permits, but a reversal, a collapse of language back into the realm of mob violence? For Samuel Bamford, a radical attempting to establish himself as a writer for middle-class journals, a certain form of radical speech signaled what Judith Butler calls the ‘‘irruption of the unspeakable.’’6 The middle-class author’s ‘‘voice’’ – an agency of language presenting itself as a mastery over written signs – defines itself through the rejection, appropriation, and reorganization of the bad utterance thought to emerge from the emblematic radical orator, Henry Hunt. Victorian middle-class ideology held apart ‘‘violence’’ and ‘‘literacy’’ as opposing terms, implying that where the latter is absent, the former will spring into being. Speech, I would suggest, mediated between these two poles of violence and literacy. When linked with writing in a practice of rational conversation and education, working-class speech identified its speaker with the middle-class nation. Yet when such speech became the means of advocating political dissent, to middle-class observers it began to seem to migrate from writing to physical violence: to become a senseless, fragmentary production of bodies wracked by the frustration of poverty and social marginality, something like the painful speech Carlyle first feared he would articulate when taking the stage. Speech – positioned between illiterate bodies and writing – was an indeterminate term revealing the stresses on and contradictions in the definition of mass literacy.7 We can understand the discourse of mass literacy as at once defining much of the nation as subliterate and therefore sub-English, yet also gesturing toward a unified and wholly rationalized modern England. The

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rhetoric of mass education and literacy implied that to lack literacy was to live in ignorance and irrationality – but also that even the poorest citizen might overcome this ignorance. Class status was now redefined as no longer innate but a function of education. Not even the poorest and most ignorant citizen was therefore doomed to perpetual irrationality. Yet the definition of literacy was simultaneously restrictive enough that many or most working-class English people would never be able to count as fully literate: to speak with a regional accent, for example, or to use one’s education for radical ends, potentially labeled one as illiterate. The figure of the speaking worker marked, then, a point where two competing or contradictory concepts of literacy collided. An illiterate worker’s speech offered the promise of future education, the possibility of improvement, and even the liberal utopia of a fully educated, middle-class England. Every ignorant citizen thus embodied the promise of a literate future; every regional dialect, the goal of a uniform national English language. But the speech of a literate worker articulating a message of political protest generated an uncontainable contradiction in the discourse of literacy and so had to be understood as something closer to sound or noise than to signifying speech. Out of this contradiction emerged the figure of the orator’s curse, the breakdown of public address such that language degenerated into a body’s struggles to signify before a mass audience, into a failed or corrupted speech act that could not signify or communicate.8 Samuel Bamford’s use of the figure of the orator’s curse reveals how, even in the hands of a radical sympathizer, such a curse signaled the propensity of speech – particularly political speech – to transform into bodily violence. Although language can tame and even take the place of mob violence, Bamford implies, the ‘‘curse of scorn’’ can reverse the priority of language over violence, allowing the mob in effect to invade the public sphere of literacy and writing. In a moral drama of good and bad utterance, the curse can thereby destroy positive forms of speech and writing. DUMB UTTERANCE

In a discussion of popular literacy and its links to political expression, Bamford insists that successful democratic reform must rely on ‘‘soberminded’’ representation by ballot – and not by bodies in mobs: The sense of the electors to be taken annually – by ballot in districts; all elections to be by ballot. No hustings; no nomination farce; no mob gatherings; no ruffianism; no demagogueism; no canting and deception of the multitudes; nor opportunity

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for the display of insolence and ignorance to win a passing clap or huzza. Many evils would be done away with; excitement would be moderated; sobermindedness would take the place of extravagance; court intrigue, or ascendancy of faction, would not have the power of dispersing the people’s servants, nor of throwing the country into a ferment of brute passion, to take advantage of it. (Bamford, Passages, p. 14)

Bamford sketches a scene of political expression organized by a dichotomy between reason and disorder. On the one hand, ‘‘the sense of the electors . . . taken annually – by ballot’’: regular, systematized political ‘‘sense’’ registered by the marking of votes on paper. On the other, a kind of freewheeling carnival of ‘‘mob gatherings,’’ ‘‘displays’’ of ‘‘extravagance,’’ ‘‘passing clap[s]’’ and ‘‘huzza[s].’’ Here he alludes to the gatherings of the Chartists, whose demand for universal enfranchisement and style of political action he evidently deplores. He figures his political opponents as governed by spectacular display, carnivalized aural expressions, and ‘‘brute passion.’’ Should speech be located on the side of reason or disorder? Bamford’s memoir establishes a series of oppositions: between ‘‘disturbances,’’ ‘‘convulsions,’’ ‘‘bloodshed,’’ and ‘‘riots,’’ on the one hand, and reading, writing, discussion groups, rational conversation, and ‘‘systematic’’ behavior on the other. Words that are directed at a crowd are ‘‘demagogueism.’’ Such speech reemerges from that crowd in the form of ‘‘huzzas’’ and ‘‘displays of insolence.’’9 When speech fails to participate in the development of literate citizenship and devolves instead to the level of non-verbal expression, it becomes dangerously linked to the body. In public demagoguery, speech rumbles in the throat, emerges from the mouth, and reverberates in the ear. Unlike writing, speech cannot signify apart from the body and can thus easily give rise to physical violence. When the violence is directed outwards in the form of calls for political change, the speech becomes dangerous demagoguism. Passages in the Life of a Radical opens with a series of vivid pages that spell out the connections Bamford perceives between rioting, speech, reading, and literacy. He recounts how in 1815 ‘‘elements of convulsion were at work amongst the masses of our labouring population’’ (Passages, p. 6) and catalogues a lengthy litany of ‘‘convulsion[s],’’ acts of violence and counterviolence, linked to the introduction and discussion of the Corn Laws. He then interjects a scene of rapid distribution of literacy among those who had formerly been occupied by violence, implying that those whom the state had denied the power of literacy could join the community of rational men provided they joined political clubs influenced by the likes of such

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known radicals as William Cobbett and Francis Place. Bamford deemphasizes the content of Cobbett’s political writings and focuses on the form and ritual of his work, such that literacy becomes, as much as anything else, a mode of control over unruly bodies.10 At this time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth . . . Their influence was speedily visible . . . Riots soon became scarce, and from that time they have never obtained their ancient vogue with the labourers of this country. . . . Instead of riots and destruction of property, Hampden clubs were now established in many of our large towns, and the villages and districts around them; Cobbett’s books were printed in cheap form; the labourers read them, and thenceforth became deliberate and systematic in their proceedings. (Passages, p. 7)

Bamford’s own written narrative offers itself as a substitute for violence: ‘‘One of these clubs was established in 1816 . . . and I, having been instrumental in its formation; a tolerable reader also, and a rather expert writer, was chosen secretary’’ (Passages, p. 8). Democratic citizenship takes the place of physical violence, thereby mending the schism between rationality and the mass body. At this point in the Passages, working-class culture gains a foothold in the rational public sphere. But in representing the speech of one of radical England’s most illustrious orators, Bamford now complicates the narrative logic whereby literacy just naturally replaces violence. Recalling a visit to London as a delegate to discuss a Bill at the House of Commons, Bamford offers his impressions of the famous Henry Hunt (‘‘Orator Hunt’’), known for his ‘‘mastery of mass oratory’’ (E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 467). Although these impressions were formed twenty years before Bamford set them down in print, we cannot ignore the context in which he writes, namely, 1839, one year after the declaration of the People’s Charter. Martha Vicinus suggests how crucial the tradition of public speech-making was within that era’s literary and political culture. In the late 1830s, she writes, Chartism was developing ‘‘as a highly literate and thoroughly articulate movement that made the most extensive use of newspapers and speeches. Speeches . . . were looked upon as a vital form of entertainment and education. Moreover, the mass meetings, which were the main forum for important speeches, encouraged the camaraderie of the movement by extending the range of shared experience’’ (Vicinus, Industrial Muse, p. 482). Vicinus’s account of Chartist speech-making suggests how vitally linked the modes of written and oral discourse were in the working-class literary and political culture of 1840. ‘‘Chartist speeches were a major contribution to a working-class oral culture’’ (Industrial Muse, p. 500),

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a vocal culture which often used and incorporated writing for its purposes. Speeches ‘‘lived again through the columns of newspapers, when the speeches were read aloud at Chartist pubs on Saturday and Sunday nights,’’ Vicinus argues.11 The political practice of Chartism must be understood in part as linguistic innovation, the development of new circulations and tactics of verbal action.12 Bamford views Henry Hunt not as an author of powerful or eloquent language, however, but as a demagogue whose oral performance, in a case of what Shoshana Felman calls a ‘‘scandal of the speaking body,’’ turns that body into a conduit of political violence. Hunt seems to become the living, cursing embodiment of all the radical political and linguistic practices Bamford despised.13 For Bamford, writing by this time as a successful journalist for middle-class publications, Hunt represents the most dangerous excesses of political rhetoric. His sketch of Hunt registers Bamford’s appalled recognition of working-class literacy gone wrong: His lips were delicately thin, and receding; but there was a dumb utterance about them which in all the portraits I have seen of him was never truly copied. His eyes were blue or light grey – not very clear, nor quick, but rather heavy; except as I afterwards had opportunities for observing, when he was excited in speaking; at which times they seemed to distend and protrude; and if he worked himself furious, as he sometimes would, they became blood-streaked, and almost started from their sockets. Then it was that the expression of his lip was to be observed – the kind smile was exchanged for the curl of scorn, or the curse of indignation. His voice was bellowing; his face swollen and flushed; his griped hand beat as if it were to pulverize; and his whole manner gave token of a painful energy, struggling for utterance. (Passages, p. 16)

Those ‘‘convulsions’’ of the masses that might have been transformed into rational language, are, in the body of Hunt, reconverted into signs of somatic dysfunction or excess.14 Hunt’s body transforms monstrously while speaking: his eyes ‘‘distend or protrude,’’ become ‘‘blood-streaked’’ and leap out of their sockets, as in some lurid penny-gothic illustration, as if Hunt has suddenly become an expression of mass literacy at its most debased. Hunt’s ‘‘exchange’’ of a kind smile for a ‘‘curse of indignation’’ figures, I would argue, the replacement of violence for the literacy which had domesticated it. In the ‘‘exchange,’’ Bamford sees natural voice replaced by its antithesis. For Bamford, Hunt poses the threat that violence, having been expelled from the realm of written language, will take over public oratory. The ‘‘curse’’ embodies this threat most concisely: a curse is language that has acquired the physical force and menace of literal violence. This is speech that has become embodied with a vengeance,

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over-embodied – that acts not to communicate but to make a display of its own failure to do so.15 As Hunt’s voice rises into a bellow, his face too distorts, colors and swells. Thus do somatic and verbal signs become identical. His hand ‘‘beat as if to pulverize,’’ his body yearns to commit violence, and his ‘‘whole manner’’ dramatizes a ‘‘struggling for utterance.’’ A successful speech act has degenerated into a struggle for verbalization. The distinction between Hunt’s ‘‘delicately thin’’ lips and his monstrous facial contortions indicates the intractable problem of the violence inherent in political rhetoric. The ‘‘painful energy’’ of his utterance finds its counterpart and realization in the energy of the mass audience Hunt addresses.16 In one particularly revealing scene, Bamford suggests his future position as an author reaching middle-class readers, depicting Hunt as inextricably confined to the world of vocal performance, insolence and noise. In describing the trial of himself, Hunt, and others in March 1820 (Passages, p. 56) for sedition following their arrest at Peterloo, Bamford explains that the prosecutor and solicitor for the government had some days into the trial happened upon a copy of Bamford’s ‘‘small poetical work’’ and expressed interest in it, asking Bamford to bring them both copies if he should have occasion to visit London (Passages, p. 87). Bamford detaches himself from Hunt’s oratory by explaining how the prosecutor then publicly praised his ‘‘talents, and the respectful manner in which he had conducted his defence’’ (Passages, p. 88) and was only ‘‘sorry that he was not found in better company.’’ In describing these ‘‘mutual civilities’’ between Bamford and the men who are prosecuting him for dangerous insubordination against the government, Bamford the author separates himself from Hunt the orator through the mastery of print-culture practices. Just as Bamford, by becoming an author, appears to transcend his radical political beliefs in the eyes of his prosecutors, so he transforms mass protest into a form that will be legible to government officials. Immediately following this episode, Bamford provides another example of how linguistic practices can forge and sustain social ties. In this case, however, Bamford describes the verbal practices of an unruly proletariat: One day I had done something which pleased Hunt mightily, and when the court broke up, and we were in the yard, Hunt said, ‘‘come Bamford, take my arm; you are my right-hand man.’’ I took his arm, and we walked down the street, with a great crowd at our heels, shouting ‘‘Hunt for ever!’’ ‘‘Hunt for ever’’ and huzzaing. Looking back, I saw the judges [sic] carriage with his lordship in, and the horses restive in consequence of the noise, and I put out my hand and desired the crowd to be silent. Hunt heard what I said, and giving me a sudden jerk, began cursing in

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his usual wont when in a passion, and asked who ordered me to stop the people from shouting? I pointed to the carriage then in the midst of us, the horses still prancing; but that did not pacify my shout-loving friend, and he continued his maledictions until I turned to go to my lodgings. (Passages, p. 88)

In these two different male bonding scenes, Bamford offers an allegory of his upward mobility, transferring his affections from Hunt – and that ‘‘great crowd at our heels, shouting’’ – to fellow masters of print. Bamford’s anecdote invokes rival concepts of politically efficacious language. Taking Hunt’s arm and walking down the street, Bamford and Hunt seem corporeally identified with one another and with the ‘‘great crowd at our heels.’’ Their ‘‘huzzaing’’ lacks individual agency, seeming to emanate from the crowd as a whole. But Bamford emphatically breaks this scene with his request for silence. Bamford’s intervention infuriates Hunt, whose ‘‘jerk’’ is a gesture altogether different from Bamford’s raised hand. While Bamford seeks to control the crowd, asserting his own authority over physical and verbal signs even as he implies his own submission to the greater authority of ‘‘his lordship,’’ he defines Hunt’s language as defiant of social hierarchies. Hunt suddenly occupies another world, one in which both speech and gestures emerge from ‘‘passion’’ and so tend to become ‘‘cursing.’’ The lesson seems clear: a ‘‘shout lover’’ who ‘‘jerks’’ and issues ‘‘maledictions’’ cannot fully participate in the ‘‘mutual civilities’’ of authors and other professionals. Here Hunt represents an unruly public culture that must be abandoned if Bamford is to acquire effective social power. Hunt’s shouts and curses are his refusal of the norms of written English and the social system to which such language is the ticket of admission. Intemperate speech troubles Bamford’s entry into writing, which indicates to him the danger that the vociferous poor may well prevent the formation of a society governed by writing. In describing his encounter with the reformer and well-known orator Richard Oastler (a leader in the Ten Hour movement for the right of workers to a limited working day), Bamford directly stages his own refusal of such embodied rhetoric.17 Attending Oastler’s speech in his capacity as a reporter for a Manchester newspaper, Bamford finds ‘‘the place . . . densely crowded, and Oastler . . . in the full enjoyment of an abusive speech against the public press.’’ At some point, Oastler directed his venom directly against Bamford himself and declared that he would not speak another word until he was turned out of the hall. ‘‘Amid indescribable confusion and . . . menacing vociferations,’’ Bamford reports, speaking of himself in the third person, he ‘‘eyed Oastler sternly, and then putting his

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note-book in his pocket, he buttoned up his coat, and speaking loudly above the uproar, he said – ‘who is to begin, then?’’’ Confounded by Bamford’s refusal to be intimidated, Oastler eventually ‘‘made a[n embarrassed] finish of his address’’ (quoted in Chaloner, ‘‘Introduction,’’ pp. 22–3). As the target of the crowd’s fury, Bamford becomes the figure of responsible literacy and assumes the role of a man of letters whose reasonable language will prevail against his opponent’s abusive rhetoric. He describes his speech before a crowd as a kind of extension of his notebook, almost as a form of writing. ‘‘Speaking loudly above the uproar,’’ as he puts away his notebook for safekeeping, Bamford marks his language as possessing the social prestige and efficacy of writing that the ‘‘vociferations’’ and ‘‘uproar’’ of a crowd altogether lack. His reasonable speech is so closely aligned with the stability of print culture that it may safely enter the battleground of violent political rhetoric and triumph. Bamford’s descriptions of his own literate triumph over the forces of mob politics reveal the political stakes of literacy in the 1830s and 1840s. Writing in 1839 as a self-described former radical to a largely middle-class readership, Bamford argues that mass literacy can transform the inarticulate masses into intelligent members of rational discussion groups. But the rise of a new form of mass literature, enabled by innovations in printing technology, disturbs the logic of literacy as a substitute for physical violence. What Bamford describes as the ‘‘trashy, unreal novels’’ (Passages, p. 245) of the 1830s threaten to produce a new proletarian public sphere characterized not by rationality but by melodrama and printed ‘‘vociferations.’’ Middle-class forms of taste and distinction become one of several means by which vociferous utterances – including both Chartist political rhetoric and songs and ballads – might be cleansed of the potential for violence or disruption. All of these dissident forms of utterance and mass literacy seem haunted, in Bamford’s memoir, by the emblematic image of Henry Hunt in full vocal delivery – so ‘‘excited’’ and ‘‘furious’’ that his eyes became ‘‘blood-streaked, and almost started from their sockets.’’18 THE INDUSTRIAL NOVEL, RHETORIC, AND THE WOMAN’S VOICE

In 1848 the ‘‘Gagging Act’’ was passed in England, making ‘‘seditious utterance not just a crime carrying a penalty of two years’ imprisonment but a transportable offence’’ (Yeo, ‘‘Some Practices and Problems,’’ p. 360). Thus the implications of Bamford’s text bore legislative fruit, and ‘‘seditious utterance’’ would be punished by extradition.19 The equivalence

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suggested between radical language and violence, always implied in state efforts to regulate such language, had become part of middle-class common sense. This linkage would go on to figure importantly in the ‘‘industrial fiction’’ of the 1840s, the genre of middle-class narratives addressing and representing the problems of the new industrial towns. Indeed, Bamford’s phobic representation of Henry Hunt’s public speech offers a useful introduction to the politics and practices of this genre, for the major industrial novels share a common concern with the potential of workers’ speech to degenerate into violence. The ‘‘industrial novel’’ of the 1840s is centrally engaged with the problem of developing forms to represent workers’ voices that will control such violence. In Bamford’s working man’s autobiography, political speech – invoking the violence of the author’s youth and England’s radical past – threatens the structures of the print culture the adult writer wishes to enter. The middle-class novels of the 1840s similarly strive to transform dangerous speech acts into more polite forms of leisure reading. Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell represent workers’ speech at once as a vehicle for social and political conflict and as a component of domesticity, lyric interiority, and romance. For industrial fiction, the representation of workers’ speech becomes a test of the health of the nation’s language and utterance. As so often throughout the nineteenth century, the uses of voice acquire larger meaning as a sign of the state of the nation and its public sphere. The genre of the industrial novel constitutes an effort to redefine and thus to control, both at the ideological and the formal level, the uses of writing and speech introduced by Chartism. A particular category of workers’ orality – lyric or storytelling voices associated with female speakers – operates powerfully in Sybil and Mary Barton. Such voices represent the interiority of the ‘‘heart,’’ and they invariably turn listeners away from political protest. If Chartism’s mass meetings and radical newspaper journalism sought to redefine public culture, then the middle-class industrial novel countered that effort with a soothing, consensus-building female voice. Such forms of discourse as singing, domestic storytelling, and lyric utterance operate within industrial fiction as models of effective and salubrious language. In the 1840s, when Chartist speech and journalism possessed an unmistakable charisma and authority, middle-class novelists envied the capacity of workers’ speeches to enthrall a mass audience. But like Bamford, they feared the links between political rhetoric and violence and sought to disable such speech politically and recuperate it as a formal device. Thus it should come as no surprise to find that Gaskell and Disraeli redeem speech through the operations of aesthetic taste. By defusing

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dangerous political rhetoric, women in industrial fiction perform the cleansing rituals of literacy. Responding to Chartism and working-class discontent as a problem of linguistic form and offering the conventions of the middle-class novel as a palliative, Sybil and Mary Barton represent the evils of industrialism as problems that arise in part from bad linguistic practices. Disraeli and Gaskell were in effect arguing that their writing, addressed to individual readers, was a more responsible language than the collective calls to action of political speech addressed to a mass audience.20 Each of these industrial novels represent rhetoric as at once appealingly charismatic, and also prone to cross over from the domain of language into that of action and then to become destructive. And both novels offer such feminine or domestic forms of language as storytelling or singing as the remedy for such masculine public rhetoric. Sybil (1845), the novel in which Benjamin Disraeli famously described industrial Great Britain as ‘‘two nations,’’ is organized by competing forms of vocal performance. Disraeli portrays three primary speaking voices, each possessing charismatic power. These are Gerard, the Chartist leader who is famous for his oratory, Sybil, his daughter, who like Mary Barton’s Margaret possesses an angelic singing voice, and Egremont, the aristocratic son who falls in love with Sybil and only then learns how to speak powerfully in public. In a scene designed to distinguish between two groups of striking workers, Disraeli links aesthetic taste to the group he prefers. Where the admirably non-violent protesters desire above all to enjoy the pleasure of the gardens of a manor house, their violent cohorts ravage and destroy. When all was over, the deputation waited again on the lady to express to her their gratitude; and, the gardens of this house being of celebrity in the neighbourhood, they requested permission that the people might be allowed to walk through them, pledging themselves that no flower should be plucked and no fruit touched. The permission was granted: the multitude, in order, each file under a chief and each commander of the files obedient to a superior officer, then made a progress through the beautiful gardens of their beautiful hostess . . . The Hell-cats and their followers were of a different temper from these gentle Lancaster insurgents. They destroyed and ravaged; sacked and gutted houses . . . robbed and rioted. (Disraeli, Sybil, pp. 375–6)

Looking ahead to Parliamentary debates about working-class access to the 1851 Exhibition as well as to museums on Sundays, Disraeli implies that a worker’s reverence for objects of beauty, such as gardens and aristocratic women, is a measure of his virtue. The ‘‘gentle’’ worker understands that

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participation in the aesthetic requires restraint of the physical impulses to ‘‘pluck’’ or ‘‘touch.’’ Shifting registers to contrast the aristocratic-identified aesthetic with violence, Disraeli then describes a very different species of worker, a man whose political expression takes the form of an orgy of physical destruction. Like Bamford, Disraeli figures the working man’s political rage as inarticulate utterance: There rose one of those universal shrieks of wild passion which announce that men have discarded all the trammels of ‘‘civilization,’’ and found in their licentious rage new and unforeseen sources of power and vengeance. Where it came from, how it was obtained, who prompted the thought, who first accomplished it, were alike impossible to trace; but, as it were in a moment, a number of trusses of straw were piled up before the house and set on fire, the gates of the timber-yard were forced, and a quantity of scantlings and battens soon fed the flame. (Sybil, p. 379)

As if in anticipation of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Disraeli assigns a primitive ‘‘rage’’ and ‘‘power’’ to the ‘‘shrieks of wild passion’’ that emerge from a crowd bent on destroying a manor house.21 Both their utterances and actions lack agency, as Disraeli represents workers’ speech as a primal energy requiring the channeling of aesthetic and political form. If Disraeli recognizes the dangers of workers’ speech, he also acknowledges its potential power to enthrall. Earlier in the novel, he describes Walter Gerard – the Chartist leader and father of the novel’s namesake and heroine – as he ‘‘address[es] a T O R C H - L I G H T M E E T I N G ’’ (Sybil, p. 216). This representation of Gerard’s public speech reveals the novelist’s struggle to appropriate the force of such speech while disabling it politically. Gerard’s noble ancestry invests him with all the positive qualities of moderation and rationalism as well as with the charismatic appeal associated with an aristocracy of virtue. But as a Chartist leader, Gerard’s public speaking can easily be caught up in the destructive energies of the mob. Poised between positive and negative rhetoric, his language possesses the same virtues novelists sought for their own writing: His tall form seemed colossal in the uncertain and flickering light, his rich and powerful voice reached almost to the limit of his vast audience, now still with expectation and silent with excitement. Their fixed and eager glance, the mouth compressed with fierce resolution or distended by novel sympathy, as they listened to the exposition of their wrongs, and the vindication of the sacred rights of labour; the shouts and waving of the torches as some bright or bold phrase touched them to the quick; the cause, the hour, the scene, all combined to render the assemblage in a high degree exciting. (Sybil, p. 216)

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Disraeli figures Gerard as a spellbinding storyteller hypnotizing a ‘‘vast audience’’ who become transfixed with ‘‘fixed and eager glance, the mouth compressed.’’ Disraeli thus portrays working-class politics as generating an enviably coherent speech community, a scene of political oratory as unifying an otherwise dispersed and discordant people. In contrast to the writing of the working-class journalist Stephen Morley, Gerard’s public speaking captivates his audience. ‘‘If you come to the depth of a question, there’s nothing like Stephen Morley,’’ comments a member of Gerard’s audience. ‘‘But Gerard gets hold of the passions’’ (Sybil, p. 216). When a speaker ‘‘gets hold of the passions,’’ however, there is always a chance that his speech can generate anarchy. As long as Gerard’s listeners keep their ‘‘mouth[s] compressed,’’ the danger of inflammatory rhetoric is forestalled. But should these lips begin to open, ‘‘novel sympathy’’ will give way to ‘‘shouts and waving of the torches.’’ Seeking to appropriate the ‘‘passion’’ of Gerard’s speech without its political risks, Disraeli invents the transcendent voice of Sybil, Gerard’s daughter. Her beautiful singing voice asserts a magnetic attraction on rich and poor, factory owner and worker alike.22 Sybil sings in ‘‘a single voice . . . [with] tones of almost supernatural sweetness; tender and solemn yet flexible and thrilling’’ (Disraeli, Sybil, p. 66). Perceived as akin to ‘‘the fair phantom of some saint haunting the sacred ruins of her desecrated fane’’ (Sybil, p. 66), she strikes the aristocratic Egremont as a figure from a pre-industrial past whose voice transcends contemporary concerns to invoke the eternal. Another man describes her as ‘‘[t]hat seraphic being, whose lustre even now haunts my vision; the ring of whose silver tone even now lingers in my ear’’ (Sybil, p. 254), and he too responds to her ‘‘haunt[ing]’’ resonance.23 Later in the novel, Sybil’s voice is described by Lady Maud Fitz-Warene, an aristocratic heiress, as an aesthetic experience of a rare order: [A] service had been performed and a collection made for the suffering workpeople of the place. She had been apprised of it for some days, was told that she would hear the most beautiful voice she had ever listened to, but it had far exceeded her expectations. A female voice it seemed; no tones could be conceived more tender and yet more thrilling: in short, seraphic. (Sybil, p. 360)

Mr. Mountchesney adds his anticipation for ‘‘singing, and beautiful singing in a Catholic chapel by a woman, perhaps a beautiful woman . . . I should have been amused, which nobody seems ever to think of here’’ (Sybil, p. 361). Sybil’s voice, an aesthetic attraction ‘‘performed’’ by a member of the lower class worthy of the attention of the wealthy, mediates

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between the two nations. She not only performs at a service for ‘‘suffering workpeople,’’ but visits Lady de Mowbray where some ‘‘Spanish church music . . . called forth all her powers’’ (Sybil, p. 404). Thus Disraeli in effect substitutes Sybil’s singing for her father’s oration, emptying vocal performance of political critique and rendering it a means of ‘‘reconciliation.’’ Sybil’s power over language extends even to unuttered speech only heard or read. A speech given before Parliament by Egremont is, through Sybil’s reading, transformed from a political statement into an object of beauty and romance. Egremont, delivering his speech in ‘‘one voice . . . free from the slang of faction’’ (Sybil, p. 291) – a description echoing Sybil’s ‘‘single voice’’ (Sybil, p. 66) – registers the influence of both father and daughter, Walter and Sybil Gerard. Egremont has learned from them to infuse speech with sympathy and passion, to shift political discourse into the realm of the aesthetic. In a sense, by combining Walter’s oratory and Sybil’s apolitical song, Disraeli arrives at the most satisfactory speech of all: Egremont’s ‘‘moderate’’ address in Parliament, as mediated through Sybil’s reading of it. With a heart not without emotion, with a kindling cheek, and eyes suffused with tears, Sybil read the speech of Egremont . . . She smiled through a gushing vision; and, with a flushed cheek, impelled perhaps by her native frankness, perhaps by some softer and irresistible feeling of gratitude, respect, regard, she said in a low voice, ‘‘I was reading your beautiful speech.’’ (Sybil, pp. 291–2)

As she reads, potentially divisive political rhetoric becomes a written object of romance, very like a novel. The sentence ‘‘I was reading your beautiful speech’’ draws a disjunction between utterance and text. Sybil is, significantly, reading a public address that is never represented as speech in the novel but only as a text circulated through a newspaper’s transcription of it. Sybil’s act of reading transforms political oratory into a ‘‘beautiful’’ piece of writing and a private, erotic communication. Relocated under the sign of ‘‘one voice,’’ the political address becomes the aesthetic product of a singular, authorial subjectivity. Egremont’s speech has been evacuated of all performance and rendered into a textual communication read by an audience of one. This is a version of Carlyle’s fantasy: ‘‘I am endeavouring to write down my Lectures somewhat in the style of speech; as they were, or rather as they might have been, and should have been, and wished to be, delivered to the people’’ (Carlyle, Collected Letters, vol. XII, pp. 167–8). A speech transcribed and properly read gains the power of an idealized oratory that can exist only in print. It would seem that even the most

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inherently moderate and ‘‘beautiful’’ act of political rhetoric can only be improved in its translation into novelistic form, which can at once absorb and defuse the oratory’s power.24 Finally, at the novel’s conclusion, Sybil prevents an orgy of violence by stepping between a mob of workers and the de Mowbray estate: ‘‘I see some Mowbray faces,’’ said Sybil, springing forward, with a flashing eye and a glowing cheek. ‘‘Bamford and Samuel Carr: Bamford, if you be my father’s friend, aid us now; and Samuel Carr, I was with your mother this morning: did she think I should meet her son thus? . . . Oh men, men!’’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands, ‘‘what is this? Are you led away by strangers to such deeds? Why, I know you all! You came here to aid, I am sure, and not to harm’’. . . . Sybil had made her way upon the terrace, and had collected around her a knot of stout followers, who, whatever may have been their original motive, were now resolved to do her bidding. (Sybil, pp. 408–9)

Sybil confronts these men as errant sons, men who had strayed from the feminine influence that would lead them to ‘‘aid’’ rather than ‘‘harm.’’ It is surely no coincidence that Disraeli uses the name ‘‘Bamford’’ here to designate one of the workers who are saved from ‘‘radicalism’’ by Sybil’s voice; at the time Disraeli wrote his novel, Samuel Bamford had become a metonym for the ‘‘former radical’’ adjusting his Peterloo-era politics to more moderate purposes in the 1840s. Forced to confront political violence and deliver a public address, Sybil exerts her charisma to redirect workers’ political agency so that ‘‘whatever may have been their original motive,’’ they will now submit themselves to her influence. Her bidding is the only agency that is left, as the men are transformed into obedient listeners instead of political agents. Becoming a model for the middle-class novelist, Sybil enters the contentious discourse of industrialism and exerts a moderating influence, defining individuals not as political dissidents but as members of households, sons and fathers. Her voice, a feminine analogue of Stephen Blackpool’s, exerts an irresistible and politically disinterested authority; it is a voice no one can, or would wish to, disobey or resist. LIPS COMPRESSED FOR CURSES

In Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell suggests that bad language always threatens to devolve into a version of those ‘‘convulsions’’ Bamford had described. Her Preface warns that language, under the influence of mistaken ideas or a lack of information, will ‘‘turn to’’ physical violence and ‘‘curses.’’ Like Bamford, then, she imports class struggle into language. She implies that the divisions of class may inflict traumatic damage on speech

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and transform it into obscenity and sedition. Describing the ideas of the ‘‘work-people’’ Gaskell has met in Manchester, she explains that ‘‘they were sore and irritable against the rich,’’ figuring their class anger as the psychic equivalent of a rash or itch. Refusing to pass judgment on their resentment, she states that ‘‘It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints what might be resignation to God’s will, and turns it to revenge in too many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester’’ (Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 37). Poverty and resentment ‘‘taints’’ and ‘‘turns . . . to revenge’’ what might otherwise be pious ‘‘resignation.’’ Gaskell sees this political problem as a linguistic one: she became ‘‘anxious . . . to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people’’ (Mary Barton, pp. 37–8). Drawing on Bamford’s vocabulary of ‘‘convulsions,’’ Gaskell implies that her own novelistic narrative might effect political reconciliation by speaking for these agonized workers, who lack a voice.25 ‘‘Dumb people’’ have no agency. An agony connected to no single subjectivity recurs like a seasonal plague on a mute people.26 Gaskell concludes her Preface on an ominous note: ‘‘At present they seem to me to be left in a state, wherein lamentations and tears are thrown aside as useless, but in which the lips are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite’’ (Mary Barton, p. 38). Later in the novel this condition recurs: ‘‘In many instances the sufferers wept first, and then they cursed. Their vindictive feelings expressed themselves in rabid politics’’ (Mary Barton, p. 126). A somatic process, crying, sets in motion a chain of linguistic effects culminating in political violence. Gaskell identifies ‘‘hunger and distress’’ as the origin of the violent language produced by the Chartists. Like Bamford, she locates the origins of radicalism in the body, which is also the source of language. Bad speech, it is implied, will always lead to violence; such speech acts and cannot transcend its material origin in a human body. In Mary Barton, this certainly proves to be the case. It may be true, as Hilary Schor asserts, that ‘‘Mary wants to ‘speak out’ . . . And so, at its heart, does Mary Barton: to find and persuade, to speak and transform’’ (Schor, Scheherezade, p. 43). But to ‘‘speak out’’ in this novel is often to turn one’s language into a weapon. As Mrs. Wilson comments, ‘‘If my words are to kill my son, they have already gone forth out of my mouth, and nought can bring them back’’ (Mary Barton, p. 339). We see the familiar trope of language that evades ownership or possession: voice, that inalienable possession, torn away from the self. As she realizes that her refusal of Jem Wilson’s offer of marriage may be irrevocable, Mary thinks to herself,

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‘‘Were a few hasty words, spoken in a moment of irritation, to stamp her lot through life?’’ (Mary Barton, p. 224). Gaskell focuses on the propensity of language to initiate harmful effects far beyond the control of its original speaker. The degeneration of John Barton’s speech dramatizes the point most explicitly. After his return from London on the failed Chartist mission, he falls into a silence that signals his increased capacity for violence: ‘‘he seldom spoke, less than ever.’’ Gaskell depicts his descent into a frightening underground of trade unionism that is evacuated of ordinary, domestic speech. This is a world in which any speech can quickly become literal violence. The power of the masculine worker wanes or turns destructive. John Barton becomes a figure of failed action and agency, his impotence represented in his silence. We may recall Benjamin’s dictum that the storyteller faces ‘‘industrial technology as a stranger’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p, 92); John Barton becomes, in a sense, that stranger in Mary Barton, a token of the failure of modern community within industrialism. Gaskell depicts the scene of the fateful trade union meeting, where the unionists draw lots to determine who will take on the task of murdering the son of a mill-owner, as a stage for a variety of forms of unnatural or improper language.27 A ‘‘gentleman from London’’ speaks to the meeting. Like the rabble-rousing activist Slackbridge in Dickens’s later Hard Times, he is an outsider who enters the community with inflammatory language to destroy the possibility of reconciliation: ‘‘rising like a great orator, with his right arm out-stretched, his left in the breast of his waistcoat, he began to declaim, with a forced theatrical voice’’ (Mary Barton, pp. 236–7). Gaskell discredits this orator by associating his rhetorical style with demagoguery. After the demagogue leaves, however, John Barton also speaks with conscious rhetorical emphasis and tonal variation that affects his audience: ‘‘they turned to him with deep attention . . . ‘We do not want dainties, we want bellyfuls; we donnot want gimcrack coats and waistcoats, we want warm clothes’ . . . He lowered his deep voice almost to a whisper . . . He began again in his usual tone’’ (Mary Barton, pp. 238–9). Although Barton remains a sympathetic character, his oratorical flourishes signal his descent into political speech. The whisper, like the ‘‘whispered talk’’ (Mary Barton, p. 162) of conspiracy Mary had earlier overheard downstairs while she lay in bed, suggests the language’s swerve away from addressing a readership. The conscious modulating of one’s voice for polemical effect is deeply suspect in this novel that is itself so unsure about what it means to speak to an audience. Gaskell may vilify overtly manipulative rhetoric, but she seems much less clear about what a speaker or author must do in order

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to avoid such excesses while gaining the ‘‘deep attention’’ of listeners. What Derrida sums up as the charisma of the ‘‘natural unity of the cry, the voice, the song’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 197) is clearly unattainable in a long novel – yet that very unattainability seems to produce a desire on the part of novelists to generate a vocal effect within printed prose. Mary Barton ponders the difficulty of constructing an effective and charismatic novelistic ‘‘voice’’ free of the taint of radical ‘‘rhetoric.’’ Gaskell’s formal aim is to appropriate the energies of radical rhetoric while jettisoning the political content of such language. Where authors of an earlier generation felt comparatively sanguine about the capacity of a rational print public sphere to control and contain orality, Gaskell – like so many other Victorian authors – sees seditious or otherwise destructive voice as at once an insurgent threat to middle-class verbal authority and an enviable source of authenticity. Thus she characteristically drains her working-class speech of its political content in order to render it a powerful component of her own writing.28 Facing a new mass audience and a shifting public sphere, she seizes upon the moment of vocal utterance as both the heart of the problem faced by the nation and the potential solution. In its most destructive form, speech becomes an ‘‘oath,’’ language that departs so thoroughly from any realm of rational print culture as to act as violence. Such oaths – in J. L. Austin’s terms, ‘‘commissives’’ that declare a relationship to a future action (Austin, How To Do Things with Words, p. 150) – join the category of those bad speech acts that at once challenge print culture and reveal voice’s capacity for discordance and conflict (recall the ‘‘flood of tears and blubbering’’ Carlyle feared would disrupt his public speaking, for example). Plotting to murder one of the ‘‘masters,’’ the trade unionists reveal all that is dangerous, corrupted, and misguided in speech: And so with words, or looks that told more than words, they built up a deadly plan. Deeper and deeper grew the import of their speeches, as they stood hoarsely muttering their meaning out, and glaring, with eyes that told the terror their own thoughts were to them, upon their neighbors. Their clenched fists, their set teeth, their livid looks, all told the suffering their minds were voluntarily undergoing in the contemplation of crime, and in familiarising themselves with its details. Then came one of those fierce terrible oaths which bind members of Trades’ Unions to any given purpose. (Mary Barton, p. 241)

Gaskell depicts this language as at once inexpressive and overly expressive, over-embodied. Meaning has come unglued from the spoken language and affixed itself to gestures and somatic signs: ‘‘looks that told more than words,’’ ‘‘eyes that told the terror.’’ This is in short a situation where, once again, ‘‘their clenched fists, their set teeth, their living looks, all told the

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suffering.’’ ‘‘Hoarsely muttering’’ voices produce ominously somatic sounds that are direct expressions of the human ‘‘suffering.’’ Gaskell’s Preface has suggested that such expression, unmediated by literary form and middle-class authorship, will depart from the realm of rational discourse and devolve into violence.29 This meeting concludes with a ‘‘fierce terrible oath’’ analogous to Henry Hunt’s ‘‘curse.’’ Whereas Hunt’s curse is performed for a crowd, the trade unionist’s ‘‘oath’’ is a secret vow. Where the curse is too public, the oath is much too secretive, but both speech acts signal the devolution of speech into physical violence. Hunt’s ‘‘curse,’’ and the huzzas it elicits from the audience, bind a mass audience and speaker into a collectivity much as this ‘‘oath’’ binds the conspirators. Forging a compact in a speech act which middle-class listeners can only overhear – as ‘‘once or twice, when Mary was in bed, she heard men’s voices below’’ (Mary Barton, p. 162) – the ‘‘oath’’ produces a division between workers and owners. Whispered in secret and constrained in enclosed space, the oath produces perverse community. Such speech acts hold too close a relationship to physical action and performance. Lacking the proper disinterested authority and charisma of a good speaker, this language is all too embedded in a material, somatic realm. Mary Barton suggests that when speech is directed as an ‘‘oath’’ to hungry workers, the middle class can only hope to eavesdrop or listen in.30 Such speech is not for them. The middle class no longer occupies the de facto position of both speaker and implicit addressee for any speech act. In response to such a threat, Sybil and Mary Barton offer speech that tends toward the phonemic rather than the semic, operating as pure sound and self-expression. Such utterance is the positive correlative of the hoarse ‘‘muttering’’ of the trade unionists and the ‘‘curses’’ produced by suffering bodies. Uttered by female voices and inspiring aesthetic appreciation and sympathetic feeling, lyric speech converts a political threat into a social cure. In her description of Margaret Jennings’s singing of ‘‘The Oldham Weaver,’’ Gaskell grants the performance of an old folk melody enormous cultural power: The air to which this is sung is a kind of droning recitative, depending much on expression and feeling. To read it, it may, perhaps, seem humorous; but it is that humour which is near akin to pathos, and to those who have seen the distress it describes, it is a powerfully pathetic song. Margaret had both witnessed the destitution, and had the heart to feel it; and withal, her voice was of that rich and rare order, which does not require any great compass of notes to make itself

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appreciated. Alice had her quiet enjoyment of tears. But Margaret, with fixed eye, and earnest, dreamy look, seemed to become more and more absorbed in realizing to herself the woe she had been describing, and which she felt might at that very moment be suffering and hopeless within a short distance of their comparative comfort. (Mary Barton, p. 73)

Reminiscent of Sybil, Margaret possesses a pure voice that is at once noncommunicative and self-‘‘absorbed,’’ but deeply sympathetic. Here is an example of the Victorian storyteller as an adaptation of the Romantic-era bard Katie Trumpener has analyzed. ‘‘In his state of poetic rhapsody, the unlettered bard is able to immerse himself completely in memory,’’ Trumpener writes, adding that ‘‘this state is potentially solipsistic’’ and that a fundamental tendency of bardic poetics is ‘‘its desire to block out the transformations of the present, taking refuge in memory and poetry’’ (Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 108). In Margaret or Sybil we see these bardic qualities refunctioned, in the context of the industrial politics of the 1840s and the genre of the middle-class English novel, as the attributes of a domestic woman. This voice produces benign tears in a listener as it re-imagines the ‘‘suffering’’ nearby, transcending the merely written – the song on the page as transcribed for us by Gaskell – with sympathetic orality. Her singing produces a powerful interiority that Gaskell suggests may heal the wounds of politics. With ‘‘fixed eye, and earnest, dreaming look,’’ Margaret has entered the aesthetic. Her voice induces an experience of refined taste and pleasure. Later, she sings for the sailor Will Wilson, who is utterly entranced: Margaret began some of her noble old-fashioned songs. She knew no modern music for which her auditors might have been thankful, but she poured her rich voice out in some of the old canzonets she had lately learnt . . . Mary was amused to see how the young sailor sat entranced; mouth, eyes, all open, in order to catch every breath of sound. His very lids refused to wink, as if afraid in that brief proverbial interlude to lose a particle of the rich music that floated through the room. (Mary Barton, p. 202)

Margaret’s voice, like Sybil’s, induces absolute attention in a listener. Gaskell has defined the social problems of industrialism as a function of a blockage in communication. If only the rich and the poor, the factoryowners and workers, could speak with one another and understand, harmony might be attained.31 Like Disraeli, Gaskell turns to non-verbal singing to represent such an imaginary language that might unify and entrance the nation. Phonemic, ‘‘entranc[ing],’’ ‘‘old-fashioned,’’ not ‘‘modern,’’ Margaret’s singing evades modern political engagements and

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draws a listener into an aural pre-political folk world and an idealized community of total understanding.32 Margaret’s voice conforms to what Friedrich Kittler defines as a fantasy of feminized or maternal utterance. In his analysis of new European reading and pedagogy practices emerging around 1800 that emphasized language acquisition through orality rather than reading, he claims that the mothers and nurses who taught language became associated with ‘‘[v]oices of pure song’’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 66); ‘‘the Mother, or source of all discourse, was . . . the abyss into which everything written vanished, only to emerge as pure Spirit and Voice’’ (Discourse Networks, p. 54). The idealized maternal voice sublates both writing and all discordant actual voices. Both Margaret and Sybil’s singing voices function according to a Kittlerian logic as a fetish and a cultural cure. Gaskell offers language that immerses a listener in memories of the past and so domesticates political speech – that allows listeners vicariously to enter the inner recesses of domestic spaces filled with fondly recalled objects.33 The telling of personal stories redefines language as a private exchange between individuals defined by their feelings and emotions. When Mary’s aunt Esther Barton, the fallen woman, tries to save herself, she knows that her best hope is that ‘‘her tale might be told, and listened to with interest’’ (Mary Barton, p. 208). ‘‘You must listen to me’’ becomes her mantra. She adds, ‘‘for Mary Barton’s sake’’ (Mary Barton, p. 208), in order more clearly to locate her speech in the world of feminine feeling. Jem Wilson cannot help but listen ‘‘like a three-year child’’; Gaskell cites ‘‘The Ancient Mariner’’ as a signifier of magically persuasive speech. Such language transforms a prostitute seeking the attention of a man on the street into something closer to a mother speaking to her young child. This is the very magic that Gaskell seeks for the language of her own novel in order to situate her readers in a domestic space of family feeling. Coleridge’s Romantic poem becomes the material for a Victorian novel, as vocal charisma becomes domesticated. Individuated storytelling takes the place of anonymous public spectacle. Early in the novel, Mary and Margaret witness the burning of the factory. As in Disraeli’s scene of rioters burning a manor house, flames and vocal shrieks become analogues. Immersed in the crowd watching the fire, Mary begins to lose her hold over her own mind: ‘‘the heated air, the roaring flames, the dizzy light, and the agitated and murmuring crowd, had bewildered her thoughts’’ (Mary Barton, p. 89). Gaskell evokes the voice of the crowd, the murmuring, shouting, erotic speech of a mass of people entranced by a frightening spectacle.

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A sob, as if of excited women, was heard in the hush of the crowd . . . A mighty shout arose; a sound to wake the dead . . . Then the multitude might shout; and above the roaring flames, louder than the blowing of the mighty wind, arose that tremendous burst of applause at the success of the daring enterprise. Then a shrill cry was heard . . . The multitude in the street absolutely danced with triumph, and huzzaed and yelled till you would have fancied their very throats would crack; and then with all the fickleness of interest characteristic of a large body of people, pressed and stumbled, and cursed and swore in the hurry to get out of Dunham Street, and back to the immediate scene of the fire, the mighty diapason of whose roaring flames formed an awful accompaniment to the screams, and yells, and imprecations, of the struggling crowd. (Mary Barton, pp. 90–2)

Gaskell, like Bamford, represents the ‘‘huzza[ing]’’ and shouts of a crowd as a dangerous sign of language’s distortion and retreat from rationality. Nonsignifying voice threatens intelligible speech. As one character earlier wished to ‘‘bite out her tongue,’’ so these spectators ‘‘yelled till you would have fancied their very voices would crack.’’ Gaskell again represents the speech act of cursing as one of various vocal productions associated with the irrational crowd. The curse figures the distortion of language in a public sphere governed by the passions and ‘‘fickleness of interest . . . of a large body of people.’’ Gaskell represents a crowd swayed by competing attractions and spectacles. Their utterances push at the limit of rational speech, becoming sheer noise. As voice turns on itself, speech becomes over-embodied and tongues are bitten, voices crack.34 We might recall Carlyle’s painful account of the experience of lecturing: ‘‘I was wasted and fretted to a thread, my tongue let me drink as I would continued dry as charcoal’’ (Carlyle, Letters, vol. IX, p. 215). The tongue makes its presence felt in voice’s embodiment as if to remind the speaker that speech is ultimately little more than physical production – even a twitch or flail of a single body part. At the conclusion of the chapter on the fire, Margaret tells John Barton about the frightening event. Here we find violent public speech replaced with domestic storytelling: When they [Mary and Margaret] arrived at home, they found John Barton smoking his pipe, unwilling to question, yet very willing to hear all the details they could give him. Margaret went over the whole story, and it was amusing to watch his gradually increasing interest and excitement. First, the regular puffing abated, then ceased. Then the pipe was fairly taken out of his mouth, and held suspended. Then he rose, and at every further point he came a step nearer to the narrator. (Mary Barton, pp. 93–4)

In this sequence, Gaskell broaches the issue of artistic production and its reception by a mass audience. Following the dystopian scene of the fire and

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its fickle spectators, this domestic tableau of a young woman telling the news serves as a more reassuring exemplar of the transmission of narrative to an audience. As Margaret goes over ‘‘the whole story,’’ turning the scattered impressions of the event into a complete and ‘‘whole’’ narrative, we witness the ideal response of her listener, whose attention and ‘‘interest’’ increases in perfect synchrony with the tale. Like a comic afterthought to the fire itself, his pipe gradually stops producing smoke as he begins – like a man in a trance, hypnotized by the speaker – to come ‘‘a step nearer to the narrator’’ with ‘‘every further point.’’ No more complete repudiation of the ‘‘fickleness of interest characteristic of a large body of people’’ could be imagined. Gaskell rejects the mass as a model for her own audience and substitutes this single, ideal listener in its place.35 She imagines the reception of her own novel among a mass reading public that she understands as a series of individual readers, each of whose sympathetic responses she can predict and individually manage. The process closely resembles Sybil’s transformation of a political speech into an aesthetic object of beauty through her reading (as well as Carlyle’s, Dickens’s, and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of charismatic utterance). Mediated through Margaret’s female voice, the frightening scene of mass violence turns into a soothing domestic tale. The ‘‘large body of people’’ gives way to the individual bodies of a young woman and her father who constitute a communicative circuit of two. Gaskell offers alternating scenes of speech damaged by politics and the reemergence of good speech from politics.36 John Barton’s return home after the disastrous Chartist delegation to London and his reluctant, halting narration of his experience there initially exemplify the failure of speech. Gaskell sets the scene for Mary’s efforts to induce her father to tell her about his trip with this stark summary of ‘‘the political news of the day: that Parliament had refused to listen to the working-men, when they petitioned with all the force of their rough, untutored words to be heard’’ (Mary Barton, p. 141). Gaskell sums up the failure of the Chartist petition as a failure of speech and a ‘‘refus[al] to listen.’’ She thus frames Chartism in the basic communicative terms of a speaker and a listener, and demonstrates how this larger failure of the speech act infects domesticity.37 Parliament refused to listen to the Chartists, and now John Barton can no longer effectively speak to his family: ‘‘When he had eaten and was refreshed, they sat in silence for some time; for Mary wished him to tell her what oppressed him so, yet durst not ask’’ (Mary Barton, p. 141). Having been thwarted in his desire to ‘‘speak’’ in London, Barton is now overcome by ‘‘silence,’’ which Gaskell figures throughout the novel as a sign

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of crippling personal and social paralysis. Barton breaks the silence with a statement of the impossibility of finding a human listener: ‘‘Mary, we mun speak to our God to hear us, for man will not hearken; no, not now, when we weep tears o’ blood’’ (Mary Barton, p. 141). In turn, Mary ‘‘did not know what to say, and was so afraid of speaking wrongly, that she was silent.’’ Silence and an inability to speak become emblems of political failure and of the impact of that failure on private life.38 Simply to speak is not necessarily to tell a story in its fullest sense, an act which requires drawing language out of one’s own self and personal experience. Job Legh and Margaret finally induce Barton to break his silence, yet his speech is still primarily concerned with observing speech’s failure or insufficiency. ‘‘‘Do tell us all about London, dear father,’ asked Mary, who was sitting at her old post by her father’s knee’’ (Mary Barton, p. 142). Mary, ‘‘at her old post,’’ does her best to induce a nostalgic storytelling scene between father and daughter. To ‘‘tell all’’ would be to prove, after all, the resilience and permanence of the comforting old verbal bonds and the domestic context in which they flourish. But Barton quickly dispels this illusion of continuity: ‘‘How can I tell yo a’ about it, when I never seed one-tenth of it. It’s as big as six Manchesters, they telled me.’’ Explaining his own lack of direct experience out of which he could speak, Barton can do no more than pass on information he received from others. As Benjamin writes, ‘‘the storyteller takes what he tells from experience’’ and ‘‘in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale’’ (Mary Barton, p. 87). Barton’s lack of transmissible experience evacuates his language of meaning for himself or his listeners and points to a breakdown in community. When Barton pauses, Job says, ‘‘Well, but that’s not a’ your story, man. Tell us what happened when yo got to th’ Parliament House.’’ These listeners expect the ‘‘story’’ to include more than second-hand observations about London architecture and customs. But what really happened in London between the Chartists and Parliament, Barton insists, cannot be spoken of as a ‘‘story.’’ This experience instead generates the antithesis of storytelling: frustrated ‘‘curses,’’ the verbal correlative of what Gaskell described as ‘‘rabid politics.’’ ‘‘If yo please, neighbour, I’d rather say nought about that. It’s not to be forgotten or forgiven either by me or many another; but I canna tell of our downcasting just as a piece of London news. As long as I live, our rejection that day will bide in my heart; and as long as I live I shall curse them as so cruelly refused to hear us; but I’ll not speak of it no more.’’ (Mary Barton, pp. 144–5)

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‘‘So,’’ Gaskell’s narrator comments, ‘‘daunted in their inquiries, they sat silent for a few minutes.’’ Here Gaskell’s narrative itself seems to have achieved a point of stasis. Much of Mary Barton’s momentum has derived from the hopeful sense that Barton and his fellow delegates might ‘‘be heard,’’ might speak and have an effect in London, but now Gaskell herself seems to run out of faith in the power of narrative or story – which have apparently been replaced by the frustrated curse, a thwarted declaration of future action. The bitter failure of the Chartist speech act presents a difficulty for Gaskell’s novel. Gaskell offers a solution in an extended representation of storytelling as a compensation for the earlier failures of speech. Job breaks the painful silence: ‘‘Did you ever hear tell,’’ said he to Mary, ‘‘that I were in London once?’’ ‘‘No!’’ said she, with surprise, and looking at Job with increased respect. (Mary Barton, p. 145)

Job proceeds to tell a long story which is, if not the one Barton himself could not bring himself to tell, at least a substitute for that thwarted tale. The telling and reception of this narrative suffers none of the blockages, frustrated outbursts, and silence of Barton’s thwarted language. Indeed, Job’s narrative of his daughter’s marriage, her untimely death from fever, and Job’s own travel with his orphaned granddaughter from London back to Manchester exerts much the same effect on listeners as did Mary’s narration to her father of the tale of the fire. The story finds an utterly engrossed and ideally responsive audience: ‘‘‘But how was your daughter when you got there?’ asked Mary, anxiously’’ (Mary Barton, p. 146). Job’s account possesses special power and emotional appeal as language which conveys subjectivity in its most authentic state. His story serves as a narrative device to allow characters to enter the homes of others, where they encounter strangers as intimate selves. His story thereby permits Gaskell’s novel to overcome the purported limitations of print and to communicate with the emotional appeal of speech. Traveling with the baby’s other grandfather, Job and his companion stop at a cottage where a kind woman takes the baby from them and comforts it. When Job asks if they might buy breakfast from her, she rejects his offer of payment. [S]he said nought, but gived me th’ babby back, and afore yo’ could say Jack Robinson, she’d a pan on th’ fire, and bread and cheese on th’ table. When she turned round, her face looked red, and her lips were tight pressed together. (Mary Barton, p. 151)

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Later in the same paragraph, Job describes how the woman took out a key to unlock a drawer; ‘‘I were sorry to be prying,’’ he says, but I could na’ help seeing in that drawer some little child’s clothes, all strewed wi’ lavender, and lying by ’em a little whip an’ a broken rattle. I began to have an insight into that woman’s heart then. (Mary Barton, p. 152)

