‘Speakers’, speakers, and the texts in hand

‘Speakers’ might therefore be a relatively new text-type but they were swiftly imbricated in the teaching of British literature, and, above all, the spoken language in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The need for reform in both had been seen as a highly topical issue, forcefully expressed by the Irish writer Thomas Sheridan. As he pointed out in his British Education; or, The Sources of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756), the formal teaching of English was typically restricted to elementary instruction and matters of basic literacy while, for older students, classical rather than that British literature dominated the syllabus, especially in elite instruction. If, in consequence, ‘a polished and rational people’ was thereby ‘at great expense of labour, time, and money to have their children instructed in languages which can never be any use to them in life’, it was equally troubling that they also ‘neglect entirely to have them instructed in one which would be of perpetual use and ornament to them in whatever rank or station they were placed’.¹⁹ The result, he stressed, was a ‘shameful neglect of our own language’ as well as its literary heritage such that ‘there are no persons trained to the art of reading well, nor have we ever an opportunity of hearing any of our own poems skilfully and gracefully recited’ (pp. 201, 309).

Sheridan not only made a convincing case for educational reform but taught, extensively, by example. In his later ‘Attick evenings’ or in the lecture courses he delivered in London, Bath, Dublin, Oxford, and Edinburgh, vernacular literary texts were, without exception, chosen as the vehicles for exemplary vocal performance.²⁰ Meanwhile, in the detailed schema for education that Sheridan proposed at both elementary and higher levels, articulatory training, and access to a shared accent for all, was posited not only as an object of desire but as a way to end sociocultural division.²¹ Method, information, and education were the linchpins of his intended reform such that, as he noted in relation to his later pronouncing dictionary and prosodial grammar, ‘a similar uniformity of pronunciation […] may be spread through all parts of the globe, wherever English shall be taught by its aid.’²²

In the intellectual hinterland that gave rise to Enfield’s Speaker, the legacies and import of Sheridan’s work were palpable. As surviving manuscript materials from Warrington Academy confirm, the syllabus, even before Enfield’s appointment, had formally embraced Sheridan’s emphasis on vernacular literature and language as taught spheres in ways that included instruction in a normatively instituted mode of speech. ‘There is every week a particular lecture on PRONUNCIATION, wherein the greatest care is taken to form the students to a just habit of reading and speaking’, as the ‘Report’ of the Trustees affirmed in 1766. It was, however, Enfield’s innovatory reframing of these ideas within the device of a performative anthology that facilitated their wider implementation across a range of educational establishments. While anthologies, as Price suggests, play a significant part in ‘determin[ing] not simply who gets published and what gets read but who reads and how’ (p. 3), there was, in the ‘Speaker’ as text, to be a new, and arresting, focus on ‘how’, accompanied by new and unprecedented levels of detail in relation to speech style and the individual voice.

Seen in educational terms, anthologies were, of course, works of obvious utility, not least in terms of their self-evident economies of space and expense. The advantage of a compact library, comprised within a single book, was a familiar conceit, advanced by, for example, Isbister in 1870. A collection of extracts, actively deployed, he stressed, was of far greater value ‘than a whole library unused’. It also afforded new and important democracies of knowledge: ‘I do not admit that literature, even the higher literature, belongs only to the few.’²³ Hewlett set out the virtues of her own New Speaker, and the extracts it contained, in similar ways: ‘It will […] prove an agreeable addition to small libraries, as it furnishes specimens of the style of authors whose whole works are too voluminous and expensive for general purchase’ (p. 3). In school settings (and especially within the expanding education system of Victorian Britain), collective texts of this kind had undeniable value.

Significant, too, was the literary education that ‘Speakers’ provided. They might primarily be intended for recitation and recitation lessons but as Bertha Skeat, mistress of the County Girls School in Llandovery in Wales, made plain, recitation was an important means by which ‘a taste for Literature may be […] insinuated by the wary teacher’. Her Public School Reciter was a case in point. ‘By exercising a judicious and careful choice in selecting poems’, she argued, ‘we can do a very great deal towards laying the foundations of a good literary training, and a real appreciation of beautiful poetry’ while, ‘at the same time […] develop[ing] a talent for reciting with expression.’²⁴ Reading, and reading aloud, could, she emphasized, be harnessed to shared ends. ‘The study of Elocution is inseparably connected with the study of Literature’, as Alfred Macleod endorsed with reference to the principles (and praxis) he adopted across a range of schools in Aberdeen.²⁵

