The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom

Abstract

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.The rising graph of literacy brought no corresponding decline in the use of the human voice. Children emerged from schools with their ears ringing with the noise of print. The first generation of inspected teachers aspired to harmony rather than silence in their lessons. Only in the more advanced schools of the last quarter of the nineteenth century were pupils permitted to spend part of their lessons quietly reading or writing. (Vincent 2000, 94) As critics such as David Vincent and more recently Ivan Kreilkamp have argued, print did not replace oral speech in Victorian culture so much as incorporate it into the broadly-encompassing project of universal print literacy. In the schoolroom, the reasons for this had much to do with numbers -numbers of students to teachers in a single room, and numbers of available printed texts. It was also a holdover from ancient catechetical pedagogy, in which students would mumble their lessons aloud before being examined individually by the master (Vincent 2000, 47). Taking Vincent's observations above as a starting

Voices that Matter?

“…Much like sonic skills include conscious exercise and work in developing the act of listening (next to the unconscious work of existing and functioning in a changing sonic environment), they should also include the conscious practice or training that go into learning how to speak, how to sing, and how to sound right for a particular environment. 87 This practice is always performed in connection to shared understandings of health, beauty, and comprehensibility. While historical actors of any given period or context may not vocally perform in similar ways, they did share vocabularies, imaginations of the body, and ears attuned to the same aspects of transcribable sound described above.…”

Physiology and philhellenism in the late nineteenth century: The self-fashioning of Emil du Bois-Reymond

“…While most of du Bois-Reymond's formal addresses were already published in two extensive volumes during his lifetime (EBR 1886(EBR , 1887, our analysis of his university and itinerant lectures builds on the unpublished notes he took as a memory aid, as well as notes taken by his listeners. Public addresses, as opposed to letters or journal articles, are particularly relevant to our purpose because nineteenth-century philhellenism encouraged an obsession with the professorial voice, one that affirmed the putative objectivity of science by tying it to the charismatic authority of the professor (Clark 2003;Schroeder 2015). Moreover, the professorial voice endowed its scientific utterings with a "Socratic spirit" (Schroeder 2015, 46) that catered to the philhellenic educational institutions of du Bois-Reymond's time.…”

“…In keeping with the high esteem in which the aural sense was held, students attending the lectures of du Bois-Reymond were often impressed by his "sonorous" delivery and "remarked the lucidity of his expression, the splendour of his imagery, and the breadth of his erudition" (Finkelstein 2013, 176). The scientist could therefore capitalize upon the nineteenth-century fascination with the professorial voice (Schroeder 2015).…”