Victorian Soundscapes

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.