What was recited, and why, is of similar interest. As Skeat affirms, choice and selectivity are typical features of anthologies. ‘An anthology, in its basic understanding, is a collection of picked flowers, of selected texts’, writes Barbara Korte.²⁶ Enfield’s selection of writers included Young, Akenside, Shakespeare, Pope, Anna Barbauld, as well as, say, an extract from Dr John Tillotson’s often reprinted seventeenth-century sermon ‘Of Sincerity towards God and Man’. Later ‘Speakers’, however, tended to stress the diatopic as well as diachronic range of the extracts thereby assembled in ways that foregrounded particular readings of cultural heritage. ‘Passages from the principal writers of past ages’ as well as those from ‘modern authors’ had been carefully combined, the Dublin-based David Bell hence assured prospective readers of his Modern Reader and Speaker in 1850.²⁷ In similar ways, James Douglas (a teacher of English in Edinburgh) affirmed his commitment to ‘living authors’ alongside those of earlier periods, such that his Selections for Recitation demonstrated qualitative affinities between Shakespeare and Tennyson, or the shared dramatic potential of Robert Browning and Felicia Hemans, or the working-class poet Eliza Cook (1818–1889) alongside Byron and Scott.²⁸

Patterns of this kind were common, reinforcing aspects of popular canon-building, if with some distinctive emphases. Extracts from, for example, George Eliot, the Brontës, or Gaskell remained rare. In contrast, Dickens quickly became a high-frequency source text, with thirteen extracts in Baynham’s Elocution, and six in John Forsyth’s Practical Elocutionist.²⁹ Dickens’s fondness for reading his own work aloud, and doing the voices in the act of composition, was, in effect, widely mirrored in recitative anthologies of this kind. The death of Little Nell, included in, for example, Ford’s Art of Speaking, was particularly popular. Isbister’s inclusion of a marked-up extract from Dickens’s Dombey and Son, focusing on the death of Paul Dombey, remains illuminating in its directions for expressive reading and the effective, and affective, use of pause and emphasis (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Death of Paul Dombey, in Alexander Isbister, Outlines of Elocution and Correct Reading (Longmans, Green, 1870), p. 23.

Other high-frequency sources included the English poet and humorist Thomas Hood whose ‘The Song of the Shirt’ with its motifs of social protest, as well as his ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ often featured in works from the 1850s onwards. Even more prominent was the Liverpool-born but Dublin-based Felicia Hemans. Hemans’s work underpinned seven separate extracts in Macleod’s First Text-Book of Elocution (first published in Edinburgh in 1877) and four in Baynham’s Elocution. It is via the ‘Speaker’ as text that Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ — popularly known as ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ — became such a well-known classic, often being memorized and recited in schools across Britain just as an extract headed ‘Douglas to Lord Randolph’, with its opening line ‘My name is Norval’ (taken from John Home’s 1756 tragedy Douglas) was familiarized for earlier readers courtesy of Enfield’s work. ‘My name was Norval, every evening of my life through one Christmas holidays’, as Tom laments in Austen’s Mansfield Park. In her novel Austen offered, in essence, a considered reprise of Sheridan’s own thesis on elocution, education, and the arts of speech:

The too common neglect of the qualification, the total inattention to it, in the ordinary school-system for boys, […] the want of management of the voice, of proper modulation and emphasis, of foresight and judgment, all proceeding from the first cause, want of early attention and habit.³⁰

Text selection, however, could display an equally active transnationalism. Across the nineteenth century, ‘Speakers’ routinely claimed to address the literature of ‘our nation’ in which nation was rendered in broad rather than narrow terms in an imagined community of both literary affiliation and Britishness. Isbister, as in his Lessons on Elocution and Good Reading for Girls, hence promised readers ‘some of the most exquisite specimens of the literature of our native land’ (p. iv), a commendation which drew together the work of Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, and Tennyson among the assembled texts. Elsewhere, Britishness was made an organizing principle in its own right. David Bell’s overarching aim was, he explained, ‘a Selection in which elegance and propriety of thought are combined with eloquence of expression’. Nevertheless, in so doing, he also divided his chosen extracts into Scottish, Irish, and English while including, for example, separate sections on ‘Irish melodies’. ‘The poets and poetry of Ireland have not been forgotten’, he reassured his readers.³¹ Advertising for the second edition of his Modern Reader and Speaker emphasized the transnational basis of revision: ‘The Extracts have been revised and enlarged with the greatest care […] selected from the writings of the most popular authors in British, Irish, and American Literature.’

