Victorian Soundscapes [Paperback]

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

Picker is suggestive, intelligent and insightful.... There are enough fine chords struck and suggestions made so his own soundscape keeps resonating after the book is closed.... [He] is subtly and ingeniously correct...in his dissection of George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda. --Edward Rothstein,The NewYork Times

A pioneering work on an important topic.... Fascinating.... Important for [its] interest in how the senses register modernity, and for the broader social implications of the ways in which the outside world penetrates the bodily sensorium, whether the ear accommodates, or is jarred by, the impact of technology and of commerce. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

[A] brilliant interweaving of diverse texts and fields around the Victorian cultural response to the perceiving body. --Albion

Poised to propel further study of Victorian acoustic culture, an outgrowth and counterpart to widespread study of visual technologies. --Victorian Poetry

Picker'sVictorian Soundscapesbrilliantly evokes not only the sheer noisiness of nineteenth-century city life, but also the vibrancy of authorial response to it.... His approach is absorbingly persuasive. --Dickens Quarterly

Il3T