This incident, concisely told by Job, opens up new spaces of interior experience and sentiment. The hidden drawer in a stranger’s home contains material evoking domestic tragedy.39 Job’s story of hunger, suffering, and the sympathetic camaraderie these experiences produce transcends the failure of communication suffered by Barton in London. The woman’s ‘‘lips . . . tight pressed together’’ recall the lips ‘‘compressed for curses’’ in Gaskell’s Preface – and ‘‘the mouth compressed with fierce resolution or distended by novel sympathy’’ (Disraeli, Sybil, p. 216) of Gerard’s listeners in Sybil – yet this image offers to cure the damaging language of curses with the balm of emotional experience. Gaskell transforms the ‘‘compressed lips’’ of speech that is equivalent to violence into the ‘‘pressed together’’ lips of a narrative of recollection, domestic generosity, and resigned solidarity. The poor, Gaskell suggests, will help one another with soothing language rather than with angry speech. An ideal of ‘‘disinterested’’ speech offers the message of Stephen Blackpool: ‘‘merely the truth,’’ uncontestable, consoling. This is a form of language that evades any explicit politics, keeping faith with a utopian belief that human communication and powerful forms of sympathetic speech might create a polis in which no politics would be needed – for everyone would, at last, understand one another. A VALENTINE AND A GUN

Samuel Bamford’s writings enter Mary Barton very directly, and serve to initiate a linguistic transformation similar to the one we have seen in Bamford’s own Passages in the Life of a Radical. After Job Legh tells his story, he proceeds to read John and Mary Barton ‘‘a little poem of Samuel Bamford’s he had picked up somewhere.’’ The poem, which includes the refrain ‘‘God help the poor,’’ describes the suffering of those whose poverty prevents them from enjoying a proper domestic life. Gaskell includes a footnote describing Bamford as ‘‘the fine-spirited author of ‘Passages in the Life of a Radical’ – a man who illustrates his order, and shows what nobility may be in a cottage.’’ She also transcribes five full stanzas of the poem in a footnote, and represents another transcription of it when Barton asks Mary to make a copy of the poem:

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So Mary took the paper. And the next day, on the blank half sheet of a valentine, all bordered with hearts and darts – a valentine she had once suspected to come from Jem Wilson – she copied Bamford’s beautiful little poem. (Mary Barton, p. 156)

This piece of paper – first a valentine, then a copy of a poem of Bamford’s that has been read out loud – plays a new role later in the novel, when it becomes the piece of wadding paper used by John Barton to load the gun with which he murders Harry Carson. The paper, left on the ground and discovered by Mary’s aunt Esther, reveals to Mary that in fact it was not Jem Wilson but her father who committed the crime: That corner of stiff, shining, thick writing-paper, she recognized as part of the sheet on which she had copied Samuel Bamford’s beautiful lines so many months ago – copied (as you perhaps remember) on the blank part of a valentine sent to her by Jem Wilson. (Mary Barton, p. 299)

This paper, subject to a series of rewritings and recyclings, thus becomes material proof of the danger of domestic language turning into violence as it enters public circulation. A valentine containing the language of romance and marriage first becomes the writing surface for a piece of workers’ literature celebrating domesticity. This formerly benign piece of paper subsequently, however, is used by John Barton to commit an act of murder, as if to prove that his deadly speechlessness corrupts even the most positive language. Gaskell traces a logic in which language of the heart or the home continually threatens to transform into a deadly weapon. A valentine may be safely recycled into the writing surface for a poem by Bamford celebrating domesticity and social resignation. When that same sheet of paper is subsequently used to commit a murder, however, Gaskell suggests how quickly workers’ speech and writing may shift into violent politics. What began as Job Legh’s recitation of Bamford becomes a piece of writing that becomes swept into a current of violence. Gaskell seems to want to locate her own novel’s language in the space of the reading aloud of the poem and its subsequent copying down on a valentine. Here, worker’s literacy works as a boon to domestic pleasure and the closeness of families. But when that piece of paper is used as an element of a political conspiracy, Gaskell suggests how easily even the most desirable workers’ language can also serve to destroy the home. It is not only that when people stop reading, writing, and talking to one another, violence emerges – but that when violence erupts, those signs and products of literacy themselves become corrupted, swept into a deadly orbit.40 Mary’s transcription – ‘‘she copied Bamford’s beautiful little poem’’ – recalls Sybil’s declaration, ‘‘I was reading your beautiful speech.’’ With

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these sentences, Gaskell and Disraeli signal the function of the industrial novel as a means of linguistic and political transformation. Mary’s act of transcribing Bamford’s poem participates in the logic of Bamford’s own memoir, in which political speech is defused as it is translated into written texts and introduced to the national print sphere. Similarly, Sybil’s reading of Egremont’s speech transforms political speech into an aesthetic object. The exercise of aesthetic taste – in the appreciation of a poem or of a speech – substitutes for political protest or for intemperate speech. This particular literary effect, a defining characteristic of the 1840s industrial novel, recalls Bamford’s own experience of initiation into that middle-class print culture in which writers and readers exchange language in a social ritual of distinction. The act of transcription, the turning of speech into writing, becomes emblematic of the larger process of translation in which these novels participate. When Sybil reads Egremont’s speech, Bamford promises to lend his prosecutors copies of his book of poetry, or Mary copies Bamford’s poem, we learn that a mastery of literacy promises to turn political rhetoric or voices of protest into writing. Those who successfully learn how to turn language into an object of aesthetic appreciation, drained of overt political content but bearing the trace of the powerful ‘‘passion’’ that was once associated with that content, become ideal candidates for social mobility. As the authors or protagonists of industrial novels and memoirs, they can bear witness to the social benefits of a literacy that transforms angry speech into charismatic texts. BAMFORD’S RECITATION

In conclusion, we come full circle back to Samuel Bamford himself, not as an author, now, but as a speaker whose lyric voice in print acquires a power neither ordinary writing nor speech can provide. Gaskell knew Bamford, a Manchester celebrity, personally, and in her descriptions, she transforms him into a figure rather like Margaret or Sybil, a speaker whose utterance provides the means of resurrecting a virtuous community. In 1849, shortly after the successful publication of Mary Barton, Gaskell wrote a letter to John Forster to ask him whether he might obtain from Tennyson a signed copy of his work for Bamford, whom she describes as ‘‘a great, gaunt, stalwart Lancaster man, formerly hand-loom weaver, author of ‘Life of a Radical’ &c, – age nearly 70, and living in that state which is exactly ‘decent poverty,’ with his neat, little apple-faced wife’’ (Gaskell, Letters, p. 84). The tranquil home life of this former radical, living with a pleasant wife in a state of poor but happy domesticity, explains, in a roundabout way, the equally ideal manner of his vocal performance:

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I dislike recitations exceedingly, but he repeats some of Tennyson’s poems, in so rapt, and yet so simple a manner, utterly forgetting that any one is bye, in the delight in the music and the exquisite thoughts, that one can’t help liking to hear him. He does not care one jot whether people like hearing him or not, in his own intense enjoyment. (Letters, p. 84)

As represented here, Bamford’s voice is not an act of communication but lyric self-expression. ‘‘In his own intense enjoyment,’’ he is as thoroughly and completely consumed by the experience of the poem as a reader curled up in the corner with a book. Gaskell’s suggestion that Bamford’s speech proceeds unaware of his social milieu recalls her depiction of Margaret’s singing. Bamford utters just that form of speech that is at once oblivious of an audience and yet legible by a readership. Ordinary speech may degenerate into political rhetoric, which may in turn wax physically violent, but a lyric voice ‘‘utterly forgetting that anyone is bye’’ soothes the crowd and produces a sympathetic community. In this respect, Bamford provides a solution to the conflicts of Chartism and working-class activism more generally. By reading Tennyson’s poetry out loud in a trance-like state, Bamford demonstrates that working-class speech can be intensely personal. In the light of his own writings on the connections between literacy, speech, and political action, we must regard Gaskell’s characterization as a striking appropriation. I have observed a telescopic logic in this chapter as I explained how Bamford, first, situates Henry Hunt within his Passages at the pole of verbal violence to which he, Bamford the author, provides the antithesis. Where Bamford appropriates and delegitimates Hunt’s speech to authorize writing, Gaskell appropriates Bamford’s speech as the antidote for the bad speech Bamford had already located in Hunt. In doing to Bamford much the same thing that Bamford had done to Hunt, she incorporates the difference between good speech and bad speech. For Bamford, good speech participates in print culture and deliberative democracy. Speech is desirable when it enters the rational conversation of readers and writers, threatening when it addresses a mob at an open-air meeting. When incorporated in the fiction of Gaskell and Disraeli, however, the relationship between speech and writing follows a different cultural logic. In industrial fiction, Bamford’s faith in the power of rational print culture to control dissident speech no longer suffices. We should remember the transformation of Bamford’s poem in Mary Barton from lyric expression to a piece of wadding paper used to commit a political assassination. Gaskell first attempts to solve the problem of the fundamental instability of speech by transcribing voice into writing, but her novel goes on to suggest

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that writing can also be just as volatile as speech. Once transcribed onto paper, Bamford’s poem still proves murderous. How, then, to make speech safe for a novel readership? Gaskell finds one answer in the letter I cite above. In Mary Barton, Bamford exists only in his writings. In Gaskell’s letter, however, Bamford is embodied as the source of speech that resembles the utopian utterance Kittler associates with a maternal voice, or that in which Thomas Carlyle located the source of powerful writing: that is to say, in spoken words ‘‘as they might have been, and should have been, and wished to be’’ (Carlyle, Collected Letters, vol. XII, pp. 167–8). Bamford, a figure reminiscent of Stephen Blackpool, becomes in Gaskell’s hands a relic of a artisanal past – ‘‘formerly hand-loom weaver’’ – whose soothing but powerful utterance can be enlisted to lend an irresistible authority to her writing.

CHAPTER

3

Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing

THE REFORM OF WRITING

In 1853 Henry Noel Humphreys published a lavish tome entitled The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing. Following his survey of the world history of writing – from the ‘‘Picture-writing of the Mexicans’’ to the ‘‘System of Writing of the Chinese’’ and ‘‘the Cuneiform Writing of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia’’ – Humphreys appends a brief coda on the current, Victorian practice of writing. He concludes his survey with a tribute to a new method that he suggests may well utterly and permanently revolutionize the ancient ‘‘Art of Writing.’’ The changes introduced by this new writing system could be so sweeping, he suggests portentously, that we might wonder ‘‘whether professorships may be established in our colleges for the study of the ancient pseudo-hieroglyphic character, [that is, ordinary written English] in which books were printed and letters written, so late as the nineteenth century’’ (Humphreys, Origin and Progress, p. 178). Figuring himself and his age as poised on the brink of a monumental epistemic shift, Humphreys foresees the obsolescence of traditional writing and standard English, and the rise of an altogether new system, one which would eliminate the ‘‘arbitrary’’ and the ‘‘contradictory’’ from writing, and create ‘‘a more severe and scientific method, truly and originally founded upon a classification of all the sounds which the human voice is capable of enunciating’’ (Origin and Progress, p. 177). Since we still find ourselves, even on email and by fax, using that same ‘‘ancient pseudo-hieroglyphic’’ writing that Humphreys predicted would imminently become a relic of history, we might well wonder what this new form of writing was that promised, in 1855, to reform English on the basis of ‘‘the human voice.’’ The object of Humphreys’s rhapsodic praise was Isaac Pitman’s ‘‘phonography,’’ a new system of shorthand that, in 1837, marked a new phase in English print culture’s relationship to speech. Lacking mechanical reproduction, phonography seemed to offer a more 69

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exact and mimetic registration of speech than ordinary writing could claim. The excitement that greeted phonography reveals the early Victorian period as yearning for the storage and recording capacities that only become available later in the century with the invention of the phonograph. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that ‘‘the cultural work of defining a new medium may go on during and in a sense even before the invention of the device itself ’’ (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 66); along these lines, we can see phonographic shorthand as doing the cultural work necessary for the later invention and reception of the phonograph.1 In fact, the historical accident of Pitman introducing his phonographic system in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s inauguration, makes irresistible the claim that the Victorian era was fundamentally phonographic. From 1837, up to and beyond Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, Victorian culture struggled resourcefully to find ways to transcribe and write voice. Pitman’s phonographic technique – a form of shorthand that, unlike those that had existed for centuries before, based itself directly on phonetics and the sounds of human speech – emblematizes Victorian culture’s ongoing romance with voice as a cure for print culture’s ills.2 In the aftermath of Pitman’s 1837 invention, the phonographic goal of transcribing voice and sound became seen as one of the natural tasks of shorthand more generally, even its fundamental task; I take this as justification, here, to treat ‘‘shorthand’’ and ‘‘phonography’’ as overlapping, if not synonymous, categories in this era. Humphreys concludes his book by imagining a world transformed by phonography. His vision of ‘‘the most valuable books . . . reprinted in the more scientific method of phonographic notation,’’ and professorships established in the obsolete ‘‘pseudo-hieroglyphic’’ standard English, offers a surprising window to a Victorian understanding of the relation of voice to writing. Humphrey’s predictions may seem eccentric or extreme, but he was in fact simply participating in a well-established early Victorian discourse that heralded shorthand phonography as the means by which writing might be reformed by voice. The banishment of the ‘‘arbitrary’’ from writing is an aim returned to again and again, as the progress of a humanized (if also ‘‘severe and scientific’’) and vocalized writing is associated with a social shift away from arbitrary state rule, and the advent of a Victorian era of reformed social power. Shorthand offers the promise of a reformed writing that would bear the trace of the living voice of speech.3 In his 1842 A Concise and Practical System of Stenography, or Short-Hand Writing – one of the many dozens of such self-help guides available in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century to ambitious young men

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eager to learn the skill of legal or Parliamentary reporting – G. Bradley discusses the primitive state, prior to 1780, of the journalistic reportage of public speeches. He points to the reporting career of Samuel Johnson as embodying a pre-Victorian, primitive notion of the proper relationship between speech and writing, and between public politics and its representation in the press: It is singular that although stenography was introduced into this country at a very early period, yet that our forefathers should never, until a very recent date, have thought of adopting it to that which is now its primary, although by no means its only use – we mean the transcript (so to speak) of addresses delivered to the public . . . [U]p to 1780 public proceedings, or rather miserably abridged sketches of them, were taken down in ordinary writing for the London journals. Dr. Johnson was one of the earliest reporters of the debates in Parliament, and the doctor boasted that he took care the Whig rascals should not have the best of the argument – a course which he could well adopt; for, instead of reporting the speeches of noble lords and honourable members, he composed them, and it is recorded that he made them all speak in the same pompous and grammatical style in which he was himself accustomed to write. (Bradley, Concise and Practical System, p. 11)

Samuel Johnson, according to this highly biased account, does not so much ‘‘report,’’ or accurately transcribe, the speeches he heard as put them into his own words. The varied speeches all become perfect, ‘‘grammatical’’ Johnsonian prose – they are reported in the same form Johnson was ‘‘accustomed to write.’’ The problem here lies in a slippage from speech to a writing that excludes voice altogether, that lacks any connection to the human speech it purports to transcribe. Johnson, claiming to ‘‘report’’ on spoken language, bypasses voice entirely, and arrogantly imposes his own monolithic, homogeneous standard of written English on speech.4 So if the major problem identified in Johnson’s reporting lies in a kind of technical oversight – the unaccountable failure to use the available practice of shorthand, which had after all been around since the Romans, to reproduce speech – it is also a moral or ethical lapse. Johnson’s slipshod method of transcription leads, predictably, to overt bias in his reporting, as he ‘‘composes’’ the speeches in order to make his political opponents come off badly. We should not, of course, confuse this account with an accurate description of Samuel Johnson’s – or the eighteenth century’s – attitude toward or practices of transcription of voice. In fact, Johnson made no claims to be doing anything other than offering his own impressions of the speeches he had seen. What is important, for our purposes here, is the Victorian presumption that Johnson should have been attempting an exact

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transcription of speech – even that writing or opinion’s ethical value may depend on its fidelity to spoken utterance.5 Bradley’s shorthand manual draws a line between the eighteenth-century relationship of writing to speech and the newly reformed, nineteenthcentury version. Where once writing was imposed in whole cloth on speech, flattening differences of voice and expression in the forcible rule of ‘‘grammatical’’ written law, now – so these manuals tend to claim – a new approach to writing embodied in shorthand incorporates the vocal and so reforms an inhuman, rule-bound writing. This shift brings with it a moral improvement, it is implied, as the representation of politics attains a new standard of mimetic accuracy, permitting the free workings of an unbiased fourth estate. If Habermas’s history of the public sphere suggests that the nineteenth century is already the era of that institution’s decline, Bradley insists that the eighteenth century’s flawed public sphere will be mended by new nineteenth-century techniques of shorthand transcription. The grandiose claims made for shorthand in the early Victorian era signal a new way of thinking about writing and its relationship to human utterance. Shorthand promises not simply an efficient system of information storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with orality and the living breath of vocal articulation. This realm of orality, formerly understood as an inferior stage on the way to the proper use of language in writing, now is invested with a new value. Phonography, seen as the means by which writing might move one step closer to the presence of voice, attains new significance as the method by which writing might reform itself. As Lisa Gitelman explains, Shorthand was the subject of particular attention and acclaim during the middle of the nineteenth century, encouraged in part by the British publication of Isaac Pitman’s Stenographic Sound-Hand in 1837. Prior to Pitman, shorthand was called stenography (derived from the Greek, narrow or close writing), tachygraphy (swift writing), or brachygraphy (short writing). But Pitman soon dubbed his system phonography (sound writing) because he claimed that his was the first shorthand based explicitly on the phonetics of English, rather than on its spelling . . . Phonetic shorthand emphasized the oral character of language at the same time that it sought to perfect a technology for linguistic representation. (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 24)

Pitman, whose system Humphreys predicted would revolutionize writing, discusses the difference between ‘‘spoken and written language’’ in his 1842 manual Phonography, or Writing by Sound. ‘‘Hitherto, among all nations,’’ he writes, ‘‘there has existed the greatest disparity, in point of facility and

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dispatch, between these two methods of communication: the former has always been comparatively rapid, easy, and delightful; the latter, tedious, cumbrous, and wearisome’’ (Pitman, Phonography, p. ix). Pitman stages a conflict between a living voice and the dead letter of writing. He figures writing as a ponderous tool of bureaucracy, an inhuman technology opposed to the ‘‘delightful’’ voice. But his own system, he suggests, ‘‘offers a method of really exhibiting speech on paper, by signs as simple and intelligible as the sound they represent.’’ Political and moral progress is conjoined with the incorporation of speech and sound in writing. To represent ‘‘speech on paper’’ is to infuse the ‘‘wearisome,’’ inefficient realm of writing with the free spirit and vitality of voice. The oddly named V. D. de Stains, in his similarly titled 1842 Phonography, or the Writing of Sounds, goes still further in associating a non-vocal writing with misery, dry scholasticism and unremitting labor. Discussing the tiny elite whose education permits them to attain the ‘‘power’’ of ‘‘knowledge,’’ de Stains laments, ‘‘How dearly even those few must pay for it, not with money, but with the precious years of their youth passed sorrowfully in a damp, dull school-room, bent over the great tormentor of childhood: the spelling-book!’’(de Stains, Phonography, p. 7). A dedicatory poem to Thomas Gurney’s famous shorthand system figures writing in the pre-shorthand era as the painful labor of ‘‘pale-ey’d scribes’’ who ‘‘watch’d their midnight oil / O’er the slow progress of their folio toil’’ (Gurney, Easy and Compendious, p. 10). If Samuel Johnson serves for Bradley as a figure of irresponsible pre-Victorian writing, these ‘‘scribes’’ practice a miserable writing, a writing associated with torment and ‘‘toil.’’ The ‘‘introduction of a rational alphabet’’(Phonography, pp. 7–8), de Stains suggests – meaning a non-arbitrary shorthand alphabet based on vocal sounds – would not merely return ‘‘to the studious world years till then spent in misery and confinement,’’ but would indeed ‘‘render a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world!’’ (Phonography, p. 8) This ‘‘new world’’ is no other than a voice in writing, the attainment of a writing released from misery and infused with vocal magic. In the context of the age of industrialism, such claims resonate broadly; shorthand, it is implied, would transform painful labor into delight, ‘‘confinement’’ into freedom. Shorthand, by apparently rendering writing directly mimetic of human speech, seems to imbue this writing with the very breath of the human. ‘‘As the voice of the orator raises or lowers itself in the speech,’’ de Stains advises, ‘‘alter in proportion the direction of your writing, raising it above or lowering it below the straight line’’ (Phonography, p. 92). This writing changes and transforms even as speech occurs, becoming

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something like a trace of speech, recording the idiosyncrasies of the individual vocal style. No longer arrogantly substituting itself for speech, writing may now be seen to join with it in an intimate alliance. In a vocal idyll reminiscent of various of those we have already examined – from Carlyle’s imaginary vocal address, through the singing and storytelling of Gaskell and Disraeli, and Bamford’s recitation – de Stains fantasizes a scene of an idealized voice emerging within print culture to redeem that culture. The rhapsodic claims of phonographers may strike us as overblown. Certainly, the rhetoric of a commentator like de Stains is grandiose and jingoistic. Yet Gitelman concludes that ‘‘Pitman’s phonographic reporting style . . . does seem to have offered the first widespread system for verbatim reporting’’ (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 42) and to have revolutionized Parliamentary reporting by introducing new standards of fidelity to utterance. The invention of phonography participated in a larger nineteenth-century shift in the understanding of print’s relationship to voice. The phonographic invention of ‘‘verbatim’’ reporting should be understood within a longer history of Anglo-American redefinitions of the meaning and function of language. In the late eighteenth century, Murray Cohen argues, linguists begin to ‘‘share a conception of language in terms of speakers and listeners’’ (Cohen, Sensible Words, p. 118) rather than writers and readers. Katie Trumpener notes that ‘‘Continental linguistic theory and British literary practice increasingly derive their political, intellectual, and aesthetic mandates from a new vision of a communal national language as the living breath of the people’’ (Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 88). Phonography, in this intellectual context, becomes a means by which writing – no longer granted pride of place as the source of logical meaning – can at least tap into the meanings and value now believed to be generated by the human voice. If meaning is seen to reside in speech, then writing must be reformed, its ‘‘arbitrary’’ character abolished, in order more accurately to register those vocal meanings. A form of print-culture guilt emerges as print becomes increasingly seen as hegemonic and potentially inhumane, needing voice’s infusion of vitality.6 ‘‘The future progress of shorthand,’’ writes de Stains, is essentially united with that of religious and political reform, in which case it exerts an influence as powerful as that of the press itself, with which it is closely united. This explains why England was the first amongst the modern nations to borrow this science from the Roman republic; why France began only to make some progress in it after the year 1815, when she received her present form of government, and why Italy and Spain appear as yet to have hardly had any use for it. (Phonography, pp. 107–8)

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‘‘[R]eligious and political reform,’’ de Stains claims, go hand in hand with shorthand, which allows ‘‘rapid speeches’’ to be registered in writing. The proof of social and political progress, it would seem, may be found in the efficiency with which ephemeral speech is translated into text. Democratic writing must be based on speech; democratic speech must be transcribable. De Stains puts forth the strongest claims of any of the shorthand manual authors for the links between phonography and political and social reform. He boldly suggests that phonography performs a double act of resurrection and murder: both infusing the life of orality into the ‘‘dead language’’ of political repression, and once and for all rendering obsolete, making ‘‘irrevocably dead,’’ those repressive systems of occulted writing: Now, from the most ancient times down to the present ages, wherever has existed a strong government, a privileged aristocracy, there has existed also a dead language, an unknown tongue, in which were written the laws of the land, most energetically enforced upon those who could not read them . . . Hence it is easy to explain why the first step in all noble experiments has been to tear aside the veil, to renounce the unknown tongue, in order to teach mankind in the living speech . . . From religion the movement has extended to politics, and every branch of learning; the social laws as well as the religious ones are now to be enforced, not by violence, but by persuasion, every member of the human family being cheerfully invited to partake of the fruit of knowledge; and now, at last, the ancient languages may well be considered as irrevocably dead. (Phonography, pp. 57–8)

‘‘Not by violence, but by persuasion’’: hegemony replaces compulsion and forcible rule, openness replaces repression, as ‘‘living speech’’ replaces ‘‘the unknown tongue.’’ In this progressive teleology, a ‘‘dead language’’ that formerly reigned becomes finally truly ‘‘dead,’’ stripped of its power, as the progress of speech ‘‘cheerfully’’ includes more and more of the ‘‘the human family’’ into the realm of language. Shorthand is associated with an ideology of ‘‘persuasion,’’ a writing that puts voice into system not with the brute force of military rule nor the secret, feudal compulsion of aristocratic control, but with the political ideology of the first Reform Bill: moderately democratic incorporation. What was unknown becomes publicly known; what was occulted, open to view. By this means writing begins, as it were, to speak out for the first time. We see once again the thematics of resurrection associated with voice and print. Once again, voice is ascribed a particular power because of its former oppression. Its vitality depends on its having almost been killed off, its visibility on its former concealment behind a ‘‘veil.’’ As in Carlyle’s pronouncement – ‘‘Whatsoever thing . . . has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible

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power’’ (Carlyle, On Heroes, pp. 142–3) – voice emerges with the force of a resurrection. If in the era of Johnson’s Dictionary standard English was thought to reform the unregulated (if passionate) profusion of speech, shorthand manuals of the nineteenth century offer a new narrative in which their own practices reform the randomness, lack of planning, and inaccuracy of English. Pitman even claims that shorthand will eliminate ‘‘all ambiguity’’ from language by creating an absolute one-to-one correspondence between ‘‘sound’’ and ‘‘sign,’’ voice and inscription: ‘‘as not only every sound has a sign, but as, also, every sign represents a sound, all ambiguity ends’’ (Pitman, Phonography, p. 3). Pitman, noting the fact that our usual mode of writing ‘‘obliges the readiest to spend at least six hours in writing what can be spoken in one,’’ wonders ‘‘[w]hy . . . we use a long series of arbitrary marks to represent what the voice utters in a single effort?’’ (Phonography, p. 3). De Stains portrays modern languages as a hodgepodge of ill-conceived, careless adaptations performed unsystematically, each successive adaptation moving writing further along away from an originary speech. Standard English, seemingly well established in the eighteenth century as the apotheosis of language’s development, has been boldly redefined as a ‘‘series of arbitrary marks,’’ a cumbersome system that can, at best, hope to rid itself of the arbitrary, and attach itself to the true source of verbal meaning, the human voice.7 CHARLES DICKENS: THE NOVELIST AS VOICE RECORDER

If we may take the depiction of an arrogant Dr. Johnson, sitting in Parliament and recording the speeches so as to make them say what he wants them to say, as an embodiment of the eighteenth-century relationship of writing to voice (as remembered by Victorian phonographists), we can turn to Charles Dickens as a representative of the nineteenth-century author as self-described faithful recorder and shorthand expert. ‘‘I’ll buy a book,’’ declares his hero David Copperfield, ‘‘with a good scheme of this art in it; I’ll work at it in the Commons, where I haven’t half enough to do; I’ll take down the speeches in our court for practice – Traddles, my dear fellow, I’ll master it!’’ David and Dickens did both eventually master shorthand; Dickens continued to boast of his shorthand expertise many years after he gave it up, and his skill in the craft became a familiar element in his biographical myth. It may even be fair to say that Dickens’s characteristic style, the vivid immediacy of his characters’ voices, owes a significant debt to the shorthand mastery that meant so much to him.

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If Dr. Johnson, whose conversation was said to possess ‘‘the correctness of a second edition,’’ turns speech into elegant standard written English, the Victorian Dickens attempts instead to infuse writing with all the immediacy of the moment of oral utterance. ‘‘For a number of important formative years,’’ Steven Marcus writes of Dickens, ‘‘he had worked as a kind of written recording device for the human voice, for speech, for the English language. He had been a writing machine for others, their language flowing through his writing’’ (Marcus, ‘‘Language Into Structure,’’ p. 138). Marcus argues convincingly that the enormous success and cultural impact of The Pickwick Papers derived in part from Dickens’s having hit upon a way to bring his experience as a shorthand reporter to bear on fiction writing. In the language of the character Jingle, Dickens represents a character’s rapid-fire, fragmentary, abbreviated speech as something very much like shorthand notes: ‘‘‘Pooh, pooh! – nothing more easy – blackguard boy – lovely woman – fat boy horsewhipped – you believed – end of the matter – all comfortable’’’ (Dickens, Pickwick, p. 113). Marcus suggests that Dickens’s shorthand-influenced writing, more thoroughly than ever before in English fiction, does something to speech other than simply transform it, Johnsonianly, into standard written English.8 If the speakers of Johnson’s reporting or Austen’s fiction tend to utter consistently perfect prose, such a character as Dickens’s Jingle or Sam Weller opens up the novel to a new kind of writing that offers the effect of a transcription of voice in all its impropriety, ungrammaticality, and energy.9 Orality seems to pour into the novel in such a voice, heralding a new power for fiction, in the Victorian era, as a putative ‘‘verbatim’’ transcription of living speech. Considering Dickens’s voices as enabled by his shorthand practice allows us to see another manifestation of the Victorian insistence that a storyteller or speaker must stand at the origin of a novel. Phonographic rhetoric redefined voice no longer as a potential threat to writing, but as a virtuous prisoner struggling to free himself from the binds of print and the oppressive rule of linguistic law. We can understand Dickensian verbal energy as motivated in part by a fantasy of triumphant release from the constraints of such rule. Pickwick inaugurates the phonographic history of Victorian fiction in a vocal explosion that presents itself as an escape from an oppressive print history. A tacit ethical claim – anticipating some of the claims of contemporary literary criticism – suggests that ‘‘real’’ human voices are permitted now to speak within print where they had formerly been suppressed or merely represented. In the recognition that speech may act independently of writing, Dickens also signaled a threat to writing’s cultural sovereignty. In the

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previous chapter, we have seen this threat associated with Chartism and working-class sedition. In the present context, the danger and power of speech is associated not so much with working-class politics as with a challenge to the standardization of the English language first promised by Johnson’s Dictionary. This recognition goes hand in hand with the insights provided by early nineteenth-century folklore and the first stirrings of what would become ethnography and anthropology. The heterogeneous voices and dialects of Great Britain modeled a practice of language that could no longer be thought to constitute more or less imperfect fallingsaway from proper written English. No longer, as in the fiction of Jane Austen, could novelists present a highly stylized representation of the conversations of a tiny educated elite as, in some sense, speech itself. The English novel needed a solution for this potentially revolutionary insight – needed a means to bring heterogeneous speech into the form of the novel without exploding that form. Dickens, as ‘‘master shorthand writer,’’ staked his claim on the Victorian novel with a response to this challenge. Indeed, what is characteristically and newly ‘‘Victorian’’ about Dickens, if I am correct, cannot be separated from what is phonographic in his writing: its urge to vocalize writing and to write voice, its tacit concern that a print culture that is not vocalized may become oppressively bureaucratic and hostile to the idiosyncrasies of the human. Dickens, Peter Ackroyd reports, taught himself the Gurney method of shorthand, probably using the 1825 fifteenth edition I have quoted from above; ‘‘he set to work to master a system which, on average, took a person of moderate capacity some three years to learn. Dickens seems to have managed it in almost as many months’’ (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 124).10 Every biography of Dickens tells some version of the story of his step-by-step graduation from shorthand transcription of Parliamentary speeches, to the dashing, competitive world of daily newspaper reportage of public speeches throughout England, and then to Dickens’s first sketches as ‘‘Boz’’ and finally, in The Pickwick Papers, his shift from reporter to author. In this narrative we see a kind of shadow history of the Victorian novel itself, forming out of the fragments of early nineteenth-century speech, fiction and journalism, rising up as in a teleological progress toward organic literary form.11 Dickens’s own descriptions of his life as a shorthand reporter figure this occupation as offering the opportunity for heroic and manly adventure. In the industrial fiction of the 1840s, as we’ve seen, the novelization of voice often takes the form of voice’s domestication and feminization. Shorthand or phonography discourse offers an opportunity for voice

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to seem emphatically masculine without veering into the dangerous waters of political speech. If in Hard Times Dickens abides by the logic of industrial fiction insofar as his hero Stephen Blackpool needs to be on the brink of death in order to speak powerfully and effectively, he elsewhere taps into an alternate figuration of the powerful voice as masculine, jaunty, adventurous. In an 1865 speech at the second anniversary dinner of the Newspaper Press Club, an organization founded by London Parliamentary reporters, Dickens reminisces of his reporting days with fond vainglory: I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, all through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. (Dickens, Speeches, p. 347)

Dickens figures the shorthand reporting of a now obsolete early-nineteenthcentury era as a perilous test of skill, an encounter with and triumph over ‘‘a wild country.’’ Whereas shorthand today is commonly associated with a feminized position of passive reception before a male voice of authority, Dickens thoroughly imbues the practice with masculine romance; shorthand seems not a business tool or a mechanism of bureaucracy, but the method of a practice eminently suited to an ambitious and dashing ‘‘young man.’’ Indeed, to fail to transcribe accurately – that act that Samuel Johnson purportedly disdained to perform – would be specifically ‘‘compromising’’ to a ‘‘young man,’’ as if his masculinity might be called into question by any mis-transcription. In Dickens’s reminder of the need for ‘‘the strictest accuracy’’ in transcribing these public speeches, we see the particularly Victorian mandate for ‘‘verbatim’’ recording – the new danger, once literal transcription of voice seems attainable, that a slippage will develop between utterance and print. Once literal or verbatim transcription becomes the standard, print begins to bear a new burden. ‘‘To this present year of my life,’’ Dickens continues, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech – the phenomenon does occur – I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the table cloth, taking an imaginary note of it all. (Speeches, p. 347)

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The practice of shorthand notation, then, both captures ‘‘important public speeches’’ and brings them from the ‘‘wild countryside’’ to London, and also renders the dullest speeches interesting. Shorthand domesticates the wild but also enlivens and revitalizes the tedious. We might be inclined to be suspicious of retrospective descriptions, by Dickens himself and his biographers, that remember the young reporter as the predecessor of the famous novelist. But the likely inflation of the claims about Dickens’s shorthand prowess are themselves of interest, for one of the central claims of Victorian shorthand is to ‘‘master’’ voice, to control it through the labor of a professional authority. As master shorthand writer, Dickens embodies in exaggerated form the cultural logic of shorthand, a writing system that claims to register voice, to appropriate voice’s spontaneity and affect, but to replace it with – subsume it in – a wholly rationalized modern sign system. Dickens’s image of himself ‘‘writing on the palm of my hand . . . galloping through a wild country’’ suggests the power of such a figuration of writing: this is a cultural process that appropriates the ‘‘wild’’ and yet turns it into rational writing ready to read at every English hearth the next morning; that registers the most far-flung ‘‘voice’’ within a system of written signs. Part of the power – and also, perhaps, the danger – of such an image of shorthand transcription is the way it transforms the reporter’s own body into the writing surface or the ground for language. De Stains instructs the shorthand student to ‘‘alter in proportion the direction of your writing, raising it above or lowering it below the straight line’’ (de Stains, Phonography, p. 92) as the orator’s voice modulates. Spoken language acts directly upon the writer’s body. Almost as if in mesmeric possession, the spoken words raise or lower the writing hand. Dickens too emphasizes the somatic effects of shorthand in this description of scribbling directly on the palm of the hand. ‘‘Find[ing]’’ his ‘‘hand going on the table cloth,’’ Dickens portrays shorthand as a form of possession in which the human body becomes a writing device. In Dickens’s discussions of shorthand, the way shorthand brings the reporter’s own body into play becomes part of its appeal: it is as if writing so becomes physical and adventurous. We can also, however, recall other, less positive representations of what I’ve called the over-embodiment of speech: Carlyle’s painful early experiences with public speaking, Bamford’s description of Hunt’s convulsive oratory. Pitman’s claims for phonography depend on a sense of the technique as embodying English, giving it new human voice and breath. As we have seen, however, such a logic tends also to bear with it the concurrent threat of the corruptions of embodiment, language’s devolution into somatic excess.

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DAVID COPPERFIELD: SHORTHAND AND DETERMINED CHARACTER

In Dickens’s fictional representation of a young man’s struggle to learn shorthand, he echoes and parodies the claims made for shorthand by the various manuals that proliferated in early Victorian England. David Copperfield’s attempt to learn shorthand is, of course, a means of professional advancement. Dickens situates David’s apprenticeship to the craft at a moment of crisis in his relationship with his fiance´e, Dora. David describes the mastery of shorthand as a way to ‘‘work my way on to Dora’’ (Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 487): a career path, ‘‘work,’’ that will enable him to become a husband. To master shorthand, it would seem, would be to find a way ‘‘on to Dora,’’ to attain a position of benign sexual dominance and a newly ‘‘determined character’’: Traddles now informed me . . . that . . . a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand writing and reading, was about equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages . . . I, only feeling that here indeed were a few tall trees to be hewn down, immediately resolved to work my way on to Dora through this thicket, axe in hand . . . ‘‘I’ll buy a book,’’ said I, ‘‘with a good scheme of this art in it; I’ll work at it in the Commons, where I haven’t half enough to do; I’ll take down the speeches in our court for practice – Traddles, my dear fellow, I’ll master it!’’ ‘‘Dear me,’’ said Traddles, opening his eyes, ‘‘I had no idea that you were such a determined character, Copperfield!’’ (David Copperfield, pp. 487–8)

What is of interest here is not only Dickens’s representation of David’s interest in shorthand as a brash, manly craft, a supremely difficult ‘‘mystery’’ the ‘‘mastery’’ of which promises a subsequent mastery of wife and home, but the significance of the shorthand guidebook as a portable means of self-tutoring: ‘‘I’ll buy a book.’’ Shorthand is not taught as part of an elite educational system, but can be learned through the study of a single, reasonably priced book and is so available to a working-class or lower middle-class man like David or Dickens himself. Gitelman notes that ‘‘education in shorthand offered self-reliance, self-discipline, clean hands, a white collar’’ (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 51). Gurney’s guide – ‘‘an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence)’’ (David Copperfield, pp. 503–4) – offers a means of self-education and self-advancement for those cut out of the usual route of professionalization. ‘‘An approved scheme,’’ David’s shorthand manual represents and enables the professional aspirations of a young man for whom the path to social distinction seems filled with obstacles. To master

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shorthand would be for David to become ‘‘a determined character’’ – a phrase suggesting the fixing of language in place, its infusion with a new kind of professional authority. Mary Poovey points out that ‘‘Whereas David’s work in the bottling warehouse was concretely detailed and his various jobs in Doctors’ Commons, Dr. Strong’s study, and Parliament were metaphorically figured, the work involved in writing is explicitly effaced’’ (Poovey, Uneven Developments, p. 100). I would only add the observation that while the labor of writing in authorship is, indeed, effaced, Dickens very explicitly portrays the labor that goes into David’s struggle to learn shorthand, itself a form of writing. Since a successful career as a shorthand reporter was the prerequisite and stepping-stone, in the case of both David and Dickens himself, to the assumption of the mantle of authorship, it is worth considering in some detail Dickens’s explicit representation of the difficulties of shorthand. For indeed, if (as Poovey argues at length) the work of writing is effaced and linked to the similarly effaced work of housekeeping in the novel, this effacement is prefaced by a wrenching description of David’s subjection to, and abjection before, the laws of shorthand. If Dickens drains all signs of effort from writing in the sense of the composition of fiction, he reinvests that difficulty in his representation of shorthand. Dickens’s description of David’s struggles to learn shorthand suggests a struggle to ‘‘master’’ a system (described by David as a ‘‘mystery’’) that always threatens to ‘‘master’’ oneself. Here we see the competing and contradictory representations of voice in the discourse of shorthand. The errant voice, evading representation, is at once the object of desire and the threat to meaning; the sign system of shorthand is a tool of professional authority and also an ‘‘arbitrary,’’ bewildering code associated with ancient, undemocratic hieroglyphics. As in the shorthand manuals, in Dickens’s novel the ‘‘arbitrary’’ is a shifting threat – it represents that which must be conquered and reformed by an improved writing system, but it also at times becomes the hallmark of that system itself. Dickens stresses David’s persistent hard work: shorthand was ‘‘one of the irons I began to heat immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at, with a perseverance I may honestly admire’’ (David Copperfield, p. 503); even while laboring at shorthand in the evenings, ‘‘I was always punctual at the office, at the Doctor’s too, and I really did work, as the common expression is, like a cart-horse’’ (David Copperfield, p. 505). This self-apprenticeship is, among other things, a proof of David’s new manly resolve: Dickens represents shorthand in the terms of

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blacksmithing, Joe Gargery’s profession in Great Expectations, as something to be ‘‘hammered at,’’ and as an artisanal craft, imbuing the English language with the aura of manual labor. Shorthand will help David become a man and a powerful worker through the recording of voice. But shorthand proves to be the very opposite of ‘‘determined’’; its characters and laws prove altogether ‘‘arbitrary,’’ evoking the foreign, oriental despotism of even an ‘‘Egyptian Temple’’: I . . . plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heartbreaking. (David Copperfield, p. 504)

Dickens here playfully satirizes the claims made by such a method as Gurney’s Brachygraphy by emphasizing the sheer, fiendish arbitrariness of a system that purported to eliminate the arbitrary from language. Shorthand promises to eliminate the arbitrary and the ambiguous from writing by investing it with the living voice of speech. Yet the ‘‘arbitrary’’ is also a necessary evil and a technical component of all shorthand systems themselves. Gurney’s 1825 edition (the one Dickens probably used) admits the presence of ‘‘arbitrary characters’’ even as it claims to be eliminating them; this double gesture captures the reluctance within shorthand discourse to admit to the lack of perfect clarity of its own sign system: When a person has made himself master of the Alphabet, and of the method of expressing the vowels, he will then be able to write any thing in the English Language. But as it would be impossible, in that case, to write with swiftness sufficient to answer the usual purposes of Shorthand, we are under the necessity of using contractions, and arbitrary characters; care, however, should be taken that too many of these be not crowded upon the memory. I have dismissed a great number which had place in the former editions of this system; and to shorten the trouble of the learner, have disembarrassed the art from many needless difficulties and real incumbrances. (Gurney, Brachygraphy, p. 18)

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Pitman’s claim to have created a shorthand system in which ‘‘not only every sound has a sign, but . . . also, every sign represents a sound’’ (Pitman, Phonography, p. 3) may be taken as representative of a utopia of shorthand, and indeed of early Victorian linguistic practice generally, one in which writing is reformed by voice and is thereby transformed into a wholly rational and non-arbitrary system. Gurney’s reluctant acknowledgment of the continued need for ‘‘arbitrary characters’’ in his system points to a competing, less idealized vision of language within shorthand discourse: of language practice as an ongoing struggle to master and eliminate the arbitrariness that will, perhaps, never be fully routed from both speech and writing. With this tension in mind, we can see that Dickens’s depiction of David’s apprenticeship draws on the cultural discourse surrounding shorthand in order to figure it as the very site of an impossible effort to control language and one’s own body. David sees shorthand as a ticket to professional success and domestic and erotic authority, but he ‘‘plunge[s] into’’ it as into a threatening, feminizing ‘‘sea of perplexity.’’ Dickens represents David’s engagement with Gurney’s brachygraphy system as a nightmare in which his reason is shaken by an encounter with a principle of nonrational, non-Western, non-masculine ‘‘horror.’’ ‘‘The tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place’’ refers here not to a film-noir seductress but to the curve of a letter; all the same, Dickens’s description of ‘‘circles,’’ ‘‘legs,’’ and ‘‘curves’’ appearing to him in his sleep seems to draw on a reservoir of anxieties about an unbounded feminine sexuality. Given the links implied between David’s mastery of this skill and his authority as a husband, his utter bewilderment here may be read as a manifestation of a fear of feminization. Seeking to find himself a trade and thereby to earn his role as husband, David encounters in shorthand a painful setback. Hoping to become a master of language, David becomes instead its dupe, ‘‘blindly’’ groping through this ‘‘thicket’’ through which he had hoped to hew and ‘‘work . . . through . . . axe in hand’’ (David Copperfield, p. 487). Shorthand is supposed to offer perfect, verbatim records of speech, a faultless written memory, yet David finds that each new piece of information he takes in makes him forget another. David compulsively reaches for tools of masculine labor as figures for his work, wanting to ‘‘hammer at’’ shorthand, to use an axe to hew through it. In Dickens’s description, however, it is as if these tools of mastery drop from his weak hands. If Dickens has bragged of his ability to turn his own manly body into a kind of writing tool in shorthand transcription, here he depicts David as unmanned and physically overcome by the attempt to learn the practice.

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Far from possessing the ‘‘full corporeality’’ of the restored storyteller, he has in fact become physically damaged by his attempt at mastery of voice and writing. Shorthand manuals tout their product as an element in British imperial dominance. As Gurney boasted, ‘‘Brachygraphy is an Art peculiarly under your Majesty’s own dominion, it being entirely unknown to any People in the World, except the Subjects of your great Empire’’ (Gurney, Brachygraphy, p. 2). Dickens in effect satirizes such simplistic links between the mastery of shorthand and national geopolitical mastery by figuring the shorthand alphabet as – far from a model of clarity and common-sense – ‘‘an Egyptian Temple in itself.’’ Those ‘‘arbitrary characters’’ that Gurney apologetically included in his system, Dickens melodramatically describes as ‘‘terrors,’’ not simply arbitrary but indeed ‘‘despotic.’’ Dickens here wittily reverses the associations made in shorthand discourse between English democratic reform and the nation’s mode of stenography, suggesting that the writing system that boasts of its elimination of the arbitrary in fact magnifies arbitrariness, turning English language into a strange, ‘‘despotic’’ instrument of oriental terror. David does learn how to take shorthand notes, but cannot afterwards assign them any meaning: ‘‘But, as to reading them after I had got them, I might as well have copied the Chinese inscriptions on an immense collection of tea-chests’’ (David Copperfield, p. 505). Dickens reminds us of shorthand’s long history as a form of secret code – a history conspicuously deemphasized by Victorian shorthand boosters – and suggests that the phonographic promise to render language absolutely transparent may be an illusion. If David initially hoped to ‘‘work [his] way on to Dora through this thicket, axe in hand,’’ Dora in fact attains a less wholly subservient position and becomes a necessary domestic helpmeet: ‘‘It might have been quite heart-breaking, but for Dora, who was the stay and anchor of my tempestdriven bark’’ (David Copperfield, p. 504). Here we see a preview of her eventual role as the audience to David’s authorship; when David ‘‘bore the weight of all our little cares, Dora held the pens’’ (David Copperfield, p. 643). Dickens makes use of David’s struggle with shorthand to put forward a model of masculine authority that is later rejected: one of straightforward mastery, where the woman is simply the object of desire to be earned by the husband’s labor. David’s radical disempowerment in the thickets of shorthand feminizes him and makes him understand the insufficiency of this model. Dora must attain a more involved (although still subservient) position in the household, that of the holder of pens and the internal domestic audience for David’s authorship. The apprenticeship

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to shorthand becomes an initiation which David must undergo in order to arrive at the later position of author and husband. Part of what David learns through shorthand is that an unproblematic understanding of language as something to be ‘‘hammered at’’ and mastered through sheer masculine force is naı¨ve and ineffective. Victorian authorship requires a model of the labor of writing that partially incorporates the vocal and the ‘‘arbitrary’’ by including it within the space of authorship, as Dora is later included.

THE REFORM OF VOICE

Let Wise or Foolish with their Words Abound, The Faithful Pen shall copy ev’ry Sound; Ages unborn shall rise, shall read, and say, Thus! Thus! Our Fathers did their Minds convey. (Gurney’s Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand )

We have seen that shorthand practitioners promote their systems as reformations of writing through vocalization. The dead letter of writing is, through orality, given new life and rendered open, democratic, and free. It should be kept in mind, however, that whatever gestures are made toward denigrating writing to the advantage of speech, these are, after all, still writing systems. The claim is not that speech will gain priority over writing, but simply that a writing that incorporates or registers the vocal is preferable to one that banishes voice. And the discourse of shorthand even contains another, parallel, narrative – one in which rational, modern writing is threatened by an atavistic, pre- or uncivilized, all-too-natural voice. This epigraph from an early edition of Gurney’s shorthand system evokes one pervasive trope of shorthand discourse I have not yet discussed, that of wild, undisciplined vocal words captured by the ‘‘pen.’’ It is as if the technique of accurate shorthand reporting brings into clearer vision the sheer multiplicity, disorder, and excess of speech. ‘‘Words Abound,’’ and the very possibility of orderly cultural reproduction – figured here as the passing down of an inheritance from ‘‘Fathers’’ to sons – depends on the successful copying of ‘‘ev’ry Sound.’’ ‘‘Sound’’ and voice here become associated with an evasiveness that threatens the orderly progress of linguistic inheritance. Shorthand promises to tame voice with a patrilinear inscription and to prepare the groundwork for ‘‘Ages unborn,’’ a future male readership whose ‘‘rise’’ seems to occur in writing rather than biology. For all its praise of voice at the seeming expense of writing, the Victorian discourse of shorthand never wavers in its confidence that, whatever its

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virtues, voice must all the same be brought into writing. Shorthand manuals glorify the vocal as a transcendence of any system or technology even as they labor to develop a perfect system of transcription. A form of writing, and a social system, that tends to be excessively rule-bound, too dedicated to industry and too inhospitable to the individuality of the human voice, represents one problem seen as typical of nineteenth-century English modernity – but the unleashing of wild voices does not necessarily offer a desirable solution to that problem. In the industrial fiction of the 1840s we hear the shrieks of just such wild voices: the cries of angry workers in Disraeli’s Sybil who utter ‘‘one of those universal shrieks of wild passion which announce that men have discarded all the trammels of civilization, and found in their licentious rage new and unforeseen sources of power and vengeance’’ (Disraeli, Sybil, p. 379); the ‘‘rioters’ yell – a North-of-England – a Yorkshire – a West-Riding – a West-Riding-clothing-district-of Yorkshire rioters’ yell’’ that ‘‘rends the air in hate’’ (Bronte¨, Shirley, p. 335) in Charlotte Bronte¨’s Shirley. The Victorian problematic of voice was such that to draw on the power of utterance without framing that power in writing was to seem to traffic in dangerous forces. What was desired, both in politics and in the technology of writing, was moderate, partial incorporation. In the early Victorian era, voice is represented as an object of desire, a necessary humanizing supplement to the dead letter of writing – and yet also as a dangerous force that bursts the bounds of any written representation and turns language into raw, threatening nature. Part of what seems at stake here, and in Victorian shorthand discourse generally, is the possibility of controlling or owning spoken language. Some of the emotional charge of Benjamin’s ‘‘The Storyteller’’ derives from the claim that ‘‘it is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83). Speech seems to turn words loose, to set language on a circuit of transmission and reception that no speaker can control or determine. While that understanding of vocal utterance has been a truism since Plato, what is more specific to the Victorian period is a broader anxiety regarding voice: the fear of the human voice itself somehow being diminished or destroyed by writing and modern print culture. Shorthand in effect promises to bring spoken words, once uttered, back to their speaker or to instantiate them in solid form: ‘‘speech on paper.’’ The triumphal rhetoric introduced by Pitman’s phonography suggests that voice has been successfully captured and linked harmoniously to writing: ‘‘as not only every sound has a sign, but as, also, every sign represents a sound, all ambiguity ends’’ (Pitman, Phonography, p. 3). Yet ultimately, as

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David Copperfield suggests and the shorthand manuals tend to confess inadvertently, the claim is premature. Voice remains elusive, evading any such firm possession. Pitman’s language seeks to break voice down into singular whole units such that one can generalize about the behavior and identity of ‘‘every’’ sound: one might count up and account for every existing one. Yet ultimately, despite vainglorious boasts, vocal words do ‘‘abound’’ and cannot be so easily reduced and summarized. Voice eludes its capture on paper, and preserves its stubborn heterogeneity.

CHAPTER

4

‘‘Done to death’’: Dickens and the author’s voice

Roger Chartier argues that our understanding of print culture and the literary public sphere suffers from a tendency to overlook the performative dimension of literature. He notes that notwithstanding the rigid separation we tend to draw between print and oral culture, overlaps of reading practices associate the spoken word and writing: either a spoken word fixes itself in writing or, conversely, a text returns in oral form through the mediation of reading out loud. Other overlaps connect writing and gestures . . . The history of cultural practices must consider these interpenetrations and restore some of the complex trajectories that run from the spoken word to the written text, from writing that is read to gestures that are performed, from the printed book to reading aloud. (Chartier, ‘‘Texts, Printing, Readings,’’ pp. 170–1)

This chapter takes such an approach to speech and writing in examining the career of Charles Dickens and the location of his own reading performances within it. Of all major Victorian bodies of fiction, certainly none is more thoroughly embedded in modes of vocal performance than his. Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend testifies to the strong link between reading and performance for Dickens: By-the-bye, that very word, Reading, in its critical use, always charms me. An actress’s Reading of a chambermaid, a dancer’s Reading of a hornpipe, a singer’s Reading of a song, a marine painter’s Reading of the sea, the kettledrum’s Reading of an instrumental passage, are phrases ever youthful and delightful. (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 542)1

In the spirit of Chartier’s and Wrayburn’s comments, this chapter contends that we cannot read Dickens without acknowledging the popular stage productions of his novels, informal readings-aloud in homes and on street corners and places of employment, and Dickens’s own readings from his work. We have already considered Dickens as a ‘‘phonographic’’ author whose literary technique was informed by the technique and rhetoric of 89

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phonographic shorthand. In this chapter I extend this line of thinking by analyzing another cultural site in which print and vocal culture overlapped and mutually informed one another: that of the literary reading or performance. Dickens, more forthrightly than any other Victorian writer, structured his career around a literalized metaphor of the author as storyteller. From the beginning of his career in the 1830s and 1840s, he used public speaking as a means by which to infuse his written work with the authority of voice and dramatic performance. His association of his writing with speech and performance acquired a new emphasis when, in 1858, he began a profitable and famous second career as a reader of his own fiction. While we of course must read his work in the absence of his own physical and vocal presence, during his own lifetime Dickens insisted that to read him properly required seeing and hearing him as well. Here I at once take him at his word by attempting to reconstruct the vocal contexts of his career, and also interrogate the assumptions behind the belief that a novelist must present himself to the public as a speaker. Patrick Brantlinger notes the ‘‘rhetoric of intimacy’’ between author and reader conventionally associated with Dickens’s public readings, and argues that such rhetoric ‘‘expresses nostalgia for face-to-face storytelling that print culture had long ago rendered unnecessary, though hardly extinct’’ (Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson, p. 14). In this chapter I explore the question of what it means when a novelist writing for a dispersed mass audience presents himself as a vocal ‘‘face-to-face storyteller.’’ What sort of ‘‘intimacy’’ might such an illusion create? Novelists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries felt little compulsion to represent their writing as voice. Those authors, such as Edgeworth and Scott, who developed new strategies of representing dialect speech tended to do so within a narrative frame that presented itself as writing rather than speech.2 Dickens, however, found it expedient and even necessary – increasingly so, as his career went on – not only to seek to transcribe and capture the energy of spoken language but more broadly to define his authorship as a form of speaking. This chapter attempts to answer the question of how and why Victorian fiction created the figure of the author as storyteller by analyzing the contradictions that surrounded and determined Dickens’s performance of that role. I will argue that to perform authorship as vocal storytelling was for Dickens a means of controlling, protecting, and in effect copyrighting his writing as speech. From The Pickwick Papers onward, Dickens’s work succeeded in the marketplace in part by acting as a script for improvisational public performances. His authorship thus relied on a partial relinquishment of authority

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and control over the text to his readers. But by presenting himself on stage as storyteller, Dickens made a vain attempt to appropriate all such performance and speech as the property of a professional author.3 As we have seen, the invocation of the storyteller is typically linked to dismay over a perception of dispossession or loss: of language, of authority. Dickens’s performance as a storyteller should be seen as a complex and contradictory attempt to regain an authorial power that could, in reality, never be possessed in the first place. I am considering Dickens in the context of the emergence of a contested Victorian public sphere in which various paradigms of the labor of both authors and readers struggled for dominance. I argue that Dickens’s work and its reception were structured by an ongoing and unresolved tension between private reading and vocal performance. My topic here is not only Dickens’s writing but the whole structure of Victorian authorship and literary reception in which his career was extremely influential. With Dickens in particular, one cannot fully understand the impact and functioning of his authorship without analyzing his relationship to vocal – as well as print – culture. Dickens’s popularity needs to be understood within literary history not only as a quantitative leap but also as a qualitative one. Yes, we can say that novels were read by more and more people in increasingly divergent ways from the late 1830s on. More important, however, is fiction’s participation in a new competitive struggle between, roughly speaking, ‘‘bourgeois’’ reading practices and the competing practices of a new mass reading public. The importance of what I refer to as performative, mass reading in the Victorian period has sometimes been neglected because of our own tendency to project our own reading practices backward into history. By such mass reading I mean a mode of literary consumption that is intersubjective, often occurring communally; vocal rather than silent; productive and active rather than passive and receptive; often occurring in public spaces rather than interior, domestic ones; and – perhaps most significantly – somatically responsive, involving a performance or display of physical reaction.4 We have seen how the middle-class industrial novel negotiated with working-class vocal culture in order to refine a literary technique that would tap into the power and charisma of Chartist speech forms while draining those forms of their troubling political content. Here I examine some of the ways Dickens, throughout his career, engaged in a comparable process of negotiation. His career vividly reveals Victorian culture’s attempt to confront and incorporate the labor of a mass readership formerly excluded from the literary field. Indeed, later in his career and after

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his death, Dickens came to stand precisely for the emergence of a powerful and dangerous new heterogeneous audience for fiction. Dickens found himself balanced between two models of authorship. His writings bear the traces of the discursive struggle both to appropriate the labor of popular, performative reading and to efface or disable it.5 The question of possession recurs: who owns language, narrative, and voice? Throughout Dickens’s career can be seen a recurring thematics of possession and dispossession in which two potential possessors – the author himself and his readership – vie for control of the text. A contradiction runs throughout Dickens’s work. While the founding moment of his public success relied on the enthusiasm of an early Victorian mass audience, his continuing respectability as a man of letters required him to re-imagine this audience as a compliant, passive, receptive, and spatially enclosed readership, compatible with domestic ideology. That he was never able fully to enclose or contain his audience, I suggest, grants his work a particular importance within Victorian culture as a site where authorship began to fracture under the pressure of competing paradigms of literary reception. LITERARY CELEBRITY, PUBLIC SPEECH

When Dickens traveled to the United States in 1842, he participated in the invention of the role of an international celebrity author. He discovered that to be such an author at this time meant to confront a mass audience whose own language was at least as powerful as his own. He noted that this public language and behavior took two forms. First, in a letter to John Forster, he commented on the vocal language of celebration, love, and welcome he received from the crowds that emerged wherever he went. How can I give you the faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end? (Dickens, Letters, vol. III, p. 34)

With grateful appreciation, Dickens acknowledges that written language cannot fully evoke the sheer physical presence of his readership, transformed before his eyes into an audience. This vocal audience – cheering, generating verses and letters ‘‘without end’’ – possessed a manic verbal productivity. They offered themselves as if in imitation of Dickens’s own characters come to life as a spontaneous tribute to his power as an author.

