Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848--1900 (Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad)

This dissertation eavesdrops on the other side of the critical silence that has surrounded the Victorian soundscape to analyze the acoustics of public and private spheres. I assess the ways sounds acquired meaning in the later nineteenth century, showing not only how outbreaks of noise and impositions of silence challenged middle-class professionalism and domesticity, but also how scientific and technological attempts to discipline sound during the fin de siecle destabilized conceptions of literary voice. I begin with Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, which reverberates with the changes brought by the 1840s railway boom as well as the auditory fantasy explicated in Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. Dickens relates aural expression in the novel, especially the sounds of the express train and ocean waves, to his desire as author and public reader that his works and voice perpetually circulate. The figure of the Italian organ-grinder disrupted this broadcast, and the 1864 Street Music Act was a rallying point for the London "brain-workers," including Dickens, Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, and John Leech, who heard in street entertainment a threat to their professional status and quiet laboring spaces. Turning from city noise to internalized vibrations, George Eliot incorporates the metaphor of sympathetic resonance throughout her novels to convey the ethic of empathy central to her fiction, a metaphor that in Middlemarch and particularly Daniel Deronda suggests a sophisticated understanding of contemporary acoustics derived from Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone. Like that other breakthrough of 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, itself informed by an idiosyncratic reading of Helmholtz, Deronda portends new paradigms of "separateness with communication" at home and internationally, which prefigure the work of another Helmholtz admirer, Freud, who invoked a telephonic metaphor for the psychoanalyst-patient relationship. In 1888 Edison ordered his transatlantic agent Gouraud to create an uncanny archive of Alfred Tennyson's, Robert Browning's, William Gladstone's, and others' voices. Works of the 1890s by Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and Francis Barraud suggest that the phonograph offered interactions late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns often did, but, in a period of diminishing control over empire and the self, peculiarly intimate and reassuring.