If less explicit, patterns of this kind were pervasive across many works such that they included, for example, specific sections on ‘Scots ballads’ or gave prominence to the writings of Robert Pollok, Joanna Baillie, John Gibson Lockhart, or Charles Mackay, or to Irish writers such as the poet and lyricist Thomas Moore (whose ‘Go, let me Weep’ became another staple extract). Other well-attested favourites included Robert Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and ‘Highland Mary’, as well as ‘To a Haggis’ (often placed under ‘Humorous’ readings, and requiring its own distinctive declamatory style). Living in Ireland, Bell nevertheless remains in the minority (alongside Hewlett) in reassuring prospective readers of the absence of any sectarian feeling within his selected extracts. ‘Every sentiment of a political or sectarian character has been carefully excluded’, he affirmed.³² Extracts in Welsh, in keeping with common Victorian educational proscriptions, fared somewhat differently while their omission affirmed other readings of nation, hegemony, and control.³³ Whether Hemans’s lengthy residence in Wales might perhaps have acted as a form of token literary allegiance remains unknown, though it plays interestingly into her textual prominence in ‘Speakers’ from across the period.

Outside Shakespeare, the highest-frequency source was, however, unquestionably Walter Scott whose prominence reflects his striking familiarization within Victorian education, as well as a form of cultural priming which conceivably underpinned at least some of his enduring popularity at this time. As in Graham’s Principles of Elocution (another bipartite text and a ‘Speaker’ in all but name) or, say, Baynham’s Elocution, containing Select Reading and Recitations, multiple Scott extracts were included across the same work.³⁴ Extracts in Graham (complete with editorially invented titles) hence comprised Scott’s ‘Introduction to the Lord of the Isles’, ‘Hymn of the Hebrew Maid’, ‘The Resolve’, ‘Punishment of a Spy Whose Employers Had Betrayed Rob Roy MacGregor’, as well as a section headed ‘Interview between Waverley and Fergus MacIver’ and a further extract with the title ‘Rebecca and Ivanhoe’. Extracts in Baynham spanned ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, ‘Death of Marmion’ (from Canto 6 of Scott’s much longer narrative poem), ‘Punishment of a Spy’, ‘The Trial by Combat’, several sections from ‘Blanche of Devan’ and two extracts from Guy Mannering. A. M. Hartley in his Academic Speaker (1846) meanwhile selected the ‘Death of Marmion’ (one of the most popular extracts in extant Victorian ‘Speakers’) though he also included ‘The Saxon and the Gael’, a ‘piece’ headed ‘Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu’(from Canto 5 of ‘The Lady of the Lake’), and the dramatic ‘Death of Bertram Risingham’ (from Scott’s lengthy narrative poem ‘Rokeby’, published in 1813).³⁵ As in a popular extract from Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ — variously retitled ‘Love of Country’ (in Hartley and Richson), ‘The Patriot’s Song’ (in Forsyth), and ‘My Native Land’ (in Carpenter’s School Speaker) — Scott was repeatedly used to present, and perform, a rhetorical paean to a shared national identity: ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, | Who never to himself hath said, | This is my own, my native land!’. Isbister, to similar ends, included an extract from the Scottish poet James Thomson that he retitled ‘The Glory of Britain’ with its celebration of

Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts,
Inspiring vigour, Liberty abroad
Walks, unconfined, even to thy furthest cots,
And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.36

Titles, as this suggests, can be a productive source of intended affect within contemporary ‘Speakers’, and not least in the positive readings of nationhood, and unity amid diversity, that extracts of this kind affirm. We can, however, also see affect as a further significant point of differentiation between ‘Speakers’ and the generality of miscellanies or anthologies. If, in the latter, as Piper notes (p. 127), obvious organizing principles can be obscure, within ‘Speakers’ affect was often deployed in categorizing the assembled extracts while codifying a structural bridge between anthologizing and performance. Enfield divided his chosen texts into, for example, didactic, narrative, and pathetic — or, as defined by Samuel Johnson, those ‘Affecting the passions; passionate; moving’. ‘Before the publication of Dr. ENFIELD’s SPEAKER, a methodical order in the arrangement of the pieces selected was not attempted, or even thought of’, Mary Wollstonecraft commented with approbation: ‘it is evidently the only way to render a book of this kind extensively useful.’³⁷ Later compilers followed, organizing extracts in relation to the emotional correlates they might produce, for speaker and listeners, when read aloud. Isbister’s Outlines of Elocution, for example, placed Addison under ‘Didactic Reading’, Thackeray and Macaulay under ‘Descriptive’, while Brougham on ‘The African Slave Trade’ (another very popular piece) appeared under ‘Vehement and Impassioned’.³⁸ Caroline Southey (‘The Christian Pauper’s Death-Bed’) meanwhile appeared under ‘Serious and Pathetic’. Descriptors of this kind hence routinely encompassed the compiler’s assessment of the relevant ‘piece’, but also the tone, and style, to be achieved as printed extracts moved into active use and the demands of recitative performance.