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Later during this trip, however, Dickens wrote to Forster of a very different and less happy response his celebrity provoked. Because of the lack of an international copyright law in the US, Dickens was receiving no royalties on his books sold there. Perhaps emboldened by the ecstatic reception he had received, he took the opportunity of a public speech in Hartford to issue a strong statement on the need for such a law.6 The response was hostile. The ‘‘cheering . . . without end’’ turned into an angry ‘‘outcry’’ of ‘‘monstrous mis-representations’’: I had no sooner made that second speech than such an outcry began (for the purpose of deterring me from doing the like in this city) as an Englishman can form no conception of. Anonymous letters; verbal dissuasions; newspaper articles making Colt (a murderer who is attracting great attention here) an angel by comparison with me; assertions that I was no gentleman, but a mere mercenary scoundrel; coupled with the most monstrous mis-representations relative to my design and purpose in visiting the United States; came pouring in upon me every day. (Letters, vol. III, p. 83)

An anonymous crowd’s sustained cheer now became irresponsible ‘‘assertions,’’ anonymous slander, insinuation and attack of all kinds, all ‘‘pouring in’’ upon him as a wave of venomous language. Dickens suddenly found himself as author assaulted by wholly unauthorized speech. What has happened here? Dickens – in a manner we see throughout his career – is painfully caught between two conceptions of his own mass audience. As beloved celebrity author, he witnessed the power of his writing to mobilize a heterogeneous audience who did not passively read him, but turned his writing into speech, performance, and more writing. In this way – as in the attempt to make writing ‘‘phonographic’’ – Dickens attached his work to a charismatic vocal utterance, albeit in this case an utterance articulated not by himself but by his readers. Yet in this role he now found both private and public space transformed into an undifferentiated site of violent language. The crowds who had praised him now dissolved the boundaries between home and street. Dickens confronted critical language that came not from him but at him, making him its target, as he writes to Forster in this same letter: I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair . . . I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighbourhood of the pew I sit in, and the clergyman preaches at me. (Dickens, Letters, vol. III, p. 87)

For Dickens, the trip to the States crystallized his perception of the benefits and dangers of his mass audience. Such an audience threatened to deprive

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Dickens of agency as an author and to make him the object of verbal aggression. Speaking directly on the subject of international copyright, Dickens insisted that an author’s work was personal intellectual property. His audience angrily countered that such work, once published, enters a domain of publicity over which its creator possesses no special control. In its most aggressive form, this publicity undermined the possibility of Dickens enjoying a normal domestic life, transforming ‘‘house’’ into bustling ‘‘fair.’’7 Dickens struggled with this problem for the rest of his career. His performance of the author as a storyteller attempted to solve it. The solution Dickens found, as we shall see, was an attempt to control and protect – by defining as a sacred domestic interiority – that space of authorship which he believed to be menaced by the public’s aggressive speech. The public sphere of unregulated print and vocal culture seemed increasingly dangerous and unsympathetic; in its place, Dickens attempted to construct a safe zone in which positive forms of utterance would be protected and enclosed. PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

Dickens’s work can be understood in the context of David Vincent’s argument about the persistence of performance in nineteenth-century literary reception: ‘‘The simple relationship between the faceless publisher and the soundless reader was disrupted by men and women reciting, singing, shouting, chanting, declaiming, and narrating’’ (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 201). Early nineteenth-century print culture witnessed an explosion of noisy vocality and performance.8 Just as Dickens was publishing his early work, the field of literature was besieged by new forms of oral performance that undermined the ideologies and practices of proprietary authorship and silent reading. A scene in Dickens’s Great Expectations provides a vivid representation of popular reading aloud and its disruption by a professional expert. ‘‘There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three Jolly Bargemen attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud’’ (Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 130). Dickens portrays a print culture partially constituted by vocal practices, ones that Pip says provide a sense of sustaining community: ‘‘Of that group I was one.’’ We know, from Pip’s efforts to teach Joe how to read, that this is an incompletely literate community; Mr. Wopsle’s performance – for it is emphatically a performance – of a newspaper’s depiction of a murder trial serves as a necessary source of news for those gathered in the tavern.

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A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, ‘‘I am done for,’’ as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, ‘‘I’ll serve you out,’’ as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, become Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cozy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder. (Great Expectations, pp. 130–1)

Mr. Wopsle’s entertaining performance of the text stands as Dickens’s representation of one ‘‘highly popular’’ mode of Victorian literary reception. Wopsle ‘‘identifie[s] himself ’’ with the characters in the text. He imitates, mimics, gloats, and ‘‘enjoy[s] himself ’’ in such a way that his audience also enjoy themselves. This performance prefers vividness to accuracy and abandons impartiality for the sake of enthusiastic involvement in the drama of the report. His reading aloud is, in fact, very loud. Wopsle moans, bellows, and pipes, turning the language on the page into an uproarious vocal display that must strike us as characteristically Dickensian. Wopsle might be understood, or heard, to be phonographing the newspaper report – voicing it. The happy scene is, however, interrupted by an outsider who introduces a different perspective on the reading. Mr. Jaggers witnesses Wopsle’s performance with ‘‘an expression of contempt on his face’’ (Great Expectations, p. 131) and proceeds to attack it as an irresponsibly creative act. This big city lawyer’s ‘‘bullying interrogative manner’’ soon convinces the audience that Wopsle’s performance is deeply flawed. Possessing ‘‘an air of authority not to be disputed, and with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us’’ (Great Expectations, p. 133), Jaggers exerts the power of modern bureaucracy. He redefines Wopsle’s creative performance of the text as a blatant misreading: ‘‘Now, follow that passage with your eye,’’ he commands Wopsle, forcibly controlling his reading in the name of correct interpretation, ‘‘and tell me whether it distinctly states . . . ’’ Directing attention to the basis of reading in the perception of a ‘‘passage’’ by the ‘‘eye,’’ Jaggers reminds Wopsle’s audience that his impersonations – performing the beadle in the manner of Coriolanus, for example – are unauthorized by the written text, which does not ask to be vocalized. Defining Wopsle’s every extrapolation as an unwarranted departure from a proper meaning, Jaggers turns ‘‘enjoyment’’ of reading aloud

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into embarrassment. Judged by the exacting standards of legal rationality, Wopsle’s performance is a failure and even, suggests Jaggers, a potential miscarriage of justice. Jaggers may object to Wopsle’s performance more for its inexactness and embellishments than for its orality as such, but as Walter Ong reminds us, both formal logic and legal rationality might be included as among ‘‘the kind[s] of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible’’ (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 52). Dickens portrays Wopsle’s performance as a tacit act of performative and vocal resistance to a textbased model of bureaucratic, legal rationality. To read out loud is to value a text less for its intentions or meanings than for its performance value. This passage roughly follows the pattern of Dickens’s letters to Forster, where he first appreciatively represents a scene of verbally productive response to his own authorship, and then complains that public language becomes an irresponsible weapon used against him. In this passage from Great Expectations, of course, Dickens seems to locate his sympathies clearly with the group at the Three Jolly Bargemen, and against the dour professional expert from bureaucratic London who insists that a newspaper should be responsibly, correctly, and silently read. Yet the conflict dramatized in this scene recurs throughout Dickens’s career, and he does not always position himself so clearly as he does here on the side of those who would turn reading into a communal vocal performance. In such a passage, we see two competing models of literary reception: one in which reading is a creative public performance of a script-text, and another in which it is an exact decoding, subject to professional evaluation, of the meaning contained on the page. Dickens himself was always part Wopsle, part Jaggers, unevenly balancing their respective paradigms of reading. He identified himself ambivalently not only with the forces of performative mass reading, but also with the ideal of authorship as a professional and individualized occupation.9 Dickens’s heart seems to be with Wopsle’s approach to a text, where free-wheeling irreverence is best expressed through forms of performative vocality. Yet Jaggers’s corrections to Wopsle also remind us that Wopsle’s reading could, from a certain point of view, be seen as troublingly unauthorized. Indeed, what proved most innovative in Dickens’s authorship emerged from just this kind of uneasy balancing act. As in his engagements with phonography, his linking of text to a voice could signify the vitalization of print – but could, in so doing, also embody language in disruptive ways. Dickens at once capitalized on his appeal to a mass audience and tried to control that audience. The combination of these two impulses granted him a new form of cultural power defined not by mastery over his readership, but by a uneasy failure ever to achieve such mastery.

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MASS PUBLIC OPINION

The publicity and word of mouth surrounding the publication of The Pickwick Papers suggested that Dickens’s success relied on a new practice of reading which seemed so excessive in voice and gesture as to strike polite observers as something on the order of an hysterical fit. If the early public sphere for which Walter Scott wrote was defined by gentlemanly journals of opinion like The Edinburgh Review,10 Dickens’s success signaled the advent of a new mass readership: one formed of a socially expanded national readership and inaugurating unruly new practices of literary consumption.11 Dickens’s audience was larger than that of any previous novelist in England, and was characterized in an entirely different way than the readership of Scott and Austen. Dickens and his readership served as evolving signs of the state of ‘‘public opinion’’ in England. Dror Wahrman argues that ‘‘public opinion’’ in England ‘‘was presented in the late 1810s as the fount of authority and legitimation’’ (Wahrman, ‘‘Public Opinion,’’ p. 92), but that by the 1820s and 1830s – in the aftermath of Peterloo – a new skepticism developed regarding the possibility that ‘‘public opinion’’ could accurately represent the views of the entire nation. Wahrman suggests that an Enlightenment confidence in the effects of ‘‘critical habits of reading’’ led to ‘‘an understanding of the political process in which the possibility of violence was limited and disciplined within the overall dependable operation of an orderly political mechanism’’ (‘‘Public Opinion,’’ p. 88). In the 1810s, confidence in critical reading skills allowed the fantasy of a unified English ‘‘public opinion,’’ but this fantasy soon began to disintegrate in the face of the English people’s apparent penchant for forming variant opinions. If, in the heyday of Scott and Austen, the novel purportedly produced a rational mode of edifying reading, Dickens’s ability to attract an unruly mass readership implied the breakdown of the fantasy of an orderly sphere of novel-readers.12 Dickens’s sudden success in the 1830s can thus be understood as symptomatic of a shift in the ‘‘imagined community’’ of readers. Some believed they saw the collapse of the public sphere under the pressure of excessive heterogeneity. Other contemporary thinkers, however, believed such an arena of rational debate was threatened by excessive homogeneity, by the emergence of a mass culture of standardized response. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), that key manifesto of mid-Victorian liberalism, offers a particularly influential model of a Victorian professional author’s relationship to a new mass audience. For Mill, the free liberal individual in England was menaced by what he calls ‘‘the crowd,’’

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‘‘masses,’’ ‘‘public opinion’’ (Mill, On Liberty, p. 62). ‘‘The very idea of resisting the will of the public’’ (On Liberty, p. 69) has all but disappeared, Mill laments. And for him, to resist that will is to protect one’s individual ‘‘opinion,’’ which may best be understood as a form of property: ‘‘a person’s taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse’’ (On Liberty, p. 78). Although Dickens shares Mill’s anxiety over unregulated popular speech, his relationship to such speech is complicated by his dependence on it as a popular author. Dickens’s career rests on a tension similar to that which structures On Liberty. Yet if Mill attempts to solve the problem of public opinion through the formation of an elite intellectual domain in which experts can control language, Dickens’s solution is very different. Dickens proposes a newly sanctified domestic realm over which the individual author can enjoy a dominion denied him in the streets. For Dickens, the privatized interior space of the domestic defines a realm in which a father/author can own and control his own language and protect it from the vicissitudes of popular performance, while still retaining some of the power and pleasure of that performance. Concern about the popular reading of Dickens’s work amounted to concern about the emergence of what we now call mass culture. Contemporaries had to recognize that the cultural effects of Dickens’s fiction derived not simply from his authorial work, but from the work of those readers and performers who made Pickwick (and subsequent novels) their own, treating a novel not as a bearer of authorial intentions but as the script for their own entertainments. A new understanding emerged of the literary text as an object of mass reading, whose meanings and effects derived in significant part from the work of that popular culture. This shift marks a conflict between two versions of the public sphere – the printbased public sphere that Habermas famously evokes, and the emerging Victorian public identified with a mass readership that read novels in public and out loud.13 The conflict between the two prompted a redefinition of the bourgeois public sphere as a domestic space that would restrict literary performances. By defining such a protected interior space, Dickens in effect offered an alternative to Mill’s proposal that a cadre of elite experts might control public speech. Within a conceptual space of domesticity, Dickens seemed to believe, dangerous public speech and performance might be channeled into a revised authorship. As I have suggested, however, what was most interesting about Dickens’s revision of the public sphere was its ambivalence and its ultimate failure. That domestic space always proved to be less secure than it claimed to be.

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For every gesture Dickens made to tame or domesticate his mass readership, he made another celebrating that audience and attempting to appropriate its power. For Mill and the class of professional intellectuals he represented, the culture of the streets had to be regulated and contained. Dickens’s rhetorical attempts at containment were never so emphatic, final, or unambiguous as Mill’s. In Dickens’s writings and his performances of authorship, we witness a new kind of uneasy reconciliation with a mass audience. By locating a permeable domestic sphere as the space of authorship, Dickens defined authorship as necessarily engaged in a productive struggle with a vocal public readership. IRRESISTIBLE PICKWICK

George Ford notes the special position of The Pickwick Papers in Dickens’s career: To the majority of nineteenth-century readers, Pickwick Papers was the most likeable book ever written by Dickens. In the twelve years following his death, for example, when over 4,000,000 copies of his novels were sold, the sale of Pickwick far outdistanced all the others. Earlier, during the 1850s and 1860s, Dickens had been plagued by reviewers demanding a return to the manner of his first novel, and, as might be expected, he himself vainly wished that attention might be shifted away from Pickwick to the novels of his maturity. (Ford, Dickens and His Readers, p. 3)

The continued appeal of Pickwick can serve as a first step in understanding the Victorian transformation of the public sphere. Pickwick represents the England of 1837, a moment of overwhelming expansion of the reading public and the popular participation in print culture, a moment in which the English language, the fields of journalism and fiction, and public life itself were infused with the energies of an expanding mass readership. For the rest of his life, Dickens remained indelibly associated with this moment. Indeed, in subsequent decades, Pickwick acquired a nostalgic aura as a text that had both pleased and managed an unruly mass readership. From the vantage point of the 1850s and 1860s, Pickwick represents a passing moment when doing, saying, and smashing what one likes (to cite Matthew Arnold’s phrases) had not yet taken hold of English culture – a moment when mass publicity existed in a temporary harmony with individual authorship. The spectacle of a heterogeneous mass readership for Pickwick made clear to early Victorian observers that the relationship between author,

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work of fiction, and audience was undergoing a significant change. Dickens represented himself as masterfully controlling his audience, but in fact the relationship was not so one-sided. Dickens tried to represent physical, even violent public response as something he owned, yet the force of his engagement with mass culture lay in his willingness – by contrast with John Stuart Mill – to write the script, as it were, for reading performances that were beyond his control. If intellectuals and writers from Plato through Isaac Pitman to Walter Benjamin were concerned about the tendency of language and especially speech to evade capture and possession, Dickens’s particular strength lay in his (deeply conflicted) willingness to permit his words to achieve a kind of life beyond any authorial control. Popular fiction published in England before Dickens had certainly found large, enthusiastic audiences, and eighteenth-century gothic fiction in particular provoked anxieties about over-responsive female readers. But Jane Austen’s mockery in Northanger Abbey of characters who confuse the public response to a scandalous new novel’s arrival at the circulating library with an actual ‘‘riot’’ typifies the common sense of the early nineteenth century: ‘‘You talked of expected horrors in London – and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could only relate to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields’’ (Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 88). For Austen and her audience, ‘‘the only riot is in your brain’’ (Northanger Abbey, p. 88) – any excited response to literature is safely contained within interior mental space. The rise of cheap mass fiction in the 1830s made involuntary physical response to fiction appear a more widespread problem, however, and one affecting men as much as women. The reading of Dickens in particular challenged such a presumption of the safe interiority of literary reception. Dickens himself made frequent reference to the capacity of his narratives to produce tears and other physical response, often identifying this capacity as the source of his popularity and income. He describes his audience at a benefit reading as unified in their generous and sentimental response to his words: ‘‘I made a Speech last night at the London Tavern, at the end of which all the Company sat holding their napkins to their eyes with one hand, and putting the other into their pockets. A hundred people or so, contributed Nine Hundred Pounds, then and there’’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 132). In his public readings, Dickens in effect capitalized on this talent, which he had previously exploited only in speeches, for his actual literary performance: ‘‘We had an amazing scene of weeping and cheering, at St. Martin’s Hall, last night. I read the Life and Death of Little Dombey;

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and certainly I never saw a crowd so resolved into one creature before, or so stirred by any thing’’ (Letters, vol. VIII, p. 584). By turning the crowd into one single, responsive body wholly in thrall to his power, Dickens sets his mass audience at odds with both the highly individuated silent reader and the hysterical mass reader. Here Dickens’s audience becomes a compliant collectivity that responds as one and on cue. We may recall the comparison Elizabeth Gaskell implies in Mary Barton between the angry, excited mob and John Barton, the individual listener enthralled by his daughter’s storytelling. Dickens in effect has it both ways by facing a large audience yet turning them into a figure like John Barton, hanging on the word of the speaker; he thus achieves the benefits both of individualized, novelistic storytelling and of charismatic address to a mass audience. Such a perfect balance, however, remains Dickens’s only occasionally attained ideal. DONE TO DEATH

It was a commonplace for commentators in the late 1830s and 1840s to note that all social classes read Dickens. His novels were frequently performed in ways that demonstrated the power of reading to unify a heterogeneous crowd. While Pickwick was being serialized, Philip Collins notes, ‘‘a group of some twenty poor people clubbed together, not to buy the shilling parts (they could not afford that) but to hire them for twopence a day from a library, and they gathered in a locksmith’s shop where one of them read the new instalment to the others’’ (Reading Aloud, p. 6).14 On streets and in workplaces as well as in private homes, Dickens’s serials were performed in new spaces of literary reception and consumption. The enthusiastic appropriation of his work defined Dickens’s special status as author. If Walter Scott seemed to stand, for example, for the single, masculine origin of proprietary texts to be silently consumed within the space of the home, Dickens was associated with an ongoing process of improvisatory re-performance of narrative in public. As The Pickwick Papers passed into national mythology it became subject to ongoing re-readings and performance, and thereby no longer traceable to the mind and experience of such a proprietary author as Scott. Such widely read plagiarisms as The Peregrinations of Pickwick, The Posthumorous Notes of the Pickwick Club, and Oliver Twiss (Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, pp. 45–71) indicate how available Dickens’s early writing was to popular appropriation. Kate Field alludes in 1871 to a few of the more famous Dickens stage adaptations: ‘‘any one who remembers Burton’s ‘Captain Cuttle,’ the late J. M. Field’s ‘Mantilin,’

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Mrs. Field’s ‘Smike,’ Charlotte Cushman’s ‘Nancy Sykes,’ E. L. Davenport’s ‘Bill Sykes,’ and James W. Wallock’s ‘Fagin,’ will never cease to congratulate himself on seeing Dickens embodied’’ (Field, Pen Photographs, p. 54). Collins writes of Dickens’s own first 1858 performances of The Trial From Pickwick, The Trial, a favourite comic episode ever since 1837, had been very popular in theatrical adaptations and, long before Dickens started doing it, had been ‘‘done to death’’ in Penny-readings and other such performances. It was, as reviewers said, in the repertoire of every public reader, amateur or professional. Dickens’s performance did not prove a disappointment, however, and his conception of the characters differed significantly from the usual interpretations. (Collins, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 196)

Note the irony in the observation that Dickens’s first performance of his own text ‘‘did not prove a disappointment.’’ It is judged a success not because it successfully dramatized the episode to meet the expectations of private readers, but because it differentiated his authorial performance from those amateur productions already familiar to spectators. If Dickens as author was at least guaranteed to gain priority over any plagiarizer, as performer he was always already secondary, forced to compete with his own fans. He faced the possibility of failing to measure up to the standard they had already set.15 Two competing kinds of performance – popular and authorial – thus characterize Dickens’s career. As writer, Dickens finds his work subject to continual appropriation by rivals; in order to maintain his power as an author, he must link writing with performances that he cannot entirely control. A letter Dickens wrote in 1838 to a theater manager and actor, Frederick Yates, vividly represents the author at work, mid-novel, as an entrepreneur trying to compete for the performance rights to his own characters and stories. Dickens acknowledges that his characters acquire a life of their own in the marketplace of public performance as soon as they leave his pen. In the midst of writing his second novel, Oliver Twist, he is arranging with Yates for a future stage production of the novel. This novel is, he assures Yates, ‘‘tolerably safe’’ from any competing, unauthorized theatrical production simply because Dickens himself doesn’t yet know how it will end: I don’t see the possibility of any house doing it before your next opening night . . . I am quite satisfied that nobody can have heard what I mean to do with the different characters in the end, inasmuch as at present I don’t quite know, myself; so we are tolerably safe on that hand.

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Any way, I am quite sure that your name as the Jew and mine as the author would knock any other attempts quite out of the field. (Dickens, Letters, vol. I, pp. 388–9).

Dickens’s boast that his name ‘‘as the author’’ would assist in promoting Yates’s production over ‘‘any other attempts’’ bespeaks an underlying lack of confidence that authorship alone marks sure ownership of literature. Authorship now seems to require not simply the writing of a text but also the laying claim to public performance of it. Because such performance is inherently beyond the grasp or copyright of any single author, to be a novelist requires an ongoing but perhaps impossible struggle to authorize authorless performances. And in fact, the editors of Dickens’s correspondence point out that he was too sanguine in his reassurances to Yates. As it happened, more than one rival production of Oliver Twist beat Yates’s to the stage – lending credence to Dickens’s concern that readers would ‘‘have heard’’ what he ‘‘mean[t] to do’’ with his characters even before he had finished writing them. When an author’s fictions so quickly enter the word-of-mouth network of mass popularity, he cannot easily control their drift from print and paper to voice and conversation.16 As we can see, Dickens wrote his novels with full awareness of their future appropriation by a mass reading practice, and his fiction itself often registers this awareness. As early in his career as the opening chapter of Pickwick, Dickens makes effective formal use of vocal interruption of public speech or performance: (Cheers – a voice ‘‘No.’’) No! (Cheers.) Let that honourable Pickwickian who cried ‘‘No’’ so loudly come forward and deny it, if he could. (Cheers.) Who was it who cried ‘‘No’’? (Enthusiastic cheering.) (Dickens, Pickwick, p. 5)

In such a scene, Dickens asserts the crucial difference – that difference Mikhail Bakhtin would famously assert – between novelistic aesthetic effects and those of any orderly form of monological discourse. The value of fiction, he suggests, will derive in part from its openness to audience participation and active popular reading, its participation in or mimicry of the stuttering rhythms of mass publicity. Thus in Great Expectations, when Pip attends a performance of Hamlet, Dickens depicts an audience so demanding that it can alter even Shakespeare’s text by thoroughly dismantling and reassembling it. The audience’s cheerful mockery of Mr. Wopsle’s portrayal of Hamlet transforms Shakespeare’s tragedy into a parody of that most sober of deliberative bodies, a ‘‘Debating Society.’’ Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the

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public helped him out with it. As for example; on the questions of whether ’twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said ‘‘toss up for it’’; and quite a Debating Society arose. When he was asked what should such fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged with loud cries of ‘‘Hear, hear’’ . . . And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions. (Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 251)

To ‘‘ask a question or state a doubt’’ are at once speech acts in a play and activities of a rational public sphere, but here no question or doubt can be expressed without ‘‘the public’’ stepping in with unwanted assistance. Dickens’s text becomes a register of ‘‘loud cries,’’ ‘‘peals of laughter,’’ and derisive or amused roars that attest not only to the presence of a vocal mass audience within the space of aesthetic reception – but also to the diminished authority of the writer (Shakespeare), of a single performer (Mr. Wopsle), and even of the work itself, which is never actually named in Pip’s account of it.17 In an 1837 letter, Mary Russell Mitford describes Pickwick as the scene of an expansion of the reading of fiction into a domain of national public performance: So you have never heard of the ‘‘Pickwick Papers!’’ Well! They publish a number once a month . . . It is fun – London life – but without anything unpleasant: a lady might read it aloud; and it is so graphic, so individual, and so true, that you could curtsey to all the people as you met them in the streets. I did not think there had been a place where English was spoken to which ‘‘Boz’’ had not penetrated. All the boys and girls talk his fun . . . and yet they who are of the highest taste like it the most. (quoted in Ford, Dickens and His Readers, p. 7; emphasis and ellipses in original)

That ‘‘a lady might read it aloud ’’ is of course meant to indicate Pickwick’s lack of any offensive content, yet Mitford also lays particular stress on the performative experience of the novel. Dickens’s work is to be found not only wherever English is written and read, but also wherever it is spoken and acted out – particularly ‘‘in the streets.’’ Thus one does not so much read the novel as ‘‘hear of ’’ it. Pickwick thrillingly but dangerously redefined the novel not only as a literary representation of speech, but also as an occasion for dramatic performances. What happens to fiction when a novel becomes the occasion for a public spectacle, and is read less as a completed aesthetic object than as a script written to elicit public reenactment and emotional response? The phonographing of writing or the transcription of ‘‘speech on paper’’ was motivated by a desire to infuse writing with vocality; in this instance, the ‘‘voice’’ is not in the text but in the response to the text,

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and can thus even less easily be understood as a copyrighted possession of the author. The Victorian novel’s ability to represent heterogeneous speech within a narrative of perfect written English helped make it the effective technology of nation formation Benedict Anderson describes.18 The frame defined by a narrator who ‘‘speaks’’ the standard written vernacular formally contains the many voices of characters of all social classes – voices that deviate, sometimes hilariously, from that standard – uniting them in one linguistic totality. They nevertheless pose a certain threat. If the novelistic technique of omniscient narration mastered by Jane Austen marks the incorporation of speech by a powerfully unified narrative ‘‘voice’’-in-writing, then Dickens’s fiction displaces that univocality through the heterogeneous din of competing voices; he in effect opens up reading to the streets.19 Such an appropriation of voice and performance by the novel also marks a shift of the agency of narrative from a single author-figure to a mass vocal readership – a readership whose responses could seem situated in a dangerously unbounded public space. Commentators on the Pickwick phenomenon noted that physicians read the novel’s installments in a carriage on the way to make house calls, judges read it on the bench while waiting for a jury to reach a verdict, ‘‘the butcher-boy, with his tray on his shoulder, read with the greatest avidity’’ (Ford, Dickens and His Readers, pp. 7, 10). These examples of acts of public novel reading suggest the socially wide-ranging appeal of Dickens’s fiction; but we should also note the location of such reading – not by the hearth, but outside, in public, in transit, and at work. In the classic storytelling situation, a charismatic speaker grounds a harmonious community that surrounds him. The danger here would seem to be that the speech acts associated with Dickens are mobile and shifting and so cannot serve as a stable center. Dickens’s phenomenal success, in Mitford’s description, seems to depend less on the institutions of the literary public sphere – journals of opinion, lending libraries, the opinion of professional cultural arbiters – than on a kind of wildly self-perpetuating popular culture of imitation, performance, and vocal repetition. In the terms of Vincent’s history of nineteenth-century literacy, Dickens seems fully embedded in that transitional stage where small-scale capitalist distribution of literature ‘‘intensif[ied] rather than displace[d] time-honoured [vocal] means of reaching the public’’ (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 202). By tapping into traditional modes of literary reception associated with street broadsides, Dickens attached the English novel to a powerful mode of vocal performance – leaving open the question of how this redefinition of literary

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form would in turn redefine traditional authorship. The potential problem with Dickens’s audience, it would seem, is that it might become so diffuse, self-perpetuating, and de-centered that it would threaten to do away with the privileged site reserved for the storyteller or novelist. DOMESTIC AUTHORSHIP

Dickens sought means by which at once to allow his work to circulate in public and to control or domesticate public response to it. One way to do this was to characterize his readers as members of an extended family in which Dickens occupied pride of place as father. Mass reading emerged in the early Victorian period as literary production became increasingly commodified and industrialized by new methods of printing, distribution, and publication. The Victorian novelist wrote for a dispersed audience of an increasingly heterogeneous and international character. Dickens sought rhetorically to redefine this readership as a family circle consuming his books not in the open spaces of the public sphere, but before the fire in a virtual home.20 The definition of his audience as friends or even siblings gathered around his own hearth worked, in a back-handed way, to reassert the proprietary rights of an author over his work.21 Dickens’s association of authorship with domesticity became a means by which Victorian print culture adapted itself to include the effects of a mass readership, while still preserving a place for proprietary authorship. After arrival in America in 1842, Dickens wrote back to London, ‘‘They cheer me in the Theatres; in the streets; within doors; and without’’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. III, p. 44). A decade and a half before he began his public readings, we can already see Dickens touting his status as an author who is read – or, in this case, simply cheered – inside and outside of a space of private reading. As a celebrity author within an international mass culture, Dickens found himself associated with a readership that was also a noisy audience. In his first speech on that American trip, Dickens gestured toward the rhetorical containment of that audience by asserting that even as he spoke to a large crowd, he was, in effect, in his own home. ‘‘[Y]ou give me no chance of playing at company, or holding you at a distance,’’ he told his audience, ‘‘but flock about me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home.’’ To hold a readership ‘‘at a distance’’ would be the act of an author who is only a writer, whose relationship to his readers is entirely mediated through print. Dickens admits that he, unlike such an author, must acknowledge the claims of an active and physically embodied readership. Yet he figures this audience as contained within the space of a ‘‘home.’’

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The image of a ‘‘flock of brothers,’’ oddly conjoining the intimate and familial with the public and numerous, captures the strangeness of Dickens’s effort here to define a mass audience as a component of domestic experience. When, later in this same speech and in subsequent ones in the American trip, Dickens raised the topic of international copyright, he revealed the strategic value of his assertions of intimacy and domestic familiarity. Dickens’s mockintimate request, ‘‘I would beg leave to whisper in your ears two words, International Copyright’’ (Dickens, Speeches, p. 25), reveals some of the contradictions of his rhetoric here. Even as he repeatedly claims that his audiences’ appreciation for him makes the space of a large hall in a foreign country resemble his own home in London, he takes advantage of his speech as a public forum to engage in an unpopular campaign for copyright reform.22 Many in his audience chose to interpret his stage whisper not as an intimate confidence exchanged between friends, but as an aggressive intervention in a struggle over the control of writing: the Hartford Daily Times commented in their report on this speech, ‘‘it happens that we want no advice upon this subject, and it will be better for Mr. Dickens, if he refrains from introducing the subject hereafter’’ (Speeches, p. 26). Dickens never takes for granted that reading occurs in a safely enclosed domestic space. He represents such protection from public life as a vulnerable ideal, always under siege by the dynamic forces of popular culture. A scene from Oliver Twist demonstrates how easily the power of literacy could be hijacked. Dickens represents a public realm that is up for grabs, subject to multiple practices and even to a kind of spatial warfare. Oliver’s benefactor Mr. Brownlow selects the street as the place in which to carry on a mode of reading that would normally occur within a cozy interior: [Mr. Brownlow] had taken up a book from the stall, and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his elbow-chair, in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he saw not the bookseller, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short, anything but the book itself: which he was reading straight through: turning over the leaf when he got to the bottom of a page, beginning at the top line of the next one, and going regularly on, with the greatest interest and eagerness. What was Oliver’s horror and alarm as he stood a few paces off, looking on with the eyelids as wide open as they would possibly go, to see the Dodger plunge his hand into the old gentleman’s pocket, and draw from there a handkerchief! To see him hand the same to Charley Bates; and finally to behold them, both, running away round the corner at full speed. (Dickens, Oliver Twist, p. 114)

Mr. Brownlow is so thoroughly defined by domesticity and print culture that when he looks at a ‘‘bookseller,’’ ‘‘street,’’ or ‘‘boys’’ he sees nothing

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‘‘but the book itself ’’ and behaves as if alone in ‘‘his own study.’’ Such ‘‘abstraction’’ leads directly to a violent invasion of that ‘‘fancied’’ private space by thieves. Thus the Artful Dodger and Bates serve notice that Brownlow’s use of the street as a site of private reading is more a wishful middle-class fantasy than a truly effective occupation of a social space that still remains open to all members of the public. The thieves’ intrusion abruptly transforms a scene of reading into a criminal spectacle (albeit an inadvertent one) – a performance conducted for the benefit of a mesmerized spectator, Oliver. The scene registers the possibility that the ‘‘interest and eagerness’’ felt by a reader for ‘‘the book itself’’ may not be able to compete with the visceral thrill of the sights at which one might look ‘‘with the eyelids as wide open as they would possibly go.’’ Yet in writing such a scene, Dickens also invested his own work with a new kind of excitement and public resonance by appropriating the entertainment value of the street spectacle for his own writing. Like the Artful Dodger’s crime, a novel is supposed to be private and enclosed, but here becomes public and visible. That which is thought to be cut off from public view gains a special power and interest when it is publicized. With this scene, then, Dickens not only taps into the anxieties of a reader who he presumes will sympathize with Mr. Brownlow’s desire to inhabit a private, self-enclosed space, but also allows vicarious identification with an alternative readership who enjoy seeing that space invaded and turned into a spectacle. ‘‘ P E R S O N A L ’’:

RUMOR AND PERFORMANCE

I have been discussing the function of ‘‘the domestic’’ for Dickens as a conceptual space for authorship. Now I want to be a bit more specific about what domesticity meant for Dickens, whose reputation depended on his representation of the happy home life he was unable to sustain. Garrett Stewart identifies the moment of the late 1850s as ‘‘the height of the Victorian fiction industry’s confidence in a congregated and harmonized public,’’ prior to ‘‘the breakdown of the Victorian literary populace . . . into mass audience versus modernist clientele’’ (Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 214). We can see the step Dickens took in 1858 as a sign of things to come – of impending breakdown of any such unproblematic understanding of a ‘‘harmonized public.’’ Dickens’s life changed in two major ways in this year. He separated from his wife and he began his unprecedented career as a public reader for profit. Dickens himself linked the two events, presenting to his skeptical friends the idea of giving reading

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performances as a salutary distraction from his personal difficulties. Even when asking John Forster – who disapproved of the plan as a vulgarization of authorship – to consider the readings apart from the circumstances of Dickens’s home life, Dickens made clear how intertwined they were. In a letter about taking the ‘‘Plunge’’ of publicly announcing the readings, Dickens writes Forster that [i]t becomes necessary . . . to consider and settle the question of the Plunge. Quite dismiss from your mind any reference whatever to present circumstances at home. Nothing can put them right . . . Will you then try to think of this reading project (as I do) apart from all personal likings and dislikings, and solely with a view to its effect on that peculiar relation (personally affectionate, and like no other man’s) which subsists between me and the public? (Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 539)

The letter reveals Dickens’s attempt, in this difficult period, to reimagine his ‘‘public’’ as a replacement for his wife. With a failed marriage, he shifted his attention to a different, special relationship – that ‘‘peculiar relation’’ between himself and the public. In the scandal surrounding the dissolution of his marriage, Dickens lost control altogether over the process by which his words and ‘‘character’’ became public. He repeatedly miscalculated the effect of his words, making public language that should have remained private, failing altogether to control the terms in which he was known to his readership. Through private advocacy, public statement, and litigation, he vainly sought to regain his usual mastery over his language and reputation. Dickens did so by rhetorically distancing himself from language that he sharply condemned as ‘‘whispering,’’ gossip, and slander. Such language recalls the whispered oaths and vows of the Chartists in Mary Barton – it is covert language linked to the body, speech that refuses to participate in a purportedly rational print sphere. He initiated a suit for slander against an editor, Colin Rae Brown, overheard claiming that Dickens had sired three children by his sister-in-law. Writing on his behalf, his lawyers contended that Dickens himself, and not his wife or his mistress, was the victim of illicit publicity: ‘‘Mr. Dickens feels that much as he should suffer from having such a statement brought before the public, the pain would be infinitely less than he now endures in the thought that Brown or any one else may be whispering about this monstrous charge with impunity’’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 755). Such whispering seems to become an analogue of copyright violations or plagiarisms, as unauthorized verbal repetition. Throughout this episode Dickens and his representatives make strong associations between rumor (‘‘whispering’’) and illicit reproduction,

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as if to shift the burden of guilt for such reproduction from the author himself to those who gossiped about him. Claims as to Dickens’s sexual impropriety, even to his fathering multiple bastards, threatened the paternal character of his authorial persona. He needed to present himself to the nation – as until now he indeed had – as a model father whose authorial integrity guaranteed an ideal home. ‘‘Rumor,’’ no longer working to spread Dickens’s fiction by word of mouth, now seemed to be authoring the author against his own will. Like the ‘‘curse’’ for Gaskell, ‘‘rumor’’ becomes for Dickens a particularly virulent form of utterance that fails to abide by proprietary laws of authorship, a contagious speech act lacking any responsible individual agent. Dickens found himself, even as he defended himself against public rumor and irresponsible speech, accused of violating his wife’s privacy through improper publication. A letter by Dickens in which he described his separation from his wife in terms very unflattering to her – subsequently referred to as the ‘‘Violated’’ letter (Letters, vol. VIII, pp. 740–1) – found its way into print in an American newspaper and then made its way back to England. The ‘‘Violated’’ letter’s transatlantic itinerary in effect demonstrated to Dickens how little he could manage the international flow of his language. London society soon buzzed at Dickens’s unkindness to his wife and the shocking impropriety of his allowing such a document to make its way into print.23 In an unwanted return to the issues Dickens had addressed regarding international copyright in 1842, he now struggled to control his words, to own his reputation, and to make sense of the connection between public speech and private identity. No longer able effortlessly to advance his career through canny manipulation of all forms of publication, he now found himself, as he had briefly felt in 1842, oppressed rather than rewarded by his audience’s own verbal powers. Dickens’s somewhat desperate response to this situation was, on June 12, 1858, to publish an open letter to the public concerning his separation from his wife, entitled ‘‘Personal,’’ in Household Words (reprinted in Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 744). In this fascinating document, Dickens struggles to retain his proprietary grasp on his authorship and the proliferating narratives it generated. Accused of a violation of domesticity, he responds with a fierce claim concerning the power of domestic virtue and individualist authorship. To assert the links between authorship and domesticity had become, by the 1850s, a means of protecting literature against a readership grown alarmingly powerful, against speech acts that seemed irresponsible and hostile.

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Public rumor immersed Dickens suddenly in that domain of hysterically productive reading which had, up to this point, worked to his advantage. Now, unfortunately, these reading practices were producing slanders against the author. In this incident, he announces the return of that irresponsible public who had vilified him in the US a decade and a half earlier. The very term ‘‘monstrous misrepresentations,’’ with which Dickens described the public’s response to his call for international copyright in 1842, now recurs in his commentary on the rumor and innuendo that was impeaching his authority as a public figure. Positioning himself as a member of a professional community threatened by unregulated speech, Dickens declares, ‘‘For the first time in my life, and I believe for the last, I now deviate from the principle I have so long observed, by presenting myself in my own Journal in my own private character.’’ Dickens here gambles all on the power of his ‘‘own private character,’’ his ‘‘own Journal,’’ his own name, and his own written oath to defeat the forces of public rumor: My conspicuous position has often made me the subject of fabulous stories and unaccountable statements. Occasionally, such things have chafed me, or even wounded me; but, I have always accepted them as the shadows inseparable from the light of my notoriety and success.

His own spectacular literary success, Dickens half-boasts, half-complains, has rendered him not only the ‘‘subject of fabulous stories’’ but also subject to the process of ‘‘fabulous’’ fiction-making. We should understand Dickens’s complaint not only in biographical terms but as an indication of a change in the institution of authorship itself, in a historical situation where the relationship between author and audience could suddenly reverse itself. In this context, to be an author is at once to make stories and to find oneself uncomfortably rendered a character in stories produced by one’s audience. ‘‘Such things have . . . wounded me,’’ Dickens writes, admitting his vulnerability to the effect of these reversals. By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasions of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel . . . and so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air.

Dickens here offers an appalled representation of the Victorian mass reading public as a veritable plague of ‘‘misrepresentations.’’ If Mary Russell

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Mitford portrayed a social domain in which Dickens’s words spread like a catchy child’s rhyme, Dickens here figures himself as the victim of a language issuing like a malign ‘‘breath’’ or ‘‘air’’ from a cruel mass body. What seems to be damaged here is, among other things, writing, and the possibility of accurate reading: not one ‘‘reader’’ in a thousand, Dickens declares, will have the opportunity to read this text without prior contamination by the ‘‘most monstrous’’ of ‘‘misrepresentations.’’ It is as if Dickens can now see Jaggers’s point. Hysterical, unregulated language may entertain and amuse but will fail entirely to arrive at ‘‘justice.’’ Dickens seems to see himself as an analogue to Stephen Blackpool as a victim of mob injustice. The ‘‘righteous man’’ has been falsely attacked. In response to this language – a print language figured as a metaphorical voice, an infectious orality – Dickens addresses his fellow journalists and entreat[s] all my brethren (as they deem that they have reason to think well of me, and to know that I am a man who has ever been unaffectedly true to our common calling), to lend their aid to the dissemination of my present words . . . I most solemnly declare, then – and this I do, both in my own name and in my wife’s name – that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced, are abominably false. And that whosoever repeats one of them after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie, before Heaven and earth.

He counters the force of rumor with a call to the fraternal order of print culture and a rather quixotic brandishing of the power of domesticity. He asserts – in a manner reminiscent of Samuel Bamford’s call for election by ballot rather than by ‘‘mob gatherings . . . ruffianism . . . demagogueism . . . [and] canting’’ – the power of a written oath over wild rumor, and absolutely forbids the public repetition of any language without his assent.24 He condemns inaccurate verbal reporting and demands the proper reproduction performed by those journalists who count themselves as Dickens’s ‘‘brethren.’’ It is difficult to read this vow without thinking of the American publications of Dickens’s work from which he received no royalties, the unauthorized performances of Pickwick and Oliver Twist, the plagiarisms of his novels (Oliver Twiss and the like) – those various forms of public appropriation of his language. Now he takes a passionate stand against any such theft by declaring that ‘‘whosoever repeats’’ these rumors will be damned as a ‘‘false witness.’’ And by declaring his innocence in both his own and his wife’s name, Dickens asserts his married state, his location in a proper domesticity, as the ground of the veracity and authority of his writing. This, even though he had just separated permanently from the wife in whose name he makes the vow: the domesticity he brandishes is an altogether imaginary effect of writing.

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The Household Words letter suggests Dickens’s uneasy recognition that he occupied a vulnerable position in relation to the very public he had created. We can see in discussions during this period, by himself and others, a persistent vision of the author and his writing rendered passive and powerless in the face of the din of a surging mass audience. The sanctity of an inviolable space of domesticity began to seem increasingly crucial as the source of any persistent power for authorship within that Victorian mass culture which, invested with an alluring power of fictionmaking, appeared to possess an enviable force. Even as Dickens vilified the public language which threatened his reputation, he himself needed the power of exactly such language to assert his authorship. Dickens’s dilemma was that his own literary achievement relied less on the sober, and solemn, and truth-telling writing defined as an ‘‘oath’’ than on an energetic, Wopsle-like authorial performance hopelessly embroiled with rumor, gossip, and word of mouth. Mamie Dickens, in her 1885 memoir of her life as the famous author’s daughter, offers a first-hand account of her father’s working method. She describes his work as both a secluded personal activity and a paternal performance, requiring the presence of a mute daughter. It was at Tavistock House that one of his daughters, after an illness, was taken, at his request, to lie on the sofa in the study while he was at work. Of course this was considered a great honour, and of course she lay as quiet as a mouse. For some time there was no sound to be heard in the room but the rapid working of his pen on the paper, then suddenly he jumped up, looked at himself in the glass, rushed back to desk, then to the glass again, when presently he turned round and faced his daughter, staring at her, but not seeing her, and talking rapidly to himself, then once more back to his desk, where he remained writing until lunch time. (Mamie Dickens, Charles Dickens, p. 100)

In her description we see Dickens, first, as a professional gentleman alone at home, communicating with an imagined public through the practice of solitary literary work. But this description shifts abruptly to reveal Dickens as a performer overcome at once with self-regard and acute awareness of an audience. Looking at ‘‘himself in the glass,’’ he performs for himself and then for his daughter in a manner as hyperactive as she is docile. By talking to himself, he reveals the crucial function of vocal performance in his writing process, as he sounds out his characters’ speech patterns long before he would literalize this performance on a stage. ‘‘Staring at’’ Mamie but ‘‘not seeing her,’’ he reassures himself that she is there: mute, sick, ‘‘quiet as a mouse’’ and stretched ‘‘on the sofa.’’ This description of Dickens materializes the two poles between which his work vacillated: a frenzied speech

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performance and a place of repose drained of all productive energy. In this way, we might imagine, he sought to produce a spectacular performance and a purely receptive, passive reading. DICKENS’S READINGS: HOME AND STAGE

Anecdotal evidence of how Dickens was read in middle-class Victorian homes indicates that a new Dickens publication became the occasion for a ritual of a masculine authority defined by incompleteness and limitation. Such Dickensian masculine authority, as dramatized through oral readings, sought but always failed to mark out a safe domestic space in which language could be wholly owned and protected.25 Indeed, we might argue that Dickensian authority was defined by that very failure. Dickens’s writings became spectacular only at the cost of his proprietary control over language. And through the communal reading of his work, the middle-class family itself became infused with some of the performative power associated with his authorship. ‘‘In many middle-class homes,’’ George Ford writes, the arrival of a number was the signal for a family revel. In one home, the father’s custom was to seclude himself for an hour or two studying each number in order to be able to read it aloud to his large family afterwards, with some control over his laughter. During this interval, the family’s impatient anxiety to hear the new number was heightened by overhearing the father’s ‘‘apoplectic struggles’’ to attain a ‘‘decent gravity’’ and by his ‘‘occasional shouts.’’ (Ford, Dickens and His Readers, p. 8)

The middle-class father needed to ‘‘seclude’’ himself to prepare for reading. By shutting himself into a private space within the middle-class home, the reader confines the reading performance and so doubly domesticates it. The father’s subsequent reading to his family is a re-reading, a return to a text that, although just published, has become partially familiar even to his wife and children, who have secretly been listening in to the backstage rehearsal. In this manner, Dickens’s text becomes ‘‘household words’’ – already-read, already-known narratives – and the anarchic ‘‘shouts’’ can be understood simply as preparatory to the more composed performance that follows upon them. The careful management of the Dickens text creates an effect of an impressively deep reserve corresponding to the secluded space of study in which ‘‘irresistible’’ response is supposedly contained. Yet the distinctive power of this reading seems to derive in part from the permeability of that secluded space. The father struggles but fails to contain his physical response to Dickens’s writing, and the success of the subsequent

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official performance appears to owe a significant debt to the unofficial preshow teaser. The relationship between the two performances resembles that between the official Dickens text and the myriad spin-offs that he could never control. While the single author may aspire to unchallenged authority over language, the success of his text depends on performances of it to excite interest and generate ‘‘impatient anxiety to hear the new number.’’ The literary work can thus never be entirely or individually owned. What happened when Dickens himself occupied the place of the father reading aloud to his family?26 Dickens’s own ascent to the platform in 1858 – many years after much of his work had been ‘‘done to death’’ by amateur performers – constituted a vexed attempt to redefine his writing as private, domestic, and already read. Dickens’s most popular reading scripts came from works written decades earlier – Pickwick, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol; by choosing these works, Dickens defined his own authorial performance as a re-reading of familiar language, much like that of the middle-class father with the new Dickens number.27 We have considered Thomas Carlyle’s painful but ultimately very successful venture into public performance and lecturing in the late 1830s. The London Times claimed in 1868 that a major vogue for public readings began in 1844, and that since that time the practice had become universal: ‘‘‘Readers’ are abundant; there is not a literary institution that does not in the course of the year publish a programme of entertainments in which some plays or poems to be ‘read’ by some person of celebrity, general or local, do not hold a prominent place, and for the innocent amusement of the poor, ‘penny readings’ in the parish schoolrooms are now commonly encouraged by every clergyman who takes a practical interest in his flock’’ (‘‘Mr. Charles Dickens,’’ p. 10).28 In Thackeray and Dickens, The Times identifies two distinct practices of vocalizing literature. For Thackeray, public reading is itself ‘‘a means of publication,’’ the first presentation of a work to the public, while for Dickens reading aloud is a comforting return to and repetition of ‘‘household words’’ already known to the public: There was this particular attraction in Mr. Thackeray’s appearance as an elocutionist, that he adapted ‘‘readings’’ as means of publication, for it was not until after the power of exciting curiosity on the platform was supposed to be exhausted that his essays were presented through the ordinary medium of black and white. Not only were multitudes drawn to see a celebrated author read his own works, but they had also the opportunity of hearing new matter. Mr. Dickens, who, having long preceded Mr. Thackeray as a novelist, came many years after him as a public reader, has acted on principles directly opposite to that of the deceased humorist. The works which he reads are attractive, not

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because they acquaint the public with something not communicated before, but because they are already familiar as household words to every one who comes to hear them endowed with fresh vitality by the lips of the author. Every jest, every touch of humour or of pathos, is anticipated with delighted eagerness, and people are charmed to hear the oft-told tale told once by him to whom they are indebted for its existence. (‘‘Mr. Charles Dickens,’’ p. 10)

Dickens’s work, this writer suggests, is always already read, always already spoken, and read before spoken. Any performance is always a repetition of that well-worn script. Dickens’s performance therefore buttresses the authority of the official text. There is in one sense utterly no novelty in a performance whose charm resides in its familiarity. In his 1872 Charles Dickens as a Reader, Charles Kent sounds the same note: Characters and incidents, brought before us anew in the Reading, were all so cordially welcomed, – the former being such old friends, the latter so familiarly within our knowledge! Insomuch that many passages were, almost word for word, remembered by those who, nevertheless, listened as if curious to learn what might follow, yet who could readily, any one of them, have prompted the Reader, that is the Author himself, supposing by some rare chance he had happened, just for one moment, to be at fault. (Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, p. 98)

Dickens’s audience, having memorized his work, locate themselves in the same position as the family members who first overhear the father’s ‘‘secluded’’ reading and then submit to his performance. This event seems ultimately to become a ritual of willing submission to an infallible author/reader whose public authority derives from his link to a domestic scene. The performance is presented as simply an exact and faithful reproduction of the written text, given additional interest by that slight possibility that it might ‘‘just for one moment’’ diverge significantly from its original.29 But Dickens’s readings were also forays into a mass culture that could not really be convincingly represented as a collection of passive consumers. The respectable reader was as likely to see the audiences for Dickens’s performances as troubling versions of the ones that had coalesced around Pickwick, grown more unruly and demanding in the passage of time. The memoir of Dickens’s final tour manager, George Dolby – and what previous English author could ever have been imagined to require even one tour manager, let alone several? – recounts the crowd control measures required by a Dickens performance: Thus, in Edinburgh . . . many seatholders who should have attended the Reading on the first night, held aloof until the second, swelling the crowd on that night to

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an alarming extent . . . Hundreds poured into a hall already crowded to suffocation, amid rent garments, expostulations, threats, cries for ‘‘the manager,’’ and ‘‘Where is Mr. Dickens?’’ It was a surging, roaring sea that overflowed everything, even the platform on which Mr. Dickens was to read . . . It was the recurrence of such scenes, entailing much worry and anxiety, and no inconsiderable expenditure of physical strength and energy, which often at the commencement of a Reading left Mr. Dickens almost in a state of collapse. (Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, pp. 6–7)

The energy of Dickens’s mass readership, Dolby implies, instead of being safely dispersed throughout the nation, is bottled up within ‘‘a hall already crowded to suffocation.’’ The readings seem designed to perform the work of amassing public sentiment within a confined place. This proves no easy task, as even the line separating performer from his public – ‘‘the platform on which Mr. Dickens was to read’’ – is overwhelmed. The strain of trying to contain the bodies of his audience within an enclosed space leaves Dickens’s own body ‘‘almost in a state of collapse,’’ signaling the physical energy required to deliver a popular reading. Dickens’s readings constituted a final attempt to capture and appropriate the energy of his audience. This energy is related to the power Bamford glimpsed in Henry Hunt’s voice and face, the force Gaskell and Disraeli heard in the voices of working-class protesters and believed should be placed under the control of a novelist. The portrait I am offering of the energy and power of the Victorian mass audience is at odds with one familiar portrayal of that audience as inert, passive, and subject to canned emotion. The tone of John Ruskin’s comments on Dickens’s audience, for example, should be familiar from later denunciations of mass culture. In 1871, the year after Dickens’s death as well as the passage of the Education Act mandating popular education, Ruskin responded to a request to deliver a lecture thus: I find the desire of audiences to be audiences only becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everyone wants to hear – nobody to read – nobody to think; to be excited for an hour – and, if possible, amused . . . [T]he miserable death of your Dickens, when he might have been writing blessed books till he was eighty, but for the pestiferous demands of the mob, is a very solemn warning to us all, if we would take it. (Ruskin, ‘‘The Value of Lectures,’’ p. 517)

In complaining of a mob who want to be ‘‘excited for an hour – and, if possible, amused,’’ Ruskin condemns popular reading. By the time of Dickens’s death we see a sea change in Victorian conceptions of authorship and literary reception, a change in which his own career played a significant part. Having become the very embodiment of a new mode of literary

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reception, Dickens came to represent one possible fate of the literary author in an age of a mass reading which Ruskin depicts as at once destructive and passive – possessing power but no real agency. Ruskin implies that ‘‘the multitude’’ turn from reading to listening out of laziness and a tendency to seek intellectual shortcuts – along the lines, perhaps, of listening to an audiobook while jogging, rather than buckling down to the work of actual reading. But my examination of Dickens’s career-long engagement with his readership suggests, I hope, the limitations of any such view. The representation of mass reading as no more than a thoughtless form of consumption is itself a strategic gesture of delegitimation on the part of professional intellectuals. I have demonstrated that Dickens struggled continually in his effort both to tap into the powerful energies of his performative readership and to exercise his own power over it. He boasted that his performances could transform the surging crowds into a form of currency flowing directly at one of his employees: ‘‘You will be glad to know that . . . a torrent of five hundred shillings bore Arthur away, pounded him against the wall, flowed on to the seats over his body, scratched him, and damaged his best dress suit’’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 619). If the money flowed uncontrollably, the audience could be rendered silent and immobile at will: ‘‘It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand’’ (quoted in Kaplan, Charles Dickens, p. 383), Dickens commented on the thrill of performance. Somewhat less ominously, he wrote to John Forster, ‘‘As to the truth of the Readings, I cannot tell you what the demonstrations of personal regard and respect are. How the densest and most uncomfortably-packed crowd will be hushed in an instant when I show my face’’ (Letters, vol. VIII, p. 676). These performances, Dickens seemed to believe, demonstrated his own ability to confront the ‘‘roaring sea’’ of a mass readership and to render it as mute, passive, and receptive as Mamie Dickens on the couch – to force a crowd, however ‘‘uncomfortablypacked,’’ to submit to self-restraint. If Dickens could do this, he would – like Mill or Ruskin – have succeeded in defining the Victorian mass readership as altogether passive. And he would, in a sense, have fulfilled Carlyle’s dream of the intellectual ‘‘step[ping] forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power’’ (Carlyle, On Heroes, pp. 142–3): by confronting the crowd and silencing it with personal charisma, Dickens demonstrates a new or revived power for the individual author, for whom the book is a pulpit for powerful utterance. But Dickens’s particular strength as an analyst of Victorian culture was his refusal to simplify his audience or to deny its own power.

