Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
National Language ◽  
Systematic Observation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Bureaucratic Civilization

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
Domestic Reform

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.

Operatic Battlefields, Theater of War

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-195
Author(s):  
Flora Willson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Military Bands ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Listening Habits

Willson’s chapter explores how opera inflected listening for British officers and tourists in and near Crimea: in particular it discusses operatic perceptions in the Pera district of Constantinople, the site of the city’s first opera house, as well as ways of listening to traveling military bands connected with the Ottoman imperial court. It also examines European elites’ perceptions of foreign battlefields and cityscapes, with the aim of examining a larger shift in the history of listening: that of middle-class audiences falling silent in theatrical spaces during the nineteenth century, supposedly to devote more concentrated attention to elite music. The chapter argues that these listening habits, formed in part in the opera house, persisted well beyond its hallowed enclosures when war came to extend the complex geographies of attentive listening.

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