Speaking the text and doing the voice(s)

While ‘Speakers’ were, as this suggests, primarily texts to be used, they were, in what is perhaps their most distinctive property, equipped with an extensive set of directives not only for the styles, but also the specific sounds, that were variously to be inculcated or suppressed. Both aesthetic and articulatory control were commended. ‘Good reading’, as a range of writers elaborated, was ‘intelligent reading’ — an expressive resource used in relation to both exegesis and understanding in which, as Macleod affirmed, ‘the voice is the servant of the thought’ (p. vi). ‘We should […] guard against that uniformity called monotony, which is an unvarying effort of the lungs and of the tones’, Hartley warned (p. 9, emphasis in original). ‘Declamatory pawing’, as memorably described by Isbister, was equally disfavoured.³⁹

There were, however, some notable emphases in other evaluative criteria that were commonly endorsed. Enfield’s lectures in Warrington had, for example, been delivered ‘with the design of assisting the Students […] in acquiring a just and graceful Elocution’ (p. iii). Yet, as he made plain, what was ‘just and graceful’ did not easily coexist with regionalized markers of pronunciation or what, in the Speaker, were dubbed the ‘peculiarities and vulgarisms of provincial dialects’ (p. xiv). Instead, localized features such as the zero-realization of /h/ in words such as hat, happy, or pronouncing ‘ou’ (as in out) like ‘oo’ (i.e. [u:]) were unequivocally proscribed. Enfield’s use of <oo> referred to the monophthongization typical of Northern English (corresponding southern forms were diphthongal) but other stated infelicities included the ‘confusion’ of /v/ and /w/, or pronouncing <oi> as <i> in words such as boil, both features listed by John Walker as among the ‘Faults of the Londoners’ or Cockneys in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791). ‘The practitioner should pay particular attention to his prevailing defects’, Enfield urged, recommending the utility of elocutionary mentorship in the guise of a teacher or friend. A ‘regular course of exercises’, even if ‘irksome and disagreeable’, was likewise recommended (p. xxv).

From the beginning, the Speaker (and the ‘Speakers’ that followed) were thereby inscribed with particular performative ideals and aligned with prevailing models of linguistic prescription more widely.⁴⁰ ‘Doing the voices’ (and the diversity this implies) was thereby routinely dispelled in favour of one type of speech — supra-local rather than regionalized, and freighted with cultural capital in which elite and metrocentric identities were made pervasive reference models. ‘These faults, and all others of the same nature, must be corrected in the pronunciation of a gentleman, who is supposed to have seen too much of the world, to retain the peculiarities of the district in which he was born’, as Enfield affirmed (p. xiv). Here, too, Sheridan’s legacies were plain. His Course of Lectures on Elocution (originally delivered in Edinburgh in 1761) had specified the social affect that a standard spoken English might convey and the salience (both positive and negative) that particular variables — including /h/-loss — might possess.⁴¹ The ‘consciousness’ that diatopic varieties, including Scots and his own Irish tones, inevitably had ‘some degree of disgrace annexed to them’ were further elements of the readerly re-education that Sheridan advocated. As he stressed, ‘information’ was the key to beneficial and normative change.⁴² In elocutionary texts of this kind, transnationalism was both formally addressed and rhetorically subsumed within hegemonic prescriptions of a national voice for all.

The practical as well as ideological salience of the bipartite structure Enfield established is, in this respect, overt such that the assembled extracts offered a form of sustained praxis for the elocutionary tenets that the expository introduction set out, alongside the normative education in spoken standard English that should result. The remedial ‘exercises’ that Enfield commended (and the attendant reading of regionality as ‘defect’) were, in turn, to be subject to striking elaboration as the nineteenth century advanced. In Victorian texts, training in what was described as ‘the physical side of Elocution’ was, as by Charles Clegg, often presented under the heading of ‘oral gymnastics’, a collocation which unambiguously signals the application, and dedicated ‘vocal exercise’, deemed essential. ‘The muscles of the tongue, lips, and other parts of the mouth, may be much increased […] by suitable gymnastics’, he instructed.⁴³ Here, too, practice made perfect.