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Dolby’s reference to Dickens’s collapse seems to make proleptic reference to his eventual death on his final reading tour, in which the notorious ‘‘murder reading,’’ ‘‘Sikes and Nancy,’’ from Oliver Twist, formed the centerpiece.30 There is a logical inevitability, a sense of expectation fulfilled, in this performance, of which one observer commented, ‘‘The public had been looking out for a sensation these fifty years, and now they have got it’’ (Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 351). This declaration evokes the craze for the ‘‘sensation novels’’ of Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, and suggests that Dickens’s readings were understood as a way of managing the ‘‘sensational’’ response to literature with which Dickens had been, from the first, associated. Where the Times article had claimed that Dickens’s readings successfully defined his fiction as familiar ‘‘household words,’’ Dolby suggests that the readings might be seen as stagings of the spectacle of the text overwhelmed by the unruly ‘‘roaring sea’’ of the audience they invoked. With the ‘‘Sikes and Nancy’’ reading, Dickens seemed finally to give the audience the ‘‘sensation’’ they desired, as if in order to prove once and for all his ability to make the energies of that audience submit to the will of the individual author. Dickens had contemplated reading this piece for at least five years but had hitherto considered it too ‘‘horrible’’ to perform in front of an audience (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 923). So concerned was he about the violent response his performance might elicit that he conducted what his friend Charles Kent described as ‘‘a sort of experimental rehearsal of the last and most daring of all these vividly dramatic Readings by the popular Novelist’’ (Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, p. 253). He invited ‘‘somewhere about fifty of the critics, artists, and literary men of London’’ to a ‘‘rehearsal’’ performance of the reading, prior to its public presentation. This audience was ostensibly invited in order to ‘‘advise’’ Dickens. ‘‘It was a very full-dress effort, with printed tickets, a distinguished audience . . . a feast laid on to assist them in their advisory functions – and some members of the press’’ (Collins, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxii). Dickens reported that different members of the audience spontaneously made the same observation about the reading’s ‘‘irresistible’’ power to spread the ‘‘contagion of hysteria’’: Next morning, [the Rev. William] Harness . . . writing to me about it, and saying it was ‘‘a most amazing and terrific thing,’’ added, ‘‘but I am bound to tell you that I had an almost irresistible impulse upon me to scream, and that, if anyone had cried out, I am certain I should have followed.’’ He had no idea that, on the night, Priestly, the great ladies’ doctor, had taken me aside and said: ‘‘My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place.’’ (Dickens, Selected Letters, p. 172)

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This boastful comment suggests that we might best understand this special, semi-private ‘‘Experimental Reading’’ (Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, p. 259) as an effort to present the work to a band of professional men before its revelation to a hysterical ‘‘public.’’ This public, the doctor’s remark suggests, cannot be trusted to control its own utterances; if one woman ‘‘cries out,’’ then the entire audience might fall into hysteria. The threat of impromptu utterance cannot be ruled out, it is implied, but professionals should be able to manage that threat. The ‘‘private’’ pre-reading, with press invited, served as a theatrical performance within a masculine domestic environment, in contrast to the ‘‘sensation’’ later offered to a hysterical mass audience. The ‘‘murder reading’’ of 1870 might thus be understood as an elaborate enactment of the competition between these two Victorian public spheres, and a demonstration of the safe appropriation of the second by the first. On closer examination, however, the distinction both between the two spheres and between the two kinds of reader begins to break down. The ‘‘great ladies’ doctor’’ warns Dickens of the danger of ‘‘a contagion of hysteria’’ among women, yet the Reverend admits that he himself nearly caught the screaming bug. The experimental, pre-public reading, apparently designed to demonstrate the deft management of vocal reading by male professionals, led instead to a different conclusion: that the threat of an eruption of vocal hysteria was in fact fundamental to Dickens’s authorial power. But what of Dickens’s own position within this performance? The trick of the ‘‘murder reading’’ would be to perform popular sensation in the ‘‘open air’’ of publicity, yet to be able to retreat from it into a space of authorial domesticity – following something like the logic of, for example, Gaskell’s transformation of the frightening scene of the fire in Mary Barton into the enclosed storytelling of Mary’s narration to her father. Dickens sometimes described his reading tours as a necessary, but problematic, separation from the calm of the ‘‘quiet room and desk’’ of the author’s home: ‘‘I cannot deny that I shall be heartily glad when it is all over, and that I miss the thoughtfulness of my quiet room and desk’’ (Letters, vol. VIII, pp. 623–4). He immediately implied, however, that his authorship required that ‘‘thoughtfulness’’ and domesticity to be infused with the power attained by immersion in ‘‘restless’’ publicity: ‘‘But perhaps it is best for me not to have it just now, and to wear and toss my Storm away – . . . in this restless manner.’’ Dickens would, perhaps, hope to be able to shift at will between ‘‘thoughtfulness’’ and publicity, ‘‘secluded’’ interior space and the sensation of a public audience. Charles Kent describes just this sort of mobility in

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Dickens’s final performance, shortly before his death: the ‘‘prolonged thunder of applause that followed him to his secluded room at the back of the platform, whither he had withdrawn alone, recalled him after the lapse of some minutes into the presence of his last audience’’ (Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, pp. 270–1). By infusing the work of a novelist with the violent performance of ‘‘sensation,’’ Dickens incorporated the power of his audience: ‘‘As for the Author’s embodiment of Sikes . . . it was only necessary to hear that infuriated voice, and watch the appalling blows dealt by his imaginary bludgeon in the perpetration of the crime, to realize the force, the power, the passion, informing the creative mind of the Novelist’’ (Charles Dickens as a Reader, p. 257). It is as if the ‘‘Novelist’’ and his writing have appropriated the force of public reading in all its ‘‘appalling’’ power. Yet the ‘‘Novelist,’’ once having given a public performance of ‘‘the power, the passion’’ of his art, must be able to withdraw into ‘‘the secluded room at the back of the platform,’’ just as the father reading Dickens aloud must be able to shift back and forth between his solitary study and his audience in the drawing-room.31 But if Dickens indeed hoped to perform a violent sensation only in order to demonstrate the ease of re-incorporating it into a domestic space overseen by an author, he failed dramatically. Dolby wrote that in performing the ‘‘murder reading,’’ Dickens worked himself up to a pitch of excitement which rendered him so utterly prostrate, that when he went to his retiring-room (which he reached with difficulty), he was forced to lie on the sofa for some moments, before he could regain strength sufficient to utter a word . . . These shocks to the nerves invariably recurred later on in the evening, either in the form of great hilarity or a desire to be once again on the platform, or in a craving to do the work over again. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, pp. 385–6)

The desire to repeat the violent enactment of the reading had become for Dickens so physically overwhelming that he could reach his ‘‘retiringroom’’ only ‘‘with difficulty.’’ And when he did manage to leave behind the place of hysterical performance for a refuge of domestic interiority, he seemed there to resemble much less the powerfully domestic father than the inert daughter stretched passively, exhausted and silenced, on the sofa: not Charles but Mamie Dickens. The ‘‘sensation’’ of the mass readership had rebounded damagingly on Dickens, whose own body was electrified and stricken by the very surges of desire and performative ‘‘craving’’ over which he had hoped to demonstrate his triumphant mastery.

CHAPTER

5

Unuttered: withheld speech in Jane Eyre and Villette

Charlotte Bronte¨, visiting London following the publication of Jane Eyre and Shirley, attended a party held in her honor by William Thackeray. His daughter Lady Ritchie explains how guests, conflating the author with her most famous protagonist, felt themselves invited ‘‘to meet Jane Eyre’’: [O]ne day Mrs. Proctor asked me if I knew what had happened once when my father had invited a party to meet Jane Eyre at his house. It was one of the dullest evenings she had ever spent in her life, she said. And then with a good deal of humour she described the situation – the ladies who had all come expecting so much delightful conversation, and the gloom and the constraint, and how, finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone on to his club. (Bronte¨, Shakespeare Head, p, 50)

Greeted as a literary celebrity indistinguishable from her most famous fictional creation, Bronte¨ retreated into near-silence: ‘‘It was a gloomy and silent evening. Every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. Miss Bronte¨ retired to the sofa in the study and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess’’ (Shakespeare Head, p. 49). Boredom and disappointment are inevitable when the author of a great novel turns out to have nothing to say, no ‘‘brilliant conversation’’ to offer her lionizing fans. The silence of an author whose book seemed to promise such powerful speech produces a mild form of social panic, at least on the part of the host. Where the party guests expected a strong personal presence to correspond to Bronte¨’s fiction, they encountered instead a frustrating vacancy, a retreat and refusal to engage. Yet ultimately Bronte¨’s radical disengagement seemed to acquire a surprising power, ‘‘overwhelming’’ Thackeray and routing him from his own home. What is the secret of this perverse power, the aggressive force of passivity or personal withdrawal? I want to argue that it emerges from a certain kind of writing that flatly denies its origin in an embodied voice. Thackeray’s guests expected that Bronte¨, 122

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appearing as ‘‘Jane Eyre,’’ would perform her authorship by providing speech continuous with her written fiction. By withholding that speech the party guests desired, Bronte¨ carved out a space between speech and writing, and suggested that it is in that space that we must understand her authorial work.1 In Jane Eyre and Villette, Bronte¨ develops a paradigm of authorship in which fictional narration is associated not with the speech of an embodied and personalized author figure, but with a new kind of writing to be understood as opening up spaces of language drained of personality and people. The writing gestured toward by Jane Eyre, and more explicitly represented in Villette, strongly rejects the Victorian association of narratives with an embodied speaker, and instead generates a form of interiority belonging not to an individual but to the ‘‘thousands,’’ the ‘‘millions’’ – of a mass readership only recently made accessible by shifts in Victorian publishing practices and the growth of national literacy we have examined in the context of Dickens’s career.2 These novels reach out tentatively to a new kind of reader – one imaginable only as an abstraction and not as a potentially physically present audience – and to a new narrative form suited to address it. Bronte¨’s novels suggest that writing best reaches a mass audience when it is severed from voice and personality, and instead inhabits a sphere of withheld speech, extensive revision, and impersonality or denial of self-nomination. What kind of authority and authorship was enabled and defined by Bronte¨’s particular relationship to the public sphere? Michael Warner argues that in the eighteenth century, ‘‘the imaginary reference point of the public was constructed through an understanding of print . . . In print . . . one surrendered one’s utterance to an audience that was by definition indefinite . . . the consciousness of an abstract audience became a badge of distinction’’ (Warner, ‘‘The Mass Public,’’ pp. 379–80). By the use of ‘‘rhetorics of disincorporation’’ (‘‘The Mass Public,’’ p. 382), Warner argues, writers could claim a‘‘self-abstracting disinterestedness,’’ a disembodied authority specifically generated by print. Yet such authoritative selfabstraction, Warner argues, was always ‘‘implicitly – even explicitly – white, male, literate, and propertied’’ (‘‘The Mass Public,’’ p. 382); to disembody successfully, one needed to have a certain type of body to begin with. Very much like Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere itself, Warner’s essay analyzes the fate of the classic bourgeois eighteenth-century public sphere in mass culture. But where Habermas laments the decline of the public sphere in twentieth-century mass culture,

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Warner embraces the ‘‘other forms of publicity’’ (‘‘The Mass Public,’’ p. 385) that have complicated the public sphere by embodying it. ‘‘In earlier varieties of the public sphere,’’ Warner argues, ‘‘it was important that images of the body not figure importantly in public discourse.’’ But ‘‘[w]here printed public discourse formerly relied on a rhetoric of abstract disembodiment, visual media – including print – now display bodies for a range of purposes: admiration, identification, appropriation, scandal, and so forth.’’ If the subject of the bourgeois public sphere is disembodied and abstract, the subject of mass culture is re-embodied with a vengeance. ‘‘To be public in the West,’’ Warner concludes, ‘‘is to have an iconicity’’ (‘‘The Mass Public,’’ p. 385). Where, one might wonder, might we situate Charlotte Bronte¨ within this eighteenth-century/twentieth-century dichotomy? Warner’s distinction, even if it says little explicitly about the long gap constituted by the nineteenth century, can point us toward a better understanding of the Victorian public sphere.3 As we’ve seen, beginning in the 1840s, male authors increasingly took to the stage to perform their writing, thereby incorporating and personalizing the public sphere with their celebrity bodies and voices. Clearly, the form of authorship Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and hosts of lesser performing authors achieved was something very different from the disembodiment Warner argues eighteenth-century writers sought in print. According to Warner’s dichotomy, we might place Dickens on the side of an emergent form of mass publicity, Bronte¨ on the side of a residual publicity based entirely in texts and seeking to deny or conceal the authoring body. But Bronte¨’s work should, I think, be understood instead in terms of a specifically Victorian dynamic which Warner’s (or Habermas’s) distinctions do not fully explain. In the context of the shifts in print culture signaled by Dickens’s and Thackeray’s performances, Bronte¨’s insistence on a disembodied, depersonalized authorship does not so much reach back toward an eighteenth-century paradigm as seek to forge a new one. If the body of the author in an earlier print culture had to be both disincorporated and yet white and male, as Warner argues, Bronte¨ seems to struggle in her work to make a space in the public sphere for a new kind of female authorship. Bronte¨’s reticent stance, I argue, seeks to take advantage of the explosive potential of the mass culture of the 1840s and 1850s without presenting her writing as a form of personalized voice. Bronte¨ hints at the possibilities of a form of writing which will generate meanings apart from an embodied, speaking author and thereby effectively reach a new kind of mass readership. ‘‘[L]et me be content with seclusion – it has its advantages’’ (Bronte¨, Shakespeare Head, p. 17), Bronte¨ writes in an 1849

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letter; these ‘‘advantages’’ – the professional benefits of an authorial practice that favors the withholding of speech and personality from writing – will be the subject of this chapter. AN INVALUABLE STORYTELLER

The Victorian novel of the 1840s and 1850s, led by the example of Thackeray and Dickens, claimed for itself the status of an inscribed voice. Charlotte Bronte¨’s work, however, even if it can sometimes seem to embrace this association of fiction with voice, in other ways distinctly evades the imperative to make fiction speak. Indeed, it implicitly argues that the gendered construction of this imperative forces women writers to embody and vocalize their writing when disembodiment might best serve their interests. Philip Collins, in his discussion of Victorian authors’ ascent to the platforms of public lectures and readings, includes Bronte¨ among those Victorian women writers whose ‘‘sex would have kept them off such platforms, even if they had no other disadvantages in terms of physique, temperament, and social position’’ (Collins, Reading Aloud, p. 9).4 This prohibition was in fact a constitutive factor in the Victorian literary marketplace. This chapter will, through a reading of Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre and Villette, argue that Bronte¨, in resisting the equation of novel-writing with speech, comes up with a more effective means by which women writers could participate in the public print sphere and attain the ‘‘full reward’’ of professional success in that domain. Contemporary critics still remain so invested in the idea that writing has a ‘‘voice’’ linking it metaphorically with speech that they sometimes reestablish the very cultural logic that Bronte¨ resisted. By recognizing the gendered relationship between speech and authorship within which she worked, we can begin to understand how she modified that relationship. I want to argue that Bronte¨ rejects a model of authorship based on voice and embodied personality, instead embracing the material possibilities of print. But I do not wish to be misunderstood as locating Bronte¨, all too familiarly, on the side of a privacy that contrasts her work with that of her brasher male counterparts, Thackeray and Dickens. To suggest that Bronte¨ rejects public voice for a more withdrawn writing immediately generates familiar images of the female author confined to the recesses of heart and home. The kind of authorship I have in mind is not only withdrawn but also anonymous, or at least impersonal, and prone to extensive revision. There is, in other words, nothing especially personal or spontaneous about it. What is more, this authorship self-consciously addresses a mass

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readership, a dispersed, necessarily abstract group scattered throughout an expansive public sphere. In Bronte¨’s work, the interiority of writing therefore provides the means of a new form of publicity – a publicity obtained without showing one’s face or raising one’s voice.5 Bronte¨’s fiction is thus disembodied and impersonal and yet able to address an ‘‘invisible’’ mass audience. In the 1840s and 1850s, Thackeray and Dickens performed their work on stage as if to say that fiction published for a mass audience was really not that different from the vocal utterances of storytellers, men present to an appreciative audience. Bronte¨ emphatically rejects such a model, suggesting that writing that renounces the fiction of the storyteller will reach a mass readership more effectively. Charlotte Bronte¨’s early career as Currer Bell is generally regarded as a phase she passed through on the way to full authorship, an unfortunate moment of self-concealment required by the sexism of the Victorian literary marketplace. One recent critic, Sharon Marcus, offers an alternative reading, however, in contending that Jane gains the power of authorship by ‘‘abstracting’’ herself into signs bearing social power within a modern print culture (Marcus, ‘‘Profession,’’ pp. 213–17). In the place of the warmth, communal experience, and personal charisma associated with the figure of the storyteller, Bronte¨ offers this readership the gifts of a professional writer: the exercise of good taste, strong interpretation, revision, and physical disembodiment. I argued in chapter 1 that the logic of the storyteller has traveled down from Victorian culture to our own in the form of an unacknowledged myth regarding voice’s martyrdom and resurrection. Bronte¨ criticism, in particular, has become deeply invested in a vision of the author as a storyteller, a writer whose charisma is closely related to her suppressed but powerful voice. A narrative of imprisonment and escape associates Bronte¨’s agency with an utterance confined or thwarted. This approach leads critics to overlook how sharply Bronte¨ rejected the storyteller paradigm established by male authors like Thackeray and Dickens. Such a mistake was encouraged early on, when Elizabeth Gaskell described Charlotte Bronte¨’s relationship with her schoolmates as that of an invaluable storyteller, frightening them almost out of her wits as they lay in bed. On one occasion the effect was such that she was led to scream out loud, and Miss Wooler, coming upstairs, found that one of the listeners had been seized with violent palpitations, in consequence of the excitement produced by Charlotte’s story. (Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte¨, p. 133)

Such an account implies that the roots of Bronte¨’s novels lie in a storytelling practice associated with vocal screams and palpitations. Carla

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Kaplan, in one of the most interesting recent readings of Jane Eyre, takes a slightly different approach, insisting that ‘‘conversation is the ‘paradise of union’ to which Jane aspires. A romance with conversation is at the heart of Jane Eyre’’ (Kaplan, ‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 8). But it is too hasty, I would respond, to presume that Bronte¨’s purported childhood model of telling stories to an ‘‘audience’’ of friends, or engaging in intense conversation with them, continued to provide the adult novelist with her method. Indeed, we should not be too quick to follow Gaskell’s lead and define even Bronte¨’s juvenile mode of textual production as one of oral storytelling. After all, why were the Angrian sagas so utterly written, in forms as divorced from speech as mock-newspapers? The sisters ‘‘brought out a ‘magazine’ once a month, and wished it to look as like print as possible’’ (Life of Charlotte Bronte¨, p. 130), Gaskell tells us: even as children, the Bronte¨s defined themselves less as story tellers than as text printers. Indeed, I would suggest, Kaplan’s model participates in the very logic that Jane Eyre powerfully questions. Kaplan’s attention to the significance of voice in Jane Eyre ingeniously rescues us from a taken-for-granted understanding of Bronte¨ as producing novelistic ‘‘inwardness’’ and privacy. Kaplan problematizes Jane’s yearning for conversation with an equal partner by pointing out that contemporary critics imagine themselves to be the conversational partners Jane desires. ‘‘With the childhood declaration, ‘Speak I must’ Jane resolves to narrate her own story, to explain and vindicate her life, to exercise her voice and participate in the ‘joyous conversational murmur’ ’’ (‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 5), Kaplan begins her essay. Her analysis of Jane Eyre as a developing romance of conversation convincingly connects the novel’s beginning and conclusion into a coherent telos. There is no denying that Jane, having declared her desire to ‘‘speak’’ in a context where her speech seems to be either ignored or forcibly repressed, continues to seek the opportunity to exercise her voice throughout the novel. When she explains, ‘‘we talk, I believe, all day long’’ (Bronte¨, Jane Eyre, p. 475) at the novel’s conclusion, she provides an utterly satisfying conclusion for readers who have learned to long, with Jane, for fulfilling conversation and speech: a satisfying conclusion, at least, for readers and critics who have deeply internalized the association of unfettered, expressive speech with emotional fulfillment. But Kaplan errs, I believe – and errs in a manner I find symptomatic of Bronte¨ criticism’s ongoing investment in a vision of the Victorian novelist as a would-be vocal speaker – in then declaring that this ‘‘story of . . . [Jane’s] own longing to talk’’ is also ‘‘the story of the growth of a writer, someone who can extend the gesture – or invitation, if you will – of her own, assured voice to an unknown and

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unpredictable other (the reader)’’ (‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 9). Bronte¨ indicates rather that a woman must abandon the conceit that authorship is equivalent to speaking if she wants to exercise the social power of an author. Indeed, Bronte¨ suggests that ‘‘the story of the growth of a writer’’ is also the story of the abandonment of a fantasy of speech as self-expression and of the metaphor of the author as possessing a ‘‘voice.’’ Jane Eyre begins with Jane’s exclusion from the very sort of domestic speech community that Dickens offered as the imaginary scene of his own narration: ‘‘Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fire-side, and with her darlings about her . . . looked perfectly happy’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 7). With children ‘‘clustered round their mama’’ like satellites around a planet, the Reeds embody an inviting possibility of domestic unity. Appearing in the first page of a Victorian novel, the scene clearly represents an idealized tableau of narrative’s reception. In order to understand that what Jane is being excluded from is the social ground of language as the vehicle of family feeling, one must bring to this scene the insistent Victorian linkage between domesticity and narrative. ‘‘Be seated somewhere,’’ Mrs. Reed commands her; ‘‘and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 8). Those who associate speech with personal fulfillment would have to take this injunction as a wholly negative blockage of all that someone like Jane might desire: self-expression and fellowship. But in fact Jane seems to find considerable pleasure in her silent solitude, ‘‘shrined in double retirement.’’ A small breakfast-room adjoined the dining-room: I slipped in there. It contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume . . . Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day.

Jane is describing herself in terms similar to those with which she describes the book itself. ‘‘Contained’’ in a series of enclosures, protected by a pane of glass, Jane as she reads very much resembles a prized volume. It is in this space of textuality and reading, where the self becomes understood as a text, I will argue, that Jane finds her greatest satisfaction. While it has become customary to interpret Jane Eyre as a novel charting Jane’s progress away from such isolated immersion in books toward the warm presence of speech, what we actually encounter, I believe, is Jane’s gradual recognition that happiness was always as close at hand as Bewick’s History of British Birds. As Jane reads, Bronte¨ offers a comparison between book and experience that might support the claim that Bronte¨ sees books as transcriptions of voice, relics of the more primary pleasures of speech and storytelling:

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Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads. (Bronte¨, Jane Eyre, p. 9)

Jane forgets her sorrows – her expulsion from the happy domestic scene of closeness and conversation – in the ‘‘profoundly interesting’’ pictures and stories contained in the book, a book which ‘‘tells’’ a story. The pleasure she takes in these pictures seems to derive from primary memories of speech: they are ‘‘as interesting’’ as ‘‘the tales Bessie sometimes narrated’’ and, no doubt, as those Bronte¨ herself told to her schoolmates. This passage turns on the Victorian conceit that underlying print are the vocal tales of pre-modernity which soothe us like childhood narratives received from the lips of mothers and governesses. Reading a book in solitude, it would appear that Jane returns for solace to memories of a linkage between gratifying speech and physical proximity. Bessie’s improvised tales offered an invitation to listeners to draw near, and granted language a warmth of vocal presence that is now denied Jane. Jane’s mental drift, from the pages of a book to memories of a woman’s speech, makes perfect sense in the context of Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of the early nineteenth-century links between text and voice. In the ‘‘metaphysics of silent reading’’ that overtook Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century, Kittler argues, a ‘‘voice, as pure as it is transcendental, rises from between the lines . . . The reader is no longer reading; in his joy he encounters a phantasmagorical Nature-body’’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 65) that is no other than the vocal Mother herself. ‘‘Around 1800 a new type of book began to appear, one that delegated to mothers first the physical and mental education of children, then their alphabetization’’ (Discourse Networks, p. 27). [C[hildren, instead of attending to books or philanthropic letter games, were all eyes and ears for the instrumental presentations of this mouth . . . The Mother’s Mouth thus freed children from books . . . The phonetic experiment gave rise to a psychology or psychagogy that made possible the complete consuming of texts. Only the mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the optic form of the letter. And when later in life children picked up a book, they would not see letters but hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice between the lines. (Discourse Networks, p. 34)

Kittler allows us to see how a ‘‘metaphysics of silent reading’’ could paradoxically rely on an imaginary identification of writing, letters on a

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page, with a longed-for voice. New methods and ideologies of education rendered full literacy in standardized written national languages a prerequisite for citizenship, and delegitimized non-standard dialects. ‘‘The Mother’s Voice’’ – an imaginary national norm of pure utterance – ‘‘assumed the task of establishing . . . the purity and universality of standardized high idioms’’ (Discourse Networks, pp. 36–7). At the same time, these new pure national languages, notwithstanding their actual status as systems of writing, were misrecognized as orality, as the emanation from mothers’ mouths. So even as oral dialects were delegitimized, standard print-based languages were infused with the aura of childhood memories of language instruction from the maternal voice. Thus a cultural shift toward the ever-greater centrality of writing systems within the nineteenth-century public sphere advertised itself as a shift into orality.6 Voice becomes a kind of alibi: if writing is a form of voice, a human emanation, then it cannot be oppressive or dominating. This contradiction profoundly shaped the Victorian novel, which represents itself, in addressing a mass readership, as a transcription of some preceding and more natural utterance. Given this projection of a vocal origin for the meaning of written words, it should not surprise us that many Victorian novelists felt compelled to present their work on stage as ‘‘readings.’’ It should be noted, however, that female Victorian writers were not likely to be well served by the fantasy of language’s basis in oral performance. When language is thought to derive from the archaic speech of pre-modern mothers and governesses, modern women are likely to find themselves at once idealized and professionally disabled. Jane’s reading seems to confirm the association of written texts with an originary voice, as Jane associates the text she reads with Bessie’s narration of tales ‘‘taken from old fairy tales and older ballads.’’ Originating in folk legend and even older lyric ballads, the writing of modern books might seem mere supplements to a deep fundamental orality. Bronte¨ suggests this genealogy of narrative: in the modern moment, a girl reads a book silently. What she experiences depends on her recollections of early childhood stories told by a governess. These stories, in turn, derive from ‘‘old fairy tales’’ and even ‘‘older’’ ballads, which suggests an origin for modern literature receding back ever further to pre-modern vocal utterance. But Jane continues: ‘‘or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.’’ As her mind wanders from the book in her hands to the childhood memories of a governess narrating ancient ballads, a new or ‘‘later’’ awareness suddenly intervenes. There is another source of the narrative, one encountered in Richardson and John

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Wesley’s abridgment of Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality. This addition (‘‘or’’) overthrows the originary status of speech, suggesting that, as Derrida would put it, ‘‘language is first . . . writing’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 37). If Bessie’s tales originate in modern novels rather than ancient ballads, then the pleasure of the text comes from the printed page rather than from the mother’s or governess’s voice. Bronte¨’s insistence that Bessie’s tales emerge out of modern print culture begs consideration in the context of the emerging nineteenth-century study of folklore. As David Vincent points out, those oral tales and songs collected by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folklorists as authentic remnants of a vanishing indigenous culture more often than not came from publications: The constant movement backward and forward between the oral and the printed greatly complicated the work of the folklorists, though few realized just how impure most of their material was. Recent research suggests that as much as four-fifths of the folksongs gathered in the major early-twentieth-century surveys ultimately derived from published broadsides. (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 199)

John D. Niles observes, similarly, that ‘‘[m]ost of the ballad texts that are on display in the ‘late medieval’ section of the Norton or Oxford anthologies of English literature are literary inventions of the age of Percy, Burns, and Scott’’ (Niles, Homo Narrans, p. 150). But Bronte¨ displays no dismay at the discovery of print or ‘‘literature’’ at the origin of what may have at first seemed to be a pure product of voice. Indeed, she wittily invokes a reader’s desire for an authentic voice or a pristine ‘‘primary orality,’’ only to undermine that desire. ‘‘With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon,’’ Jane continues. She finds happiness, albeit an unconventional happiness (‘‘in my way’’), in a reading of texts which are based on other texts, which may in turn be based on other texts. There is no voice in narratives that have been passed on from novel to novel, silent reader to silent reader, bypassing the storyteller or speaker. She who can be happy in such a textual realm need fear nothing but interruption by those voices that resent such immersion in silent reading: ‘‘ ‘Boh! Madame Mope!’ cried the voice of John Reed’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 9).

AN EROTICS OF HERMENEUTICS

In order to read Bronte¨’s novel as the story of a young woman becoming an author figure by discovering her ‘‘voice,’’ it was necessary for Carla Kaplan

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to deemphasize the importance of written texts in Jane Eyre. At the novel’s beginning, Kaplan suggests, Jane is someone who witnesses truly satisfying conversation among others, but who has not yet herself located ‘‘an audience with whom it would be possible to satisfy the imperatives of ‘true conversation’ ’’ (Kaplan, ‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 12). Kaplan thus allows a characteristic slippage between Jane’s speech and Bronte¨’s writing. Just as Jane looks on at two women speaking and yearns for such intimacy, Kaplan suggests, so Bronte¨ imagines a possible readership for her novel as a listening ‘‘audience,’’ a partner in conversation. We can observe this slippage in Kaplan’s reading of the scene in which Jane observes Helen Burns and Miss Temple engaged in conversation: ‘‘They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past; of countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at . . . Helen she held a little longer than me’’ (quoted in ‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 12; ellipses Kaplan’s). Only by skipping over a crucial element of this scene can Kaplan read it as the objectification of an ‘‘erotics of talk’’ from which Jane is excluded and which she will spend the rest of the novel trying to achieve. This is the passage eliminated in Kaplan’s citation: they spoke of books: how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of Veneration expanding at every sounding line. ( Jane Eyre, p. 76)

To render this romance with writing as a romance of conversation alone, Kaplan must erase the books from this scene. Jane’s description of Bessie’s tales at first implied the primacy of voice, only to reveal that voice follows and depends on writing. So here Bronte¨ initially suggests that sustaining female conversation comes only from personal experience, only to go on to indicate that it is in fact an encounter with books that produces the best talk. Indeed, Helen and Miss Temple’s ‘‘erotics of talk’’ climaxes in a pedagogical scene of Latin, a language transmitted entirely through written texts. This scene may be powerfully erotic, but its payoff occurs when Miss Temple, ‘‘taking a book from the shelf,’’ bids Helen to ‘‘read and construe’’ as Jane looks on in excited admiration. It is not just a dazzling conversation about ‘‘nations and times past’’ and ‘‘secrets of nature’’ that attracts Jane, it would seem, but a process of pedagogic instruction mediated through the text of a silent language. Admittedly, the fact that what arouses Jane is a vocal performance – the Latin lesson – and not a silent reading complicates

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my own reading. We have seen, however, that writing tends to provide the basis for the most moving vocal exchanges: voice very often, even as it passes itself off as autonomous, achieves the effect of natural spontaneity in negotiation with print and writing, or as a secondary effect of writing. Jane Eyre mobilizes the emotional associations of the voice in order to turn writing – that tool of the modern bureaucratic state, of professional practice – into novel-writing. ‘‘Then her soul sat on her lips,’’ Jane says, describing Helen’s eloquence, ‘‘and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 76). This is one of Jane Eyre’s most important questions: ‘‘from what source’’ does the power of speech come? Most modern readers quickly assume that the source must be the interior domain which harbors memories of childhood stories and from which speech emerges spontaneously. But Bronte¨ makes clear that Helen’s eloquence comes instead from reading. With the Rivers sisters, Jane seems to find true satisfaction in the exchange of speech: ‘‘There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time – the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 368). But here too, we find, Bronte¨ positions such pleasure as an effect of reading. Having extolled the Riverses’ love for their home and nature, Jane dwells on their superior literacy: They were both more accomplished and better read than I was: but with what eagerness I followed in the path of knowledge they had trodden before me. I devoured the books they lent me: then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I had perused during the day. ( Jane Eyre, p. 369)

Here as in the novel’s first scene, Jane finds pleasure in a book, and in the exercise of taste associated with literary interpretation. Silent reading of written texts comes first (‘‘during the day’’), and the erotic pleasure of conversation second (‘‘in the evening’’). There is pleasure in speech, conversation, voice, but it is a secondary pleasure, Bronte¨ suggests, one based in writing. The famous scene of Mr. Brocklehurst’s public denunciation of Jane as a liar and the thrill of her subsequent vindication dramatizes the dangers of embodied speech: in this case, danger posed by a male authority figure to a silenced girl. But Bronte¨ suggests that, counter-intuitively for Jane, she may best find justice not by breaking the silence enforced on her by masculine speech with speech of her own, but by mastering forms of communication based less in speech than in silence. Jane’s triumph over Brocklehurst suggests that justice for women, in a culture where men control the most overt forms of power, must be found in the realm of print, where personal character is defined apart from physical presence,7 and also that women

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may empower themselves by redefining personal identity in relation to an invisible domain of a mass readership. By shifting her attention from the local circumstances of embodied authority to a necessarily more abstract mass realm in which personal identity is communicated by exchangeable written signs, Jane finds that she can free herself from oppressive male domination. She also finds that by ‘‘editing’’ her spoken language – subjecting it to the kind of rigorous self-reflection associated with writing – she can endow it with some of the authority of print. In short, Jane begins to learn one of the ultimate lessons of the novel: that female agency acquires a special force through the use of writing. Although we are not accustomed to think of Bronte¨ as the successor to Walter Scott, Ian Duncan’s observations about Scott’s fiction apply to her work as well. Duncan observes ‘‘a lack of ‘voice’ ’’ in Scott’s writing, which ‘‘displays its character as composition rather than inspired invention’’ (Duncan, Modern Romance, p. 94). Rather than being ‘‘the powerful sign of a personality,’’ such writing should be understood as ‘‘a professional, institutional language, administrative and legal and academic’’ (Modern Romance, p. 95). ‘‘If Scott’s mother was his personal source of romance, of a nourishing domestic culture of memory and voice,’’ Duncan continues, ‘‘the father whose name he bore was the Writer.’’ But to define Bronte¨ as the creator of ‘‘professional . . . language’’ is not, as Duncan’s dichotomy might suggest, to remove her from female authorship and reassign her to a masculine Writing; it is instead to recognize that Bronte¨ works powerfully toward developing a paradigm of a professional writing in the service of women. When Jane sees Mr. Brocklehurst at Lowood, she immediately fears the damaging things he will say about her: ‘‘I had been looking out daily for the ‘Coming Man,’ whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 64). Her worst fears are realized: ‘‘He stood at Miss Temple’s side; he was speaking low in her ear: I did not doubt he was making disclosures of my villainy.’’ Here Bronte¨ represents a paradigmatic scene of oral communication – ‘‘disclosure’’ from a male authority figure – as the means of regulating a recalcitrant girl. The scene of the anticipated bearer of harmful information, bent over ‘‘speaking low in her ear,’’ ‘‘making disclosures of . . . villainy,’’ acquires a lurid power as an emblem of judicial practice. In this world, punishment is meted out by authority figures who arrive suddenly, give voice to a verdict, and then turn the criminal into an object of spectacular observation: ‘‘Ladies,’’ said he, turning to his family, ‘‘Miss Temple, teachers, and children, you all see this girl?’’

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Of course they did; for I felt their eyes directed like burning-glasses against my scorched skin . . . There I was, then, mounted aloft: I . . . was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. ( Jane Eyre, pp. 69–70)

Jane’s first reaction to her humiliation is to assume that Mr. Brocklehurst has convinced ‘‘everybody’’ of her guilt. She does not doubt the power of what we might call a vocal/visual system of jurisprudence, one conducted according to the principles that Michel Foucault attributes to a premodern system of punishment. Burning with shame beneath the gaze of her schoolmates, Jane feels painfully embodied. But Helen Burns proposes a new and much larger context in which to think about her reputation – a context in which one’s sense of community must broaden to include those far beyond the range of either sound or hearing: ‘‘Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar?’’ ‘‘Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions.’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 71)

Helen Burns is typically read as an embodiment of Christian self-renunciation. True enough, but Helen also serves to push Jane into a new understanding of modern identity as defined in a context of ‘‘millions,’’ where an embodied voice is less important than the disembodied information conveyed by writing. A mere handful have ‘‘heard’’ Mr. Brocklehurst’s verdict, it is implied, in comparison to the vast masses constituting a potential audience for writing. ‘‘Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 72), Helen informs Jane – telling her that the disembodied language of the book can trump spoken English. Helen opens Jane’s eyes to the potential of language that is first ‘‘suppressed,’’ pondered, and only later expressed: ‘‘Teachers and pupils may look coldly on you for a day or two,’’ she explains to Jane after her public disgrace, ‘‘but friendly feelings are concealed in their hearts; and if you persevere in doing well, these feelings will ere long appear so much the more evidently for their temporary suppression’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 72). Criticizing the way ‘‘Mr. Brocklehurst has weakly and pompously repeated at second hand’’ the charges against Jane, Helen insists that ‘‘God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward’’ ( Jane Eyre, pp. 72–3). What the less devout Jane takes from this Christian lesson is a worldly understanding of how truth can win out over the tired repetition of spoken language. Speech is always ‘‘second hand,’’ if we understand writing as the source of verbal power.

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Miss Temple gives Jane a chance to vindicate herself by teaching her to speak with restraint and self-editing: I resolved in the depth of my heart that I would be most moderate: most correct; and, having reflected a few minutes in order to arrange coherently what I had to say, I told her all the story of my sad childhood. Exhausted by emotion, my language was more subdued than it generally was when it developed that sad theme; and mindful of Helen’s warnings against the indulgence of resentment, I infused into the narrative far less of gall and wormwood than ordinary. Thus restrained and simplified, it sounded more credible: I felt as I went on that Miss Temple fully believed me. ( Jane Eyre, p. 74)

Rosemarie Bodenheimer notes that this episode marks ‘‘the moment when . . . [Jane] realizes the power of conscious control over sequence, diction, and tone . . . It is especially important here that at the moment when Jane’s internal life finally finds a fair hearing, Bronte¨ should stress the complicated artfulness required by Jane’s double awareness of story and listener, the interdependence of art and audience’’ (Bodenheimer, ‘‘Jane Eyre,’’ p. 391). I would argue not at all with Bodenheimer’s analysis of Jane’s shift into self-conscious ‘‘artfulness’’ in regard to her own ‘‘story,’’ except to point out that Bronte¨’s language indicates Jane’s acquisition of the qualities of a writer even in her speech. Walter Ong argues that the cultural shift from an oral to a writing-based culture allows a new form of editing, retroactive adjustment of narrative: ‘‘[B]ackward scanning’’ makes it possible in writing to eliminate inconsistencies, to choose between words with a reflective selectivity that invests thought and words with new discriminatory powers . . . With writing, words once ‘‘uttered,’’ outered, put down on the surface, can be eliminated, erased, changed. There is no equivalent for this in an oral performance, no way to erase a spoken word: corrections do not remove an infelicity or an error, they merely supplement it with denial and patchwork . . . By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity. (Ong, Writing and Orality, pp. 104–5)

‘‘Of course,’’ Ong notes, ‘‘once the chirographically initiated feel for precision and analytic exactitude is interiorized, it can feed back into speech, and does’’ (Writing and Orality, p. 105). We should understand Jane here as demonstrating the lessons reading and writing have taught her. ‘‘Restrained and simplified,’’ pre-meditated, ‘‘reflected’’ upon and ‘‘arrange[d] coherently,’’ her introspective story attains a new rhetorical power, one that allows her to erase and change her ‘‘character’’ as verbally defined by Mr. Brocklehurst. Jane is eventually cleared of guilt through writing: ‘‘About a week subsequently to the incidents above narrated, Miss Temple, who had

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written to Mr. Lloyd, received his answer: it appeared that what he said went to corroborate my account’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 77). Her ‘‘story,’’ no longer the ‘‘fierce speaking’’ of a beleaguered individual, has become a documentary ‘‘account’’ subject to verification through long-distance communication. Jane’s exculpatory ‘‘story’’ wins out over Mr. Brocklehurst’s account of her criminality only when Jane learns how to render her narrative in writing. WITHHOLDING SPEECH

When Jane returns to Rochester at the novel’s conclusion, Bronte¨ introduces a famous crux involving a spectral vocal utterance. After he tells Jane how he called her name three times and heard her voice in return, Jane explains to the reader why she allowed this amazing revelation to go unanswered: Reader, it was on Monday night – near midnight – that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words [‘‘I am coming: wait for me!’’] by which I had replied to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester’s narrative; but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed . . . I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart. ( Jane Eyre, p. 472)

Critics have offered numerous explanations of this withholding of speech, narrative, and autobiography at just the moment when Jane would seem best positioned at last to unify her story and her self in verbal exchange with the man she loves. One critic, arguing that even in this withholding Jane achieves fulfilling speech to a reader, writes that Jane ‘‘is enabled to tell her life, to say to us, in effect, listen to my words, Reader.’’8 When one addresses a ‘‘Reader,’’ however, one does not speak but write, and this simple fact may explain why Jane makes ‘‘no disclosure,’’ ‘‘kept these things, then, and pondered them in [her] heart.’’ Jane does not tell Rochester the story of her life, but instead writes it to a readership.9 She shifts from a vocal to a scriptive mode of communication. She chooses the silent address to an unknown mass readership – a readership potentially including those ‘‘millions’’ of whom Helen Burns first made her aware – over the intimate, confessional ‘‘disclosure’’ to a loved one. (It is noteworthy that Rochester at one point defines the intimacy of his and Jane’s spoken conversation as modeled on that of a written journal: ‘‘I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary’’ [ Jane Eyre, p. 142].) As in her early self-exoneration to Miss Temple, where she learned to craft her story with writerly ‘‘restraint,’’ here too Jane withholds, fails to

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disclose all, and thus opens up a new space of interiority – ‘‘in the depth of my heart’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 74), ‘‘in my heart’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 472) – created by writing. Paradoxically, Bronte¨ suggests, address to a mass readership is best achieved not through vocal amplification but through restraint, withholding, and the construction through writing of an ‘‘articulate interiority.’’ Bronte¨’s decision to make Jane withhold the spoken telling of her tale, and provide instead the written narrative of the novel we read, offers a clear message that writing cannot be understood as merely the transcription of a preceding voice where meaning and affect reside. Instead, Bronte¨ suggests that writing gains value because it is unspoken. Novel-writing in the 1840s attained cultural power, in part, by creating a sense of having been spoken, by allowing a storyteller or what Kittler describes as the Mother’s Mouth to seem to speak between the lines. Writing passes itself off as speech, or as an effect of speech. But Bronte¨, recognizing the ways female authors may ultimately be short-changed by the assumption that contemporary writing derives from an originary but historically past woman’s speech, defies the convention and suggests in Jane Eyre that her heroine comes into her own as she turns to writing. Only writing can define the new kind of powerful interiority, abstract justice, and appeal to a mass audience that Bronte¨ seeks. Jane Eyre incorporates speech into writing and makes ‘‘fierce speaking’’ compatible with a highly effective print culture. Choosing not to speak, Jane develops a rewarding subjectivity around textual practice. Yet it must also be acknowledged that this process of writing’s incorporation of voice is hardly seamless or absolute. Jane Eyre also contains a remainder of vocal aggression that ultimately cannot be wholly subsumed into writing, and that finds a frightened auditor rather than an audience. Critics often misconstrue this remainder, I believe, by situating it at the beginning of a telos of self-expression culminating in the novel we read: fierce speaking eventually turns into the exercise of literacy. In such accounts, the novel’s moments of interruption by vocal violence become signs of self-empowerment, inchoate gestures toward the full development of a female self that occurs, depending on the critical account, either in Jane’s companionate marriage to Rochester, in Bronte¨’s success as a novelist, or in the female conversational community Jane finds with the Rivers sisters. But Jane Eyre’s moments of vocal aggression cannot in fact be assimilated to such narratives of progress, and should instead be recognized as irruptions of disruptive violence that justify exclusion from community and yet also serve to break oppressive community affiliations, thereby

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opening up new social spaces. When Jane first erupts in anger, her aggressive speech act is one of literary citation: ‘‘you are like the Roman emperors!’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 11) she tells John Reed, drawing on her reading of Goldsmith’s History of Rome to seek justice. Jane’s citation looks ahead to the scene where she defeats Mr. Brocklehurst through writing and the corroboration of a documentary account of her self. Her vocal outburst is, in fact, a writing act as well as a speech act, a defense of the self using weapons of print culture. But soon, imprisoned in the Red Room and at the height of misery, Jane undergoes a hallucinatory experience that culminates in a different sort of vocal expression: a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down – I uttered a wild, involuntary cry – I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. ( Jane Eyre, pp. 17–18)

‘‘What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me,’’ complains Miss Abbot. In adding, ‘‘she has screamed out on purpose,’’ Miss Abbot draws a conclusion shared by many Bronte¨ critics who assimilate such irruptions of verbal violence to narratives of purposefulness, self-expression, or selfempowerment. But Jane’s frightening cry in fact does go ‘‘quite through’’ the self, rupturing ties of community and family. She faints, marking a break in the narrative; when it resumes, Jane’s ‘‘dreadful noise’’ has created a new social space, one where she is not punished, but nursed and tended with care. Nor is she scorned, but instead lavished with ‘‘[w]onderful civility’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 20). Bronte¨ links the ‘‘involuntary cry’’ to a discontinuity in self-possession, suggesting that Jane’s Bildungsroman will include such occasional abrupt breaks. The developmental narrative toward the reward granted by and in print culture is punctuated by the remainder of a vocal aggression. This is an outburst that breaks intolerable bounds of community and, by annihilating the self, forcibly constructs new social spaces in which a writing-based subjectivity might be recreated. Jane’s momentous ‘‘involuntary cry’’ in the Red Room is echoed, of course, in the mysterious laughter of Bertha Mason. It is not quite right, however, to so quickly identify the laughter as the speech of a named character.10 For the first half of the novel, Jane experiences Bertha’s utterances only as an aural interruption, which, when asked to identify itself, responds with a ‘‘gurgl[e]’’: This was a demoniac laugh – low, suppressed, and deep – uttered, as it seemed, at the very key-hole of my chamber-door . . . I rose, looked round, and could see nothing; while, as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated: and I knew it

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came from behind the panels. My first impulse was to rise and fasten the bolt; my next, again to cry out, ‘‘Who is there?’’ Something gurgled and moaned. ( Jane Eyre, p. 155)

‘‘What crime was this,’’ Jane later wonders, ‘‘that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner? – . . . What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman’s face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 221). This ‘‘crime’’ or ‘‘voice’’ which can be neither thoroughly ‘‘subdued’’ nor ‘‘expelled’’ is the novel’s remainder of vocal aggression, that disruptive voice that evades total incorporation into writing or selfhood. If the primary movement of the novel is toward a professional writing that proves more useful and rewarding in every way than embodied speech, some of its eerie force still derives from its representation of an agentless utterance, an ‘‘unnatural sound’’ that destroys community, defies human affiliation, and generates the asocial violence necessary to allow Jane’s progress toward her destiny as a master and creator of texts. This is an aggressive vocality, unattached to print, that cannot be fully assimilated into the figure of the storyteller, the authorspeaker, or the professional writer. MAKING SPEECH

‘‘ G R A P H I C ’’

In the time between the publication of Jane Eyre and the writing of Villette, Bronte¨ became a literary celebrity, and personally confronted some of the issues and questions that Jane Eyre engages. In letters and statements from this time regarding authorship, writing, and identity, Bronte¨ ponders the relationship between writing and speech and the implications of that relationship for her own authorship. These issues are particularly conspicuous in Bronte¨’s editorial work on a posthumous edition of her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights. In her 1850 Editor’s Preface to the new edition, Bronte¨ acknowledges a problem in the relationship between the first edition of Wuthering Heights and its readers. She describes a cultured audience confronted by a ‘‘rude and strange’’ text containing dialect speech which has not been properly processed and transformed into writing. For Charlotte Bronte¨, then, speech is not the origin of writing, but is rather an impediment to effective communication. She associates Wuthering Heights with dialect that has not yet been ‘‘trained’’ in the national written norms: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts, must be to such readers in a great measure

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unintelligible, and – where intelligible – repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as harsh as themselves. (Bronte¨, ‘‘Editor’s Preface,’’ p. 367)

Emily Bronte¨’s original text is not truly writing but a ‘‘rough, strong utterance’’ requiring ‘‘translation’’ if it is to be properly understood by a literate mass readership. In a letter of September 1850 Bronte¨ discusses her intention to perform just this necessary translation by rendering the character Joseph’s speeches into a legible form: ‘‘it seems to me advisable to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph’s speeches; for though as it stands it exactly renders the Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear, yet I can see Southerns must find it unintelligible; and thus one of the most graphic characters in the book is lost on them’’ (Bronte¨, Shakespeare Head, p. 165). Bronte¨ considers that a literature that speaks ‘‘dialect’’ to an ‘‘ear’’ is ‘‘unintelligible’’ to the proper readership of a novel. Indeed, even such a ‘‘graphic’’ character as Joseph fails to communicate until his speech is made graphic, e.g. translated into something closer to standard written English. In this she was shrewd, as her editing of Wuthering Heights allowed the novel to find an audience for the first time. As editor, Bronte¨ disciplines unruly speech, in doing so inscribing a language that may be read without reference to locality, at any place within England or even beyond: a national print language of maximum portability. There seems a rather precise analogous relationship between Jane Eyre’s ‘‘fierce speaking’’ and her subsequent ‘‘restrained and simplified’’ narrative ‘‘arrange[d] coherently,’’ on the one hand, and (in Charlotte Bronte¨’s account) Emily’s ‘‘rough, strong utterance’’ – which ‘‘renders Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear’’ but cannot signify to a wider audience – and the version of Wuthering Heights created by Charlotte’s editorial process, on the other. Charlotte Bronte¨ is in effect arguing against the idea that writing is based on pre-modern or local orality, on the grounds that it breaks up the nation into a collection of dialect groups, and offers an alternative in the form of language edited as writing. She suggests that her sister Emily is one of those woman authors ill served by the Kittlerian fantasy of the ‘‘Mother’s Mouth’’ as the source of their writing, and that Emily’s tendency to subordinate writing to the ‘‘headlong partialities’’ of dialect blocked her from reaching an educated, modern audience. Thus did Emily fail to learn

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Jane’s lesson: that character and authorship gain power through the ‘‘guardedness of language.’’ LUCY SNOWE’S SILENCE

I’ve noticed again and again – you’ve all probably noticed – how difficult it is reading Villette out, reading it in public. For that isn’t its world. (Williams, The English Novel, p. 73)

Critics frequently observe that Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, is extraordinarily repressed and emotionally thwarted. In The Madwoman in the Attic, for example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar called Villette ‘‘perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of female deprivation we have’’ (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 400). To these critics, what seems most deprived about Lucy is her voice, or lack of it: there is a ‘‘progressive deterioration in spirit and exuberance,’’ they argue, from Jane Eyre to Lucy’s ‘‘submission and silence.’’ In her silence, they argue, Lucy is utterly ‘‘dispossessed . . . of her own identity and power.’’ What seems so commonsensical as to go almost unremarked in this argument – an argument that became hugely influential on subsequent Bronte¨ criticism and criticism of the Victorian novel more generally – is an equation between silence and powerlessness, and between speech and power. But is silence always powerlessness, speech always power? Is it possible that Lucy Snowe might choose not to speak, for reasons of her own? For the rest of this chapter, I will suggest that we take Lucy at her word when she rejects any simple equation between silence and powerlessness or oppression: ‘‘Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings; no words could inspire a pleasanter content than did M. Paul’s wordless presence’’ (Bronte¨, Villette, p. 436).11 In 1851, immediately before beginning to write Villette, Bronte¨ spent a month in London; the letters she wrote from there reveal how much – even before Dickens began his public reading tours – the public entertainment of the day involved forms of public speaking, and suggest that she was intensely interested in, yet disturbed by, this particular form of entertainment. She writes of going to hear ‘‘D’Aubigny – the great Protestant French Preacher – it was pleasant – half sweet – half sad – and strangely suggestive to hear the French language once more’’ (Shakespeare Head, p. 241). She saw Cardinal Wiseman speak: ‘‘the Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience seemed to look up to him as to a god. A spirit of the hottest zeal pervaded the whole meeting’’ (Shakespeare Head, p. 249); this ‘‘hottest zeal’’ might,

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perhaps, be understood as analogous to the ‘‘secret power and fire’’ that she sees in both her sister Emily and young Jane Eyre, the ‘‘power’’ and ‘‘zeal’’ of strong language not yet processed as written English. She was fascinated and appalled by the famous actress Madame Rachel: ‘‘I neither love, esteem, nor admire this strange being, but (if I could bear the high mental stimulus for so long) I would go every night for three months to watch and study its manifestations’’ (Shakespeare Head, p. 253). While many critics have commented on Bronte¨’s interest in Rachel, surprisingly few have attended to what she thought of William Thackeray’s public readings.12 She went several times to hear the famous novelist, and wrote in a letter that ‘‘Thackeray’s lectures and Rachel’s acting are the two things in this great Babylon which have stirred and interested me most – simply because in them I found most of what was genuine whether for good or evil’’ (Shakespeare Head, p. 248). Bronte¨ apparently found authorial public performance to be just as suggestive and troubling as the more ostentatious theatrical performance of Rachel. In Bronte¨’s descriptions of Thackeray’s sensational public lectures, she strongly links public speaking with a form of literary celebrity and professional ambition she condemns. His lectures, it would appear, are a triumphant success . . . but . . . I cannot see that this sort of society produces so great an effect on him as to tempt me in the least to try the same experiment, so I remain obscure. (Shakespeare Head, p. 247)

‘‘I remain obscure’’ is not necessarily for Bronte¨ – as it might appear – a modest statement of self-doubt, but may be read as a strong and even scornful assertion of a value system within which a writer’s professional status is weakened rather than enhanced by the celebrity linked with public speaking and embodied authorship. To introduce the author’s voice into fiction, Bronte¨ seems to suggest, is to localize and vocalize the text inappropriately, to attach it to a particular place and body. Thackeray’s public reading exemplifies the danger of an author who invests himself in voice and presence. Such an author succumbs to the vanity of personal charisma and sacrifices the benefits of writing, which allows narrative a reach and power it could never have when linked to a particular voice and body. Villette extends the argument Bronte¨ makes in Jane Eyre regarding the (specifically female) power of withheld speech and authorship; yet I should note at the onset that Villette does not deliver the same satisfactions that Jane Eyre does to its protagonist or to its readers. Like Bronte¨’s more famous protagonist, Jane Eyre, Villette’s Lucy Snowe learns that the separation of bodily presence from language leads to the ‘‘full reward’’ of professional advancement and participation in the public print sphere. In

