‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). This book considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this ‘Parliamentary people’, and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources — classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, and treatises on crowd theory — this book argues that oratorical procedur ... More

‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). This book considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this ‘Parliamentary people’, and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources — classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, and treatises on crowd theory — this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. The book focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending demands and allegiances in their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary engagement that could both resist and respond to the terms of contemporary political discussion. Providing a close reading of the relations between printed words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible civic conduct.