Volume 63, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Victorian Oral Cultures / Issue Editor: Anne-Julia Zwierlein

The ‘peepshow’ was one of the commonest and cheapest forms of optical entertainment for most of the nineteenth century: however, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. This essay explores the heyday of the peepshow through a detailed exploration of its exhibition spaces, performance practices, and audience experiences, as well as its relationship with other popular forms such as theatre, lecturing, and illustrated journalism. In particular, the essay argues that the peepshow should not be seen as predominantly a ‘visual’ show, but, rather, that the oral performance of the peep showman was crucial to the appeal and organisation of the exhibition. The visual tableaux were subservient to his narrative, and the showman needs to be seen as part of the growth of illustrated lecturing during the period.

This article examines the vocality of teachers and schoolchildren in nineteenth-century English education discourse. Drawing on Andrew Bell’s model of the monitorial schools of the early nineteenth century, as well as the annual reports of the school inspectorate for the Committee of Council on Education, the article investigates the disaggregation of vocal sound and linguistic meaning in speech training and reading instruction in the writing of the mass schoolroom. Of particular interest is the development of notions of the teacher’s voice as a potentially powerful vehicle for the development of moral selfhood. Children’s speaking voices were understood as crucial indices of an effective pedagogy, something which the Revised Code of 1862 simultaneously enshrined and misrecognized.

Identifying the “literary” lecture as a bridge between oratory and print, I argue for the platform’s centrality to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. American lecture bureaus like the Redpath Lyceum Bureau employed an intricate system of print and oratory to create a market for lectures that both responded to and challenged notions of authorship at the fin de siècle . Authors such as Kate Field, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley used and were used by the platform to promote works in progress and works in print by offering readings, dramatic interpretations, critical commentaries, and personal reminiscences about writers and writing. By studying the promotional materials of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, I demonstrate the lecture’s importance in defining literary activity and authorial celebrity during this period. Attending to the lecture and its wide influence, I argue further, allows us to examine orality’s unstable position in a then developing intellectual hierarchy.

This essay investigates the late-Victorian competition between oral and print mass cultures by focusing on the example of the popular lecture. It situates fictional lecturing scenes in the historical contexts of increased literacy rates and the explosion of mass print culture as well as elitist fears about political inclusiveness after the 1867 Reform Act. My lecturing scenes are taken from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel Armadale (1866) and sensationalist fiction serialized between 1862 and 1895 in three penny fiction weeklies, Bow Bells , the London Reader , and the London Journal , all of which targeted (female) lower-middle and middle-class readers. I attend to the scenes’ metafictional resonances and ironic remediations of orality in print, reading them as offering valuable reflections on ongoing changes in the nineteenth-century mediascape. Such staged lecturer-audience interactions can be shown to be engaged with a vital topic of late-nineteenth-century psychology: the problem of attention, closely tied to the development of ‘modern’ constructions of subjectivity. Attention in these sensationalist narratives is modelled as a physiological affect, and states of deep attention or fascination are shown to be uncannily indistinguishable from hypnotic trance or sleep. Investigating how the texts negotiate the anonymous urban mass culture of the late nineteenth century, the essay thus also demonstrates how fictional lecture performances model pressing late-Victorian political concerns about democracy and authority, class and gender. While Victorian conservative critics had for a long time accused sensation fiction of having an illegitimate impact on (female) readers’ bodies and nerves, my fictional examples of charismatic oral performances, by revealing the speakers’ techniques of attraction and audience manipulation, also debate whether suggestibility is indeed a feature of the lower classes and women – or, paradoxically, indexical of upper-class cultivation.

The connection between mechanical voice reproduction and artificial femininity, popularized most recently by Apple’s debut of Siri for the iPhone in 2011, dates nearly to the very moment of the introduction of the phonograph in 1877. This connection was reinforced in the literature of the period, where it served to preserve or question traditional Victorian gender roles amid social and economic changes that were already upending them. In this essay, I build upon arguments in my book Victorian Soundscapes to sketch a trajectory of imaginative representation of the “female talking machine” across what historian of technology Vaclav Smil has identified as “the Age of Synergy” – that is, from Edison’s 1880s talking doll to E. E. Kellett’s turn of the century short story “The Lady Automaton” and on through George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion . After mapping out the figure of the female voice engine along this arc, from speaking automaton to autonomous vocalist, I conclude by suggesting how the demands of post-war capitalist mass entertainment sought to undermine if not reverse it.

This paper locates the origins of the forms and practices of Edwardian suffrage theatre in a late-Victorian middle-class entertainment culture with which it shared many of its distinguishing features, if not its politics. Suffrage theatre has long been lauded for its radical embracing of alternative performance spaces and a democratic blurring of the lines between amateur and professional. However, these features were already present in the 1890s, in a theatrical scene which emerged from nineteenth-century enthusiasm for private theatricals and which offered women authors important artistic opportunities. “Dramatic recitals,” which combined the performance of short plays and dramatic sketches with recitation and music, developed independently of both the West End and the music hall, drawing instead on the traditions of home performance. This genteel variety theatre was written and performed by women and clearly directed at primarily female audiences, laying the foundation for suffrage theatre in spite of its own conservative gender politics.