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contrast with Jane, however, Lucy Snowe learns this lesson by experiencing a loss from which there is no recovery or adequate compensation. If in Jane Eyre the withholding of speech seems to produce a rich interiority, Villette often represents the same withholding of speech as more punitive, more perverse. I argue that Jane Eyre shows that withheld speech and writing provide an author with access to a new mass realm of print culture which that novel figures, with almost giddy excitement, in terms of ‘‘millions.’’ Villette too shows the power of writing for a mass audience, but figures that audience in the diminished numbers of ‘‘a thousand weepers’’ (Villette, p. 617). Villette’s demonstration of the means by which a woman might gain social power through the renunciation of her natural voice is accompanied by a powerful sense of loss. Observing the joyful reunion of a father and daughter and their exchange of fond words, Lucy Snowe exclaims, ‘‘on all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain or ridicule comes to the weary spectator’s relief’’ (Villette, p. 16). This biting comment sounds a challenge Villette meets throughout. Observing the verbal and physical contact between the father and daughter, Lucy figures herself as a disdainful ‘‘spectator,’’ a reader and interpreter rather than a participant in the presence and emotional community of voice. Thus, we can say, Lucy does not want to be a participant in an exchange of language that produces physical intimacy. Instead, as the ‘‘voice’’ of the novel, she addresses a mass readership who consume novels in anonymity, far away from their authors. Bronte¨ suggests, counter-intuitively, that narrative best flourishes in that acid moment of distaste for the voicing of emotions out loud, for the excitement and heat of private or public vocal reading – the excitement she herself, according to Elizabeth Gaskell, had once mastered as a student, telling stories to her friends. Villette advocates silence, writing, solitude, and defines its own narrative as writing disconnected from voice. ‘‘Speak I must,’’ Jane Eyre declares, in a paradigmatic expression of the Victorian logic of redemptive speech; critic Brenda Silver echoes Jane Eyre in asserting of Lucy, ‘‘Speak she must’’ (Silver, ‘‘Reflecting Reader,’’ p. 103). Thus Silver describes Lucy’s experience of play-acting as the beginning of ‘‘the process that allows her . . . to find her own voice’’ ( ‘‘Reflecting Reader,’’ p. 108). In doing so, Silver participates in the logic of the storyteller in taking for granted the equivalence of ‘‘finding one’s voice’’ and finding satisfaction as a self and writer. But this one-to-one equation of voice and self leads us, I think, to misread Villette, which consistently raises the possibility of finding satisfaction in free speaking and then purposefully dismisses such a pleasure as misguided. Lucy says instead of the possibility

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of confessing her own emotions out loud, ‘‘Speak of it! you might almost as well stand up in an European market-place, and propound dark sayings in that language and mood wherein Nebuchadnezzar, the imperial hypochondriac, communed with his baffled Chaldeans’’ (Villette, pp. 341–2). Bronte¨ suggests that to give voice to personal emotions is to speak in a foreign and obsolete tongue. I have described Jane Eyre as defining a special form of valuable writing deriving from withheld speech. I now want to suggest that Villette goes still further than Jane Eyre, and arrives at a point of terminal withholding, where Lucy acquires value by refusing to narrate. ‘‘There is enough said’’ (Villette, p. 617), one of Lucy’s last statements in the novel, gestures toward a narrative strategy of absolute reticence. She resolves difficulties not by talking her way out of a jam but by simply shutting up. Villette thus seems to signal the limits of any faith in the capacity of the novel – a form of print culture disseminated in parts nationally, composed by authors with no physical contact with or knowledge of their audience – to mimic or appropriate oral storytelling. Lucy’s statement of the futility of speech occurs immediately after she, starved for companionship, receives a long-awaited letter. There is a tension implicit in Villette between a common-sensical valuation of the letters Lucy receives as second-best compensations for actual presence, speech, the fullness of human companionship, and a very different sense that these letters are not substitutions for what Lucy desires, but are themselves the final object of her desire. We must recognize that Lucy describes her letters not merely as secondary vehicles for the presence of speech, but as themselves the foundational source of real value. Lucy invests the writing surface with a deeply voluptuous, sensual desire: Yes: I held in my hand not a slight note, but an envelope, which must, at least, contain a sheet: it felt, not flimsy, but firm, substantial, satisfying. And here was the direction, ‘‘Miss Lucy Snowe,’’ in a clean, clear, equal, decided hand; and there was the seal, round, full, deftly dropped by untremulous fingers, stamped with the well-cut impress of initials, ‘‘J. G. B.’’ I experienced a happy feeling . . . Did I read my letter there and then? . . . I knew better . . . I stole from the room, I procured the key of the great dormitory which was kept locked by day. I went to my bureau; with a sort of haste and trembling lest Madame should creep up-stairs and spy me, I opened a drawer, unlocked a box, and took out a case, and – having feasted my eyes with one more look, and approached the seal, with a mixture of awe and shame and delight, to my lips – I folded the untasted treasure, yet all fair and inviolate, in silver paper, committed it to the case, shut up box and drawer, reclosed, relocked the dormitory, and returned to class, feeling as if fairy tales were true and fairy gifts no dream. (Villette, pp. 299–300)13

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The intense attention Lucy pays to the material substance of the letter, its handwriting, the impress of the initials, might allow for interpreting Lucy as valuing the signs inscribed by Dr. John Bretton as a substitute for his absent person and voice. But such an interpretation collapses once Lucy misplaces the letter and its author, Dr. John, himself appears: ‘‘Oh! they have taken my letter!’’ cried the grovelling, groping, monomaniac. ‘‘What letter, Lucy? My dear girl, what letter?’’ asked a known voice in my ear. Could I believe that ear? No: and I looked up. Could I trust my eyes? Had I recognized the tone? Did I now look on the face of the writer of that very letter? Was this gentleman near me in this dim garret, John Graham – Dr. Bretton himself ? (Villette, p. 308)

A traditional definition of writing as a secondary substitution for speech would suggest that in the presence of the letter’s writer, Lucy would no longer miss the letter. But this is not what happens. Instead, Lucy’s longing for the letter itself is absolutely undiminished in the presence of ‘‘the face of the writer of that very letter,’’ as she explains to Dr. John: ‘‘ ‘I had saved it all day – never opened it till this evening: it was scarcely glanced over: I cannot bear to lose it. Oh, my letter!’ ’’ (Villette, p. 308). So we must conclude that Lucy wants not Dr. John but his writing; and wants not simply his writing, but his writing concealed, locked up in a series of enclosures, contained and withheld. Lucy suggests that language accrues significance by remaining undivulged. The process of locking up, encasing, may best be understood, however, not as a construction of privacy but instead of that certain kind of interiority that retreats and withdraws in order to attain the value of writing circulated through a national print sphere. Bronte¨ dedicated Jane Eyre to Thackeray yet did not relish his company; similarly, Lucy seems to want Dr. John not in person but rather in writing. John Kucich defines ‘‘a particular Bronte¨an formulation of desire that is articulated partly through repression itself ’’ (Kucich, Repression, p. 38). Nicholas Dames, similarly, observes the numerous failures of traditional desire in Villette and concludes that ‘‘antagonism and frustration in the novel are signs of desire’’ (Dames, ‘‘Clinical Novel,’’ p. 386).14 I would suggest along these lines that Villette becomes more intelligible, its perversities at least governed by a recognizable logic, once we see in it something like a desire for a failure of vocal intimacy, for conversations broken off, for language experienced not as personality’s vocal expression but as material writing: ‘‘a clean, clear, equal, decided hand . . . the well-cut impress of initials’’ (Villette, p. 299). Villette’s language is not speech and cannot bring together a reader and author as if two loved ones conversing, no matter how

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much we might wish, like Thackeray’s party guests, to speak with Bronte¨. This novel represents instead the achievement of mastery of, and pleasure in, the social power of print. That this heroine must strive to satisfy a desire for companionship in Villette as a member of a foreign speech culture may be understood not simply as a failure or absence of a native vocal community, but an opportunity to develop a subjectivity and professional identity based on a mastery of writing instead of speech. There is pain or regret in the turn from conversation, human speech, the intimacy and excitement of storytelling; the metaphorical connection between novel-writing and speech is certainly a seductive and comforting one. But with the abandonment of that metaphor, Bronte¨ suggests, comes the satisfaction of professional rewards: ‘‘from that day I ceased to be nursery-governess, and became English teacher. Madame raised my salary’’ (Villette, p. 99). Lucy consistently rejects improvisational, free speaking in favor of language produced through restraint, writing, and intellectual labor. Having written an unusually skillful (but, in her own eyes, unremarkable) essay, Lucy finds herself accused of plagiarism by two ‘‘pedants’’ from the school administration. M. Paul expects Lucy to prove the authenticity of the essay by bearing herself well under interrogation. But in response to the professors’ questioning, Lucy clams up. ‘‘Though answers to the questions surged up fast, my mind filling like a rising well, ideas were there, but not words. I either could not, or would not speak – I am not sure which’’ (Villette, p. 502). Typically, Lucy refuses to specify the source for her reticence and silence. She continues, however, to explain that the skill of her essay was not available on a moment’s notice, ready to manifest itself in speech. Lucy is less orator or conversationalist than scholar and writer. And, like any good researcher, when confronted with a topic about which she has little knowledge, she heads for the library: I got books, read up the facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure. With me it was a difficult and anxious time till my facts were found, selected, and properly jointed; nor could I rest from research and effort till I was satisfied of correct anatomy . . . the knowledge was not there in my head, ready and mellow. (Villette, p. 503)

Lucy’s professional success derives from her recognition that knowledge and effective language are to be found not ‘‘in the head’’ but outside the self, in books; not in spontaneous speech but in ‘‘laboriously constructed’’ writing. One of Villette’s central interpretive problems concerns the question of Lucy’s reliability as a narrator, and specifically the problem of how to

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interpret her various lapses in full disclosure. The most striking of such reticences is Lucy’s eventual revelation that she recognized ‘‘Dr. John’’ as her childhood acquaintance Graham Bretton long before the novel’s readers are made privy to this identification. The passage in which she explains her failure to speak up to Graham himself – and, implicitly, to the novel’s readers as well – offers a striking demonstration of Lucy’s identification with the principle of writing, writing as a withholding of speech and selfnomination: To say anything on the subject, to hint at my discovery, had not suited my habits of thought, or assimilated with my system of feeling. On the contrary, I had preferred to keep the matter to myself . . . Well I knew that to him it could make little difference, were I to come forward and announce ‘‘This is Lucy Snowe!’’ So I kept back in my teacher’s place; and as he never asked my name, so I never gave it. (Villette, pp. 219–20)

Explaining to her reader, ‘‘I had preferred to keep the matter to myself,’’ Lucy sounds very much like Jane Eyre, who comments, ‘‘I listened to Mr. Rochester’s narrative; but made no disclosure in return . . . I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart.’’ One achieves authority, Bronte¨ implies, not through verbal exchange but by ‘‘keep[ing]’’ language in that peculiarly private/public domain of print. Bronte¨ here establishes a protocol of narrative which refuses ‘‘to say anything,’’ to ‘‘come forward’’ to identify oneself as a vocal self. Bronte¨’s text demands to be read as writing rather than conversation or confession. It knows that the audience it may reach will never be knowable as a speech partner, but can only be anticipated as the eventual reward for valuable texts: prestige, financial payment, the positive balance of authorship as a material practice of writing.15 One of the novel’s key scenes describes Lucy’s first experience as a teacher, in which she proves that she possesses the talent to advance professionally and thus exchange her place as a governess for the position of instructor. Bronte¨ depicts Lucy confronting a scene of aural disorder, a room full of noisy schoolchildren, to which she responds with a display of textual power that produces orderly writing. Bronte¨ here raises and then rejects the possibility of Lucy achieving order with her voice. ‘‘Nature had given me a voice that could make itself heard,’’ Lucy says, sounding somewhat like the youthful Jane Eyre who imagines that a ‘‘naturally’’ powerful voice will lead to social power. Lucy imagines the possibilities of using both sarcasm and ‘‘easy banter’’ in order to ‘‘get command over this wild herd and bring them into training.’’ Yet Lucy’s position in Villette, her

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‘‘command of French so limited, and exercised under such cruel restraint,’’ is such that she cannot speak with authority. She must respond not vocally but with a display of power over writing. In order to gain control over what she describes as a ‘‘campaign . . . of titterings and whisperings,’’ Lucy takes the exercise-book from the hands of one of the culprits, ‘‘deliberately read[s] the composition, which I found very stupid, and as deliberately, and in the face of the whole school, tear[s] the blotted page in two’’ (Villette, p. 98). Lucy’s exacting taste – her quickness to recognize ‘‘stupid’’ writing – and the force with which she corrects such writing immediately establish her authority. At the end of Jane Eyre, Rochester ‘‘saw books through’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 475) Jane, who reveals her good taste by selecting the most appropriate texts to read her adoring husband. In Villette, Bronte¨ extends her emphasis on the importance of literary taste in the figure of a heroine whose social value derives almost entirely from her pedagogical authority. Following Lucy’s display, only one girl ‘‘persevered in the riot with undiminished energy.’’ Bronte¨ raises the stakes of Lucy’s trial by identifying the final culprit as engaged in a ‘‘riot,’’ associating the unchecked voices with the disorder of a mob. Lucy deals with this final rioter by treating her literally as a book to be put away. Lucy noted that [the girl] sat close by a little door, which door, I was well aware, opened into a small closet where books were kept . . . I slightly pushed the door and found it was ajar. In an instant, and with sharpness, I had turned on her. In another instant she occupied the closet, the door was shut, and the key in my pocket. (Villette, pp. 98–9)

Lucy masters unruly voices with the performance of what we might call a kind of astringent literary criticism. Just as she put away her letter in a series of enclosures and locks, Lucy textualizes her recalcitrant student and so brings her under the sway of her good taste and exacting discriminatory powers. The students are conquered and even won over by Lucy’s authority, and we see their formerly rebellious speech replaced with the sight of literacy’s silent triumph, pens inscribing pages with lessons: They were stilled for a moment; then a smile – not a laugh – passed from desk to desk: then – when I had gravely and tranquilly returned to the estrade, courteously requested silence, and commenced a dictation as if nothing at all had happened – the pens travelled peacefully over the pages, and the remainder of the lesson passed in order and industry. (Villette, p. 99)

We should note here that Lucy, typically, ‘‘request[s] silence.’’ Critics who focus exclusively on Lucy’s own silence as a state of powerlessness forget,

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I think, that she is a character who often asks for – and gets – silence. When Lucy finally speaks, it is in ‘‘dictation,’’ the translation of voice into the ‘‘order and industry’’ of writing. By tearing a piece of paper and putting an unruly voice into the position of a book that has been read, Lucy has effected precisely the results Jacques Derrida attributes to oppressive power and to writing within Western metaphysics: ‘‘to break presence, the co-presence of citizens, the unanimity of ‘assembled peoples,’ to create a situation of dispersion, holding subjects so far apart as to be incapable of feeling themselves together in the space of one and the same speech, one and the same persuasive exchange’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 137). Bronte¨ does not criticize writing as a violation of the self-presence of speech. Instead, she suggests that writing does ‘‘break presence,’’ and indeed implies that the particular rewards of writing derive from that break. Lucy transforms her classroom from a boisterous and rebellious speech community into an analogy of a novelist’s dispersed mass audience, comprised of ‘‘subjects so far apart as to be incapable of feeling themselves together in the space of one and the same speech,’’ subjects disciplined by – and in the practice of – writing. But Villette’s renunciation of the vocal performance of texts is still more forcefully dramatized in the scene where Lucy takes a part in a play, enjoys it immensely – and then vows never again to indulge in the pleasure of performance. [T]hough glad that I had . . . tried my own strength for once, I took a firm resolution never to be drawn into a similar affair. A keen relish for dramatic expression had revealed itself as part of my nature; to cherish and exercise this newfound faculty might gift me with a world of delight, but it would not do for a mere looker-on at life: the strength and longing must be put by; and I put them by, and fastened them with the lock of a resolution which neither Time nor Temptation has since picked. (Villette, p. 174)

This act of renunciation is perplexingly final. A reader accustomed – from Jane Eyre, for instance – to expect the eventual triumph of ‘‘nature’’ over resolutions of virtuous self-denial is amazed to discover, by the end of the novel, that Lucy truly never again participates in theatrical performance. Bronte¨ contrasts ‘‘nature,’’ and a kind of pleasure derived from performance, with containment and renunciation. We might map this division onto the distinction between body and text: Bronte¨ suggests that somatic pleasures and presence must be expelled from the final text of Lucy’s narrative, just as she suggested that a cultivated reader must try to see past the ‘‘rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the

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unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities’’ of Wuthering Heights. Lucy acknowledges the pleasures of acting, speaking, performing, but ‘‘put[s them] by’’ as inappropriate to ‘‘a mere looker-on at life.’’16 Despite the apology of ‘‘mere,’’ we should read this seemingly perverse or excessive violation of the pleasure principle as a strong effort to redefine the social experience of narrative and stories as one of reading, looking on in solitude as in a library; a disembodied experience of textual consumption in which the individual’s bodily weakness or pleasure have no bearing. ‘‘[I[t was time I retired into myself,’’ Lucy continues. ‘‘Withdrawing to a quiet nook, whence unobserved I could observe – the ball, its splendours and its pleasures passed before me as a spectacle’’ (Villette, p. 175). Having briefly participated physically and vocally in the performance, Lucy now ‘‘withdraw[s]’’ to a position of pure visual perception, describing herself as a textual reader before whom narrative ‘‘passed before’’ like pages turning. I have described two tropes as central to Villette’s anti-vocal narrative: the disinclination to ‘‘speak up,’’ and the removal of bodies to create a space for pure textuality or reading. Both tropes recur in the scene where M. Paul reads aloud to his students. Elizabeth Gaskell claimed this scene was based directly on Bronte¨’s own experience, at a Thackeray lecture, of finding unwanted public attention directed at her (Shakespeare Head, p. 242).17 Bronte¨ describes M. Paul as, in effect, reversing the logic of Lucy’s triumph in the classroom, as he intrudes on a scene of silent study and reads aloud. ‘‘It was his occasional custom . . . to arrive of an evening, always a` l’improviste, unannounced, burst in on the silent hour of study . . . cause books to be put away’’ (Villette, p. 412). Bronte¨ depicts M. Paul’s intrusion as the displacement of silent reading with ‘‘some tragedy made grand by grand reading, ardent by fiery action . . . he would . . . show us a glimpse of the current literature of the day, read us passages from some enchanting tale, or the last witty feuilleton which had awakened laughter in the saloons of Paris’’ (Villette, pp. 412–13). His reading is a vocalization of previous vocalizations, a performance of texts that have been given value by public utterance. His entrance to the classroom produces a community around speech: ‘‘We heard the sharp bell-peal which we all knew; then the rapid step familiar to each ear: the words ‘Voila` Monsieur!’ had scarcely broken simultaneously from every lip, when . . . he stood in the midst of us’’ (Villette, p. 413). A series of shared aural perceptions signal the experience of an impossible, simultaneous communal utterance, as a phrase breaks ‘‘from every lip,’’ heralding the presence of a utopian speech community truly speaking and listening together, as in one voice. M. Paul suggests the mode of the Thackerayan or Dickensian author, a storyteller whose

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charismatic voice is capable of transforming a mass of individuals into a single audience, a ‘‘community of speech where all the members are within earshot’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 136): ‘‘we all,’’ ‘‘us.’’ Thus it is Lucy who becomes the discordant element in this community because her non-participation when M. Paul sits down next to her gives the lie to the illusion of a voice that speaks to and from everyone: ‘‘I swept away my working materials, to clear space for his book, and withdrew myself, to make room for his person.’’ Insulted by Lucy’s disinclination to sit close to him as he reads, M. Paul vengefully gathers all the girls to sit at a different table and sits himself, in mockery, at the opposite end of the long bench from her. ‘‘As for me,’’ she comments, ‘‘I took it with entire coolness. There I sat, isolated and cut off from human intercourse; I sat and minded my work, and was quiet, and not at all unhappy’’ (Villette, p. 415). We do not have to look far to draw biographical parallels for such a scene, if we think of Charlotte living alone with her father at Haworth, or of her attendance in London at the party of Thackeray’s where she was the guest of honor but sat on a couch and uttered barely a word. In Villette, the withholding of speech becomes so central that such acts of suppression take on a value of their own. It is at times impossible to say why Lucy chooses to suppress rather than to express herself; the implication that she likes to suppress herself is what strikes many readers as the perversity of this particular novel. Her descriptions of vocal repression are often so eloquent as to define a poetics of withheld speech: ‘‘I held in the cry, I devoured the ejaculation, I forbade the start, I spoke and I stirred no more than a stone’’ (Villette, p. 581). When Lucy comments about a conversation with a pupil that ‘‘it was best to . . . silence for ever the tender, passionate confidences which left her lips, sweet honey, and sometimes dropped in my ear – molten lead’’ (Villette, p. 532), the mere fact that, for Lucy, language turns into ‘‘molten lead’’ between lip and ear seems reason enough for her to resist speech. As a result, emotional control seems to take the place of emotional gratification, and to become its own reward. To what end would a successful author represent such a refusal of the pleasures of self-expression? Although upset and rattled in his vocal delivery, M. Paul goes on to read a French translation of Shakespeare (one riddled with errors). Lucy assumes her classroom authority at once, reticent and harshly critical: ‘‘nor did I make any particular effort to conceal the contempt which some of [his] forlorn lapses were calculated to excite. Not that it behooved or beseemed me to say anything’’ (Villette, p. 415). With this scene, Bronte¨’s heroine once again retreats from the putative warmth of a speech community, offering instead solitary attention to one’s own

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‘‘work’’ as gratification: ‘‘There I sat, isolated and cut off from human intercourse; I sat and minded my work, and was quiet.’’ The novel thus leaves a reader with a sense of having been given a mandate to work. That work is a form of reading critically, editing, and instructing so as to organize one’s own subjectivity and actions around texts, and to encourage others to do so as well. (This mandate, I think, partly explains the particular appeal this novel has always had for literary critics and professional teachers.) Instead of one of two lovers united, Bronte¨ depicts Lucy at the end as a successful but partnerless professional: ‘‘I commenced my school; I worked – I worked hard’’ (Villette, p. 614). M. Paul is far away ‘‘in an Indian isle,’’ far beyond the reach of any vocal or physical intimacy. Bronte¨ does provide some compensation for the disappointment of Lucy and M. Paul’s physical separation in a particularly erotic representation of writing: ‘‘By every vessel he wrote; he wrote as he gave and as he loved, in full-handed, full-hearted plenitude. He wrote because he liked to write; he did not abridge, because he cared not to abridge’’ (Villette, p. 615). This writing is, perhaps, a version of what Derrida describes as ‘‘natural writing,’’ which is ‘‘immediately united to the voice and to breath . . . .to the voice one hears upon retreating into oneself’’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 17). This is a kind of writing-as-voice that seems to seek to make up and substitute for M. Paul’s physical absence; writing that seems analogous to that ‘‘known, loved, well-remembered voice’’ that spoke to Jane from a distance ‘‘wildly, eerily, urgently’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 442). But M. Paul’s ‘‘full-handed’’ writing does not conclude the novel; Bronte¨ ends instead with a final gesture of withholding. Lucy writes that M. Paul’s ship, returning home to her from the West Indies after three years, was caught in a terrible storm; she describes her desire for him in terms of a longing – one that must be denied – to hear his voice again. Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered – not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some! (Villette, p. 617)

Those ‘‘thousand weepers’’ recall the ‘‘millions’’ that Helen Burns told Jane constitute the true audience for character and language, marking another implicit invocation of Bronte¨’s mass print audience. Bronte¨ pointedly disappoints any reader who hopes to locate a voice within or between the lines. ‘‘Here pause: pause at once,’’ Lucy continues. ‘‘There is enough said’’ (Villette, p. 617). Like Jane ‘‘keep[ing] these things’’ in her ‘‘heart,’’ Lucy

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withholds speech and information, does not reveal whether M. Paul survived. Of all the removals or dismissing of bodies in Villette, the most vivid is the final disappearance of M. Paul; not even permitted the privilege of a return and burial, he simply vanishes from the text. What do we make of Bronte¨’s deliberate disfiguration of the traditional domestic romance ending, her refusal of Dickens’s strategy of linking authorship to a sanctified realm of domesticity? In withholding gratification, I want to suggest, she creates prestige; in a culture given to confession and vocal expression, there is a particular value associated with declining to divulge. It is noteworthy that, while Jane Eyre ends with its protagonist finally ruling a household as a mother, Villette concludes with Lucy presiding over a ‘‘house’’ devoted to professional duties: ‘‘My school flourishes, my house is ready’’ (Villette, p. 616). If Jane Eyre triumphantly reveals the possibility of creating value, a new kind of interiority, and even love out of writing read by a mass audience, Villette offers a more sober lesson. This later novel suggests that ‘‘reward’’ and value can only be created out of professional work and speech withheld. Bronte¨ dismisses the possibility of romance and vocal expression in order to offer, as compensation, the satisfactions of writing and intellectual labor. Lucy, and Villette, finally ask this question of us: ‘‘Surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?’’ (Villette, p. 287).

CHAPTER

6

‘‘Hell’s masterpiece of print’’: voice, face, and print in The Ring and the Book

Early and mid-Victorian poets often viewed the print culture in which they worked with suspicion and dismay: as mechanized, disenchanted, and bureaucratized. In an age of novels and journalism, the very mechanisms of print and publication could appear hostile to poetic expression. The dramatic monologue attempts to redeem such a print culture, but it does so by means of two apparently contradictory strategies: by way of an appeal to an imagined voice in print that appears to transcend the medium – an idealized voice very much like the one Carlyle, Dickens, and others invoke – and through a practice of authorship and interpretation that recognizes its embeddedness within that print culture: that is, something closer to Bronte¨’s critical response to the storyteller paradigm. My aim in this chapter is to consider the paradoxical aesthetics of print that idealizes speech at its own expense. This paradox may be understood, to adapt a formulation used by Michael Fried in a different literary context, as the Victorian poet’s ‘‘compulsion to declare but also to disguise both the literal circumstances and the material product’’ of his or her own activity as author.1 In this instance, a representation of print as ‘‘voice’’ functions to disguise the ‘‘material product’’ and process of print authorship. Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, I will argue, has the effect of producing what might be termed a print-culture guilt in its readers, who are made to feel that their participation in the practice of textual interpretation makes them complicit in a historical displacement of virtuous voices and selfpossessed speakers by a professional information culture. Browning implies that by reading his epic poem, a reader becomes in effect implicated in the destruction of its innocent and illiterate heroine, Pompilia. Yet even as Browning induces such reaction in the readers of his monumental long poem, he also takes measures to frame these feelings, and his readers’ longing for a redemptive voice innocent of print literacy, within a different discourse – one that fully recognizes Victorian authorship’s and his own book’s inescapable basis in this very print and information culture. 155

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The Ring and the Book is thus structured by a tension pervasive in Victorian culture as a whole between contradictory attitudes toward voice and speech. The culture understands a redemptive voice – in this case, that of a pure woman rather than a masculine sage – not only as a fetish with which to cure and transform print, but also as a fiction produced and made available by print media alone. I have been arguing that the Victorian mythology of the storyteller is specifically generated by and associated with the genre of the novel. What relationship, then, does the Victorian dramatic monologue have to this novelistic logic? Although to say so can seem to undervalue Victorian poetry, the hegemony of the novel in the Victorian period in fact makes the dividing line between Victorian novelistic culture and Victorian culture as a whole a difficult one to draw. Beginning with Dickens’s Pickwick Papers if not earlier, the novel achieves such dominance that no literary genre can operate without reference to it.2 Whereas the Romantic or Modernist poet is a figure very different from – indeed modeled in opposition to – the novelist, the Victorian poet becomes, even if reluctantly, a kind of sub-species or variant of the novelist; even resistance to the novel’s hegemony entails one or another strategy of imitation of it. The dramatic monologue, widely acknowledged as the Victorian period’s primary generic invention, can in fact be understood as the answer to the question of what happens to poetry in an age of fiction. The innovation of this genre lies in its accommodation of the forms of lyric poetry to some of the expectations and presuppositions of the novel. The Ring and the Book is an epic, novel-length literary work that challenges some of the usual categorical distinctions between novel and poem – a kind of hybrid ‘‘verseand-prose pollution’’ (VI, 1949).3 The work exemplifies the novelistic form and strategies of the dramatic monologue in its construction of an idealized voice: an illusion of the pre-print that only makes sense in print, an apparent denigration of print culture whose necessary ground is that culture. The dramatic monologue mediates uneasily between its actual print medium and an idealized, gestured vocality, implying a fundamental concern that print might be an inadequate, if not distorting form for language. Isobel Armstrong argues that Walter Bagehot’s influential 1864 criticism of Browning’s Dramatis Personae as ‘‘Grotesque art’’ suggested that Browning’s poetry ‘‘conced[ed] to the debasement made possible by the wide dissemination of the printed word and popular access to it’’ (Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 285). Lee Erickson has recently argued that the form of the dramatic monologue emerged in response to a

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historical shift in English reading habits and a siphoning of cultural influence from poetry to the novel; he defines the genre as ‘‘symbolic of the lack of an audience for and the consequent alienation and self-doubt of the poets who were beginning their careers in the 1830s’’(Erickson, Economy, p. 44). The dramatic monologue confronts a readership increasingly distracted by competing forms of literature, and creates a situation where the acts of ‘‘speaking’’ and ‘‘listening’’ become figures for publication and reception. As such, these acts are represented as both necessary and difficult, plagued by miscommunication and failures of expression. Armstrong argues that ‘‘the extreme textual sophistication of a monologue or the dramatic lyric, a poem proposing itself as the immediacy of a speaking voice in dialogue with a silent listener but which is in reality a text, a written artifact, raises immediately the problem of its own and the reader’s status by confusing speaking, which assumes a listener’s presence, with writing, which assumes an addressee’s absence’’(Victorian Poetry, p. 288).4 The dramatic monologue is, like the lyric, a form of print culture defined by its mimicry of voice; yet, unlike the lyric, it complicates this mimicry by calling attention to the difference between author and speaker. The poem often depicts the speaker as in error, sometimes even as insane.5 Print’s very assumption of the disguise of voice thus becomes something close to a sign of madness, which suggests that the situation that gave rise to this generic innovation may be a culture in crisis. What makes the Victorian dramatic monologue a historically new genre, despite certain earlier precedents (in the work of John Donne, for example), is the way the form forces attention to the simulation of speech as a disguise, strategy, or sign of insanity. If lyric makes the slippage from public print to private ‘‘voice’’ seem natural, the dramatic monologue insists on the artificiality of that slippage. It is a genre we value for the way it brings to light and stages as a cultural problem the desire for an impossible vocal text. Yopie Prins argues that for Victorian poets ‘‘the survival of poetry depends on the death of a living breathing voice, so it may materialize in written form: an appeal to the inner ear that is mediated by an appeal to the eye’’ (Prins, ‘‘Victorian Meter,’’ p. 97). She reads Tennyson’s ‘‘A Dying Swan’’ as ‘‘an allegorical figure for a voice that is no longer heard,’’ and argues that Victorian metrical theory posits such a ‘‘voice’’ that exists only in print. As I have been arguing throughout this book, contemporary critics can themselves be rather Victorian in their similar desire to hear a voice within the lines of print. Seduced by what I’ve been describing as a myth of storytelling and endangered yet powerful speech, critics continue to want the Victorian dramatic monologue to speak to us. A recent study by

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W. David Shaw, for instance, takes great care to demonstrate how Browning’s dramatic monologues, notwithstanding their apparent status as speech, resist being read aloud. Shaw accompanies this useful demonstration with the argument ‘‘that there are important differences between a speech in a stage play and a dramatic monologue’’(Shaw, Origins of the Monologue, p. 18). Does this distinction really need to be argued? Shaw appears to allow himself to be momentarily seduced by the dramatic monologue’s conceit that it is simply a written ‘‘transcript’’ of some preceding speech act: ‘‘As an event produced in the world and surviving on the printed page, the monologue is a speech act that has been preserved as a written record or transcript’’ (Origins of the Monologue, p. 27). Although he knows full well that the dramatic monologue is ‘‘produced in the world’’ only as a written text, Shaw nevertheless proceeds as if a credulous reader might confuse writing with speech in reading examples of this particular genre. One effect of this confusion is to romanticize the dramatic monologue as ‘‘preserv[ing]’’ oral utterance and thus allowing it to ‘‘surviv[e]’’ in the diminished form of a ‘‘record or transcript.’’ Like Raymond Williams, Stephen Greenblatt, or other critics I’ve discussed earlier, Shaw posits a written record containing or enclosing – or even violating – a vulnerable speech act that thereby gains the prestige of a wounded survivor. I will argue that such a critical approach in fact reproduces a contradictory logic within the Victorian dramatic monologue itself, which at once understands its status as a product of print culture through and through and yet idealizes the ‘‘voice’’ it evokes as an endangered remnant of a older culture more friendly to individual utterance. Like the character Pompilia, who dwells on her deathbed throughout The Ring and the Book, voice and speech themselves are defined within the dramatic monologue, and often within criticism of the genre as well, as residual and endangered: evoking sympathy, longing, and guilt.

THE HERMETICALLY SEALED POET

Confined entirely to her own apartment, and almost hermetically sealed, in consequence of some extremely delicate state of health, the poetess [Elizabeth Barrett] . . . is scarcely ever seen by any but her own family. (R. H. Horne, 1844)6

I begin this chapter by briefly analyzing Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett’s letters to one another, as well as one sonnet by Barrett, before turning to The Ring and the Book. Ian Jack notes that for Browning, ‘‘the idea of writing a long poem was associated with the idea of speaking out in

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his own voice, an ambition of which . . . Elizabeth Barrett strongly approved’’( Jack, Browning’s Major Poetry, p. 274). Indeed, Barrett not only approved of this ambition, she embodied it for Browning. At least initially in their epistolary relationship, Browning figures Barrett as an author whose value resides in her absence from the public sphere and in her inaccessibility. He views her as a reminder that poetry must ‘‘speak’’ from the individual if it is to be worth anything. Remaining a withdrawn speaker, she seemed to Browning to have found a way of succeeding within conditions unfriendly to Victorian authorship.7 In Browning’s very first letter to Barrett, he describes her as at once an author of beloved texts and as an embodied presence who is tantalizingly present, but inaccessible because of her ill health. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too: do you know I was once not very far from seeing – really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning ‘Would you like to see Miss Barrett?’’ – then he went to announce me, – then he returned.. you were too unwell – and now it is years ago – and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels – as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight.. so it now seems.. slight and just-sufficient bar to admission; and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be! Well, these Poems were to be . . . (Barrett and Browning, Letters, pp. 3–4)

Browning’s playful rhetoric contrasts ‘‘the sight’’ of Barrett with her poems. While he suggests that the poems may be consolation for never ‘‘really seeing’’ her – as if reading her poems were an inauthentic or secondary means of doing so – he also implies that the poems are an adequate substitute for that sight. The question arises: which experience would be more valuable, reading the poems or ‘‘really’’ seeing and talking with the poet? In this passage, Browning poses such a question: he begins with his love for ‘‘these books,’’ Barrett’s poetry, and then delves into an extended description of his near miss at seeing her in the flesh, and then returns to the ‘‘books:’’ ‘‘these Poems were to be.’’ He mirrors, that is, his own implied logic – a logic associated with the notion of the poet as ‘‘speaking out’’ from within print – according to which the real Barrett is enclosed within the structure of her writings. This representation of authorship recurs in both authors’ writings as a shifting figure for the ambiguous status of poetic or linguistic value. The source of such value is seen at times as a vocal presence within the written text, at others as the written text tout court. The outer term – ‘‘these books,’’ ‘‘these poems’’ – may be viewed either as the enclosure or confining container of the author (the ‘‘world’s wonder in

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chapel or crypt’’) or as itself the location of the linguistic value associated with that author. The question is whether one must get past the books and writing to get to the author ‘‘inside,’’ in speech prior to print, or whether it is that very writing that gives value and meaning to the author as poet.8 Browning in his correspondence with Barrett often expresses dismay at the conditions of authorship and writing and seems to struggle to find a more satisfactory relationship to language. His impassioned exclamation at the conclusion to one letter yearns for a medium that would evade the degrading publicity of print: ‘‘if these words were but my own, and freshminted for this moment’s use!’’(Letters, p. 39). In a well-known letter of January 13, 1845, Browning makes a distinction between his own poetry, which he defines as both ‘‘broken’’ into fragments and broken off from the author’s ‘‘voice,’’ and Barrett’s, which is whole, a vehicle for her own voice: your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you – for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you, – I only make men & women speak, – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me: but I am going to try . . . (Letters, p. 7)

‘‘You speak out, you’’ embeds the verb, imagining the ‘‘speaking out’’ inside a space defined by the self. Browning defines Barrett’s authorial agency in a way that conforms to her public image in Victorian culture – as an expression of something within, a truth that passes from inside to outside. Browning described Barrett as a ‘‘world’s wonder’’ enclosed in and by a ‘‘screen,’’ ‘‘bar,’’ and ‘‘door’’ – a source of linguistic value shut off from public space, sending language outside her preserved enclosure.9 He defines himself, in contrast, as ‘‘mak[ing]’’ others speak rather than himself ‘‘speak[ing] out’’; he provokes, induces, or even forces others to speak and in so doing reduces ‘‘truth’’ to a ‘‘broken’’ state. He may have ‘‘the pure white light’’ of artistic power ‘‘in [him],’’ but he ‘‘fear[s]’’ becoming captive to the very force that gives Barrett so much value. He possesses the same power of inner speech that he ascribes to Barrett, but it will not emerge in public as a whole ‘‘truth.’’ It manifests itself as a voiceless writing which shatters and disperses truth into striking pieces. Fragmentariness and the ventriloquism of dramatic monologue become the signature of poetic language that lacks a basis in a coherent individual able to express himself in speech. He defines the generic form of the dramatic monologue by its failure to achieve the lyric coherence of a poem that might speak for its author. We can find an analogy to Browning’s desire for a poetry modeled on a form of intimate, personal speech, speech that aims to stand in for its

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author, in Sonnet 33 of Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. This particular sonnet is especially interesting, however, for the way it contains a statement of longing for an intimately speaking poetry within a frame that, very differently, insists on the status of poetry as writing. The premise of Sonnets from the Portuguese was that Barrett herself was simply the editor and translator of a series of love poems she had found in the Portuguese language. This conceit served as a distancing strategy to downplay the personal and autobiographical nature of these poems, which might otherwise be (and indeed were) simply read as an account of Barrett and Browning’s courtship. But this strategy may also be understood as an ambivalent framing of a desire for intimate speech within a structure that defines language as ‘‘foreign’’ writing requiring editing and translating to render it readable. In Sonnet 33, Barrett begs a lover to ‘‘call me by my pet-name,’’ one not heard since childhood: Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear The name I used to run at, when a child, From innocent play, and leave the cowslips piled, To glance up in some face that proved me dear With the look of its eyes. I miss the clear Fond voices which, being drawn and reconciled Into the music of Heaven’s undefiled, Call me no longer. Silence on the bier, While I call God . . . call God ! – So let thy mouth Be heir to those who are now exanimate. Gather the north flowers to complete the south, And catch the early love up in the late. Yes, call me by that name, – and I, in truth, With the same heart, will answer and not wait. (Barrett Browning, Selected Poems, p. 232)

Barrett begins the sonnet in mid-conversation with a lover. To ‘‘call’’ her by her ‘‘pet-name,’’ she tells him, is to resurrect the intimacy conveyed by a gaze once exchanged between two ‘‘face[s].’’10 The poem laments the absence of beloved voices, ‘‘fond voices which . . . / Call me no longer.’’ She associates a modern adulthood that lacks full intimacy with ‘‘silence,’’ a failure of speech, and she instructs her lover and addressee to ‘‘let thy mouth / Be heir to those who are now exanimate.’’ To do this would be to reanimate the silenced voice of a parent and so to create a continuity between ‘‘the early love’’ and ‘‘the late,’’ and to make adulthood and modernity contain the experiences and relationships of childhood and the nostalgically recalled past. To ‘‘catch the early love in

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the late’’ might even be to incorporate the vocal into the written. Just as Sonnets from the Portuguese subsumes the autobiographical love poems in the fiction of the larger, impersonal project of editing and translating, so this particular sonnet subsumes a recalled experience of childhood intimacy associated with voices, faces, and gazes within a poem that will be typeset, printed, and distributed to unknown readers. The point of poetry, Barrett can be understood to suggest, is to capture or resurrect vocal intimacy within a literary form that is recognized by the professional mediation of writing. Sonnet 33 articulates a model of poetic language that conforms in many ways to the one Browning promotes – and associates with Barrett – in his letters to her. Yet Barrett subordinates her desire for vocal intimacy to the impersonal labor of editing and translating, acknowledging the power of a printed text that claims no affiliation with an embodied voice. We can read this sonnet, then, as offering a kind of resolution to the problem Browning viewed with anguish – that of how to achieve a value associated with ‘‘voice’’ and personal presence within a modern print form. In a hasty letter written to Browning immediately after a visit in which he seems to have proposed marriage to her, Barrett forcefully redefined her relationship with him precisely in terms of authorship and publication. She seems to repudiate his vision of her as a vocal presence and to attempt to shift the terms of their communication and relationship. [Y]ou do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly – And if I disobey you my dear friend, in speaking (I for my part) of your wild speaking, I do it, not to displease you . . . You have said some intemperate things . . . fancies, – which you will not say over again, nor unsay, but forget at once, & for ever, having said at all, – & which (so) will die out between you & me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer. (Barrett and Browning, Letters, p. 72, emphases in original)

Barrett, somewhat in the manner of Lucy Snowe, aims to substitute for Browning’s ‘‘wild speaking’’ a cooler, print-based mode of exchange. To bring about this substitution, she must ask him to join her in imagining his intemperate speech as a printer’s error – not something to repeat or ‘‘unsay’’ but rather something to remove altogether from the realm of the spoken, into that of the inscribed, printed, mis-printed, and struck out. She thereby insists that he join her in conceptualizing their relationship as an element of their own authorial work of editing, composition, and typesetting, rather than as a transcendence or escape of it. And Browning, for all his desire for the power of poetic speech, responded to Barrett’s lead. ‘‘One thing I can do,’’ he wrote to her: ‘‘pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate upon

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that I love most and least – I think I can do it, that is’’ (Letters, p. 11). His offer to edit her work, in return for her critical commentary on his own, emerges as an alternate model for intimacy: an intimacy of the pencil or page rather than of the voice or body. THE RING AND THE BOOK:

‘‘ H E L L ’ S

M A S T E R P I E C E O F P R I N T ’’

The Ring and the Book has been identified by certain critics as a partial fulfillment of Barrett’s wish that Browning might speak out in his own voice in a poem. Her suppression of Browning’s ‘‘wild speaking,’’ however, must complicate any view of her as pushing Browning to ‘‘speak’’ in his poetry. One must wonder, in fact, whether that ‘‘own voice’’ in which Browning might aim to speak existed prior to its representation in literature. Ian Jack comments that it is a paradox thoroughly characteristic of Browning’s strange career that the nearest he was ever to come to fulfilling his ambition was to be in a poem written after his wife’s death, on a subject in which ‘‘she never took the least interest . . . [even] so much as to wish to inspect the papers.’’ (Jack, Browning’s Major Poetry, p. 274)

Jack’s reference to Barrett’s disinclination even to ‘‘inspect the papers’’ immediately suggests the limitation, however, of any simple identification of The Ring and the Book with a speaking authorial voice. This triple-decker novel-length work offers all the paradoxes of the dramatic monologue writ large and long. Very like Barrett’s Sonnet 33, The Ring and the Book frames a simulation of intimate vocal speech within an editorial project of writing and composition. In the volume’s first book, Browning explains how he found the famous ‘‘yellow book’’ filled with the written and printed documents containing the genesis of his work: Do you see this square old yellow Book, I toss / I’ the air, and catch again, and twirl about / By the crumpled vellum covers . . . Here it is, this I toss and take again; / Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript. (I, 33–5, 84–5)

Richard Altick offers this biographical account: The Ring and the Book had its genesis in Florence on a June day in 1860. Browsing in the second-hand market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, he paused at a stall laden with odds and ends in various stages of damage and decrepitude, and there picked up an old book in which was bound a collection of documents produced during

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and after a sensational Roman murder trial in 1698 . . . The pamphlets and letters contained in the Old Yellow Book, as he came to call it, proved on closer inspection to be a baffling, intriguing mixture of controversy, contradiction, pedantic legal arguments, even more pedantic law Latin – and obscure questions of human character and motivation. (Altick, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 11)

In the work Browning eventually wrote four years later, after Elizabeth Barrett’s death and his own move back to England, he produced an apotheosis of the dramatic monologue form by embedding a virtuoso performance of speech – in the various sections ‘‘spoken’’ by the principals in the murder case and observers of the trial – within an utterly written frame. The interest of this work for my purposes lies precisely in the tension between Browning’s simulation of individual speaking voices and his evident fascination with the case and narrative as a material artifact of early modern print culture; between his Dickensian desire to evoke a preprint speech in his writing and his Bronte¨an recognition that such speech can exist only in print. Even as Browning evokes speech, he continually reminds us that the various ‘‘voices’’ of his narrative – indeed narrative ‘‘voice’’ itself – are always fictional effects of print. Print does not record speech or stand as its transcript, but instead conjures that speech. The author’s ‘‘own voice,’’ then, stands not before his or her writing but emerges as an effect of that writing, a writing which achieves meaning only in its circulation and consumption at the hands of readers. The Ring and the Book offers a complex, ambivalent representation of precisely those two models for understanding linguistic and literary value that, I have been arguing, emerge in Browning and Barrett’s letters. For Browning, a writer’s desire to ‘‘speak out’’ can, in the end, only be achieved as an idealized representation or fiction within the actual manipulation of print and manuscript that constitutes professional authorship. Again very much as in Barrett’s Sonnet 33, Browning expresses an intense desire for an intimate speech that might burst out, cast off the restraints of writing, and speak truth in an irresistible moment of personal charisma, authority, or longing; yet he simultaneously subsumes the representation of such speech within a system of editing and professional authorial labor. LYRICIZING THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: POMPILIA’S ILLITERATE SPEECH

The Ring and the Book contains twelve books, the first and last of which are recounted by a speaker associated with Browning himself. Of the remainder, three are delivered by narrators representing different segments of the

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populace of late seventeenth-century Rome, two by lawyers in the case, one by the Pope, and the rest by three principals of the murder case: Pompilia; her husband, Count Guido Franceschini; and the priest Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The priest, accused of having had a love affair with Pompilia, assists her in running away from Guido – who then catches up with her, murders her parents, and murders her (though she survives long enough to speak her monologue). Caponsacchi is then both witness to and participant in key events in the trial and the book. He begins his narrative by complaining about the suspicion of his listeners, the lawyers taking his legal deposition. Given Browning’s self-description, as an author who ‘‘make[s] others speak,’’ it is tempting to read this scene of involuntary speech as a selfcommentary on the procedures of the dramatic monologue.11 Browning presents Caponsacchi as a sympathetic speaker confronted by professionals whose association with a written text signals their mendacity and bureaucratic cynicism: ‘‘There was the blameless shrug, permissible smirk, / The pen’s pretence at play with the pursed mouth, / The titter stifled . . . / When I first told my tale’’(VI, 14–16, 18). Caponsacchi several times interrupts his deposition to point out with angry exasperation that Pompilia ‘‘is bleeding out her life belike, / Gasping away the last breath of all, / This minute, while I talk’’(VI, 61–3). Browning frames the scene with a reminder of the biological fact of imminent death, thereby defining a context of emergency for the exchange. Caponsacchi describes Pompilia’s ‘‘last breath’’ as all the more precious in the context of bureaucratic verbiage reminiscent of Dickens’s Circumlocution Office or Chancery Court: ‘‘[T]hen your clerk produced / Papers, a pack of stupid and impure / Banalities’’(VI, 1650–2). The enjambment and alliteration of ‘‘produced / Papers’’ makes the noun read like a curse, conveying a palpable sense of disgust at the mechanisms not only of the law but also of print culture itself.12 Pompilia assumes the role of the endangered storyteller, the speaker of truths whose transparent language is being threatened by an emergent modern discourse of impersonal information. Her death represents, among other things, the imminent displacement of personal forms of speech by bureaucratic writing. Once Pompilia dies, there remains no way to sort out the facts of the murder, and the double-speaking lawyers and deceitful Guido will carry the day. As readers making our way slowly through this work, we are kept nervously aware of her decline and the possibility that she may never have ‘‘breath enough to tell her story yet (V, 1688).’’ Her death becomes Browning’s means, I will argue, of inducing

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a kind of print-culture guilt in his readers, who by definition participate in killing off the truth that resides – encrypted – within Pompilia’s fragile body. In this scenario, both Pompilia and Caponsacchi are figures of linguistic virtue. He defies the lawyers’ discourse: ‘‘I keep calm? Calm I’ll keep as monk that croons / Transcribing battle, earthquake, famine, plague / From parchment to his cloister’s chronicle’’(VI, 216–18). Here Browning combines a figure of positive speech – ‘‘crooning’’ – with a form of writing that is at once virtuous and endangered.13 The monk singing to himself as he produces a record of cultural disaster stands in for the modern writer attempting to preserve the truth of speech in a bureaucratic modernity. Caponsacchi tells the story of his first involvement in Guido and Pompilia’s domestic melodrama. This account of an exchange of phony love letters seems almost to parody Browning and Barrett’s own courtship letters, and can certainly be read as Browning’s rethinking of the issues raised in those letters. As Caponsacchi explains, he has received a letter by way of Guido’s maid that professes to be a love letter from Pompilia. In this letter the supposed Pompilia requests a response ‘‘by word of mouth’’ (VI, 514) and instructs Caponsacchi to pay a visit that evening and speak to her from a terrace outside her window. As Caponsacchi explains, he recognizes this as some scheme on Guido’s part, ‘‘[w]hose mean soul grins through this transparent trick’’(VI, 537). In response to this ‘‘trick,’’ Caponsacchi’s language spills over with contempt for the ‘‘mock-invitation,’’ ‘‘sham appointment,’’ ‘‘part-messenger / Part-mistress who would personate the wife’’(VI, 549–50, 554). It can be argued that Browning hands over to Caponsacchi the privilege of authorship of the form of the dramatic monologue itself, figured as counterfeit, trick, and fragmentation. Caponsacchi’s image of Guido ‘‘grin[ning] through this transparent trick’’ provides the exact antithesis of Browning’s image of the true poet as ‘‘world’s wonder in chapel or crypt,’’ the poet to whom he offers the tribute, ‘‘you speak out, you.’’ If Barrett ‘‘speak[s] out’’ from within an enclosure of writing and so turns print into a personally expressive voice, Guido creates a false voice in writing designed to deceive. The tale of the forged love letters thus allows Browning to offer a critique of his own literary form and technique as an artful deception and counterfeit. As he wrote to Barrett, ‘‘I only make men & women speak, – give you truth broken into prismatic hues.’’ Now he represents the dramatic monologue as a failure to deliver ‘‘truth,’’ either morally or technically. Guido’s artistry is a means of ‘‘mak[ing]’’ another speak falsely, but Caponsacchi is not fooled for a moment by the subterfuge. In the end, Browning seems to imply, to ‘‘make men & women speak’’ will never suffice as a method for literary production.

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Caponsacchi’s tale ends unexpectedly in a scene that at once denounces and redeems Guido’s false writing, as Pompilia herself appears and speaks in a voice whose truth cannot be mistaken. Her sheer artless honesty undoes the wretched work of her husband’s writing. there at the window stood, Framed in its black square length, with lamp in hand, Pompilia . . . Ere I knelt – Assured myself that she was flesh and blood – She had looked one look and vanished . . . ... all at once she re-appeared; But, this time, on the terrace overhead, So close above me, she could almost touch My head if she bent down; and she did bend, While I stood still as stone, all eye, all ear. She began – ‘‘You have sent me letters, Sir: I have read none, I can neither read nor write . . . (VI, 702–26)

True to his earlier disdain for ‘‘composition’’ and the ‘‘mere act’’ of writing, Browning embodies linguistic truth in the figure of an illiterate woman. The question of whether Pompilia is in fact illiterate recurs throughout the book. In a curious way, imputations that she may after all have written the incriminating love letters to Caponsacchi serve much the same purpose as imputations of sexual promiscuity in a rape trial. Indeed, certain observers of the case accuse her of lying about both her chastity and her illiteracy: ‘‘The letter in question was her very own, / Unprompted and unaided: she could write – / As able to write as ready to sin’’(IV, 908–10). The Pope, on the other hand, weighs in with the figure of Pompilia as the proverbial uninscribed page: ‘‘It was not given Pompilia to know much’’ or ‘‘to write a book,’’ he declares, and she is therefore ‘‘Perfect in whiteness’’(X, 1019–20, 1005). ‘‘Whiteness’’ becomes a figure at once for sexual purity and illiteracy. In one of the longest English poems ever published, Browning uses the figure of the sexually pure woman to position linguistic value in opposition to writing and print. After the extended conceit of Pompilia’s phony authorship of the love letters to Caponsacchi, her unexpected appearance just at the point where the sham ‘‘author’’ Guido was supposed to reveal himself transforms what started out as Guido’s badly done dramatic monologue into Pompilia’s lyric poem. She herself ‘‘speaks out’’ from the writing, and Caponsacchi becomes a stand-in for the reader who ideally listens and watches, ‘‘all eye, all ear,’’ no longer so much a reader as a rapt observer, ‘‘still as stone.’’14

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Caponsacchi’s description of his encounter with the sham love letters as an irritating intrusion evokes an urban setting – perhaps more Victorian than seventeenth-century – in which the print and writing of handbills and advertisements clutter the streets: ‘‘A slip was found i’ the door-sill, scribbled word / ’Twixt page and page o’ the prayer-book in my place: / A crumpled thing dropped even before my feet’’(VI, 622–4). By restoring the truth value of literary language, Pompilia’s speech suggests how, in such a milieu, an author might still transform a distracted reader into an utterly enthralled audience member. The link between Pompilia and Elizabeth Barrett is obvious. Browning describes The Ring and the Book as a memorialization of her now-vanished song: ‘‘Never may I commence my song, my due / To God who best taught song by gift of thee’’(I, 1403–4).15 Pompilia’s speech turns to the nick-naming that Barrett welcomed in her Sonnet 33, ‘‘Yes, call me by that pet name!’’ Pompilia’s lack of a social mask is implied by her propensity to call people by private names: ‘‘When I was a mere child, my mother . . . that’s / Violante, you must let me call her so / Nor waste time, trying to unlearn the word’’(VII, 181–3). Even if Violante is her adoptive mother, Pompilia cannot bring herself to recognize the legal distinction and alter her name. She recalls a memory of a neighbor child her mother brought To play with me of rainy afternoons; And, since there hung a tapestry on the wall, We two agreed to find each other out Among the figures. ‘‘Tisbe, that is you’’ ... ‘‘ – And there you are, Pompilia, such green leaves Flourishing out of your five finger-ends ... You know the figures never were ourselves Though we nicknamed them so.

(VII, 185–98)

The parallels with Barrett’s Sonnet 33 are striking, as Pompilia, like Barrett, associates ‘‘nicknam[ing]’’ with recollections of childhood ‘‘play.’’ Here Browning returns to a favorite poetic strategy, ekphrasis, as Pompilia ingenuously admits to her childhood game of ‘‘find[ing] each other out / Among the figures’’ – locating images for the self in the patterns of the tapestry. In so doing, Pompilia and her friend transform an impersonal work of art into a highly personal self-expression. Browning thus associates Pompilia with art that becomes a form of self-naming.

