This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural ... More

This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes 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. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?