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Pompilia appears in the window in order to beg Caponsacchi to take her back to her parents in Rome: leave me in the house Where the father and the mother are; and soon They’ll come to know and call me by my name, Their child once more, since child I am, for all They now forget me, which is the worst o’ the dream – ... I cannot even call out, make them hear – Just as in dreams . . . (VI, 815–26)

Once again, she associates freedom from Guido with being properly ‘‘call[ed] . . . by my name.’’ And since Browning describes Pompilia as unable to communicate from a distance through writing, she can have no intimacy or communication except in another’s physical presence. Unlike Barrett, who could ‘‘speak out’’ in her writing, Pompilia ‘‘cannot even call out’’ in her distress. For Browning, this is true lack of agency, given the impossibility of truthful communication in writing. Writing is thoroughly tainted by virtue of its association with Guido’s forgery, but also with the machinations of the legal process. Browning figures the relationship between Caponsacchi and Pompilia, in contrast, as entirely full and transparent communication. Caponsacchi muses, ‘‘As I / Recognized her, at potency of truth, / So she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, / Never mistook the signs’’ (VI, 931–4). Ten of the twelve books in The Ring and the Book represent distinct and often contradictory perspectives on a central epistemological question and legal case. By virtue of its very form, then, this is an epic account of the problem of reading and the possibility of misinterpretation. At the center of this epic, Browning situates a couple who experience total mutual self-knowledge as a form of reading devoid of error: they ‘‘never mistook the signs.’’ These transparent ‘‘signs’’ are, specifically, Pompilia’s body, ‘‘framed’’ at the window, and her riveting voice, uttering nothing but a potent ‘‘truth’’ reminiscent of Stephen Blackpool’s articulation of ‘‘merely the truth’’: ‘‘That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, / That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)’’ (VI, 1600–1).16 Much as Barrett did in her Sonnet 33, Browning associates intuitive, vivid knowledge with the figures of ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘face’’ – dramatically embodied in Caponsacchi’s quotation of Pompilia’s words to him: ‘‘ . . . Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb; Nor face, I see it in the dark. I want

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(VI, 1316–19)

Pompilia characterizes Caponsacchi’s ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘face’’ as the transcendent, immaterial forms of those things: a voice that can ‘‘speak’’ without sound, with ‘‘[a]ll himself in it’’ (VII, 1445), a face that can be seen in the dark. These might be understood as emblems of a literary, virtual representation of the intimacy of voice and face. Browning implies that poetry might aspire to just this status as a signifier of the self, requiring no decoding and free of the lapses in communication that characterize actual bodies and utterances.17 I have been arguing that contemporary criticism has been slow to recognize that the depictions of voice and vocal utterance so central to Victorian literature are highly idealized and romanticized, precisely because it accepts these depictions at face value. A survey of recent writings on The Ring and the Book reveals a pattern of critics internalizing Browning’s own representation of Pompilia as an embodiment of endangered voice and suppressed wisdom. Browning’s representation of Pompilia’s speech has tended to be interpreted as a measure of his willingness to portray female autonomy and power. Whether critics feel that Browning does or does not allow Pompilia to ‘‘speak,’’ they have seemed to agree that such real or potential full speech would offer the best test of whether Browning participates in or transcends the tendency of print culture to suppress individual autonomy. U. C. Knoepflmacher, for example, analyzes how Browning’s poetry grapples with different approaches toward ‘‘the appropriation of a Female Other who is portrayed as elusive and silent’’ (Knoepflmacher, ‘‘Projection,’’ p. 103). According to Knoepflmacher’s logic, such female characters as Porphyria and the Duchess of ‘‘My Last Duchess’’ ‘‘have become bereft of a voice of their own’’ (‘‘Projection,’’ p. 104), whereas Pompilia is finally ‘‘allowed to speak’’ (‘‘Projection,’’ p. 115). Nina Auerbach, however, disagrees with Knoepflmacher’s assessment of the potency of Pompilia’s voice, arguing that Browning in effect ‘‘mutes’’ the vibrancy of Barrett’s Aurora Leigh to Pompilia’s ‘‘solitary whisper’’ (Auerbach, ‘‘Robert Browning’s,’’ p. 169) and concludes that ‘‘it may be Robert Browning’s ultimate victory over his celebrated wife that he robs Pompilia of a public voice’’ (‘‘Robert Browning’s,’’ p. 171). Whatever their other merits, these arguments remain contained within a logic according to which Browning’s virtue as an author may be assessed by the degree to which he allows Pompilia and other female characters effective or full speech. The drawback of such approaches

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is that they allow little role for voice other than as an index of individual self-expression.18 PROFESSIONALIZING THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: GUIDO’S EXPERTISE

Browning contrasts his depiction of a wholly successful scene of interpretation – or rather, of an understanding that does not require interpretation – with Caponsacchi’s outraged description of the lawyers’ failure to understand the signs inscribed on Guido Franceschini’s very face: ‘‘How miss, then, / What’s now forced on you by this flare of fact – / . . . Could you fail read this cartulary aright / On head and front of Franceschini there, / Large-lettered like hell’s masterpiece of print’’(VI, 1786–7, 1792–4). He depicts Guido as figuratively inscribed with a ‘‘cartulary,’’ or collection of documents, testifying to his guilt. This is indeed a hellish form of print, at once monumentally vivid and impossible to choose not to read, and yet somehow obscure when it most needs to communicate. Browning also describes Guido in terms evocative of black print on a ‘‘light’’ page: ‘‘He the black figure, the opprobrious blur / Against all peace and joy and light and life’’(VI, 1526–7). Caponsacchi continues to characterize Guido as the real author of the letters signed by Pompilia, as trapped in self-communication reminiscent of a bad – because narcissistic – form of authorship: ‘‘himself wrote those papers, – from himself / To himself ’’(VI, 1801–2). Once again, Browning serves up an implicit self-critique by invoking the tropes of dramatic monologue in an entirely negative form – indeed, as the nadir of print culture. The poem links Guido with professionalism through his reliance on the delegation of tasks, vicarious action, and expert knowledge. We have already seen how, in the exchange of spurious love letters, Browning characterizes Guido as an absent agent or author; while he does not convey the letters himself and is never seen in person, it is he who is the manager of the trick. The murder of Pompilia and her parents observes the same logic; Guido delegates his violence to hired mercenaries, to whom he appeals as a wronged husband. Rather than wreak the ‘‘natural vengeance’’(V, 1070) of a crime of passion, Guido carefully plans a murder that will be carried out by other hands. Thus Browning establishes a homology between Guido’s authorship of the love letters and his murder of their supposed author, Pompilia. The homology carries over to print itself, which Browning represents as a derivative language that is several steps away from the moment of utterance.

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If ‘‘face to face’’ communication represents his linguistic and ethical ideal, then it makes perfect sense for Browning to have linked his villain with a pathological, or ‘‘disfiguring,’’ violence against the face: ‘‘That was the face, her husband makes his plea, / He sought just to disfigure’’(VI, 1997–8).19 Raging against his false friends in Rome, Guido boasts that he spurred himself on to greater violence in the act of murder by imagining that ‘‘a friend’s face’’ lay ‘‘at the bottom of each wound’’: ‘‘not one stab, I dealt to right and left, / But went the deeper for a fancy – this – / That each might do me two-fold service, find / A friend’s face at the bottom of each wound, / And scratch its smirk a little!’’(XI, 1236–40). Guido’s ‘‘stab[bing]’’ and ‘‘scratch[ing]’’ moves ‘‘to right and left’’ in a horizontal inscription, a psychopathic writing. Such writing not only fails to convey the author’s ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘face’’ in transparent communication, but also wounds ‘‘a friend’s face’’ so as to destroy all hope of intimacy. In a kind of mise en abyme of disfiguration, Guido ‘‘disfigure[s]’’ his wife’s face in a grisly attack, each stab of which he imagines as disfiguring some other face. Browning thus portrays Guido as the author of a kind of particularly destructive writing. Just as Guido is inscribed on his face with a ‘‘cartulary / on head and front’’(VI, 1792–3), the faces he in turn inscribes stand for the intimacy he destroys.20 In his imaginative displacement of just whom he murders with this inscription, Guido assumes the role of the artist for whom creativity is vicarious experience rather than genuine feeling. Confirming Caponsacchi’s association of Guido with ‘‘hell’s masterpiece of print,’’ Guido describes both his marriage to Pompilia and his subsequent murder of her as a failed ‘‘masterpiece,’’ or ‘‘spoiled work’’ (XI, 1564, 1570). He laments ‘‘Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete’’ and wonders ‘‘[w]hat was there wanting to a masterpiece / Except the luck that lies beyond a man?’’(XI, 1559, 1564–5). Although he hires a killer whose ‘‘learning’’ or knowledge of human anatomy should guarantee Pompilia’s death, this expertise proves useless. Upon returning to Rome, he finds his wife still able to testify against him: ‘‘whom find I / Here, still to fight with, but my pale frail wife? / – Riddled with wounds by one not like to waste / The blows he dealt, – knowing anatomy, – / (I think I told you) one to pick and choose / The vital parts! ’T was learning all in vain! . . . / When destiny intends you cards like these / What good of skill and preconcerted play?’’ (XI, 1674–9, 1700–1). Finally, he admits that his ‘‘skill’’ and knowledge have proved no match for the artless Pompilia. Allowed ‘‘to tell her own story her own way,’’ she takes on the irresistible authority of the dying storyteller:

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She too must shimmer through the gloom o’ the grave, Come and confront me – not at judgment-seat Where I could twist her soul, as erst her flesh, And turn her truth into a lie, – but there, O’ the death-bed, with God’s hand between us both, Striking me dumb, and helping her to speak, Tell her own story her own way, and turn My plausibility to nothingness! Four whole days did Pompilia keep alive, ... Four whole extravagant impossible days, Till she had time to finish and persuade Every man, every woman, every child In Rome of what she would . . . (XI, 1680–95)

Browning represents these ‘‘four whole extravagant impossible days’’ as that brief moment when the wounded storyteller’s voice, though fading fast, prevails. This is a necessarily brief and ‘‘impossible’’ moment in which pure speech, nearly destroyed by the forces of expert knowledge and professional print that turn every ‘‘truth into a lie,’’ transforms a metropolis into a figure of a single entranced listener, ‘‘all eye, all ear’’(VI, 724), fully persuaded of ‘‘the truth.’’ Pompilia’s speech rivets attention, but can do so only at the moment of actual utterance, Browning implies. In her dying speech she achieves something like that ‘‘pure Spirit’’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 54) that Kittler associates with the maternal, a voice that can redeem print and the modern culture that contains it. She describes the naming of her son as an act of new creation: ‘‘That is why something put it in my head / To call the boy ‘‘Gaetano’’ – no old name / For sorrow’s sake; I looked up to the sky / And took a new saint to begin anew’’(VII, 100–3). This is nick-naming par excellence. Browning evokes the author’s wish to reform and redeem an English language that, as Isobel Armstrong suggests, seemed corrupted by ‘‘the debasement made possible by the wide dissemination of the printed word and popular access to it’’ (Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 285). Pompilia names as she gazes, dying, at the sky like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller or Dickens’s Stephen Blackpool. In doing so, she defines language as new, proprietary, and pure – just as Browning defined an ideal language to Barrett as ‘‘my own, and fresh-minted for this moment’s use’’ (Barrett and Browning, Letters, p. 39). In a parallel passage, Pompilia discusses the process by which a virtuous name – in this case, that of Caponsacchi, ‘‘your true Saint George’’ – may be degraded by gossip and rumor, which she figures in very similar terms to those with which Browning described the dramatic monologue to Barrett:

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That name had got to take a half-grotesque Half-ominous, wholly enigmatic sense, Like any bye-word, broken bit of song Born with a meaning, changed by mouth and mouth That mix it in a sneer or smile, as chance Bids, till it now means nought but ugliness And perhaps shame. (VII, 1329–35)

Caponsacchi’s name has become not a whole truth but a ‘‘broken bit,’’ a ‘‘truth broken’’ (Barrett and Browning, Letters, p. 17) – closer to print than to speech, to dramatic monologue than to lyric utterance. ‘‘ A D D E D

A R T I S T R Y ’’ : P R I N T ’ S R E C U P E R A T I O N

I have argued that Browning offers a self-critique in The Ring and the Book: an attempt to achieve lyric utterance in print and an extended repudiation both of the very technique of the dramatic monologue and of professional print culture itself. Having traced this line of argument in Browning’s work, I would like, in conclusion, to show how Browning embeds his longing for vocal utterance within the framing discourse of his first and final books, ‘‘The Ring and the Book’’ and ‘‘The Book and the Ring.’’ Within this frame, Browning reverses his position that authorship is condemned to a corrupted print culture. Instead, he represents reading and interpretation as the means by which print may be recuperated. Browning thus seems to provide a way out of a trap by which printed poetry must always fail in its quixotic effort to transcend its material conditions of inscription and distribution. In the final book, Browning once again addresses his reader ‘‘in his own voice.’’ Yet it is only here that he offers an implicit defense of print, an extraordinarily lovely image of the spread of meaning through a series of transmissions and re-transmissions – an image that is absolutely at odds with the negative representations of verbal dissemination as ‘‘half-grotesque.’’ He figures this process as a spectacular piece of fireworks: What was once seen, grows what is now described, Then talked of, told about, a tinge the less In every fresh transmission; till it melts, Trickles in silent orange or wan grey Across our memory, dies and leaves all dark, And presently we find the stars again.

(XII, 14–19)

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Where Browning had condemned all ‘‘second-hand’’ forms of language as corruptions of the truth that can be conveyed only in face-to-face presence, he now figures the shift from immediate perception to ‘‘what is now described’’ and next ‘‘talked of, told about’’ as a diminishment, perhaps, of the original, but one that possesses its own melting style of beauty. Browning associates this aesthetic effect with the inevitable slippage between the performance of an author and the ‘‘judgment’’ of a listener or reader: ‘‘you have seen his [Guido’s] act, / By my power – may-be, judged it by your own’’(XII, 9–10). ‘‘Then comes the all but end, the ultimate / Judgment save yours’’(I, 1220–1). There is, then, in the end linguistic value in inter-subjective experiences of writing and reading. The active listener, reader, or interpreter does not only threaten the original meaning, but also participates in the creation of new meanings and value. For another approach to Browning’s representation of such conflicting notions of linguistic value, we might recall his famously recondite opening figure comparing the book to a ‘‘ring’’ of gold. He defines the work of the ring’s ‘‘artificer’’ in somewhat contradictory ways: both a form of ‘‘repristination’’(I, 23), or restoration to an original state of purity, and as a work of ‘‘[p]rime nature with an added artistry’’(I, 29). ‘‘Repristination’’ looks ahead to the literary value of pure vocal essence concealed within a corrupted shell of print. If the artificer must return the ring or book to a former, now obscured, state, then the value of artistic creation lies in finding the original source of meaning. But the concept of ‘‘added artistry’’ suggests, to the contrary, that the value of the ring lies in the addition of craft to its original nature. This is the ‘‘something else surpassing’’ that Browning uses to describe his creative work: ‘‘something else surpassing that, / Something of mine which, mixed up with the mass, / . . . fancy has informed, transpierced, / Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free . . . / I fused my live soul and that inert stuff ’’(I, 461–2, 465, 469). Whereas Browning once denigrated ‘‘composition’’ in order to represent authorship as transcending writing, he now takes pleasure in the ‘‘Book’’ he found in the marketplace in Florence: ‘‘Here it is, this I toss and take again; / Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript: / . . . Give it me back! The thing’s restorative / I’ the touch and sight’’(I, 84–5, 89–90). This book is as ‘‘restorative’’ as Barrett’s writings were formerly to him. In a reversal of The Ring and the Book’s otherwise consistent representation of print as a displacement of the authentic person, Browning now expresses appreciation for the material presence of the book. That Browning finds the book in a used book market where salesmen profit by ‘‘re-vend[ing]’’ (I, 52) their commodities adds special irony to his

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revaluation of print. Such ‘‘re-vending’’ may even be seen as another version of ‘‘added artistry’’ and ‘‘something else surpassing,’’ as it too adds value to the original. Such figuration of ‘‘the book’’ exists in relation to the model of print culture prevailing throughout the body of the poem in much the same way as the two opposing paradigms of linguistic value that I have argued operate in Barrett and Browning’s letters. In the letters, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in The Ring and the Book, a notion of writing that corrupts speech collides with a rival concept of writing that restores and even redeems it.21 Ultimately, however, both authors embed their representations of idealized forms of speech within frames that call attention to the ‘‘added artistry’’ of editorial labor.22 Although Browning alludes to ‘‘hell’s masterpiece of print’’ and associates professional print culture with his darkest villain, his first and final book add a more positive dimension to print authorship. Moreover, his closing address to the reader, ‘‘Then comes the end, the ultimate / Judgment save yours’’(I, 1220–1), invites that reader to ‘‘add’’ his or her own ‘‘artistry’’ and ‘‘judgment’’ to the work. Rather than adulterating the truth of the book or its re-presentation as Browning’s poem, the reader’s participation through reading will recuperate the commodity as the kind of communication he and Barrett carried on, as they would ‘‘pencil . . . and annotate, and dissertate’’ upon one another’s writings.23 I will conclude with a description of Pompilia from The Ring and the Book in which the tension or opposition I have been describing – between a vocal denigration of print and a recuperation of print and editorial work – seems to collapse together in a figuration of Pompilia as an inscribed text or ‘‘print.’’ Pompilia describes her fantasy of having Caponsacchi ‘‘for my guide, / Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand / Holding my hand across the world, – a sense / That reads, as only such can read, the mark / God sets on woman, signifying so / She should – shall peradventure – be divine; / Yet ’ware, the while, how weakness mars the print / And makes confusion, leaves the thing men see’’(VII, 1496–1503). Michael Fried’s analysis of the figure of the ‘‘upturned face’’ as a writing surface seems relevant here. Pompilia’s language of hands, marks, and print evokes a form of inscription that, because of its association with presence and a face, transcends the mere materiality of authorship and becomes a more satisfying form of idealized communication – yet one associated not with voice but with inter-subjective writing and reading. Browning thus seems to acknowledge the self-contradiction of composing and printing a multi-volume work of literature in which the primary

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source of linguistic value is an illiterate voice. He has rendered his own readers uncomfortably guilty in the knowledge that Pompilia ‘‘is bleeding out her life belike, / Gasping away the last breath of all, / This minute’’(VI, 61–3) while we read. Our participation in literary print culture has seemed like complicity in that culture’s destruction of an irreplaceable, innocent voice. Yet in this figure of Pompilia as a page or sheet of inscribed paper, he signals his recognition that the central embodiment of his book’s linguistic value must participate in print culture rather than vocally transcend it. We can return, now, to Browning’s figuring of Barrett as an author who ‘‘speaks out’’ from within a constricting enclosure of writing and print: a conceptualization of authorship that associates poetic value with a speech threatened by a hegemonic print or information culture. As we have seen, in response to Barrett’s own revisions of this model, Browning also shifted to an alternate way of imagining poetic value as part of, rather than opposed to, the material work of writing and publishing. So too do Browning’s figures of Pompilia as an inscribed page balance her depiction as an embodiment of innocent speech within a culture where all language, innocent or malign, gets swept up into the debasement of public circulation. In these images, Pompilia is both pure and the printed page, rather than one or the other. If Browning has earlier implied that to be an innocent voice must be to resist public circulation and stereotyping, here he suggests that such an innocent voice is a kind of stereotype: is itself an image or figure only attainable in the reproductions of print media. And this also seems to have been literally true in the sense that the utterly pure and illiterate Pompilia was very much Browning’s creation. The historical Pompilia denied in court that she could read or write, but Richard Altick claims that ‘‘the evidence . . . makes it quite plain that in this respect, as in some others, she was lying’’ (Browning, The Ring and the Book, p. 635) and that she was ‘‘at least as capable of writing’’ the love letters as Guido was of forging them. Ian Jack adds that ‘‘if we consider Browning’s claim to be a faithful historian, then we are bound to conclude that he is excessively credulous, since it is hard to believe that Pompilia and Caponsacchi were technically ‘innocent,’ harder to believe they were altogether virtuous and Guido altogether evil’’ (Jack, Browning’s Major Poetry, p. 296). This is to say that Pompilia probably was, by the standards of the day, a fallen woman, and it is only in Browning’s print that she is pure; both her virginity and her illiteracy are produced through print rather than in spite of it. I have argued in earlier chapters that the standard of the pure or heroic voice is by its nature contradictory. Victorian intellectuals and authors long

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for a voice of ‘‘primary orality’’ whose innocence is supposedly a sign of its incompatibility with their modern print culture. A voice becomes a vanishing standard of authenticity for the novel and dramatic monologue, genres which stake their own virtue on their capacity to save or ‘‘preserve’’ that premodern voice in print. Yet this very voice, it soon becomes clear, never existed except within the very culture that is said to have destroyed it. Pompilia joins the ranks of the endangered speakers of Victorian fiction, her death granting her words – which are, of course, also Browning’s – the special charisma of the obsolete and the doomed.

CHAPTER

7

A voice without a body: the phonographic logic of Heart of Darkness

As Leopold Bloom muses to himself, there’s nothing quite like the phonograph (or gramophone or graphophone, to name a couple of the competitors that followed Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention) to keep alive the memory and voice of those dear departed: Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohelloamarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn’t remember the face after fifteen years, say. (Joyce, Ulysses, p. 114)

‘‘Eyes, walk, voice’’: James Joyce enumerates those quintessentially modern fragments – snapshots, recordings of voice – which are taken to stand for the whole of a person. By the time radio had made the technological reproduction of voice relatively familiar, a line like T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘she smooths her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone’’ (Eliot, ‘‘The Waste Land,’’ lines 255–6) would suggest that a certain logic of modernity as governed by mechanical reproduction was already there for the taking in the culture. But in 1898, when Joseph Conrad began work on the novel which would provide the original epigraph for Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the possibilities of a voice amplified and multiplied by technological means were newly available for exploration.1 Those lines from Heart of Darkness which served as the epigraph for Eliot’s poem – ‘‘the horror! the horror!’’ – announce the dawning of an awareness that language might function with no clear connection to its human source; their transit from Conrad’s novel to Eliot’s poem exactly reveals their ‘‘quotability,’’ their status as autonomous, detachable phonemes. Unlike the literature written by Eliot and Joyce in 1922, Conrad’s 1898 Heart of Darkness contains no representation or discussion of a phonograph. The novel’s inscription of human voice nevertheless refigures sound 179

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and voice much as the phonograph – ‘‘sound writer’’ – and its successors did in the 1880s and 1890s. Critics have long observed how Conrad’s novel problematizes the distinctions between speech and writing, voice and text; what have not been noticed are the similarities between Conrad’s literary staging of these distinctions and their technological instantiation in such a device as Edison’s phonograph.2 To recognize what links Heart of Darkness and the phonograph might help us revise some of our reigning assumptions regarding the status of mass culture and literature at this period. Richard Terdiman’s diagnosis of what he calls a ‘‘memory crisis’’ afflicting European culture, an increasing sense that memory had become ‘‘a site and source of cultural disquiet’’ (Terdiman, Present Past, p. vii), provides an important context for a consideration of the significance of the phonograph. ‘‘Beginning in the nineteenth century,’’ Terdiman writes, ‘‘we could say that disquiet about memory crystallized around the perception of two related disorders, too little memory, and too much’’ (Present Past, p. 14). Terdiman’s focus on memory aligns him with Benjamin, whose analysis of the attenuation of storytelling relies on an argument about individual and collective memory. Information, which Benjamin suggests has taken the place of storytelling, has no history: ‘‘The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 90). Benjamin argues that a culture of information has rendered archaic the experience of listening to stories ‘‘passed on from mouth to mouth’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 84), an experience which relies at once on communal recollection and on the charismatic central figure of the storyteller: ‘‘Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation’’ (‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 98). These reflections on the historical transformations in the practice of memory suggest how rich and yet troubling the possibilities introduced by the phonograph must have seemed at first: for what is the phonograph but a startling mechanism of artificial memory, a means by which the ephemeral voice might be recorded for the ages? Of all literary forms, Terdiman argues, it is the novel ‘‘that most organizes itself as a projection of the memory function and its disruptions’’ (Present Past, p. 25); and of all nineteenth-century technologies, it is indisputably the phonograph – heralded by many commentators as a guarantor of the permanence of formerly fleeting cultural memories, damned by some others as a threat to the process of selective memory which grants meaning to our own history – that most refigured and disrupted the memory function.

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Friedrich Kittler has, in fact, gone so far as to argue that the invention of the phonograph – among other late nineteenth-century developments in the technologies of inscription – marks the end of literary Romanticism. If writing and books formerly held a monopoly on the culture’s recorded memory, new forms of mechanical and electrical reproduction dislodge literature’s special place of honor: As long as the book had to take care of all serial data flows . . . words trembled with sensuality and memory. All the passion of reading consisted of hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines: the visible or audible world of romantic poetry . . . Electricity has brought this to an end. If memories and dreams, the dead and the specters have become technically reproducible, then the hallucinatory power of reading and writing has become obsolete. Our realm of the dead is no longer in books, where it was for such a long time . . . Everything which, since Edison’s two inventions [the phonograph and the kinetoscope], can be taken over by the technical media disappears out of the typescripts. (Kittler, ‘‘Gramophone,’’ pp. 42–4)

Kittler’s pronouncements about the phonograph draw attention to a cultural phenomenon that had hitherto received little analysis in relation to literary history, even as the comparable relations between photography and literature in the nineteenth century, and film and literature in the twentieth, were being extensively documented. I have argued in previous chapters that Victorian fiction based its own authority on its ability to preserve endangered speech or to conjure the illusion of vocal utterance. In this final chapter I consider the transformations effected on the novel by the invention of a new, competing technology of vocal inscription. If English culture since Pitman had prided itself on its ‘‘phonographic’’ ability to transcribe voices, it is easy to appreciate the broad cultural impact of a machine that could perform these tasks with an unheard-of precision and fidelity. As the old dream of recording voice became attainable with a new degree of literalness, literature’s relation to and representation of voice and orality inevitably transformed. It should not surprise us, then, that Conrad would draw on the discourse of the phonograph in order to address the links between speech, writing, voice, and memory in a novel. Indeed, given that the novel has been linked with the cultural function of ‘‘phonographing’’ voice at least since Pitman’s invention of shorthand phonography at the onset of the Victorian era, Edison’s invention can be seen as closing the circle and offering a new challenge to the novel. The phonograph should be understood, then, not only within a technological history including such devices as the telephone and radio, but within a cultural and literary history including such

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institutions and practices as phonographic shorthand, the authorial reading, and the Victorian novel, all of which took on the task of capturing or representing voice prior to Edison’s invention. The phonograph – invented in 1877, ‘‘perfected’’ in 1888, first widely available commercially in England in 18983 – was greeted as a radically strange device by its early auditors, who viewed with disquiet and astonishment the reproduction of a distinctive human voice by a machine. Those who witnessed early phonographic demonstrations were disconcerted by the sound of a human voice re-articulated again and again by a machine, a sound that seemed to efface the distinction between a human speaker and a ‘‘talking machine.’’ But if the phonograph seemed at first to spell the death or evacuation of the presence of the human voice, it eventually promised eternal life for a recorded and reproduced one: the phonograph is a technology of vocal murder and resurrection. In this sense the device resembles such literary works as The Ring and the Book or Hard Times, which attempted a similar double task of killing and resurrecting or preserving voice. Lisa Gitelman argues that the name Edison gave his phonograph ‘‘indicates his debt to the climate of representation within which nineteenth-century shorthand developed and prospered’’ (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 63). So, too, we can note how thoroughly Victorian literature participated in this ‘‘climate of representation.’’ Both Edison’s invention and Conrad’s novel, notwithstanding their subsequent importance within technological and literary modernism, can be understood, in 1898, to be grappling with and participating in a thoroughly Victorian cultural logic. Heart of Darkness draws on new representational possibilities suggested by the phonograph – possibilities to which, as we shall see, Conrad was especially sensitive – in order to depict the effects of speech lacking a corporeal manifestation.4 For Conrad, the perception of disembodied voice pointed the way to groundbreaking innovations in literary style and form, but it also seemed to represent a grave danger to human agency and authorship. The discourse surrounding the invention of the phonograph claimed that, in seizing a human voice as a thing apart from its origin, one might resist mortality itself. Heart of Darkness draws on this celebratory strain in thinking about sound at the end of the century, asserting that the voice without a body might offer access to philosophical and literary innovations: might even, perhaps, produce a novel of pure writing and textuality, one lacking any storyteller. But this work also offers a pessimistic vision of the voice without a body as a demonic agency, a sign not of progress but of an inhuman ‘‘horror,’’ a frightening break between the voice and its human source.

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In acknowledging this undertow to the optimistic view of scientific innovation, we should not be too quick to associate the ‘‘horror’’ ascribed to phonographic voice with the demystification of art for which Benjamin and others later blamed the machine. Benjamin’s ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ is the essay that may come first to mind in relation to the phonograph, but it is, in fact, less useful than ‘‘The Storyteller’’ for thinking about this technology and its historical moment. Insisting that mechanical reproduction shifts the art work out of the realm of religious aura into one of cultural consumption, Benjamin expresses that modernist nostalgia for originals that we see throughout twentieth-century criticism. But in the late nineteenth century, before phonographic recording and reproduction of sound had become associated with the entertainment industry, phonography was understood less as a popularizing technology than as a magical one, astonishing and unnerving for the ways it transformed language into the eerie sound of an impersonal, mechanistic universe. The wonder and terror of the phonograph at this moment, then, is not that of the machine come to life as degraded and uncontrollable mass culture, but of the disembodiment of the storyteller or the charismatic speaker, the separation of the voice and the body. Conrad’s vision of the splitting apart of the formerly whole storyteller is in some sense at once typical of the literary tradition I have been examining and radically innovative. We can say of Conrad’s novel what we can also say of Edison’s invention: as vocal technologies, both draw on well-established nineteenthcentury paradigms and also introduce the new possibilities for the representation of voice that would become crucial to twentieth-century modernity. In severing the link between a human agent and speech, the phonograph opened the way to a new conception of voice not as the sign of presence but as the fragmentary material phonemes of a circulating, authorless language. While such an understanding of voice has clear links to the earlier nineteenth-century discourse of shorthand and phonography, the phonograph seemed to offer a more literal and abrupt cutting of the link between the speech act and the speaker than Pitman’s phonography had ever been able to perform. It is this conception of voice, language, and technology – one altogether distinct from and prior to a later modernist paradigm of ‘‘mechanical reproduction’’ as the abjected other of the production of high art – that Conrad puts forward in Heart of Darkness. In drawing a parallel between the late-nineteenth-century innovations of a work of technology and a work of literature, I hope to show that during this period, similar questions regarding mimetic realism and its limits were

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being raised in quite separate discursive fields. Conrad’s simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of the scientific discourse of sound technology offers one important answer to the question of how his fiction changed the terms of a realism that had been and still is the indication of serious – as opposed to merely popular – fiction. Heart of Darkness, a novel in which an enigmatic storyteller describes his fascination with a man who was ‘‘very little more than a voice,’’ marks a new stage in the way fiction understood its relation to speech. Conrad’s depiction of the voices of Kurtz and Marlow refigured the drift of articulation away from agency, of text away from author. The novel consequently was, as critics have long recognized, an important precursor to the stream-of-consciousness technique of later modernists.5 But what Heart of Darkness did to language, and why it sits so uneasily between mimetic realism and modernism, becomes most apparent when we examine it in the context of technological modernity, and specifically in the context of the phonograph – a device which finds its way into a number of the most canonical works of literary modernism as a mechanism of disembodied voice.6 While it is true that Conrad’s novel and Edison’s invention occupy very different cultural spaces, both can nevertheless be seen to grapple with surprisingly similar issues concerning the cultural implications of the disembodied voice. This similarity should be seen as symptomatic of a broader cultural shift in which both the novel and the phonograph were a part. SOUND WRITING

The eerie effect of hearing a machine reproduce speech apart from a human body suggested to many listeners an entirely new sense of what the memory of voice might from now on mean. Voice, heard emerging from a phonograph, seemed not the natural emanation of a human subject but a piece of that subject, broken off as an autonomous thing. Earlier phonographic discourse had celebrated the capture of voice on paper, but could not yet quite imagine it as entirely distinct from the living human being. As Scientific American reported in 1877, [C]ertainly nothing that can be conceived would be more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead. Yet Science now announces that this is possible, and can be done. That the voices of those who departed before the invention of the wonderful apparatus described in the letter given below are for ever stilled is too obvious a truth; but whoever has spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has

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the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling. A strip of indented paper travels through a little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren or posterity centuries hence hear us as plainly as if we were present. Speech has become, at it were, immortal. (‘‘A Wonderful Invention,’’ p. 304)

If this editorial celebrates a momentous technological advance, it also uneasily describes this advance as a fundamental shift in paradigms of human experience. To hear a voice speaking when the body from which it emerged has ‘‘turned to dust’’ is wonderful but also ‘‘startling,’’ eerie. Edison’s phonograph suggests that an individual voice might bear no permanent attachment to any particular moment in time, might be made to re-articulate itself again and again, thus destabilizing the traditional structures of knowledge and subjectivity. And the phonograph works its magic with a simple strip of paper, offering a reconfiguration of the very notion of inscription and writing. Fantasies of speech with ghosts or the dead are, of course, as old as Western culture itself, but they took new forms in the Victorian period, which developed a myth of an endangered voice enclosed within a repressive structure of print and professional writing. Commentators on the phonograph mobilized such tropes to see the device as an unnerving fulfillment of the widespread desire for a voice that would emerge from its constraints in a show of power. Like such print technologies as the novel, shorthand, or a piece of literary criticism, the phonograph can be seen as both captor of voice, and the means by which voice might potentially be released or revived. Although the recording and playing of music turned out to be the primary function of the phonograph and its descendants in the twentieth century, in the years following its invention nearly all uses suggested for it involved not music but language. In an 1878 essay, ‘‘The Phonograph and its Future,’’ Edison followed the lead of his commentator at Scientific American in focusing on the importance of the phonograph’s capacity to save a human voice after the death of its speaker: ‘‘For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men – the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph’’ (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ pp. 533–4, emphasis in original), he writes.7 Just as earlier consumers made photography an element of the ‘‘ghost industry’’ of spiritualism, so late Victorian phonograph users treated it as a technology able to save the trace of the living and so defy mortality.8

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This defiance is, however, only partial. Something strange happens to a person’s last words when they are recorded on the phonograph. Last words have always had more authority than what might be called everyday speech. Such language, as we know from Benjamin, acquires a ceremonial significance, and can even be regarded as a comment on one’s entire life. Consider, for example, the story of Tennyson’s deathbed scene in 1892: having demanded a volume of Shakespeare containing Cymbeline, he fumbled with it, then put it face down with his hand laid heavily on it, cracking the spine, so that today it still falls open to the speech of Posthumus to Imogen: ‘‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die,’’ a passage that had always moved him to tears . . . Tennyson then spoke his last words, calling out, ‘‘Hallam, Hallam,’’ and whispering indistinctly to Emily, ‘‘God bless you, my joy.’’ (Martin, Tennyson, p. 581)

Tennyson augments his actual, relatively commonplace final utterance with an act of reading and literary citation; his manual impress on the volume of Shakespeare, marking the place of favorite lines, serves almost as a final speech act, one which satisfies the cultural and literary expectation of a great man’s final summing-up. Speaking and marking a literary text, Tennyson – at least in this account – dies as a storyteller figure fully in control of his own last words. But in introducing a phonograph at the deathbed, one threatens the possibility of such an aesthetically crafted final scene. Promising to provide a technological buttress to familial or national memories of the last words of great men – a sort of National Voice-Portrait Gallery – the phonograph’s exact mimesis in fact undermined the mythmaking which had finessed such memories into satisfying form. When last words are recorded and replayed, they can become altogether disconnected (even alienated) from the person who first spoke them: autonomous, detached phonemes, fragments of sound waves given material form on a tape or phonograph cylinder and, like printed texts or any other mechanically reproduced item, subject to unpredictable effects and itineraries. Edison identifies ‘‘[t]he captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin’’ as one of the phonograph’s essential features (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ p. 530); in its presence, a speaker’s language becomes no longer only his or her own, and is subject to ‘‘captivation’’ and possibly unwanted reproduction. Speech is now exposed to those same dangers and vagaries which we have known since Plato to be the lot of written language. In marking a passage from Shakespeare with his hand, Tennyson asserted control over his own relationship to language, positioning himself as an author in a national literary tradition; it is this control, this authorial possession (‘‘knowledge or consent’’) of final words,

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which the phonograph threatened by defining a speaker as no more than the ‘‘source’’ or ‘‘origin’’ of a voice. The connection between the recording of sound and writing or authorship is more direct than it might appear, for the phonograph inscribes sound by marking it on wax, tin-foil, or paper: the materialization of sound through a kind of writing. (Thus Kittler’s claims that the phonograph usurps literature’s power.) In this way the phonograph, like literature and the book itself, is a Victorian technological device which alternately threatens to suppress or enclose voice and promises to release it. What the phonograph made especially clear was that the material voice could be understood altogether without reference to its speaker or author. Edison first observed the principle of sound’s materiality by noticing patterns of grains of sand on a beach: We have all been struck by the precision with which even the faintest sea-waves impress upon the surface of a beach the fine, sinuous line which is formed by the rippling edge of their advance. Almost as familiar is the fact that grains of sand sprinkled on a smooth surface of glass or wood, on or near a piano, sift themselves into various lines and curves according to the vibrations of the melody played on the piano-keys. (Edison, ‘‘Perfected,’’ p. 642)

This description draws an implicit analogy between ‘‘the fine sinuous line’’ of sound-writing in nature and a line of cursive handwriting. To his own eventual commercial disadvantage, Edison always insisted on the technology’s uses as a substitute for and an aid to writing rather than as the device for recording and playing music that it eventually became. In the first two decades or so of the phonograph’s existence, it was used exclusively as a supplement to or a substitution for written records of voice: its first commercial application was as an aid to office stenographers, as a machine to record the voice of an employer dictating a letter. The phonograph was, then, a new technology of inscription which threatened to render pen-topaper writing obsolete. While tin-foil and wax were eventually chosen as the substances on which the phonograph inscribed sound, in Edison’s first prototypes strips of paper were used, so that the phonograph made good its name: it was a machine that reproduced sound by literally inscribing the page.9 In this sense the early phonograph can be understood not only as a precursor to the radio or telephone but as a device occupying, and competing for, the same cultural space as the Victorian novel. The phonograph’s inventor – and many others – saw its primary value in fulfilling a nineteenthcentury fantasy of perfectly capturing, representing, and writing the human voice without destroying that voice.

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The phonograph’s early auditors recognized its potential to disrupt traditional oral experience and to put seriously into question the presumed natural connection between voice and a speaker. Harper’s Weekly jocularly predicted the eventual replacement of ‘‘great men’’ and performers with phonographic replicas, offering a proleptic version of the now-popular genre of the cybernetic jeremiad (in which a commentator foresees the day when humans will be rendered obsolete by one or another technology of recorded memory): ‘‘There is no reason why we should not have all the great men of the age, as well as the brilliant singers and actresses, taken possession of and driven off the course by the phonograph’’ (‘‘The Phonograph,’’ pp. 249–50). Edison himself elaborated on the threats posed by his invention: in ‘‘The Phonograph and its Future,’’ he describes the machine’s ‘‘foundation principle’’ as ‘‘the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will’’ (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ p. 527). He notes, in a list of the essential features of the phonograph, the new possibility of ‘‘[i]ndefinite multiplication and preservation of such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source’’ (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ p. 530). ‘‘Without regard to the existence or non-existence’’: thus Edison casually suggests the fate of the speaker of the disembodied, reproducible voice, the speaker whose language may be ‘‘captured,’’ manipulated and multiplied without his or her own consent or participation. By way of advertising his new invention, Edison inadvertently signals a profound threat to the figure of the speaker – or, we might say, the author – of a voice.10 Yet in his 1888 essay ‘‘The Perfected Phonograph,’’ Edison further suggests that the institution of authorship will only be strengthened by his device: ‘‘Authors can register their fleeting ideas and brief notes on the phonograph at any hour of day or night, without waiting to find pen, ink or paper’’ (Edison, ‘‘Perfected,’’ p. 647).11 Scientific American reported that ‘‘Mr. Edison informs us that the whole of Nicholas Nickleby could be recorded upon four cylinders’’(‘‘The New Phonograph,’’ p. 422): as if in order to quell any fear of the device leading to the obsolescence of literature, Edison hastened to stress the phonograph’s uses as a handmaiden to it. By connecting his invention to, of all authors, Charles Dickens, Edison seemed to imply that the phonograph might follow Dickens in the project of infusing literature with the power of voice – even if the reduction of ‘‘the whole’’ of one of Dickens’s long novels to ‘‘four cylinders’’ could certainly also seem a diminution. Even as Edison suggests that the phonograph would be a boon to authors, he implies that the technology radically refigures the meaning of

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‘‘writing,’’ which now might entirely bypass the process of manually inscribing words with ‘‘pen, ink or paper.’’ By receiving the impression of sound on tin-foil or paper, the phonograph makes an inscription that appears not to be an inscription; by recording and reproducing sounds, it appears to do no less than revive the dead, bring back the lost moment of oral presence. The scientific magic by which the moment of verbal utterance might be extended into the future and, potentially, reproduced infinitely is a fantasy of reincarnation: a technologically updated version of the original dream of writing, which promises to render immortal the trace of those who write. But while writing gains immortality only in the death of oral utterance, the phonograph writes sound, and thus makes the utterance live forever in a machine. Now at last Carlyle’s fantasy of a reincarnated and charismatic voice achieved its true fulfillment: vocal ‘‘wisdom’’ could be preserved forever; the storyteller, now in the form of a mechanical recording device, might never die. It is thus fair to say that the invention of the phonograph was understood by some as a fortification of speech and of the institution of authorship. But it also raised problems: in saving the voice apart from the presence of a speaker, the phonograph broke this formerly whole signifying unit into two. As Edison himself implied, the connection between the two becomes a matter more of convention than nature or necessity when the phonograph makes possible the reproduction of ‘‘sound-waves . . . with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time’’ (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ p. 530). For a voice to gain immortality is, then, decisively not the same as for a whole person to do so, and in some cases the immortality of a voice after the decease of its speaker might seem less reassuring than horrifying. Edison insisted that in listening to a recording of the last words of a loved one, one would experience the revived or even immortal presence of that person. But others who experienced the phonograph commented on the distinctly discomfiting effect of hearing one isolated part of a person. ‘‘It sounds more like the devil every time,’’ one observer commented at Edison’s demonstration of the phonograph at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington in 1877 (Conot, A Streak of Luck, p. 109): ‘‘it’’ – the voice – begins with each reproduction to seem less and less the signifier of human presence, more and more an independent, autonomous material fragment with a disconcertingly inhuman resonance. The phonograph offered to its first auditors the euphoric promise of extending speech, agency, and authorship beyond the limits of the body, but also the disquieting threat of undermining the status of that body. We

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might think of it in terms of the competing epistemologies of nineteenthcentury mimetic realism and an emerging counter-discourse which considers all knowledge to be part-knowledge, all access to the ‘‘real’’ limited by partial perspective. Edison and many of the commentators on his invention stressed the phonograph’s uses as an aid to realism. After all, in order to be recorded by the phonograph, one must be in the presence of it. The moment of recording and inscription sits easily with a realist epistemology of reference: ‘‘whoever has spoken . . . into the mouthpiece of the phonograph,’’ as Scientific American put it, ‘‘has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones’’ (‘‘A Wonderful Invention,’’ p. 304). Any sound reproduced by a phonograph, therefore, may be understood as the sign or reference of something in the world. On the other hand, there was also something about the phonograph that struck many observers as disturbingly anti-mimetic, putting some of the truisms of realism into question. What seemed particularly so was the way the phonograph’s recording process broke up the whole object into synecdoches: part-objects, signs standing for the whole. The whole person is not made immortal; one limited piece of that person, the particular pattern of sound which his or her voice makes on a phonograph cylinder, outlives its original source and ground for meaning. From a less celebratory point of view than Edison’s, the immortality and mechanical reproduction of such an imprint – ‘‘without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source’’ – seemed not a boon to human presence and realism, but a disturbing fragmentation of the human subject into circulating bits of sound (if not yet sound bites). Although Edison was an American culture hero, Britain also had its own phonograph enthusiasts. In an 1890 letter to The Times, H. R. Haweis reported a gathering to listen to a recording of the voice of the recently deceased Robert Browning: ‘‘Today was the anniversary of Robert Browning’s death at Venice, and at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, in singular commemoration of it, an event unique in the history of science and of strange sympathetic significance took place at Edison-house. The voice of the dead man was heard speaking. This is the first time that Robert Browning’s or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave’’ (Haweis, ‘‘Robert Browning’s,’’ p. 10). Here at last was Browning’s ‘‘own voice,’’ reciting a stanza from ‘‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’’ forever preserved as an accompaniment for or rival to his writing.12 A correspondent for The Times wrote in 1888 that the phonograph ‘‘will be in many respects a source of joy to novelists as an entirely new source of startling disclosures and of unexpected de´nouements’’

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(‘‘Mr. Edison’s Phonograph,’’ p. 5). But if some applauded the phonograph as a boon to Britain’s own national literary and cultural tradition, others warned of the technology’s potentially pernicious influence. One of the most openly pessimistic early journalistic accounts of the phonograph dates from an 1888 issue of the London Spectator, from around the time Edison first engaged in publicity for his invention in Britain. This article, warning of the danger of embracing its false promise of immortality, evinces a perhaps distinctly British take on the technology as enacting a (perhaps distinctly American) desire to accumulate an excess of information:13 What are we to expect from this wonderful invention? Mainly, we fear, an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying off into nothingness what deserves only temporary life. Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifying and embalming every little ripple of human energy, that we tremble for the consequences. The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech; and unless man suddenly takes a great spring into a moral greatness worthy of all this careful storing, we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions . . . Shall we not come to regard it as a singular virtue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purposes of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered? . . . Are not men daily becoming less and less massive, – less and less impressive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them, and recording delicately all the outcome of their much-fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives? (‘‘What Will Come of the Phonograph?’’ p. 881)

This anonymous editorial makes a case for the dystopian view of the phonograph, by way of seriously questioning the usefulness and value of mimetic realism. ‘‘Are not men becoming . . . less and less impressive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them?’’ the writer wonders, succinctly and acidly capturing the threat to the ‘‘human’’ in such a technology of inscription. The withering description of the process of ‘‘recording delicately all the outcome of their much-fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives’’ makes a claim that would not, I think, have been made in the heyday of nineteenth-century mimetic realism and of the earlier Victorian phonographic discourse: that the increasingly efficient and capacious potential for ‘‘recording’’ traces and details of human life may have gone too far; that ‘‘all this careful storing’’ has produced not a useful record of the voices, images and memories of human history, but only ‘‘a museum of odds and ends of form and speech,’’ a linguistic junk-yard

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overflowing with words and phrases that should have been left to die in peace. The use of the word ‘‘embalming’’ sums up this writer’s view of the phonograph’s recording process. What the phonograph preserves, this choice of vocabulary suggests, is not a trace of human essence but something more along the lines of a body part kept in a jar: say, a nose or a finger. We see here the gothic imagery associated with the resurrected storyteller throughout the nineteenth century; think, for example, of Carlyle’s image of the voice as a kind of mummy encased in ‘‘wrappages, bandages.’’ Yet the phonograph seems crucially to deny the wholeness of the storyteller, reducing the speaker to a single preserved part. This editorial’s suggestion that the phonograph might prohibit the attainment of a peaceful closure for language, might preserve what would be better carried ‘‘off into nothingness,’’ strikes a presciently Conradian note. The article, in fact, in its discussion of ‘‘the benefits of oblivion,’’ the ‘‘steadily accumulating piles of human rubbish’’ in which we all must make our way, resonates with Conrad’s own commentary on the phonograph, displaying a modernist suspicion that the device does not preserve the most significant language but instead cancels out meaning.14 Although it is probably unlikely that Conrad read the Spectator article, I do wish to argue that he joined it in contributing to developing an anti-mimetic counter-discourse. Within this discourse, the phonograph was recognized as representing the nineteenth century’s most important innovation in what has been described as ‘‘mechanical memory.’’15 To those who were beginning to wish for new epistemologies and narrative strategies, the phonograph at once embodied the doctrine of mimetic realism at its most overweening, and offered an appropriable model of new representational alternatives to that doctrine. THE ETERNAL SOMETHING THAT WAVES

Conrad often expressed mordant skepticism about science and technology. His frequently cited 1897 letter describes the universe as a malign machine: There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. (Conrad, Letters, vol I, p. 425)

I have no argument with the critical truism that Conrad’s work casts a cold eye on Victorian trust in scientific progress and that he embraces a more pessimistic understanding of the existential plight of a universe-machine headed for heat death.16 I do have reason to think that Heart of Darkness

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intervenes more specifically in contemporary representations and arguments about technology than Conrad criticism has acknowledged, in large part because scholars place him among the modernists and not in the context of Victorian thought, where his early work belongs. Both at the level of plot and in the micronarratives of sentences and paragraphs, Heart of Darkness engages precisely the same problem defined by the technology of the phonograph, which reproduces a voice long ‘‘turned to dust’’ with a mere ‘‘strip of indented paper.’’ In the rest of this chapter, I will consider how Conrad’s novel ponders the Victorian conventions of adventure narrative and the role of an author in a print culture just beginning to understand itself in terms of the threat and opportunity of new technologies of inscription. I wish to suggest an analogy between the famous phrase which was Kurtz’s last utterance – ‘‘the horror! the horror!’’ – and those ‘‘last words’’ which Edison claimed the phonograph was uniquely equipped to reproduce. In a manner that reminds us of Edison and the journalistic commentators on the phonograph, Conrad explores the effects and consequences of a new understanding of language and speech as autonomous fragments of sound, detachable phonemes which may be understood, in Edison’s words, ‘‘without regard to the existence or nonexistence of the original source.’’ Heart of Darkness may be seen as one of the Victorian period’s final tests of the efficacy and functioning of the storyteller paradigm in a new regime of reproducible speech. Conrad began writing his novel in December 1898, exactly the time when the phonograph and gramophone were first widely advertised in Great Britain.17 On September 29, 1898, he wrote to his friend Edward Garnett describing a visit in Scotland to Dr. John McIntyre, a radiologist who showed Conrad an early X-ray machine and one of the first British models of commercially manufactured phonographs. Conrad took the opportunity to make an X-ray of his hand (reproduced in his Collected Letters) and to hear the music of his countryman, the great Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski: All day with the shipowners and, in the early dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about the secret of the universe and the nonexistence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are at the bottom of all states of consciousness . . . all matter being only that thing of inconceivable tenuity through which the various vibrations of waves (electricity, heat, sound, light etc.) are propagated, thus giving birth to our sensations – the emotions – then thought. Is this so? (Letters, vol. II, p. 94; emphases in original)

Conrad gives an ironic account of the doctor’s claim that all works of human art and culture – including the piano music and Conrad’s own

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recently published story, ‘‘The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’’ – are essentially no more than configurations of sound vibrations and waves of electricity: It was so – said the Doctor – and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood, there is only the eternal something that waves and an eternal force that causes the waves – it’s not much – and by the virtue of these two eternities exists that Corot and that Whistler in the dining room upstairs (we were in a kind of cellar) and Munro’s here writings and your Nigger and Graham’s politics and Paderewski’s playing (in the phonograph) and what more do you want? (Letters, vol. II, p. 94)18

Conrad’s uneasy response to the doctor’s description of a universe composed of sound and waves of electricity suggests how his own prose engaged such upbeat scientific discourse. The stylistic vagueness for which he is remembered may be understood as a logical response to the claim that sensations, emotions, and thought are the byproduct of vast impersonal forces of electricity and sound. Indeed, this letter allows us to imagine Conrad pondering his own status as author in precisely these terms: can the cursive script of handwriting compete with the inscription of sound waves on a gramophone record or a phonograph cylinder? Can the timbre of the human voice differentiate itself from the general ‘‘vibration’’ of sound and electricity waves that modern science has claimed to constitute the ‘‘secret of the universe’’? What would it mean to write a work of literature, a novel, within this new paradigm of sound and inscription? After the phonograph, does the novel abandon its relationship to oral storytelling – ceding place to a more efficient technology of vocal inscription – or seek to find some means of responding to the phonograph’s innovations? As critics habitually notice, Conrad introduces Heart of Darkness with a scene of storytelling.19 Fredric Jameson is simply more explicit than most when he suggests that ‘‘the representational fiction of a storytelling situation organized around Marlow marks the vain attempt to conjure back the older unity of the literary institution’’ (Jameson, Political, p. 220). Certainly, the opening of Heart of Darkness fleetingly permits a comforting and even sentimental alliance of the reader with the represented figures of listeners, as if to read the novel were to join this verbal community. Mythic overtones of structures of authority and hospitality provide a sense of firm linguistic/ social structure: ‘‘the Director of Companies was our Captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward’’ (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 7). The detail of the Captain’s ‘‘back,’’ however, immediately heralds a narrative strategy Conrad uses throughout the rest of the novel, not to comfort a reader in the persistence of familiar structures of realist narrative, but to question those structures.

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What is this, I want to consider, but a version of the synecdoche that also governs the representation of phonographic sound? There are, of course, important precedents earlier in the Victorian period for Conrad’s use of synecdoche. In 1950, Dorothy Van Ghent first characterized ‘‘the Dickens world’’ as governed by a process of reification in which people become things, and vice versa. ‘‘[S]eeing the parts of the body as separable and manipulable’’ (Van Ghent, ‘‘The Dickens World,’’ p. 421), Dickens renders characters as assemblages of autonomous pieces, Van Ghent argues, so that, for example, in Hard Times ‘‘the Coketown ‘hands’ have become approximately reduced to those members for which they are named’’ (‘‘The Dickens World,’’ p. 424).20 I cite this precedent in order to call attention to the difference between Conrad’s synecdochal representation of ‘‘voice’’ and Dickens’s use of compulsive behavioral tics – including verbal ones – to suggest what Victorian industrial culture does to individuals. The logic of Dickens’s technique might be described as that of the commodity fetish, under the spell of which things and people become, as commodities, exchangeable and indistinguishable. For Dickens, the representation of voice crucially did not call for the use of synecdoche, because he was invested in the notion of voice as the expression of the whole and self-possessed human self, that which resists commodity fetishism. Dickens defined his own speech as proprietary and emerging from a coherent authorial individual. For Conrad, writing in the era of the phonograph, voice gained a unique and eerie power precisely because of its special status as a potentially inhuman synecdoche. Edison boasted that for ‘‘preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men – the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph’’ (Edison, ‘‘The Phonograph,’’ pp. 533–4, emphasis in original); those captured fragments of a human being now acquired a new autonomy. Conrad’s literary technique similarly puts into question the link between a represented detail and the whole person to whom it would normally be presumed to refer. To stare at the Captain’s back with affection is one thing when the reader is soon to be treated to a full description of this character. It is quite another thing to offer but a piece of him, when that is all we can ever expect to see. It is the difference between a conventional synecdoche, in which the part evokes the whole, and a more elliptical use of the trope – indeed a more elliptical use of representation – where the part does not allow us to conjure up the whole, but leaves it shrouded in mystery or points to its inaccessibility.

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Roman Jakobson observes that realism is characteristically ‘‘fond of synecdochic details’’: The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism and Symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predominates the so-called Realist trend . . . Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space or time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide Tolstoj’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches ‘‘hair on the upper lip’’ and ‘‘bare shoulders’’ are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong. ( Jakobson, ‘‘Two Aspects,’’ p. 111)

Conrad could be said to fulfill this definition of ‘‘the Realist author,’’ given the ‘‘artistic attention’’ he too devotes to minor details of appearance. At the same time, however, Conrad pushes the trope of synecdoche to a point where it begins to undermine Victorian realism. He evidently discovered that synecdoche would lose its capacity to conjure a referent as a part does a whole if the details observed were forced to bear more narrative weight than they could stand. Thus in Heart of Darkness, we find a disconcertingly synecdochal narrative working against the aims of realist storytelling. Conrad repeatedly depicts the human body as a collection of parts. The secretary at the Company is observed as a head and a finger: ‘‘A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 14). The Company’s chief Accountant is described as a collection of sartorial details: ‘‘I saw a high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 21). Such statements simultaneously explore the perceptual consequences of seeing the world as a collection of fragmentary parts and display the stylistic consequences of understanding language as a collection of phonemes. The Accountant’s wardrobe, described as if so many items on a department store dummy, and the secretary’s ‘‘compassionate expression’’ – curiously isolated and detached, worn like the Cheshire cat’s grin – suggest one such consequence to be an attenuation of human presence. In Tolstoy, according to Jakobson, ‘‘hair on the upper lip’’ or a handbag serve as evocative embodiments of the entire characters to whom they belong; for Conrad, however, the ‘‘expression,’’ ‘‘skinny forefinger,’’ ‘‘white cuffs,’’ and ‘‘varnished boots’’ are, instead, simply perceived details, signs failing to evoke anything or anyone beyond themselves.

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The figure which above all defines Heart of Darkness as something other than realist in its epistemology and style is the synecdochal representation of ‘‘voice.’’ Like the attributes in the passage just cited, ‘‘voice’’ in Heart of Darkness is not an expressive trace of the fully human, but a material sign, a part-object.21 Few critics of Heart of Darkness have failed to comment on its embedded narrative structure, in which an unnamed ‘‘frame narrator’’ introduces Marlow, the narrator whose spoken tale constitutes most of the novel. To the already copious commentary on this device, I would add only the observation that the two narrators offer very different representations of the problem of writing’s relationship to speech, and of the relationship of speech and writing to a referent. The novel begins by establishing a sharp distinction between the frame narrator, who is not actually a speaker but a scribe, and Marlow, who speaks the story which the frame narrator records within quotation marks. Speech had, of course, always promised greater access to human presence in the Western philosophical and literary tradition than writing. In modern Western cultures, it appears to come from a source within the body which can only be the self itself. In the era of the phonograph and telephone, however, speech begins to lose this transparency. The frame narrator, like most narrators in nineteenth-century mimetic fiction, offers writing as an imitation of speech. In writing that ‘‘[b]etween us there was as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea’’ (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 7), he suggests that the writing we read is the transcription of an original speech act. The literary realism of the Victorian novel relies on such a conventional trust in the mimetic relationship between writing and speech. In Marlow’s narrative, on the contrary, this relationship threatens to take a different shape. That there may indeed be no natural relationship between speech and the body, as Marlow’s narrative suggests, poses a new problem for authorship. The interruption of the frame narrator by Marlow’s words in quotation marks – ‘‘‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 9) – thus stages the conflict between two competing theories of representation: one the lingua franca of the nineteenth-century novel, the other emergent, inchoate, its effects and consequences still undefined. Conrad’s utopian scene of communal storytelling in the novel’s first pages is soon disturbed, as the frame narrator interrupts Marlow, some way into his narration, to observe that It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice . . . I

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listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by the narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (Heart of Darkness, p. 30)

In contrast with the Accountant, Lawyer, and Director, Marlow is named and his personality evoked. As he becomes the narrator, however, he turns into what a member of his audience describes as ‘‘no more to us than a voice.’’ In this way, Conrad evokes a model of language and speech in which the ‘‘voice’’ drifts from the body, articulates ‘‘without human lips,’’ and so provokes something like the same ‘‘faint uneasiness’’ with which Conrad responded to the demonstration of the phonograph. The ‘‘faint uneasiness’’ is an auditor’s perception of the eeriness of a voice that may be understood ‘‘without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source,’’ as Edison puts it. The frame narrator’s narrowing of focus from ‘‘the sentence’’ to ‘‘the word,’’ in his effort to pull from Marlow’s speech a ‘‘clue’’ that will operate as a traditional synecdoche and conjure the whole, seems a necessary response to a narrative technique which disavows the natural connection between a speaker and his words. Faced with such a self-shaping narrative, a listener must weigh each word, each linguistic fragment, as a separate unit of information. Thus, it is fair to say, Heart of Darkness begins with an exemplary representation of ‘‘storytelling’’ in Benjamin’s terms. As the narrative advances, however, an auditor’s experience of others listening empties out into a solipsistic, isolated perception of speech that is only occasionally interrupted by fleeting reminders of the shipboard community. As Marlow retraces his own journey toward the voice of Kurtz, he gradually disembodies his own narrating voice, denying the reassurance of a ground of corporeal identity or a community of listeners. Surely, the only truly memorable voices in Heart of Darkness are the voice of Marlow’s narration and the equally eerie voice he describes, that of Kurtz. But it is worth noting that the work also describes in passing many others: the native African speakers who ‘‘shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd [which], interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany’’(Heart of Darkness, p. 66). These sounds are, perhaps, a version of those ‘‘archaic tribal ghosts’’ (McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 263) that Marshall McLuhan associates with sound. There is little doubt of his culture’s racism in Marlow’s – and perhaps Conrad’s – reduction of the Africans’ language to senseless bits of noise, but the representation of these voices serves another important purpose as well. Marlow describes their speech as a series of detachable

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phonemes, as simply one synecdochal fragment among many – perceived, like ‘‘feet,’’ ‘‘hands,’’ or ‘‘eyes,’’ as if in a Cubist painting: ‘‘But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roots, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless fatigue’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 37). In 1898 a writer could reduce the bodies and language of Africans to a collection of isolated parts without too greatly shocking his readers with the attenuation of the ‘‘human’’ in such a discourse, since Africans were not considered fully human to begin with. But Conrad did not reserve such treatment only for those shadowy figures along the side of the Congo. The voice Heart of Darkness privileges as its narrative destination belongs to Kurtz, Conrad’s portrayal of whom tests the limits of realist intelligibility in the condensation and reduction of a character into pure speech. When Marlow initially tells his listeners of the rumors about a certain mysterious figure named Kurtz, Conrad appears to be using a social mechanism in a manner familiar to any novel reader.22 But the subsequent depiction of Kurtz reveals these rumors as speech about speech – speech that fails to provide any access to the person himself. We find that rumor lacks any connection to extra-discursive reality, which calls into question mimetic realism itself in a way that earlier fiction did not. If the ‘‘horror’’ ascribed to Kurtz has something to do with his status as an individual who becomes nothing more nor less than his voice, then his representation suggests the experience – new to Conrad and his readers in the late 1890s – of hearing someone’s voice reproduced by a phonograph.23 ‘‘I made the strange discovery,’’ Marlow says about his initial disappointment at the thought that he might never meet Kurtz, ‘‘that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will never see him,’ or ‘Now I will never shake him by the hand,’ but ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man presented himself as a voice’’ (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 48). It is in these terms that Marlow explodes in a frustrated outburst to his listeners: I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard – him – it – this voice – other voices – all of them were so little more than voices – and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like the dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, savage, or simply mean without any kind of sense. (Heart of Darkness, pp. 48–9)

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Conrad represents Marlow’s stuttering perception of a ‘‘voice’’ that fails to articulate or lead back to a clear identity, a voice ‘‘without any kind of sense.’’ ‘‘Hearing’’ hesitates in its desire to attach itself to a stable object, stumbles and backs away from a personal identity (‘‘him’’) to ‘‘it,’’ and then to ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘voices.’’ The designations ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘him,’’ ‘‘voice,’’ ‘‘other voices,’’ function as part-objects that fail in their expected role as signifiers of the human source from which they were supposed to issue forth. Conrad represents these words as exchangeable linguistic fragments, non-mimetic phonemes detached from any represented objects or persons. In his refusal to confirm any natural relationship between speech and writing, he suggests that his culture has left far behind a (nostalgically recalled) scene of storytelling framed around a storyteller who can be grasped as simultaneously a member of the community and as an authorfunction. As we have seen, the nineteenth-century storyteller was him/ herself always an unstable invention, a retroactive fantasy more than a reality, which nevertheless provided a stable form and a normative structure for the Victorian novel. The figure of the storyteller and the scene of a storytelling community provided an ideal, for the novel, of natural and human communication within a modern world perceived as antithetical to such values. Heart of Darkness represents such a storytelling scene as a (deeply appealing) fantasy. Storytelling in the novel eventually gives way to an ‘‘immense jabber,’’ a ‘‘dying vibration,’’ recalling those ‘‘various vibrations of waves’’ Conrad alluded to in his letter to Garnett. I do not think it is too much to say that Marlow’s lament, ‘‘the memory of that time lingers around me, impalpable, like the dying vibration of one immense jabber,’’ like his curse of too much senseless memory, owes a precise debt to the new paradigm of sound, voice, and memory introduced by the phonograph: the device that promised to create ‘‘an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying into nothingness what deserves only temporary life’’ (‘‘What Will Come of the Phonograph?’’ p. 881). Since Kurtz is language and speech, it is only logical that Marlow should describe him physically by seizing upon his mouth as the partial detail which stands for the whole. In this case, however, the part displaces that whole: I saw him open his mouth wide – it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly . . . The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound,

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vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. (Heart of Darkness, pp. 59–60)

Kurtz has been associated from the beginning with a charismatic flow of language: ‘‘of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 48). To represent his anti-hero’s mendacious eloquence, Conrad draws on a scientific vocabulary of electricity and sound waves, those ‘‘vibrations of waves (electricity, heat, sound, light etc.)’’ he discusses in his letter. Kurtz produces a ‘‘magic current of phrases’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 51), a ‘‘stream of light.’’ In this Edison-haunted, electrical text, Conrad depicts Kurtz’s language as, quite exactly, a ‘‘stream’’ or ‘‘flow,’’ human utterance distilled to the components of technologically reproduced sound. Kurtz ‘‘electrified large meetings’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 71). His voice is ‘‘profound, vibrating’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 60). It sounds ‘‘far off and yet loud like a hail through a speaking-trumpet’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 64). The power of the man is inextricable from an uncanny verbal ability that vacillates between presence and absence, distance and terrifying clarity. This is also the vacillation of the phonograph. As the novel proceeds, the reader begins to understand that Marlow’s long narration – dazzling in its own right – is an extended rumination over the problem of what to do with Kurtz’s words, which have been, as it were, entrusted to Marlow. Heart of Darkness resolves into a plot concerning the fate of Kurtz’s final words, ‘‘the horror! the horror,’’ as Marlow returns to civilization bearing the memory of Kurtz and the obligation to convey the memory to his fiance´e, the Intended. When Marlow proclaims, ‘‘He lived then before me, he lived then as much as he ever did’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 72), he could almost be contemplating the possibility that the human voice was now immortal. If last words carried special significance before the phonograph, I would argue, they carry another kind of burden afterwards. Last words were no longer the end of voice but the beginning of its reproduction as voice alone. Kurtz is, in a sense, a test case for the Edisonian project of recording and passing on the last words of ‘‘great men,’’ a social practice that relies on the faith that the meaning of such words, which has its source in their human origin, can be successfully transmitted – on a faith in the possibility of the transmission of ‘‘wisdom’’ from generation to generation. Such optimism is ruled out by Conrad’s

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representation of speech as sound which, once spoken, acquires the status of the authorless ‘‘vibrations’’ of an impersonal universe.24 Heart of Darkness concludes with Marlow returning from his journey to encounter an audience eager to consume his story not simply as language but as the traces of the human presence of Kurtz – as a form of storytelling. The final scene with the Intended restages the problem posed by the novel’s opening, where Conrad posed storytelling in contrast to a new kind of disembodied transmittal of narrative. Prior to the era of the phonograph, up to the 1880s, the threat posed to print and fiction by dissident forms of speech seemed to have been at least provisionally solved by what I have called the mythology of the storyteller and its association of the text with an imagined authorial body and voice at origin. By locating the source of print’s value in an idealized speech community, the Victorian novel managed the heterogeneity of contemporary voice. Around the time of the phonograph’s introduction, however, this solution began to show signs of terminal breakdown. Conrad represents and reproduces voice much as his readers imagined the phonograph did. In doing so, Conrad may seem to reincarnate the premodern figure of the storyteller for a modern age. But his mimesis of a storyteller is far from nostalgic or regressive, suggesting, finally, that voice is itself a kind of writing and that, like writing, it lacks any natural or stable connection to the identity or author-figure from whom it emerged. Heart of Darkness begins in the voice of an unnamed frame narrator whose words acknowledge no distinction between voice and writing, a storyteller/scribe in whom those two identities do not seem to be in conflict. He is the kind of narrator that nineteenth-century fiction since Jane Austen had consistently produced, an author/speaker like Dickens in whose ‘‘voice’’ the novel passes itself off as a sort of storytelling in print. Yet when this narrator introduces Marlow, Heart of Darkness veers off in a new direction, seeming to mimic a pre-modern oral storytelling situation, yet also revealing a new understanding of speech as, like writing, disembodied, even potentially inhuman. The painful irony of the novel’s conclusion, then, lies in its staging of a confrontation between two understandings of language. One, embodied in the Intended, assumes that speech sums up a person’s life and intentions, stands as a successful synecdoche of the whole person. The other insists instead on the autonomy and materiality of language, its status as what we might call failed synecdoche: a piece of a person which no longer bears any natural connection to its human origin. In this understanding of language, ‘‘his voice’’ or ‘‘my voice,’’ once articulated, enter a circulation of utterances in which authority and embodiment are swept away: ‘‘I heard – him – it – this voice – other voices – all of them were so little more than voices.’’ From

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Conrad’s perspective, the new understanding of language not only points the way to literary innovation but also represents a frightening erasure of the human source and ground of language. To be an author under this new regime would be to give up all of the wisdom, the comfort of human presence, that Victorian authorship had conjured, mimicked, evoked even in the face of industrialized publication and an abstracted, unknowable readership. The Intended, in her sentimental yearning for a verbal memento of Kurtz in a conventional deathbed ending, seems to stand for the feminized Victorian reader, a consumer of language whose desire for narrative is indistinguishable from a desire for the preservation of lost human presence and the storyteller’s reassurance. In Marlow’s exchange with her, Conrad dramatizes a conflict of expectations regarding the reproduction of speech, as she insists on a kind of reproduction Marlow will not provide. ‘‘‘I heard his very last words . . . ’ I stopped in a fright. ‘‘‘Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want – I want – something – something – to – to live with.’ ‘‘I was at the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them.’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 75)

The command to ‘‘repeat them’’ begs for the revival of a lost presence promised by the reproduction of speech, and her stuttered ‘‘I want – I want – something – something – to – to’’ seems almost to enact such a reproduction. Conrad foregrounds the desire in her reception of language, figuring her as a consumer with grandiose ‘‘want[s].’’ What she so desires is a verbal reproduction of a deathbed scene resembling Tennyson’s – or for that matter the one Benjamin evokes – in which a great man’s final words may be reproduced and disseminated as tokens of the entire man, the entire life, ‘‘experience’’ itself. But Marlow finally cannot bring himself to pronounce Kurtz’s ‘‘whispered cry’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 72): ‘‘I could not tell her. It would have been too dark – too dark altogether’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 76). In that ominous ‘‘first whisper of a rising wind,’’ one hears the sound of the mechanistic universe Conrad described in his letter, a sound which brings new understanding to Marlow’s final speech act, his refusal to reproduce Kurtz’s last words. Conrad’s novel began with a scene of communal storytelling, and both the novel and Marlow’s story end with another scene of vocal transmission, as Marlow must decide what to pass on to Kurtz’s fiance´e. Marlow refuses

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to make his voice the means of the repetition the Intended yearns for, but he does, in a sense, give her what she wants all the same – a comforting (if untrue) representation of Kurtz’s last words: ‘‘your name’’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 75). That is, he gives her a mendacious version of what Edison promised the phonograph would provide, a gift of final or otherwise significant words preserved forever in recorded memory, words which would satisfy a need for special language transcending the contingency of everyday speech. By substituting ‘‘your name’’ for ‘‘the horror,’’ Marlow effectively reinstates a simulation of human presence at the site of its erasure,25 suggesting that there is no social space for actual last words. No one really wants an exact phonographic reproduction of the last syllables – garbled, pathetic or frightening – uttered by a man, great or otherwise. A literal transcript or ‘‘verbatim’’ recording of voice – that thing that Isaac Pitman promised in 1837 – finally includes too much noise and unwanted information. Kurtz’s final repeated phrase is something like Joyce’s imagining of grandfather’s last words – ‘‘Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark:’’ that is, not wisdom at all, not suitable as a memento, barely meaningful or human. What is desired is, rather, an improved version of such an utterance, a representation of last words as a satisfying summary of a life – like Tennyson’s citation of Shakespeare – to ward off the autonomous sound waves both Conrad’s novel and the phonograph suggest them to be. In order to deliver the commodity of a deathbed scene, Marlow has to lie – thus exposing the lie that speech can convey the presence and identity of its speaker. Heart of Darkness travels away from an idealized scene of storytelling towards the disembodied voice of a circulating textuality. Yet ultimately the novel does not fully embrace such an understanding of language as anonymous and fragmentary circulation. Marlow’s final refusal to reproduce Kurtz’s phrase ‘‘the horror! the horror!’’ at one level signals Conrad’s ambition to resist technological reproduction, to craft a literary prose which will retain the aura of non-reproducible language in a world of repetition. By offering the Intended a comforting deathbed scene that conjures human presence, Marlow distances himself from the workings of a mechanical universe and its authorless, inhuman language. Even if Marlow’s refusal is not the same as Conrad’s, Conrad does leave us with the balm of Marlow as a storyteller figure, a potential source of voice and its humane wisdom. It is in this sense that Heart of Darkness remains a Victorian novel, albeit one teetering at the verge of the twentieth century’s new world of mechanized utterance. Ultimately, Heart of Darkness can be seen both as marking the end of the Victorian mythology of the storyteller, and, in a sense, as demonstrating

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the resilience of that myth. Unlike his protagonist Marlow, Conrad hears the ‘‘first whisper of a rising wind’’ and does not close his ears to it, recognizing the sound of such a universe as the harbinger of a new literature, a transformed realism without a charismatic storyteller at the origin of utterance. Yet in the continued presence of Marlow in the narrative – a man who cannot tell a woman the brutal truth about the final words of the man she loves, choosing instead to preserve a comforting and deeply misleading fiction about a purportedly great man – Conrad also preserves, in a sense, the storyteller function and its claims to humanist values. Writing in 1898 as one of the very last Victorian authors, Conrad faces an aural and vocal world transformed by Edison’s phonograph and writes a novel that at once depicts – holds onto, longs for – a storyteller and suggests that we might be able to do without such a figure in our fictions.

Notes

1 ‘‘ T H E B E S T M A N O F A L L ’’ : M Y T H O L O G I E S OF THE STORYTELLER 1 Roland Barthes, ‘‘Death,’’ p. 1466. A short-title reference system will be used throughout this book; see the Bibliography for full information. 2 In the work of, for example, Walter Ong, probably the most influential modern theorist and historian of orality, we can find both trenchant analysis of the interactions between voice and print in literary history, and, at times, more dubious accounts of a lost oral world, to be mourned and eulogized. ‘‘We have to die to continue living’’ (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 15) is his regretful phrase to explain the recession of ‘‘primary orality’’ in the face of literacy. Even as Ong scolds modern literary and cultural critics for neglecting the crucial role of orality in society, he sounds a familiar note of mingled dismay at the irretrievably past status of a ‘‘pristine,’’ ‘‘full’’ orality and optimism regarding the possibility of ‘‘reconstruct[ing]’’ that vanished era of pre-literate orality via the use of the ‘‘literacy’’ that apparently supplanted it: ‘‘Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all – at least to reconstruct this consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly (we can never forget enough of our familiar present to reconstitute in our minds any past in its full integrity)’’ (Orality and Literacy, p. 15). Ong shifts from a faith in the power of ‘‘literacy’’ to unearth a buried ‘‘pristine human consciousness’’ associated with voice, to a sad acknowledgment of the unbridgeable historical divide separating the imperfect science of literacy from the condition of ‘‘pristine’’ oral cultures. I have certainly benefited from Ong’s often brilliant work, but I also assign him some blame for helping to define the contemporary study of orality as a scholarly work of mourning. 3 Albert Lord, in a celebrated account of the techniques of ‘‘oral’’ and ‘‘written’’ narration, offers a classically apocalyptic, all-or-nothing account of writing and literacy’s abrupt displacement of orality: ‘‘The two techniques are, I submit, contradictory and mutually exclusive. Once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained. The written technique, on the other hand, is not compatible with the oral technique’’ (Lord, Singer, p. 129). 4 Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past (2003) offers a magisterial attempt to reconceptualize the nineteenth-century history of sound and recorded voice. 206

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An increasing number of critics and scholars, many of whom have influenced my thinking on these topics, have joined Sterne in beginning to attempt the task of more carefully mapping the pre-twentieth-century experience of sound, voice, and aurality. Lisa Gitelman argues that ‘‘the nineteenth century was far more rooted in aural experience than is easy to recover today. Aural experience was tenaciously multiple . . . [L]ike other social practices, listening was changing’’ (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, pp. 25–6). Much of the best recent work on such issues has focused on the American or French contexts. In addition to Gitelman, see, for example, Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, Christopher Looby, Voicing America, Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded, Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth Century America, Emily Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, and Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things, for compelling work on sound, hearing, and orality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Looby examines ‘‘vocal utterance as a deeply politically invested phenomenon of the social world’’ (Looby, Voicing America, p. 3). For a consideration of similar issues in a French context, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris, Alain Corbin, Village Bells, and Allen S. Weiss, Breathless. On orality, speech, and sound in the British context, see Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality, on nineteenth-century Scottish literature and orality, Deborah Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theater, on Dickens and theatrical voice, Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, on female speech and the English novel in the eighteenth century, Bruce O. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, on early modern England, and John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, on sound and noise and Victorian culture. Vlock argues that ‘‘the voice [has been] overwhelmingly neglected by studies of Victorian literature and culture’’ (Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 83). 5 See Leigh Eric Schmidt for another recent critique of histories of literacy’s total triumph over voice and orality. Arguing with Walter Ong’s characterization of the ‘‘devocalization of the universe,’’ Schmidt ‘‘refuse[s] the story line of devocalization’’ and finds ‘‘little that is irreversible about the disenchantment of voices and hearing at the hands of print and visuality’’ (Schmidt, Hearing Things, p. 8). 6 Penny Fielding makes a similar point: ‘‘we should hesitate before reintroducing orality as if it were an endangered species whose peculiar qualities must be preserved, for the identification of those qualities can be extremely problematic’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, p. 3). Fielding’s book, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction, became especially helpful to me as I revised my own. Fielding addresses a different set of authors than I do here – her focus is nineteenth-century Scottish fiction from Scott and Hogg through Stevenson – but she makes an argument about contemporary theories of voice and orality that resembles mine in several respects, as when she argues that ‘‘the idealization of orality turns out to be a strategy in which its assumed ‘death’ is a means for ignoring its survival in marginalized forms’’ (Writing and Orality, p. 5) and that ‘‘throughout the nineteenth century – and into the twentieth – the death of orality is something

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always just about to happen’’ (Writing and Orality, p. 99). Fielding, as I do, uses Benjamin’s ‘‘The Storyteller’’ as a theoretical frame with which to examine nineteenth-century orality – see, for example, pp. 14–15 and 109–10. See Renato Resaldo, ‘‘Imperialist Nostalgia,’’ and James Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Allegory.’’ I have borrowed a phrase here from Lora Romero, who argues that within the politics of American domesticity, ‘‘literary value seems to depend upon identification of idealized agents (authors or intellectuals) who stand outside the social and political ideologies of their time’’ (Romero, Home Fronts, p. 5). The influential work of Marshall McLuhan quite explicitly associates voice and orality with the tribal and non-Western, and links the shift from an oral to a literate culture with the self-repression of ‘‘Western literate man’’: ‘‘In tribal cultures,’’ he writes, ‘‘experience is arranged by a dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values . . . Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man’’ (McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 88). New forms of technologized orality such as radio, McLuhan asserts, evoke ‘‘archaic tribal ghosts’’ (Understanding Media, p. 263). Richard Cullen Rath comments helpfully on what might be called the primitivization of the oral: ‘‘Anthropologists and historians have relied on the theory of orality to say much about societies where print and literacy were rarer, such as Native American peoples, African American communities, non-elites, and women. To the extent that they were illiterate they are deemed pre-modern and thus oral. Literacy and print in turn have been associated with the development of western civilization, in which case oral cultures stand in for the primitive and the ‘savage’’’ (Rath, How Early America Sounded, pp. 2–3). See Yopie Prins, ‘‘Victorian Meters,’’ for an argument about Victorian meter that relies on a similar understanding of the ways Victorian culture at once disavows voice and idealizes a mythic voice that is in reality a creation of print. Prins argues that ‘‘nineteenth-century theories of meter . . . uncover a form of linguistic materialism that complicates the claim to vocal presence’’ (Prins, ‘‘Victorian Meters,’’ p. 92). Victorian metrical theory, she argues, ‘‘develops an account of meter that is neither an imitation of voice nor a script for voice but a formal mediation that makes ‘voice’ a function of writing’’ (‘‘Victorian Meters,’’ p. 90). Voice ‘‘proves to be a prior inscription, even if it is remembered as pure inspiration’’ (‘‘Victorian Meters,’’ p. 99). Victorian print culture, that is, creates a fantasy of a pure voice. See also Prins, ‘‘Voice Inverse’’: ‘‘it seems that we at a different historical moment are carried away by the desire to recover and discover the voices of Victorian poetry. Why do we insist on reading literally what the Victorians understood to be a metaphor?’’ (Prins, ‘‘Voice Inverse,’’ p. 44). The aspiration of eighteenth-century authors to control vernacular language by the means of writing is perhaps most vividly exemplified in Samuel Johnson’s ‘‘Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language’’ (1755). Johnson describes the state of confusing disarray in which he found his native language: ‘‘When

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I took the first survey of my undertaking,’’ he writes, ‘‘I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated’’ ( Johnson, ‘‘Preface,’’ p. 277). ‘‘As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written’’ (‘‘Preface,’’ p. 278), he admits, describing his own task as the bringing of order and authority to the ‘‘arbitrary representation of sounds by letters’’ (‘‘Preface,’’ p. 278). In the work of the eighteenth-century novelists who were the inheritors of Johnson’s Dictionary we see the fruits of his labors: the chaos of oral vernacular mastered by the writing of literature. I should emphasize here, however, that I by no means want to be understood to be claiming a simple or unproblematic relationship between speech and writing or print in the preVictorian period. In the work of William Blake, to cite just one example, we can find an exceedingly rich and complex set of representations of and engagements with the problem of print’s relationship to speech. I simply mean to point out that one of the key features of the Victorian period is a quantum leap in anxieties about mass print culture, and the losses that it might entail – losses that are pervasively expressed in terms of a vanishing voice. 12 Penny Fielding argues that ‘‘compared with the crisis of literacy in the early nineteenth century, the eighteenth century seemed, and was certainly looked back on as, a period of comparative stability in which speech and writing could coexist, interact, and make themselves available as means of expression across society’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, p. 20). Walter Scott’s particular relationship to orality deserves – and has received – special consideration. See ibid., pp. 43–58, for example, on Scott’s attitude to orality in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Fielding argues that Scott sees orality as, ‘‘in its idealized form,’’ allowing ‘‘access to the purity of origins,’’ yet requiring a frame of writing because ‘‘it cannot preserve its own insights’’ (Writing and Orality, p. 52). 13 See Gillian Beer on Benjamin: ‘‘His essay has the quality of threnody, looking back upon a dying form of society’’ (Beer, ‘‘Storytime,’’ p. 132). Peter Brooks, defending ‘‘The Storyteller’’ from charges of simple nostalgia, argues that the essay’s apparent binary opposition between oral tales – now objects of historical longing – and modern novels might be best understood as ‘‘largely strategic’’ (Brooks, ‘‘The Tale,’’ p. 309), part of an effort to restore a sense of context and of shared experience to the process of literary reading. To my mind, Brooks is perhaps too generous in explaining away Benjamin’s own nostalgia as fully selfaware ‘‘strategy.’’ I should add, however, that I certainly do not intend to be offering a thorough critique or analysis of Benjamin’s work on the basis of this one essay. I justify my extended reference to it, at the expense of Benjamin’s other work, on the grounds that for contemporary Anglo-American criticism and theory of fiction and the novel, it has achieved a special status. ‘‘The Storyteller’’ is, simply, one of the founding statements of twentieth-century theory of the novel. 14 Noah Isenberg has commented on Benjamin’s fairly recent elevation to the status of ‘‘one of the great icons of twentieth-century intellectual life’’ (Isenberg, ‘‘The Work of Walter Benjamin,’’ p. 124).

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15 The references to ‘‘hands’’ are, however, an addition by the translator. The original French reads, ‘‘Un jour de 1867, un ouvrier agricole, du village de Lapcourt, un peu simple d’esprit, employe´ selon les saisons chez les uns ou les autres . . . est de´nonce´’’ (Foucault, Histoire, p. 43). 16 Foucault is among those Gayatri Spivak, in her ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ criticizes for turning to the discovery of free or powerful speech on the part of a disenfranchised subject as a strategic move on the part of an intellectual distressed at the unsatisfactory or diminished status of his own cultural position. ‘‘The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent’’ (Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ p. 275). Spivak’s skeptical argument has influenced my own thinking about the function, in contemporary criticism and theory, of representations of the transformative speech of the non-elite. 17 Anne McClintock makes a similar point about the seductive nostalgia of oral history: ‘‘Oral history may also conceal a poetics of nostalgia. In its empirical guise, oral history fulfills the nostalgic desire to represent history whole, to preserve, to embalm’’ (McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 311). 18 My argument shares some assumptions with Dorothy Hale’s recent claim that modern novel criticism since Henry James and Percy Lubbock has been motivated by an unacknowledged ethical imperative. In critics as disparate as James and Bakhtin, Hale sees a tacit assumption that to permit characters in a novel – seen as analogues for ‘‘others’’ in the world – to ‘‘speak’’ or express their own voice or dialect is inherently progressive. Bakhtin, she argues, ‘‘paradoxically accords a special fullness to the subject who is able to empty himself of any interest except the representation of others different from himself; and . . . decrees that the ideal exemplar of this appreciative subject must be the novelist’’ (Hale, Social Formalism, p. 17). In novel criticism, Hale argues, apparently formalist assertions regarding ‘‘point of view’’ and novelistic ‘‘voice’’ typically slide into tacitly ethical claims regarding the value or virtue in representing as many ‘‘voices’’ as possible within a novel. 19 On Williams and voice, also see David Simpson, who argues that ‘‘if the vocalic does indeed function in our culture as the signifier of subjective integrity, then Williams had an intuitive ability to make this work for him against what he saw as the inhumanities of ‘writing’ – of theory, abstraction, schematization, the techniques he often identified with the cruel facilitation of global rationalization’’ (Simpson, ‘‘Raymond Williams,’’ p. 10). 20 Patricia Howell Michaelson helpfully describes the metaphorical meaning of ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘silence’’ for feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s: ‘‘metaphors of silence became a shorthand for women’s oppression in now-classic texts like Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence and Audre Lorde’s ‘The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.’ The converse of silence, not ‘sound’ or ‘noise’ but ‘voice,’ came to express both self-definition and authority’’ (Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, p. 3). I concur with Michaelson’s conclusion that ‘‘for all its evocative power, the metaphor of voice has,

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I believe, become ossified in ways that have negative connotations’’ (Speaking Volumes, p. 3). See Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target, pp. 183–94 for an extended critique of Fishkin’s argument. For an especially overt, and naı¨ve, recent elaboration of the narrative of de-vocalization, one made from an evolutionary biology-influenced perspective, see John L. Locke: ‘‘Our personal voices began to fade. The seeds were sown when tiny tribes of humans gave way to large and diverse cultures that had fewer pieces of shared information and a greater need to exchange impersonal facts. The process continued when we developed quicker ways to transmit messages and to conduct economic and personal business . . . Our great-grandparents lived very differently. They could see and hear their communicants. Messages were wrapped in blankets of feeling. Voices moved, faces flashed . . . How times have changed’’ (Locke, The De-Voicing of Society, pp. 18–19). See Aram H. Veeser, Confessions of the Critics, for an anthology devoted to the genre. My interest here is not in autobiographical criticism as such but in the function of gestures toward the vocal within such criticism. One can, of course, write autobiographical criticism without any invocation of personal ‘‘voice.’’ See also Yopie Prins on Victorian meter: voice ‘‘proves to be a prior inscription, even if it is remembered as pure inspiration’’ (Prins, ‘‘Victorian Meter,’’ p. 99). John Durham Peters’s analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus reminds us of the long lineage of Carlyle’s imagery for thinking about writing, speech, and communication: ‘‘Writing on papyrus, as opposed to writing on souls, is for Socrates a kind of cheating eros. It pretends to be a live presence but in fact is a kind of embalmed intelligence, like the mummies of ancient Egypt, whence writing supposedly came’’ (Peters, Speaking Into the Air, p. 49). Also see Joseph Bristow, Cambridge Companion, pp. 15–16 on Carlyle’s essay on Elliot. See Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader, for an authoritative book-length analysis of the ‘‘dear reader’’ address of Victorian fiction – and see pp. 222–3 for a discussion of this passage itself, which Stewart describes as the moment ‘‘when Dickens’s prose, for the first and last time in his major fiction, drops into the most formulaic mode of audience address.’’ Ong defines ‘‘primary orality’’ as a state of ‘‘pristine’’ orality lacking any exposure to writing. ‘‘Secondary orality’’ is ‘‘essentially a more deliberative and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print’’ (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 134). He stresses the paradox that literacy can, albeit imperfectly, ‘‘reconstruct’’ (Orality and Literacy, p. 15) the primary orality that is, by definition, inaccessible by means of literacy. (Presumably he would see his own scholarship as performing such a reconstruction.) My own analysis of orality differs from Ong’s primarily in my skepticism about whether this so-called ‘‘primary orality’’ is anything more than the fantasy of a guilty print culture. John Picker’s recent work (see Victorian Soundscapes) offers the best – as well as some of the only – scholarship on the sheer noise of Victorian culture.

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2 WHEN GOOD SPEECH ACTS GO BAD: THE VOICE OF INDUSTRIAL FICTION 1 Political speech and rhetoric had already begun to be perceived as especially problematic in the 1790s, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Jon Klancher writes that ‘‘Rhetoric itself, as a mode of public discourse increasingly felt to be culturally outmoded and theoretically indefensible, would become attached to a new cultural site in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the language of radicalism in all its political and linguistic ‘excess’’’ (Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 99). These trends accelerated with the 1830s exponential expansion of the print sphere. 2 The speech of Samuel Johnson can be seen as emblematic of an earlier era in English culture’s vision of an ideal relationship between voice and print – an ideal relationship that, even if it never quite existed, still exerted a strong influence on the thought and practices of the time. It seems altogether characteristic that one listener declared Johnson’s conversation to possess the correctness of a ‘‘second edition’’ of a written text (Kernan, Printing Technology, p. 18). His famous conversation was so closely aligned with print culture as to seem a part of it. 3 Recent debates over the performativity of speech have influenced my thinking about the mid-Victorian struggles over good and bad speech. See, for example, J. L. Austin’s classic How to Do Things with Words, the debate between Jacques Derrida and John Searle documented in Derrida’s Limited Inc., and Shoshana Felman’s recently re-translated The Scandal of the Speaking Body (previously titled The Literary Speech Act in its English translation). 4 As Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge suggest in their Public Sphere and Experience, Chartism offered the first possibility in Western Europe of a ‘‘proletarian public sphere’’ – one constituted, I argue, in large part by dissident voices. 5 David Vincent notes the delicate problem faced by the State in ‘‘containing the use of literacy.’’ If the evolving Victorian stategy of mandating a ‘‘comparatively brief period of education lacking in systematic indoctrination . . . avoided the danger inherent in overt repression of associating any employment of reading and writing with radical protest’’ (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 241), this system also ‘‘remained full of risk.’’ Working-class literacy fed political radicalism throughout the century. 6 Judith Butler suggests that in order to understand the political boundaries of citizenship, we must discover what sort of speech may count as the language of a self-possessed subject: ‘‘If the subject speaks impossibly, speaks in ways that cannot be regarded as speech or as the speech of a subject, then that speech is discounted and the viability of the subject called into question. The consequences of such an irruption of the unspeakable may range from a sense that one is ‘falling apart’ to the intervention of the state’’ (Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 136). 7 See Penny Fielding on the ways dissident or unruly forms of both writing and orality were defined, in nineteenth-century Britain, as ‘‘illiteracy’’: ‘‘Writing becomes illiteracy partly for its political content, but also because of its exposure

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to the dangerous scenes of popular orality’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, p. 34). Dorothy Thompson notes that the Chartists’ respect for education was fully compatible with a distrust of the education provided by national schools: ‘‘Many Chartists, indeed, saw provided education, and the values it attempted to instill, as inimical to their beliefs’’ (Thompson, ‘‘Chartists,’’ p. 146). Jay Fliegelman’s arguments about the multiple significations of speech, voice, and orality in late eighteenth-century America provide a useful context for my analysis of speech in 1840s England. Fliegelman argues that speaking and listening to persuasive, compelling oral performance became linked to the ideology of non-violent, democratic hegemony. ‘‘[H]eart-felt listening became a new model of political submission, a submission that represented not rational assent but a new mesmerist mixture of voluntarism and involuntarism’’ (Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, p. 40). But ‘‘the distinction between calculated rabble-rousing and heartfelt discourse was finally highly problematic’’ (Declaring Independence, p. 79); public speech always carried the threat of generating not consensus but dissent. The terms ‘‘demogoguism’’ and ‘‘huzzaing,’’ standing for political oratory and the crowd’s response to it, appear so often as to provide an organizing structure for Bamford’s memoir: ‘‘So much for the shouting, huzzaing, and the empty applause of multitudes . . . whenever I see a grey-headed orator courting such acclamations, I set him down as being either a very shallow, or a very designing person’’ (Bamford, Passages, p. 106). See Olivia Smith for analysis of the importance of Cobbett’s 1816 ‘‘An Address to Journeymen and Labourers,’’ which she discusses as ‘‘an attempt to create a new audience’’ (Smith, The Politics of Language, p. 227) of ‘‘Journeymen and Labourers.’’ The ‘‘coup of Cobbett’s ‘Address,’’’ she argues, was to write ‘‘the swinish multitude into a dignified and traditional, particularly Burkean, social fabric’’ (The Politics of Language, p. 230). Smith stresses the address of Cobbett’s ‘‘Address,’’ the rhetorical construction of an educated, non-elite audience. More recently, John Plotz has argued that within Chartism ‘‘the introduction of a crowd-borne form of signification had substantially altered the grounds of political debate in the mid-Victorian period’’ (Plotz, The Crowd, p. 129), and Owen Ashton asserts that ‘‘a whole galaxy of itinerant orators and lecturers [were] thrown up by the growing organizational strength of Chartism as a working class movement . . . Chartism remained a national movement based upon both the magic of the voice and the power of the pen’’ (Ashton, ‘‘Orators and Oratory,’’ pp. 49–50). I would like to acknowledge here the influence of Plotz’s ideas on my own thinking about the languages of and around Chartism. Gareth Stedman Jones’s very influential 1983 essay ‘‘Rethinking Chartism’’ pioneered the study of Chartist language and rhetoric – but has since been updated by those who argue for a fuller interpretation of language as embodied in action, gesture, and ritual. The tension in Bamford’s memoir between rival forms of speech and writing may, additionally, be understood in the context of shifts in early Victorian

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religious practice, where undisciplined utterance competed for legitimacy with the sanctioned language of authority. As Deborah Valenze writes, late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century cottage congregations offered a model of speech and decorum very much at odds with both the Anglican Church and established Wesleyanism: ‘‘The meetings invited loud, spontaneous prayer from all present; the ‘great shout’ of the cottage congregation replaced the measured tones of the circuit preacher’’ (Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters, p. 83). 14 Fliegelman notes that, in elocutionary manuals and elsewhere, the presence of, precisely, ‘‘convulsions’’ in oral performance marks the slippage between persuasive speech that produces consensus, and divisive or violent speech that may require the intervention of the state. ‘‘Appropriate gestures are essential, but ‘violent convulsions’ . . . necessitated a literal straitjacket’’ (Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, p. 107). 15 Bamford’s depiction of Hunt brings to mind Richard Cullen Rath’s comments on the politics of ‘‘clamor’’ in colonial New England: ‘‘By labeling the speech of the disaffected as ‘clamor,’ [John] Smith was able to discount the content of the respective criticisms. Clamors, then, were unwelcome critiques. In a rank order society such as Virginia, critiques from below could be dismissed for their content and treated as unruly – even seditious – acts in which the disruptive nonverbal elements were given precedence over their linguistic content’’ (Rath, How Early America Sounded, p. 121). 16 Elsewhere Bamford alludes disparagingly to the ‘‘noise . . . agitation or frothy declamation . . . with which the ears of the people are dinned now-a-days, and which is but the pumping out of so much energy to the winds’’ (Bamford, Passages, p. 239). Throughout Passages, Henry Hunt is a demagogic figure whose verbal excess emphasizes the author’s own sobriety. 17 In this paragraph I discuss a passage from Bamford’s 1864 book, Homely Rhymes, Poems, and Reminiscences. I am indebted to W. H. Chaloner, the editor of the 1967 reprint of Passages in the Life of a Radical, for the reference. 18 A later phase of Bamford’s career offers a somewhat ironic coda to my discussion of Bamford’s representation of oral speech performances. W. H. Chaloner notes, ‘‘In 1859 Bamford, who was by now increasingly povertystricken, decided to try to make a living by giving public readings and recitations from his own works and those of the popular poets of the day. He was jealous of the ease with which Charles Dickens had earned large sums of money in Manchester by this means, just as in 1839 he had been spurred on to begin publishing Passages in the Life of a Radical by the vogue for the ‘publications in books in weekly parts,’ such as Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby, and Jack Sheppard ’’ (Chaloner, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 37). The anecdote suggests how conventional, by the 1850s, the links between authorship and vocal performance had become. 19 See Joss Marsh, Word Crimes, on the regulation of blasphemy as a means of social control in Victorian England. 20 As Mary Poovey argues, ‘‘When novelists entered the condition-of-England debate in the 1840s . . . they were implicitly arguing that a feminized genre that individualized distress and aroused sympathy was more appropriate to the

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delineation of contemporary problems than were the rationalizing abstractions of a masculine genre like political economy’’ (Poovey, Making a Social Body, p. 133). This mob’s destruction might be regarded as one of those ‘‘acts of violence’’ David Lloyd describes as serving a representative function for both nationalism and the novel: ‘‘the clash of representations in the struggle for hegemony demanded that certain acts of violence be seized on as symptomatic and generalized into a characterization of the people as a whole’’ (Lloyd, Anomalous States, p. 144). Wayne Koestenbaum notes that nineteenth-century singing manuals ‘‘staple the singer into family morality’’ (Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, p. 170); an 1847 manual suggests that singing produces ‘‘social order and happiness in a family’’ (quoted in The Queen’s Throat, p. 170). ‘‘Like any conduct book,’’ Koestenbaum suggests, ‘‘the singing manual instructs how to secure class position.’’ See Ruth Yeazell, ‘‘Why Political Novels Have Heroines,’’ for a discussion of these and other descriptions of Sybil. My argument overlaps with Yeazell’s that industrial fiction de-politicizes its social content through romance and domesticity. It should be noted that Egremont’s speech is hardly represented as politically inflammatory. Little resembling Bamford’s representation of Henry Hunt’s frothing oratory, Egremont’s speech is instead an expression of sympathy for Chartists uttered by a moderate aristocrat. It could certainly be objected that such political rhetoric would not have seemed dangerous to Disraeli or his middleclass readers in the first place, even before it was translated into a newspaper report and read by Sybil. My point, however, is that even such seemingly benign speech as Egremont’s, by virtue of its participation in the public sphere at the moment of Chartism, becomes potentially explosive. As I go on to suggest in my reading of Mary Barton, it is an axiom of the industrial novel that even seemingly benign forms of speech or language may swiftly become murderous. Hilary Schor makes a comparable point about Mary Barton: ‘‘The heroine, and indeed most of the characters, lack any real self-consciousness about their own ‘inscription,’ and the ability to draw the analogies on which successful closure depends rests largely with the narrator – and with the implied audience of middle-class readers to whom she speaks’’ (Schor, Scheherezade, p. 122). Thomas Carlyle, in a letter to Gaskell praising Mary Barton, echoes Gaskell’s own thematics of muteness and voice, commenting of the novel, ‘‘I gratefully accept it as a real contribution (about the first real one) towards developing a huge subject, which has lain dumb too long, and really ought to speak for itself, and tell us its meaning, if there be any voice in it at all’’ (quoted in Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 217). E. P. Thompson cites Mary Barton’s treatment of trade unions as an example of the ‘‘deep-seated fear’’ (Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 515) with which even sympathetic members of the middle classes viewed workers’ secret unions. Raymond Williams, commenting on Gaskell’s habit in Mary Barton of at once respectfully reproducing her characters’ dialect and yet also footnoting it for a

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middle-class reader, notes that such a stance of ‘‘close but limited information’’ operates as a general technique throughout the novel. He categorizes Gaskell’s relationship to the political writing of Bamford and other working-class authors as governed by just such a strategy of citation and translation (Williams, Writing in Society, p. 160). 29 See, by comparison, Richard Cullen Rath on ‘‘murmuring’’ as dissent in colonial America: ‘‘Insubordination and dissent manifested itself in quiet nonverbal vocalizations as well as loud ones . . . Murmuring, grumbling, and whispering were the most common of the quieter problems. Left unattended they could lead to ranting anarchy . . . Murmuring could threaten the very survival of a community’’ (Rath, How Early America Sounded, p. 122). 30 On the nineteenth-century novel’s representation of eavesdropping as a challenge to the sanctity of the home, see Ann Gaylin: ‘‘The nineteenthcentury novel reiterates the longing for safe spaces, places where family secrets can be kept, yet tacitly acknowledges that private space is only tentatively secure . . . No matter how many walls a family erects to shelter its intimate life, it will always be vulnerable to eavesdropping’’ (Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel, p. 111). 31 Gaskell’s later North and South (1855) very similarly idealizes clear speech, from man to man, as the novel’s ideal and as a cure for the miscommunications of industrialism. ‘‘Speak to your workmen as if they were human beings. Speak to them kindly’’; ‘‘If he and Mr Thornton would speak out together as man to man . . . ’’ (Gaskell, North and South, p. 175, p. 302). 32 On Margaret’s singing, see Amanda Anderson, who describes her performance as one of ‘‘myopic aestheticism’’ and characterizes it as a moment of ‘‘retreat inward’’ which ‘‘correspond[s] to the structure of a solitary act of reading’’ (Anderson, Tainted Souls, p. 122). 33 Rosemarie Bodenheimer observes that ‘‘Gaskell’s finest imaginative energy is directed toward the project of uncovering hidden histories; of taking us into minds, and cellars, through descriptions that quite consciously defy the middleclass instinct to categorize and distance’’ (Bodenheimer, ‘‘Private Grief,’’ p. 200). 34 Jenny Uglow comments that Mary Barton ‘‘constantly returns to the difficulty of speaking. Again and again the characters fail to find the words they need. In both the political and the personal stories their voices die in their throats or the act of speech is physically painful. If they do gain the courage to speak, they encounter a terrible gulf between themselves and their audience’’ (Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 202). 35 As Patrick Brantlinger writes about such an effect more generally in Victorian fiction, ‘‘the reduction of mass to individual, readers plural to readers singular, itself manifests anxiety about controlling reader response and perhaps also expresses more general concerns about the uses of literacy, leisure, and pleasure’’ (Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson, p. 15). 36 See Mary Poovey, who argues that in Mary Barton ‘‘psychological complexity may be an effect of the violation of domesticity by the masculine worlds of work and politics’’ (Poovey, Making a Social Body, p. 134).

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37 In J. L. Austin’s terms, Gaskell depicts John Barton and the Chartist delegation as having performed an unhappy illocutionary act: ‘‘Unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed . . . I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense. An effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out . . . So the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake’’ (Austin, How To Do Things with Words, pp. 115–16). 38 Gillian Beer, in an essay on Carlyle and Gaskell, writes that ‘‘Silence in . . . [Mary Barton] is despair, tragic and uncreative’’ (Beer, ‘‘Carlyle,’’ p. 253). 39 One cannot ignore, here, the connection to Gaskell’s own domestic tragedy in the death of her infant son, the event that prompted her to begin her career as novelist with Mary Barton. Memories of dead children frequently operate in Gaskell’s work as triggers for sympathetic connection and communication. 40 Jonathan Grossman also discusses the role of the valentine in the novel: see Grossman, Art of Alibi, pp. 110–18.

3 SPEECH ON PAPER: CHARLES DICKENS, VICTORIAN PHONOGRAPHY, AND THE REFORM OF WRITING 1 Lisa Gitelman makes a similar point: ‘‘Without nineteenth-century shorthand, Edison’s phonograph would not have ‘worked’ the way it did’’ (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 25). See ibid., pp. 21–61, for a thorough and provocative history and analysis of nineteenth-century shorthand, primarily in the American context. 2 Pitman phonography still has its proponents today. See Eric Bellman, ‘‘Dictation Deity,’’ for an entertaining, if somewhat Orientalizing, journalistic account of the efforts of S. V. Ramaswamy, a former banker in Madras, India, to preserve Pitman shorthand in the face of a twenty-first-century computerized information system that would appear to have little need for shorthand. ‘‘Call me a Pitmanite,’’ Ramaswamy declares, ‘‘I am a priest, propagating Pitman shorthand.’’ 3 See Richard Kroll for an explanation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English language theory that reveals how the nineteenth-century phonographists reversed an earlier paradigm in which the oral/vocal was associated with tyranny and arbitrary law. Neoclassical language theory, Kroll argues, believed a literate and not oral culture was necessary to provide social freedom: ‘‘Precisely because an oral culture might also easily encourage tyrants or sectarians to mystify knowledge for their own purposes, it could allow absolute claims that are subject to no public, visible scrutiny’’ (Kroll, The Material Word, p. 186). Also see William Keach, Arbitrary Power, on the Romantic-era links between ‘‘arbitrary’’ power and language. 4 See Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, pp. 63–103 on the politics of Johnson’s dictionary and its engagement with orality and dialect. Sorensen argues that ‘‘the Dictionary, along with the steadily increasing number of grammar books, alienated English from its contemporary speakers in ways

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not dissimilar to colonial linguistic practice’’ (Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, p. 63). For the history of Parliamentary reporting, see Charlene Bangs Bickford et al., Debates. Thomas Sheridan’s 1762 A Course of Lectures on Elocution can be seen as another key intellectual source for the high valuation of speech that emerged in the later eighteenth century. Patricia Howell Michaelson observes that ‘‘in all of his words, Sheridan stresses the ‘deadness’ of written language as compared with oral . . . [He] argues that written language may convey ideas, but it cannot affect the passions or the fancy’’ (Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, p. 45). Such a distinction still, in its eighteenth-century context, presumes a faith in writing as the arbiter of reason – a faith that begins to fall away by the end of the century. Gitelman notes that ‘‘In deriding their competition, shorthand authors disparaged other systems as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘mysterious,’ while promoting their own alphabets as ‘simple, practical, and complete’’’(Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, p. 30). ‘‘Titles and subtitles of shorthand manuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are replete with adjectives that all, in some sense, serve as antonyms for ‘arbitary’’’ (Scripts, Grooves, p. 34). Although it should be noted that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, with its proto-sociological footnote apparatus explaining the speech of its native Irish characters, offers an earlier example of such an innovation. Walter Scott’s fiction also engages in a particularly complex negotiation with the orality of Scottish dialect – on which see Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality, pp. 43–58. Janet Sorensen argues that the conventional view of Austen as depicting Johnsonian standard written English in her characters’ speech misses the ‘‘internal contradictions’’ (Sorensen, Grammar of Empire, p. 205) within such a depiction. Deborah Vlock reads Jingle’s speech as characteristic of ‘‘patter,’’ a form of speech she sees as fundamental to both Victorian theater and fiction: ‘‘Dickens employs the strategic dash in Alfred Jingle’s monologues as well; Jingle strings nouns and verbs in a row like Christmas popcorn, separating them with commas and dashes but denying them the connective tissue usually provided by other parts of speech’’ (Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 98). Deidre Lynch has pointed out to me how closely Jingle’s fragmentary speech resembles that of such characters as Miss Bates or Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen. One difference between Dickens’s and Austen’s depiction of such non-grammatical speech would seem to be the very clear moral or intellectual judgment implied by Austen, in whom such deviant speech tends to be a linguistic sign of some deficiency in another realm. ‘‘The textbook from which Dickens acquired the rudiments of shorthand was that of Thomas Gurney . . . The one in which he invested was presumably the 15th, ‘published as the Act directs, Jany. 1, 1825, Price Half a Guinea,’ by William Brodie Gurney, grandson of the author and official shorthand writer to the Houses of Parliament since 1813’’ (Carlton, Charles Dickens: Shorthand

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Writer, p. 38). Gurney’s ‘‘brachygraphy’’ system predated Pitman’s invention of phonography and its new claim to transcribe sound directly; as I have indicated, I am making the assumption that even non-phonographic shorthand systems to some degree participated, after Pitman’s 1837 breakthrough, in the rhetoric of phonography. 11 On Dickens’s career as a shorthand reporter – and for analysis of what it meant for him to shift from reporter to author – see Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s: ‘‘Thus in the days of clerkhood, when his main vocation as a writer had not yet become clear to Dickens, he was one among any number of young men who looked about for extra money and went to the theatre every night. The shorthand training and the British Museum reader’s ticket would not be uncommon features of the law student’s life. Later, such experience, added to parliamentary reporting, was to serve the same function in supporting the pursuit of a writing life’’ (Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s, p. 13). 4 ‘‘ D O N E T O D E A T H ’’ : D I C K E N S A N D T H E AUTHOR’S VOICE 1 See Garrett Stewart for an analysis of this passage, which he characterizes as ‘‘the one and only disquisition on the very word reading which I know of in Victorian fiction’’ (Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 232). 2 See Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality, pp. 43–58, on Scott’s attitude to orality in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Fielding argues that Scott values ballads yet feels they must be contained by the writing of editorial commentary: ‘‘Scott is concerned to show off the ballads, yet he displays a marked reluctance to let them speak for themselves’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, 51). 3 Garrett Stewart’s chapter from Dear Reader, ‘‘Telling Time: Reading Round the Dickensian Clock,’’ begins with a similar attempt to think through the ‘‘saturation of [Dickens’s] work by the presumption – and attempted programming – of response’’ in regard to what Stewart describes as the Dickens canon’s ‘‘first great crisis in regard to public reception’’ (Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 173), that of the failure of Master Humphrey’s Clock in 1841. 4 Deborah Vlock’s investigation of the links between Dickens’s novels and Victorian popular theater reaches some conclusions similar to mine about the reading of Victorian novels: ‘‘Acts of novel reading took place in ‘public spaces’ . . . in the nineteenth century, even when performed in isolation and silence. Novel reading literally entered the public sphere when novelists like Dickens took to the platform and performed public readings, and, less obviously, when the novels themselves borrowed heavily from the theatre’’ (Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 1). Her research into Victorian theater helpfully reveals the Victorian novel’s embeddedness in a vocal popular culture. Although I agree with many of the conclusions Vlock draws regarding Dickens’s position in a vocal public sphere, I also notice the ways her own rhetoric echoes the Victorian mythologizing of a lost voice that will vitalize the dead letter of print: ‘‘One cannot emphasize enough the importance of reading

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these texts aloud, to establish the vocal rhythms and cadences that Dickens placed in them. When we do this, they take on life, they become organic, spontaneously generating dramas’’ (Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 12). My argument is informed here by recent critiques of the way Habermas’s notion of the public sphere tends to exclude conflict and competition. Geoff Eley, for example, argues that Habermas ‘‘misses the extent to which the public sphere was always constituted by conflict’’ (Eley, ‘‘Nations, Publics,’’ p. 306). Eley also specifically notes the gap left by the nineteenth century in Habermas’s account of a healthy eighteenth-century public sphere and a degraded twentiethcentury mass public. Also see John Plotz, The Crowd, p. 131 for a similar effort to develop Habermas’s analysis to provide a more nuanced understanding of the Victorian public sphere. On Dickens and copyright, see Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield. See Sharon Marcus’s analysis of what she calls the subgenre of the English ‘‘urban haunted-house tale,’’ which shows ‘‘a crowd already present within the middle-class home’’ and represents ‘‘the home as simultaneously urban and domestic’’ (Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 116). Dickens’s struggles to preserve an inviolate domesticity might also be understood as a form of what Marcus terms the ‘‘strained, simmering containment,’’ the ‘‘eminently precarious interiorization’’ (Apartment Stories, p. 169), of Zola’s Pot-Bouille. See John Picker’s analysis of Dickens’s angry response to what he referred to as the ‘‘horrible noise’’ produced by street musicians (Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, pp. 41–81). See Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, pp. 77–132, for an argument about Dickens’s Oliver Twist that informs my analysis here. Clifford Siskin and Ina Ferris argue that Walter Scott participated in a masculinization and professionalization of fiction and authorship in the beginning of the nineteenth century – a construction of the figure of the male author as the sole, proprietary origin of ‘‘works.’’ Siskin writes of the Edinburgh Review (founded 1802), with which Scott was closely associated: ‘‘This was . . . the first fully professional review . . . Although a few women eventually became contributors, it initially employed . . . only ‘gentlemen writers’ who were at first unpaid but were soon recompensed at newly professional levels . . . The Edinburgh Review also helped to masculinize the literary further by juxtaposing its reviews with a wide range of newly specialized treatments of traditionally masculine subjects, particularly economics and politics. Through such juxtaposition, the literary ‘conversation’ of the eighteenth century, which subordinated but did not systematically exclude writing by women, became a professionalized and more exclusive field’’ (Siskin, The Work of Writing, p. 224). Ferris also argues that Scott’s fiction consolidated the work of the Edinburgh Review and other journals in professionalizing the novel. As Richard Altick writes in his classic The English Common Reader, ‘‘No longer were books and periodicals written chiefly for the comfortable few; more and more, as the century progressed, it was the ill-educated mass audience with

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pennies in its pocket that called the tune to which writers and editors danced’’ (Altick, The English Common Reader, p. 5). The shift in Altick’s language, from a description of ‘‘writ[ing]’’ to ‘‘call[ing] the tune’’ and ‘‘danc[ing],’’ evokes the Victorian belief that the advent of a mass readership corresponded to a newly performative manner of reading that promised, or threatened, to transform literary reception. This is not to say, of course, that such anxieties about and debates over the rationality of reading were entirely new. William Warner argues, for example, that in the first decades of the eighteenth century, ‘‘novels became the focus of a public sphere debate about reading: how is culture to license – that is, sanction but also control – the powerful new reading pleasures these novels produce?’’ (Warner, ‘‘Formulating Fiction,’’ p. 285). At this moment, however, ‘‘the dangerous pleasures of reading novels’’ were more associated with ‘‘the sexualized body’’ (‘‘Formulating Fiction,’’ pp. 285–6) than with the mass public body that became associated with Dickens’s work. Penny Fielding points to a version of the same struggle between rival versions of the public sphere in early nineteenth-century Scotland. She argues that emergent forms of unruly urban orality prompted a retrospective reevaluation of a rural orality seen as properly contained within hierarchical class structures: ‘‘Scottish educationalists began to construct a Golden Age in which popular orality had been contained with[in] a rural parish structure overseen by the local landowner . . . Urban orality, however, was a much more threatening concept which, perhaps because it was seen as being so difficult to contain, was also harder to define’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, p. 31). I’d like to note my indebtedness to Philip Collins’s pioneering work on the history of public readings in Victorian culture. See Collins, Reading Aloud. George Dolby wrote in 1885 that ‘‘Mr. Dickens’ presence in America, and the success attending his Readings, naturally prompted the various theatrical managers, not only in New York, but all over the country, to reproduce adaptations of his books in the form of plays, and for the time being the lighter pieces so popular in America were put on one side to make room for these productions – some good, some indifferent, and some bad’’ (Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 197). Deborah Vlock writes: ‘‘That Dickens’ novels were so often adapted and produced before he had finished writing them raises some interesting and exciting questions about the role of theatre and performance in their composition’’ (Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 3). Edward Said, in The World, The Text and the Critic, reads this scene as an exemplary test case of the major elements of Derrida’s deconstructive reading practice. See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities on the links between novels, newspapers, the census, and other technologies of national feeling. Garrett Stewart, in a dazzling analysis of Dickensian phonemic wordplay, argues that Dickens ‘‘enters the history of the novel as the tacit and intuitive historian of language, dialect, and their convergence in the private idiolect of

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any reading, silent or out loud, private or communal’’ (Stewart, Reading Voices, p. 199). Stewart’s Reading Voices offers one of the most fully developed and original attempts to rethink, after Derrida, the relation of the literary text to the voice. Stewart’s innovation, as I see it, is to insist on the inseparability of the literary text and the voice, and of the grapheme and the phoneme, while fully endorsing the deconstructive critique of a ‘‘phonocentrism’’ that would privilege authorial voice. While Stewart’s insistence that all reading is inevitably a sort of reading aloud might seem to fall into the pattern I criticize in this book, Stewart’s concern is in fact with a voice and a voicing that is ‘‘not centered and authorial, but rather textual, receptual’’ (Reading Voices, p. 103). What Stewart calls ‘‘phonemic reading’’ (Reading Voices, p. 20) is a form of silent reading that ‘‘activates’’ the phonotext, permitting a rupture or dissolution of the graphic divisions of words and phrases, an unconscious drift of sound and meaning. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson make a comparable argument about the role of domesticity in Dickens’s popular success: ‘‘Domesticity and popularity – the tight link between them was a signal event in the Dickensian forties’’ (Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy, p. 87). Dickens writes in an 1858 letter, ‘‘I was brought very near to what I sometimes dream may be [the pinnacle of] my Fame, when a lady whose face I had never seen before stopped me yesterday on the street, and said to me, Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends’’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, p. 656). His novels seem to define a world in which reader meets character as friend or acquaintance, in turn allowing a reader to greet the author as also a friend. After this very speech, in which he cites the example of Walter Scott’s bankruptcy and death as proof of the need for copyright legislation, Dickens wrote to Forster, ‘‘I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled . . . that I felt as if I was twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats’’ (Dickens, Speeches, p. 26). Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend, ‘‘What a dreadful letter that last was! And what a crime, for a man to use his genius as a cudgel against his near kin, even against the woman he promised to protect tenderly with life and heart – taking advantage of his hold with the public to turn public opinion against her. I call it dreadful’’ (quoted in Dickens, Letters, vol. VIII, pp. 648–9). See Penny Fielding on the early nineteenth-century Scottish educationalist Henry Duncan, who she argues marks a comparable distinction between the ‘‘lies’’ of unregulated orality and the sanctioned language of domesticity: ‘‘the fireside, in Duncan’s writings, is to be purged of its tendency to foster the ‘downright lies’ of superstition by the new domestic ideal of family-centered reading around the hearth’’ (Fielding, Writing and Orality, p. 124). Deborah Vlock’s association of her father’s voice with Dickens’s texts suggests the power and persistence of this particular Dickens-effect: ‘‘I was fortunate enough to have a parent who read to me, from an early age, most of Dickens,

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and I still hear – perhaps faintly now, but truly – strains of real voices in his novels, the characters as my father spoke them’’ (Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, p. 12). Also see Patricia Howell Michaelson on ‘‘patriarchal reading’’ in the eighteenth century: ‘‘Because the position of the reader represented a kind of authority, domestic reading could reinforce the patriarchal relationship . . . As listener, rather than reader, a young woman . . . experienced the text in a mediated form, interpreted by an authority figure who might interrupt his reading to comment on the text’’ (Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, p. 156). By so taking the position of father reading aloud, Dickens associated his authorship with what Derrida calls ‘‘the permanence of a Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech . . . to the paternal position’’ (Derrida, Dissemination, p. 76). Within this Derridean logic it is easy to see how what I’ve called the mass reading and performance of Dickens’s work would appear to the author/father/king as a form of subversion and betrayal, a refusal of the propriety of the original speech: ‘‘From the position of the holder of the scepter, the desire of writing [for ‘‘emancipation’’] is indicated, designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion’’ (Dissemination, p. 77). Or, in another formulation, such public appropriation of Dickens’s work could be seen as the ‘‘drifting’’ of writing, ‘‘due to writing as an iterative structure cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the authority of the last analysis, writing orphaned, and separated at birth from the assistance of the father’’ (Derrida, Limited Inc., p. 8). David Vincent notes that the mid-century ‘‘penny readings’’ ultimately ‘‘enhanced rather than undermined the status of the fixed text’’ (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 211); if the embeddedness of certain forms of Victorian print culture in networks of orality and performance submitted the printed text to the improvisations of oral performance, these more official, professional ‘‘penny readings’’ had the opposite effect: they used the medium of voice to reinforce the authority of text. Dickens’s own readings, too, offered an oral performance that in fact worked to buttress the authority of the printed, fixed text. Fred Kaplan notes that when Dickens first contemplated the possibility of reading for profit, ‘‘Public lectures by literary people had become increasingly popular. In the 1830s and 1840s, Carlyle had lectured successfully on historical subjects. Thackeray lectured humorously on his version of eighteenth-century history and literature, and Forster, somewhat uneasy about propriety, had lectured on the civil war’’ (Kaplan, Charles Dickens, p. 320). It should be noted, however, that even if the effect of Dickens’s performances was that of ‘‘returning’’ to familiar ‘‘household words,’’ his reading scripts were in fact adaptations rather than exact reproductions of the novels from which they were drawn. See Charles Dickens: The Public Readings for transcripts of the scripts themselves. Helen Small’s excellent analysis of Dickens’s readings to some degree overlaps with my own. Small convincingly interprets the readings in the context of the

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1867 Reform Bill as offering Dickens’s readership ‘‘the experience of being a unified public. The ‘magic’ of the Readings was that they could be seen to demonstrate the incorporation of the reading public in culture’’ (Small, ‘‘A Pulse of 124,’’ p. 276). In addition, see Susan Ferguson’s recent argument regarding the ways Dickens’s reading performances transformed Victorian authorship, ‘‘Dickens’s Public Readings’’; Catherine Gallagher, ‘‘Duplicity of Doubling’’; Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson, pp. 82–3; and Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, pp. 38–40. 31 Catherine Gallagher argues about Dickens’s performances that ‘‘it must be pointed out that Dickens is here entering the realm of the theatrical, but only, after all, to modify it in the direction of the novelistic . . . [W]hen Dickens takes the stage to read his novels, we might say that he is blocking out the theatrical, making the stage a huge blankness to accommodate the resonating words of the novel’’ (Gallagher, ‘‘Duplicity of Doubling,’’ p. 143). 5 UNUTTERED: WITHHELD SPEECH IN JANE EYRE AND VILLETTE 1 The critical tendency, manifested by Thackeray and his guests, to conflate Bronte¨ with Jane Eyre, and more generally to consider Bronte¨’s work (and women’s fiction generally) as created primarily out of personal experience, has been recently documented by Anita Levy. See, for example, Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s 1899 assertion that ‘‘Charlotte Bronte¨ is Jane Eyre . . . You cannot think of her apart from what she has written’’ (quoted in Levy, Jane Eyre, p. 82). Levy addresses the political and aesthetic pitfalls of conflating Bronte¨’s fiction with her life experience. 2 Also see Sharon Marcus (Marcus, ‘‘Profession,’’ p. 211) on Bronte¨’s use of the term ‘‘millions.’’ 3 See Geoff Eley, ‘‘Nations, Publics,’’ for a discussion of the gap the nineteenth century constitutes in Habermas’s discussion of the transformation of the public sphere. 4 On Victorian female public display, also see Barbara Harman, ‘‘In Promiscuous Company.’’ 5 My argument about Bronte¨ has something in common with Robyn Warhol’s claim that ‘‘in Victorian novels written by women, earnest direct address evolved as an alternative to public speaking ‘in person,’ which was forbidden to respectable females’’ (Warhol, Gendered Interventions, p. vii). According to Warhol (who does not discuss Bronte¨ at any length), if a Victorian woman ‘‘wanted to reach large numbers with her voice without exposing her body to the general view, her only option was to write’’ (Gendered Interventions, p. 166). 6 Murray Cohen notes that what interests English linguists of the late eighteenth century, as opposed to their predecessors earlier in the century, ‘‘is the ability to communicate through speech . . . These men share a conception of language in terms of speakers and listeners and a commitment to the priority of the oral over

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the visual’’ (Cohen, Sensible Words, pp. 118–19), the spoken over the written. The ‘‘optic form of the letter’’ – the visually perceived shape of writing – is repressed or defined as a secondary imitation of speech; the Mother’s Mouth is defined instead as the source of language. 7 My understanding of this scene has been informed by Sharon Marcus’s reading of it, although in contrast to her suggestion that ‘‘at Lowood School, writing continues to serve as an instrument or weapon that makes girls’ bodies into the objects of sadistic visual attention’’ (Marcus, ‘‘Profession,’’ p. 209), I argue that even if certain material forms of writing – a writing slate, a written sign – are associated with Jane’s punishment, Bronte¨ implies a broader distinction between a form of punishment associated with physical surveillance and vocal denunciation, and a different system of justice in which written signs determine a more just definition of personal character and culpability. 8 G. Armour Craig, interpreting Jane’s reticence as the sign of her final transcendence of the grounds of social communication, concludes that Bronte¨’s ‘‘heroine has narrated herself into silence, and the novel must end’’ (Craig, ‘‘Unpoetic Compromise,’’ p. 38). Janet H. Freeman offers a nearly opposite interpretation, arguing that in fact it is only at this moment that Jane fully attains control over her own language; ‘‘as she comes to understand the power of human utterance to represent human reality, so she is enabled to tell her life, to say it to us, in effect, listen to my words, Reader – for the truth is in them’’ (Freeman, ‘‘Speech and Silence,’’ p. 699). Joan Peters builds on Freeman’s reading in asserting that Jane’s progress and the novel’s are not the same but are parallel: ‘‘Just as Jane, the character, struggles psychologically and rhetorically to establish her own best voice as an individual . . . so the narrative itself acts out textually the separate struggle of both the character’s and narrative’s to be in Bronte¨’s view a ‘woman’s’ voice’’’ (Peters, ‘‘Finding a Voice,’’ p. 219). Carla Kaplan criticizes all of these interpretations and suggests instead that ‘‘Insofar as . . . [ Jane’s] refusal to tell Rochester her story tempers the bliss of their reconciliation, Bronte¨ is able to suggest that patriarchal, Victorian, British culture cannot provide complete fulfillment or satisfaction for a woman such as Jane’’ (Kaplan, ‘‘Girl Talk,’’ p. 20). Kaplan leaves intact, that is, the assumption that complete speech with a receptive listener would, ideally, represent an absolute fulfillment. 9 Eric Griffiths makes a similar point about Tennyson in his analysis of the poet’s use of the trope of ‘‘apophasis,’’ defined in Renaissance rhetoric as ‘‘a kind of irony, a denial or refusal to speak . . . when in fact we speak and tell all’’ (Griffiths, The Printed Voice, p. 100). ‘‘Out of the death of the voice,’’ Griffiths argues regarding Tennyson, ‘‘a new body of significance can be made to arise’’ (The Printed Voice, p. 102). Griffiths argues elsewhere in his book that ‘‘in literature shaped by the printing-press, writer and reader do not ‘properly’ face each other. But this sense of a lost community, felt as a form of death by some writers, is the germ of a new community and a new life’’ (The Printed Voice, p. 61). Griffiths’s argument in this sense resembles the one I am making throughout this book about the representation of an imaginary ‘‘voice’’

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in Victorian print culture. Even as he offers a brilliant analysis of the fictitious status of what he calls ‘‘the printed voice of Victorian poetry,’’ however, Griffiths also idealizes voice and declines to abandon a sense of a speaking body as fundamental to poetry in his presumption that ‘‘the reader must inform writing with a sense of the writer it calls up – an ideal body, a plausible voice’’ (The Printed Voice, p. 60). See Yopie Prins for a similar argument about Griffiths: ‘‘an investment in an idea (or ideal) of voice remains central to his understanding of Victorian poetry. In this respect Griffiths is a very Victorian reader’’ (Prins, ‘‘Victorian Meter,’’ p. 92). See Alex Woloch for interesting reflections on the ways Jane ‘‘conflates Grace [Poole]’s inexpressive ‘silence’ and Bertha’s inarticulate ‘sounds,’ each of which falls on one side of the speech that can translate interiority into social communication’’ (Woloch, The One vs. the Many, p. 26). Patricia Howell Michaelson suggests that ‘‘the metaphor of voice has, I believe, become ossified in ways that have negative consequences’’ in recent feminist criticism, and points out that ‘‘in ordinary language use, silence is by no means always negative, nor voice positive.’’ She adds – in a comment that applies very well to Bronte¨ – that ‘‘this dominant metaphor has encouraged us to pity, ignore, or discount the many generations of women for whom silence represented a potentially useful strategy’’ (Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, p. 3). See Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act, pp. 75–107, on Villette and theatricality. On the representation of Rachel Fe´lix in Villette and other Victorian novels, see John Stokes, ‘‘Rachel’s.’’ This scene of Lucy reading her letter recalls that of Jane Eyre reading her letter offering her employment at Thornfield: ‘‘I put it in my pocket and turned my face homeward: I could not open it then . . . Even when we finally retired for the night, the inevitable Mrs. Gryce was still my companion: we had only a short end of candle in our candle-stick, and I dreaded lest she should talk till it was all burnt out; fortunately, however . . . she was already snoring, before I had finished undressing. There still remained an inch of candle: I now took out my letter’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 88). We could take this as paradigmatic of that strain in Bronte¨’s writing that rejects conversation for written words, that always finds that there is not quite enough daylight for all the reading to be done. Also see Karen Lawrence, ‘‘The Cipher’’; Lawrence focuses on Lucy’s reticence and her self-representation as a ‘‘cipher.’’ My arguments here are informed by Catherine Gallagher’s analysis of the links between female authorship, anonymity, and the rise of the novel in Nobody’s Story. Lucy’s approach to theatricality also recalls Jane Eyre sitting ignored in hidden retirement as Rochester’s aristocratic guests play at charades and masquerades. Villette contains another scene depicting a wholly positive depiction of reading aloud – very different from the scene I analyze above – as M. Paul reads to Lucy and the girls in the countryside: ‘‘Well could he narrate: in such a diction as

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children love, and learned men emulate; a diction simple in its strength, and strong in its simplicity’’ (Villette, p. 477). Following his performance, M. Paul alludes to the future possibility – ‘‘some day’’ – of Lucy performing a similar role for him as that Jane performs for Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre: ‘‘I could dictate . . . with pleasure to an amanuensis who suited me’’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 478). I would argue that this momentary idyll of social, communal vocal reading is significantly anomalous and utopian in the novel, a passing imagination of some social possibility not to be implemented in the novel’s historical present tense. 6 ‘‘ H E L L ’ S M A S T E R P I E C E O F P R I N T ’’ : V O I C E , F A C E , AND PRINT IN THE RING AND THE BOOK 1 Michael Fried, ‘‘Almayer’s,’’ p. 198. 2 Clifford Siskin’s discussion of ‘‘novelism’’ or the ‘‘habitual subordination of writing to the novel’’ (Siskin, Work of Writing, p. 423) is relevant here. Siskin writes of the Romantic period, ‘‘Although standard literary histories identify it as an age of poetry, it was also, from the perspective offered by the history of writing, a crucial moment for novelism. In fact, it saw the start of . . . the metonymic displacement of the former by the latter’’ (Work of Writing, p. 433). He argues, in other words, that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the novel began to stand in for writing itself. 3 All references to The Ring and the Book are to book and line number. 4 See also Adena Rosmarin: ‘‘While many poems are made to sound like speech, dramatic monologues are uniquely adept at creating the illusion of someone speaking and at making us aware of that illusion. Their characteristically dense and explicit figuration joins with their speaker’s implicit error to opacify the verisimilar surface, repeatedly turning the poem and our attention back on themselves’’ (Rosmarin, Power of Genre, p. 81). 5 See Herbert Tucker for an interpretation of ‘‘the extremes of psychopathic aberration Browning’s first dramatic speakers embody’’ (Tucker, ‘‘From Monomania to Monologue,’’ p. 124) as a harbinger of the dramatic monologue’s historicizing and demystifying of the autonomous self. Critics and scholars of this genre continue to work to some degree within the terms set in 1957 by Robert Langbaum, who argued then that the reader of the dramatic monologue is divided between ‘‘sympathy’’ with and ‘‘judgment’’ of the poem’s flawed (or worse) speaker (Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience). 6 R. H. Horne, quoted in Barrett and Browning, Letters, p. 16. Horne’s widely read essay, published in A New Spirit of the Age (1844), contributed to Barrett’s growing fame. 7 See Eric Griffiths for an analysis of the Brownings’ correspondence as ‘‘the most inquiring study in the phenomenology of the dramatic monologue that we possess’’ (Griffiths, Printed Voice, p. 201). Griffiths notes (ibid., p. 60) that he takes the title of his book, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, from a phrase in

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The Ring and the Book: ‘‘(since he only spoke in print / The printed voice of him lives now as then)’’ (I, 166–7). By all accounts Browning himself was raised in a kind of enclosure of print: his biographers William Irvine and Park Honan describe the house in which he grew up as ‘‘lined from front to back door with a thick interior epidermis of books’’ (Irvine and Honan, The Book, the Ring, p. 6). See, by contrast, Isobel Armstrong’s analysis of the way Browning’s early dramatic monologues constituted a challenge to J. S. Mill’s definition of ‘‘the poetic as the solitary work of the speaking subject over and against communality’’ (Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 137). Mill’s essays on poetry, Armstrong argues, locate the ‘‘speaking subject in his or her private cell of subjectivity,’’ and Browning’s dramatic monologues ‘‘Porphyria’s Lover’’ and ‘‘Johannes Agricola’’ ‘‘come into being as analytical experiments in the logic of Mill’s closet poetics’’ (Victorian Poetry, pp. 137–8). In Browning’s letters to Barrett, he often renders her as just such a ‘‘speaking subject’’ in ‘‘her private cell of subjectivity.’’ Nina Auerbach comments that for Barrett ‘‘face to face revelations were an absolute exercise of epiphany and salvation’’ (Auerbach, ‘‘Robert Browning’s,’’ p. 167). For another example of forced speech and a sympathetic speaker confronted with a deceitful, writing-associated form of professional knowledge, see Pompilia’s desciption of her marriage ceremony to Guido: ‘‘the priest [not Caponsacchi] had opened book, / Read here and there, made me say this and that, / And after, told me I was now a wife’’ (VII, 445–7, my emphasis). The Ring and the Book’s most clearly parodic representation of bureaucratic, professional writing is Book VIII, the narration of the lawyer Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. The entire book consists of Archangelis’s monologue to himself as he works on composing the pompous, Latin-filled oration he will give in court in defense of Guido. In this book, Browning represents a professional rhetorician whose purportedly spontaneous speech is cynically composed beforehand in writing. And compare Browning’s reference to ‘‘transcription’’ as the preservation of valuable language in a cultural emergency with W. David Shaw’s definition of a dramatic monologue: ‘‘an event produced in the world and surviving on the printed page, the monologue is a speech act that has been preserved as a written record or transcript’’ (Shaw, Origins of the Monologue, p. 27). Lee Erickson’s discussion of the dominance of the literary Annuals as a market for poetry, and the Annuals’ emphasis on a ‘‘pictorial aesthetic,’’ is relevant here: ‘‘In making poetry subordinate to painting and pictures, the Annuals tied Victorian poets firmly to a descriptive, pictorial aesthetic’’(Erickson, Economy, p. 41). Erickson points out that while ‘‘Browning only once contributed to a literary Annual . . . he did recognize that pictorial poetry was popular and so he tried, as best he could, to appeal to his readers’ eyes’’ (Economy, p. 42). Both Pompilia, imprisoned and isolated by her cruel husband, and Barrett’s own Aurora Leigh, isolated by her father, seem to reference Barrett’s situation

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before the event that soon assumed mythic proportions – Browning’s ‘‘rescue of [her] from the death grip of her father’’ (Munich, ‘‘Browning’s Female Signature,’’ p. 120). Nina Auerbach offers an especially suspicious reading of the parallels between Barrett and Pompilia; Browning, she argues, ‘‘resurrects his sainted wife in order to butcher her in the person of Pompilia’’ (Auerbach, ‘‘Robert Browning’s,’’ p. 168). 16 Pompilia’s voice recalls that of Barrett’s Marian Erle. When, in Aurora Leigh, Marian is sanctified and purifed following her experience of sexual degradation, her purity is figured as a charismatic voice: ‘‘The thrilling, proud, pathetic voice. / He stretched his arms out toward the thrilling voice’’ (Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, IX, 196–7). Pompilia and Marian resemble one another in that their transcendent female purity, figured as voice, emerges out of the potential shame of sexual violence. 17 On fantasies of total communication, see John Durham Peters’s Speaking Into the Air, which he introduces as ‘‘a critique of the dream of communication as the mutual communion of souls’’ (Peters, Speaking, p. 1). ‘‘Communications,’’ he argues, is ‘‘a registry of modern longings. The term evokes a utopia where nothing is misunderstood, hearts are open, and expression is uninhibited’’ (Speaking, p. 2). 18 Dorothy Hale’s skeptical question is worth considering in regard to Browning’s novelistic poetry: ‘‘Does it make sense even to think of a novel’s characters as others whom a novel could liberate or oppress?’’ (Hale, Social Formalism, p. 19). To refer to an author as failing to permit a character to ‘‘speak’’ may serve as useful shorthand, but it seems limited as a means to consider an author’s ethical debts to his or her characters. 19 Guido elsewhere casually alludes to contemplated acts of horrific, casual violence against Pompilia in their daily life together, as when he muses, remembering the first time Caponsacchi visited Pompilia, and his possible response, ‘‘Had [I], with the vulgarest household implement, / Calmly and quietly cut off, clean thro’ bone, / But one joint of one finger of my wife . . . ’’ (V, 952–4). 20 On the links between inscription, the face, and disfiguration, see Michael Fried on ‘‘the irruption of mere (or brute) materiality within the scene of writing’’ (Fried, ‘‘Almayer’s,’’ p. 200) and the ‘‘double process’’ by which such authors as Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad ‘‘elicit’’ and ‘‘repress’’ that materiality. Fried argues that ‘‘recurrent images of the disfiguring of upturned faces both of corpses and of living persons in Crane’s novels, stories, and sketches are to be read as representing the writer’s action of inscribing his text on upward-facing sheets of writing paper’’ (‘‘Almayer’s,’’ p. 196). In The Ring and the Book we see a broadly similar process by which imagery of disfiguration and the ‘‘face’’ becomes a means by which an author at once alludes to his own scene of inscription and production and yet also seeks to disguise or transcend that scene. 21 My argument could be expressed in Walter Ong’s terms: Browning indulges in a fantasy of ‘‘preserving’’ or reviving, using the means of writing and print, a

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lost or dying ‘‘primary orality’’ embodied in Pompilia. Ultimately, however, Browning seems to recognize that no such primary orality untouched by literacy can ever be articulated via print culture; even, perhaps that such a vision of a pure orality may be a fantasy of print culture. 22 Margaret Ezell notes ‘‘how often the role of the reader of manuscript text becomes conflated with the roles of editing, correcting, or copying the text and extending its circulation of readers’’ (Ezell, Social Authorship, p. 40). Browning’s concept of ‘‘added artistry’’ might be said to invoke the ‘‘interactive literary mode of additions, adaptations, and responses’’ (Social Authorship, p. 69) that Ezell argues is characteristic of early modern coterie or ‘‘social authorship,’’ but as an effect of and within Victorian print authorship. 23 Donald Hair, basing his argument on the importance for Browning of the Congregationalist dissenting Protestant tradition, reaches a similar conclusion about Browning’s emphasis on the necessity of a special form of active interpretation on the part of his readers. Hair argues that for Browning ‘‘the interpretation of a text is not a matter of intellectual assent alone, but a recreation of the text in the mind, feelings, character, and conduct . . . [T]he text must become a living power . . . within us’’ (Hair, Robert Browning’s Language, p. 23). See also Vivienne Rundle’s argument that The Ring and the Book ‘‘forces its reader into an ethical moment of judgment’’ (Rundle, ‘‘‘Will You Let Them,’’’ p. 109), and Lee Erickson, who argues that the form of the poem ‘‘is designed to leave the work open to interpretation by readers who bring their perspectives to bear upon it or who offer more historical evidence for others to consider’’ (Erickson, Robert Browning, p. 234). It should also be noted that Browning’s often opaque and difficult poetry seems to invite a certain kind of impatient response in the margins of the text; as, for example, when Alfred Domett, trying to distinguish between several different ‘‘voices’’ in Sordello, asked himself ‘‘who says this?’’ and ‘‘scribbled in pencil . . . two or three impatient remarks’’ (quoted in Hair, Robert Browning’s Language, p. 258). 7 A VOICE WITHOUT A BODY: THE PHONOGRAPHIC LOGIC OF HEART OF DARKNESS 1 Eliot’s epigraph for The Hollow Men three years later, of course, returned to Heart of Darkness: ‘‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’’ 2 Since the publication of an earlier version of this chapter in Victorian Studies in 1997, the relation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature to phonographic recording has received considerable additional analysis. John Picker, in an essay reprinted as a chapter in his Victorian Soundscapes, approaches closest to my own topic in a contextualization of Heart of Darkness broadly ‘‘in a line of literary, visual, and historical representations of the phonograph’’ (Picker, ‘‘Victorian Aura,’’ p. 784). For other recent works of literary criticism – on T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Virginia Woolf – that draw

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on the history of recorded sound, see Juan A. Suarez, ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,’’ Brian Reed, ‘‘Hart Crane’s Victrola,’’ Michele Pridmore-Brown, ‘‘1939–40: Of Virginia Woolf,’’ and Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘‘The Subversive Mechanics.’’ See also Garrett Stewart, who suggests that in modernism’s confrontation with ‘‘the mimetic triumph of sound recording,’’ ‘‘literature did not so much back off from phonography as attempt to trivialize and overshadow it with an increased reliance on its own textual graphonics’’ (Stewart, Reading Voices, p. 127); and Jennifer Wicke, whose brilliant essay ‘‘Dracula’s Media’’ first prompted me to think further about the relation of literature to the phonograph. See Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, for a thorough analysis of the cultural contexts of Edison’s phonograph in the American scene. Also see John Durham Peters, Speaking, pp. 160–4, and Jonathan Sterne, Audible Past, pp. 179–214. For a clear and lively account of the early history of the phonograph, see Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph. Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch’s From Tinfoil to Stereo offers more detail, especially about the complex legal battles surrounding patents for the phonograph, graphophone and gramophone; V. K. Chew, Talking Machines, gives a concise overview. Both Robert Conot’s and Wyn Wachhorst’s biographical works on Edison – Conot, A Streak of Luck, and Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison – are very useful. Also see The´odose Du Moncel, The Telephone, for an 1879 commentary on the phonograph and related technologies. Dave Laing argues that the advent of the phonograph marked an epistemic shift in the culture’s experience of music: ‘‘popular music in this century has been so dominated by records and radio that we are in danger of overlooking what must have been a vital shift in the experience of listening to music: the replacement of an audio-visual event with a primarily audio one, sound without vision . . . Unlike vaudeville performances or family recitals, the phonograph offered a disembodied voice’’ (Laing, ‘‘A Voice Without a Face,’’ p. 7). My argument is that the experience of this ‘‘disembodied voice’’ was not only a musical phenomenon, but extended throughout the culture. Fredric Jameson has influentially argued that ‘‘[a] case could be made for reading Conrad not as an early modernist, but rather as an anticipation of that later and quite different thing we have come to call variously textuality, ´ecriture, post-modernism, or schizophrenic writing’’ (Jameson, Political, p. 219). He points to ‘‘the first half of Lord Jim . . . [as] one of the most breathtaking exercises in nonstop textual production that our literature has to show, a selfgenerating sequence of sentences for which narrative and narrator are mere pretexts’’ (Political, p. 219). Other important representations of phonographic devices in British and American modernism include the graphophone at the conclusion of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and the gramophone in Woolf’s Between the Acts that makes ‘‘the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong’’ (Woolf, Between the Acts, p. 76). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s fascinating Tomorrow’s Eve is narrated by a fictional Thomas Edison who, among other things, complains about the public’s impatience about his failure to improve the

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8

9

10

11

Notes to pages 185–188

phonograph (the novel was published in 1886, nine years after the phonograph’s invention but two years before the ‘‘perfected phonograph’’ of 1888). For a discussion of Tomorrow’s Eve, see Allen S. Weiss, Breathless, pp. 101–9, and Felicia Miller-Frank, who argues that ‘‘the importance of the phonograph in Villiers’s novel reveals much about its role in the history of the times and about the cultural reception of technological innovation’’ (Miller-Frank, Mechanical Song, 144). One finds echoes of Edison’s comments on the recording of last words throughout contemporary writings on the phonograph. See, for instance, Frederick Garbit’s 1878 monograph: ‘‘As a means of preserving the last words, the words of wisdom, the best thoughts of our nearest and dearest friends; of retaining and reproducing the oratorial and literary gems of our great statesmen, philosophers, poets and philanthropists, it will outvie in economy, accuracy and safety, all previous conveyances’’ (Garbit, The Phonograph and its Inventor, p. 12). Nineteenth-century photography is, of course, a vast topic in its own right, and one to which far more critical attention has been devoted than to the phonograph. See, for just a few examples, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, and Stanley Cavell, ‘‘What Photography Calls Thinking,’’ on photography’s links to death and absence; Cathy N. Davidson, ‘‘Photographs of the Dead,’’ on death, memory, and photography in the context of Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables; Nancy Armstrong, Fiction, on photography’s links to Victorian realism. Mark Seltzer writes that ‘‘the entire question of the referentiality of later nineteenth-century writing might be reconsidered in terms of . . . technologies of automatic and immediate registration’’ in ‘‘practices of dictation, registration, and material impression, such as that of the typewriter key on paper or the spoken sound on the phonographic plate’’ (Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 196). He follows Kittler in claiming that there were ‘‘radical recompositions of writing and information-technologies at the turn of the century’’ (Bodies and Machines, p. 197), and calls for a reconsideration of the literature of the period in the light of these recompositions. As Kittler argues, ‘‘phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase’’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 237). In Dracula (1898), Bram Stoker’s characters certainly take advantage of this feature, turning the phonograph into a new kind of ‘‘mechanical memory’’ used for the purpose of outsmarting Dracula. They also complain, however, about a problem Edison did not mention: that the phonographic dictaphone, for all its value as a recorder of notes and ideas, cannot easily be searched. Lacking the breaks of pagination, paragraphing, and the like, the phonograph’s records are sheer flow without division or marker: ‘‘although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up’’ (Stoker, Dracula, p. 196).

Notes to pages 190–193

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12 See Yopie Prins for a discussion of this recording in which she comments on the significance of the fact that Browning could not accurately remember the words of his own poem: Prins, ‘‘Voice Inverse,’’ pp. 47–52. 13 See Thomas Richards’s discussion of the idealism of a Victorian imperial archive – an imaginary collection of all possible knowledge – and its eventual disillusionment as ‘‘the possibility of positive knowledge . . . [began] to be eclipsed by an explosion of too much positive knowledge’’ (Richards, Imperial Archive, p. 76). 14 See Andreas Huyssen, who argues that for modernism, mass culture and women were linked as embodying that which must be excluded from artistic production: ‘‘thus the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the ‘wrong’ kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tries to stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture’’ (Huyssen, ‘‘Mass Culture as Woman,’’ p. 196). 15 Wyn Wachhorst discusses the phonograph in the context of the shift from what Lewis Mumford calls the ‘‘paleotechnic’’ to the ‘‘neotechnic’’ phases of technology. ‘‘The former, associated with coal and iron, was based primarily on the steam engine. The latter, associated with such things as alloys, synthetics, elasticity, electricity, and automation, was born with the dynamo . . . With much justice, Edison came to be viewed as the father of the new electrical age . . . [H]is phonograph [was] the precursor of all modern forms of mechanical memory . . . The phonograph seems to have been the first machine to awaken the mass mind to the potential of the neotechnic revolution’’ (Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison, pp. 22–3). 16 In the critical literature, Conrad’s fiction, and Heart of Darkness in particular, tends to be read in terms of late Victorian anxiety following Lord Kelvin’s formulation of the second law of thermodynamics – as in Ian Watt’s discussion of the novel’s ‘‘astrophysical pessimism’’ (Watt, Conrad, 154). 17 In 1888, a representative of Edison had demonstrated the ‘‘perfected’’ phonograph in London and received some publicity, but little effort was made to market the technology for another decade yet. ‘‘Until the mid-Nineties, Europe remained on the periphery of phonographic affairs and depended solely on exports from American factories’’ (Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, p. 101), Roland Gelatt writes, but ‘‘with the arrival of shipments from Hanover and Camden in the fall of 1898, [gramophone promoter] William Barry Owen proceeded to treat Great Britain to the kind of shock tactics he had learned at home . . . He was one of the first advertisers to take full pages in London newspapers, and he observed none of the customary British reticence in his layouts and copy’’ (The Fabulous Phonograph, p. 106). See, for example, the phonograph advertisements in the Graphic, December 31, 1898, p. 869, and the Illustrated London News, February 25, 1899, p. 288.

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Notes to pages 194–197

18 Bette London, Appropriated Voice, pp. 29–58, also discusses Heart of Darkness in the context of this letter, by way of very interesting reflections on the novel as a sort of proleptic meditation on the not-yet-invented technology of the polygraph. 19 In a discussion of Conrad in the context of Benjamin, Edward Said writes, ‘‘Conrad had the dubious pleasure of witnessing within his own double life the change from storytelling as useful, communal art to novel-writing as essentialized, solitary art’’ (Said, ‘‘Conrad,’’ p. 125). See also Peter Brooks, Reading, pp. 238–63, Allon White, Uses of Obscurity, pp. 108–29, and John Lyon, ‘‘Half-Written Tales,’’ who analyzes Conrad and Rudyard Kipling in the context of Benjamin’s ‘‘The Storyteller’’ and in relation to storytelling tropes and rhetorical modes. 20 More recently, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued that in Dickens ‘‘one thing that goes on when the human body is taken as a capitalist emblem is that the relations of parts to wholes become problematic . . . the parts swell up with accumulated value, they take on an autonomous life of their own’’ (Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 170). Andrew Miller links Conrad to Dickens in terms of both authors’ deployment of a literary technique registering ‘‘social and psychological processes particular to the fragmentation resultant from a routinized life’’ (Miller, Novels Behind Glass, pp. 156–7). 21 For other discussions of voice in Heart of Darkness – arguments with which my own to some degree overlap – see Said, ‘‘Conrad,’’ Vincent Pecora, ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ Brooks, Reading, pp. 238–63, J. Hillis Miller, ‘‘Heart of Darkness Revisited,’’ London, Appropriated Voice, pp. 29–58, and Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice, pp. 127–50. In an early poststructuralist account of Conrad, Edward Said argues that ‘‘what Conrad discovered was that the chasm between words saying and words meaning was widened, not lessened, by his talent for words written’’ (Said, ‘‘Conrad,’’ p. 116), and that the role of speech and voice in Conrad’s narrative is typically to mediate between ‘‘saying’’ and ‘‘meaning.’’ ‘‘[T]he dramatic protocol of much of Conrad’s fiction,’’ Said notes, ‘‘is the swapped yarn, the historical report, the commonly exchanged legend, the musing recollection’’ (‘‘Conrad,’’ p. 119). Vincent Pecora argues that ‘‘in modernism the problem of voice is implicitly tied to the problem of the philosophical subject . . . as it is explored by nineteenth-century philosophy’’ (Pecora, ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ p. 994), and discusses voice in Heart of Darkness in the context of the work of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Derrida. Brooks, although he is less interested in speech and voice as such than in storytelling, retelling and narrative, observes that ‘‘[l]ike Kurtz himself, Marlow has become a disembodied voice’’ (Brooks, Reading, p. 259). J. Hillis Miller speculates and comments valuably on the ‘‘disembodied voices’’ of Heart of Darkness, focusing on some of the same passages that I do here. Claire Kahane assays a psychoanalytic approach to speech in Heart of Darkness, arguing that in it ‘‘the circulation of the voice becomes an ambivalent means of sustaining the fraternal bond that is civilization, the symbolic order’’ (Kahane, Passions of the Voice, p. 136). She focuses on Conrad’s representation of the Intended in the novel’s conclusion to argue that Conrad depicts and participates in

Notes to pages 199–204

22 23

24

25

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‘‘a desire for an omnipotent language, the desire to speak to a listener, and specifically a male listener, who will totally understand’’ (Passions of the Voice, p. 138). Gossip and rumor, as Patricia Spacks and other critics have shown, are central discursive strategies of realist fiction. I want to acknowledge here that my initial thinking about the relevance of phonographic reproduction of voice to Heart of Darkness was, in part, inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, which brilliantly mobilizes scenes of the recording and reproduction of voice. Vincent Pecora makes a similar point, arguing that Kurtz’s final words are ‘‘overdetermined by the cultural expectations of the dying man’s ‘last words’ . . . .[T]he hermeneutical dilemma these words provide for Marlow needs to be understood for what it is: Marlow is faced (as are we) with words that could mean any number of things, but are supposed to mean something fairly important and, in the end, justifying, reassuring, edifying’’ (Pecora, ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ p. 1001). We might consider Marlow’s gift to the Intended of a supposed reproduction of the sound of her name in the light of Adorno’s comment on the narcissism of gramophone listening: ‘‘What the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself, and the artist merely offers him a substitute for the sounding image of his own person, which he would like to safeguard as a possession. The only reason that he accords the record such value is because he himself could also be just as well preserved. Most of the time records are virtual photographs of their owners, flattering photographs – ideologies’’ (Adorno, ‘‘Curves,’’ p. 54).

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Index

Bronte¨, Emily 140–2, 151 Brooks, Peter 209 n. 13, 234 n. 19, 234 n. 21 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett see Barrett, Elizabeth Browning, Robert 31–2 The Ring and the Book 31–2, 155–7, 163–78 recording of final words 190 Butler, Judith 14, 40

Ackroyd, Peter 78 Adorno, Theodor 235 n. 25 Altick, Richard 163–4, 176, 220–1 n. 11 Anderson, Amanda 216 n. 32 Anderson, Benedict 2, 105, 221 n. 18 Arac, Jonathan 211 n. 21 Armstrong, Isobel 156–78, 173, 228 n. 9 Armstrong, Nancy 232 n. 8 Arnold, Matthew 50, 99 Ashton, Owen 213 n. 11 Auerbach, Nina 170, 228 n. 10 229 n. 15, Austen, Jane 77–8, 97, 105, 218 n. 9, 219 n. 11 Northanger Abbey 100 Austin, J. L. 20, 56, 212 n. 3, 217 n. 37 Bakhtin, Mikhail 103 Bamford, Samuel 30, 35–47, 53 Barrell, John 36–7 Barrett, Elizabeth Aurora Leigh 229 n. 16 correspondence with Robert Browning 158–63 criticism of Dickens 222 n. 23 Sonnets from the Portuguese 160–2 Barthes, Roland 1, 232 n. 8 Beer, Gillian 209 n. 13, 217 n. 38 Benjamin, Walter ‘‘The Storyteller’’ 1–2, 3, 6, 7–18, 21, 24, 27–8, 33, 55, 62, 87, 180, 183, 198 ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ 183 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie 136, 216 n. 33 Bolter, Jay 70 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 8 Bradley, G. 71–2 Brantlinger, Patrick 90, 216 n. 35, 224 n. 30 Bristow, Joseph 211 n. 26 Bronte¨, Charlotte 31, 122–54 Jane Eyre 31, 122–40, 143–4, 226 n. 13 Shirley 87 Villette 31, 142–54

Carlyle, Thomas ‘‘Corn-Law Rhymes’’ 23 letter to Elizabeth Gaskell 215 n. 26 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History 18–24, 33–4, 40, 52, 56, 60, 68, 75, 118, 185 and Samuel Bamford 39 Cavell, Stanley 232 n. 8 Chaloner, W. H. 214 n. 17, 214 n. 18 Chartier, Roger 89 Chartism 24, 30, 35, 37–8, 42, 43, 47, 48–64 Chase, Karen 222 n. 20 Child, Francis James 5 Chittick, Kathryn 219 n. 11 Clifford, James 4 Cobbett, William 42, 43 Cohen, Murray 74, 224 n. 6 Collins, Philip 101–2, 125 Conrad, Joseph 32, 179–205 Coppola, Francis Ford 235 n. 23 copyright 93–4, 107, 110–11 Corbin, Alain 29, 207 n. 4 curses 44, 46, 53–4, 57, 60, 62–3, 110 Dames, Nicholas 146 Davidson, Cathy 232 n. 8 demagoguery 25, 41–2, 44, 55 Derrida, Jacques 2 Dissemination 223 n. 26 Of Grammatology 14, 56, 131, 150, 152, 153 Limited Inc. 212 n. 3, 223 n. 26 De Stains, V. D. 73–6, 80

249

250

Index

Dickens, Charles 3, 5, 24–8, 30–1, 33 David Copperfield 30, 76, 81–8 Great Expectations 83, 94–6, 103–4 Hard Times 5, 24–8, 33, 38, 53, 64, 68, 79, 112, 169 and marriage 108–14 Nicholas Nickleby 188 Oliver Twist 102–3, 107–8 Our Mutual Friend 89 ‘‘Personal’’ (Household Words letter) 110–13 Pickwick Papers 77–8, 90, 97, 99–106 and public readings 24, 31, 89–121 and shorthand 76–88 Dickens, Mamie 113–14, 118, 121 Disraeli, Benjamin 30, 35, 37, 38, 48–53, 87 Dolby, George 116–21 domesticity 30, 33, 58, 66 America and 208 n. 8 Charlotte Bronte¨ and 128, 154 Charles Dickens and 92, 98, 106–21 Benjamin Disraeli and 53 Elizabeth Gaskell and 59, 61, 62, 64, 65 singing and 215 n. 22 workers’ speech and 48 dramatic monologue 31–2, 155–78 Duncan, Ian 134

Gaylin, Ann 216 n. 30 Gelatt, Roland 233 n. 17 Gilbert, Sandra 15–18, 142 Gitelman, Lisa 72, 74, 81, 182, 207 n. 4, 217 n. 1, 218 n. 7, 231 n. 3 gramophone see phonograph Greenblatt, Stephen 17, 22 Griffiths, Eric 225–6 n. 9, 227 n. 7 Grossman, Jonathan 217 n. 40 Grusin, Richard 70 Gubar, Susan 15–18, 142 Gurney, Thomas 73, 77–8, 81, 83–8 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 35–6, 123–5, 220 n. 5 Hadley, Elaine 220 n. 9 Hair, Donald 230 n. 23 Hale, Dorothy 210 n. 18, 229 n. 18 Hewitt, Martin 39 Horne, R. H. 158 Humphreys, Henry Noel 69–70 Hunt, Henry (‘‘Orator’’) 39, 40, 43, 43–8, 67 Huyssen, Andreas 233 n. 14 Isenberg, Noah 209 n. 14

Edgeworth, Maria 90, 218 n. 8 Edison, Thomas 32, 179–92 Eley, Geoff 220 n. 5, 224 n. 3 Eliot, T. S. 179 Erickson, Lee 156, 157, 228 n. 14, 230 n. 23 Ezell, Margaret 230 n. 22

Jack, Ian 163, 177 Jakobson, Roman 196 Jameson, Fredric 11, 194, 231 n. 5 Johnson, James H. 207 n. 4 Johnson, Samuel 4, 6, 30, 71–2, 73, 76–7, 208–9 n. 11, 212 n. 2 Jones, Gareth Stedman 213 n. 12 Joyce, James 15, 179

Faulkner, William 231 n. 6 Felman, Shoshana 44, 212 n. 3 Ferguson, Susan 224 n. 30 Ferris, Ina 220 n. 10 Fielding, Penny 207 n. 4, 207–8 n. 6, 209 n. 12, 212 n. 7, 218 n. 8, 219 n. 2, 221 n. 13, 222 n. 24 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 16–17 Fliegelman, Jay 207 n. 4, 213 n. 8, 214 n. 14 Foucault, Michel 12–13, 15, 135 Ford, George 114 Forster, John 92–4, 117, 118 Fried, Michael 155, 176, 229 n. 20

Kahane, Claire 234 n. 21 Kaplan, Carla 126–8, 131–2 Kaplan, Fred 223 n. 28 Keach, William 217 n. 3 Kent, Charles 116, 119–98 Kittler, Friedrich 20, 33, 59, 68, 129–30, 138, 141, 173 Klancher, Jon 212 n. 1 Kluge, Alexander 212 n. 4 Koestenbaum, Wayne 215 n. 22 Kroll, Richard 217 n. 3 Kucich, John 146

Gagging Act 47 Gallagher, Catherine 223 n. 30, 224 n. 31, 226 n. 15 Gaskell, Elizabeth Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ 126–7, 144, 151 Mary Barton 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 48–9, 53–68, 100, 109, 120 North and South 216 n. 31

Laing, Dave 231 n. 4 Lawrence, Karen 226 n. 14 Levenson, Michael 222 n. 20 Levy, Anita 154 literacy 2–3, 13, 66, 117, 118, 123 and orality 2–3, 206 n. 2, 206 n. 3, 211 n. 28 working-class 39–47

Index Litvak, Joseph 226 n. 12 Lloyd, David 215 n. 21 Locke, John L. 211 n. 22 London, Bette 234 n. 18 Looby, Christopher 207 n. 4 Lord, Albert 206 n. 3 Lynch, Deidre 218 n. 9 Lyon, John 234 n. 19 Macpherson, James 5 Marcus, Sharon 126, 220 n. 7, 224 n. 2, 225 n. 7 Marcus, Stephen 77 Marsh, Joss 214 n. 19 mass culture 6, 97–9, 116 mass readership 22, 60–1, 91–4, 99, 106, 116–21, 125–6, 134–5, 144, 153 McClintock, Anne 210 n. 17 McLuhan, Marshall 198, 208 n. 9 Michaelson, Patricia Howell 207 n. 4, 210–11 n. 20, 218 n. 6, 223 n. 25, 226 n. 11 Mill, John Stuart 31, 97–9 Miller, Andrew 234 n. 20 Miller, J. Hillis 234 n. 21 Miller-Frank, Felicia 232 n. 6 Mitford, Mary Russell 104–6, 111 Munich, Adrienne 228 n. 15 Negt, Oskar 212 n. 4 Niles, John D. 5, 131 oath 56–7, 112–13 see also curse Oastler, Richard 46–7 Ong, Walter 12, 29, 34, 96, 136, 206 n. 2, 207 n. 5, 211 n. 28, 229–30 n. 21 oratory 30, 34, 35, 36–7, 38–41, 52–3, 55, 206 n. 2, 213 n. 9 Paderewski, Ignace Jan 193–4 Pecora, Vincent 234 n. 21, 235 n. 24 Peters, John Durham 211 n. 25, 229 n. 17, 231 n. 3 phonograph 2, 29, 32–3, 179–205 phonography 29, 30, 32, 69–76, 183 Picker, John 207 n. 4, 211 n. 29, 220 n. 8, 224 n. 30, 230 n. 2 Pitman, Isaac 32, 72–6, 84, 181, 183, 204 Plotz, John 213 n. 11, 220 n. 5 Pocock, J. G. A. 36 Poovey, Mary 82, 214 n. 20, 216 n. 36 Pridmore-Brown, Michele 230 n. 2 Prins, Yopie 156, 157, 208 n. 10, 211 n. 24, 226 n. 9, 232 n. 12 print culture 1–18, 89 Samuel Bamford and 45, 48, 66 Charles Dickens and 78

251

Elizabeth Gaskell and 56 guilt 74, 155, 166 poets’ relation to 155–6 shorthand and 74, 87 public sphere Samuel Bamford and 43–8 Charlotte Bronte¨ and 123–5 Charles Dickens and 91–2, 94, 97, 105, 106, 120 eighteenth-century 6, 72 Elizabeth Gaskell and 56, 60 Habermas’s definition of 35, 36–7, 98–9 proletarian 47, 212 n. 4 Rath, Richard Cullen 207 n. 4, 208 n. 9, 214 n. 15, 216 n. 29 Reed, Brian 230 n. 2 Richards, Thomas 233 n. 13 Ritchie, Lady 122 Romero, Lora 208 n. 8 Rosaldo, Renato 3 Rosmarin, Adena 227 n. 4 rumor 110–13 Rundle, Vivienne 230 n. 23 Ruskin, John 117–18 Said, Edward 221 n. 17, 234 n. 19, 234 n. 21 Saussure, Ferdinand de 2 Schmidt, Leigh Eric 207 n. 4, 207 n. 5 Schor, Hilary 54, 215 n. 25 Scott, Bonnie Kime 231 n. 2 Scott, Walter 6, 7–18, 90, 97, 101, 134, 209 n. 12, 218 n. 8, 219 n. 2, 220 n. 10, 222 n. 22 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 234 n. 20 Seltzer, Mark 232 n. 9 Shaw, W. David 158, 228 n. 13 Sheridan, Thomas 218 n. 6 shorthand 69–88 see also phonography; Pitman, Isaac silence 55, 62, 133, 142, 149, 210 n. 20, 217 n. 38 Simpson, David 210 n. 19 singing 51–2, 57–9 Siskin, Clifford 220 n. 10, 227 n. 2 Small, Helen 222 n. 20 Smith, Bruce O. 207 n. 4 Smith, Mark M. 207 n. 4 Smith, Olivia 213 n. 10 Sorensen, Janet 217 n. 4, 218 n. 8 Spivak, Gayatri 210 n. 16 Sterne, Jonathan 206 n. 4, 231 n. 3 Stewart, Garrett 108, 211 n. 27, 219 n. 1, 219 n. 3, 221–2 n. 19, 231 n. 2 Stoker, Bram 232–3 n. 11 Stokes, John 226 n. 12 Stone, Lawrence 39–40 Suarez, Juan A. 231 n. 2

252

Index

Tennyson, Alfred 66–7, 157, 186–7, 225 n. 9 Terdiman, Richard 180 Thackeray, William Makepeace 31, 115–16, 122–3, 124–5, 143, 151–2 Thompson, Dorothy 213 n. 7 Thompson, Emily 207 n. 4 Thompson, E. P. 40, 43, 215 n. 27 Trumpener, Katie 4–5, 58, 74 Tucker, Herbert 227 n. 5 Twain, Mark 16–17 Uglow, Jenny 216 n. 34 Valenze, Deborah 214 n. 13 Van Ghent, Dorothy 195 Vicinus, Martha 43–4 Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Auguste, comte de 231 n. 6 Vincent, David 2–3, 34, 40, 94, 105, 131, 223 n. 27 Vlock, Deborah 207 n. 4, 218 n. 9, 219–20 n. 4, 221 n. 16, 222 n. 25 vocal culture 29, 34, 91

Wachhorst, Wyn 233 n. 15 Wahrman, Dror 97 Warhol, Robyn 224 n. 5 Warner, Michael 123–5 Warner, William 221 n. 12 Watt, Ian 233 n. 16 Weiss, Allen S. 207 n. 4, 232 n. 6 Welsh, Alexander 220 n. 6 whispering 55, 109–10 White, Allon 234 n. 19 Wicke, Jennifer 231 n. 2 Williams, Raymond 15–18, 142, 215 n. 28 wisdom 6, 7, 9, 21, 27, 189, 203 Woloch, Alex 226 n. 10 Woolf, Virginia 231 n. 6 Wordsworth, William 6 Yeazell, Ruth 215 n. 23 Yeo, Eileen 47

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill by Miriam Bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art by Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians by Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry by Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Bronte¨ and Victorian Psychology by Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Sie`cle by Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater by William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels by Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Alison Byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont

13. Literary Culture and the Pacific by Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home by Monica F. Cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation by Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth by Gail Marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin by Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy by Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre by Deborah Vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance by John Glavin, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry by Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire Public Discourse and the Boer War by Paula M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God by Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House by Hilary M. Schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science by Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology by Jan-Melissa Schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World by Elaine Freedgood, University of Pennsylvania

29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour A Cultural Study by Thad Logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 by Dennis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 by Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature by Nicola Bown, Birkbeck College, London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire by Nancy Henry The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England Jewish Identity and Christian Culture by Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body by Anna Krugovoy Silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust by Ann Gaylin, Yale University, Connecticut 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 by Anna Johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 by Matt Cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland by Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical by Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, London Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicola Bown, Birkbeck College, London Carolyn Burdett, London Metropolitan University and Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination by Gautam Chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People by Ian Haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey

45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Reading the Magazine of Nature by Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds Richard Noakes, University of Cambridge Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and Jonathan R. Topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain From Mary Shelley to George Eliot by Janis McLarren Caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction by Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller by Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University