Related models in which ‘good’ vowel sounds were presented as depending on a ‘definite position of the organs of the speech’ (and systematic knowledge of this) gained particular traction.⁴⁴ Localized variants — including the markers of transnational variation typical of Scots or Irish — were, in further manifestation of the standard language ideology espoused, depicted as the product of imperfect performance or, as John Millard indicated, as ‘confusion’ or vocal ‘maltreatment’.⁴⁵ ‘The pupil must […] endeavour to comprehend fully the articulative mechanism of each consonant’, he stressed (p. 18): ‘The confusion of these related vowel sounds is one of the causes of foreign, provincial, or vulgar pronunciation’ (p. 6). Clegg provided similar strictures. ‘Along with the articulation exercises are given certain exercises in pronunciation’, he stated: ‘These are meant to correct the numerous blunders in vowel-quality, which are commonly called provincialisms’ (p. 18, emphases in original). That ‘national’ as well as regional variation fell within this evaluative paradigm was overt. ‘There are other defects which are called national, provincial, and peculiar’, Connery directed: ‘These, too, must be surmounted’ (p. 13, emphases in original).

The knowledge of articulatory mechanisms that this assumed can nevertheless seem daunting. Isbister, like others, divided sounds and their production with reference to specific features of the vocal tract. This required pupils to familiarize themselves with the proper positioning of ‘Lingua-dentals’ (‘Formed by the application of the tongue to the fore-teeth’) or, for example, ‘Lingua-palatals’ (‘Formed by the application of the fore-part of the tongue to the fore-part of the palate’). The former, Isbister elaborated, might be practised either via individual words (‘thane, think, through, thwack, thousandth’) or by means of elocutionary tongue-twisters such as ‘Theodore Thickthorn thrust thistles through the thick of his thumb’.⁴⁶ For lingua-palatals, the equivalent exercise was ‘His sister is a thistle-sifter, and she sifts thistles with a thistle-sifter’. A form of quasi-transcription was often recommended, marking sounds in relation to their articulatory qualities in a system of numerical classification (Fig. 3). Numerical diacritics were familiar features in pronouncing dictionaries such as those by Sheridan and Walker. Many ‘Speakers’ identified works of this kind as particularly useful for classroom use, not least given the supra-local transcriptions they provided for every word.

Fig. 3: Alfred Macleod, Macleod’s First Text-Book of Elocution, 3rd edn (Menzies, 1881), p. xliii.

Prescriptive and proscriptive agendas of this kind were, we should note, accompanied by a commendable diversity of author demographics. Enfield had, of course, worked in Warrington in Lancashire. Among the later exponents of practical phonetics and readerly re-education, Richson taught in Manchester, Clegg in Bradford, Alexander Hartley and John Forsyth in Glasgow, and John Millard at the City of London School. The Bell dynasty — David Bell on Lower-Abbey Street in Dublin, Alexander Melville Bell in Edinburgh, and their father, Alexander Bell in London — offer particularly eloquent testimony in this respect. Meanwhile, George Vandenhoff offered elocutionary instruction in Liverpool, and Bertha Skeat (as well as writers such as Thomas Edwards) in Wales.⁴⁷ Isbister was headmaster of the Stationers’ School in London and heavily involved in materials for the emergent national education system. As Alfred Macleod records, his own formal appointment by the Aberdeen School Board to the local High School for Girls (as well as the ‘public schools of Aberdeen’) was the impetus behind his subsequent publications. As he confirmed, ‘when the School Board of Aberdeen resolved that the pupils and pupil-teachers of their schools should receive regular training in Elocution, and instructed the editor with that duty, it became necessary to provide such a text book’ (p. iii). If Macleod’s Scottishness was undoubted, ‘training’, as he made plain, was driven by the desire to displace the local affiliations that voice might otherwise reveal. That ‘a correct pronunciation should be attained as early as possible in the study of Elocution’ was axiomatic. So, too, was the implied equivalence of correctness with a form of speech based on strongly Anglocentric and, indeed, elite metrocentric models. ‘The pupil will make every endeavour to get rid of any false or local pronunciation’, he instructed. In aesthetic as well as articulatory terms, the regionalized was deemed ‘offensive to the ear of [an] audience’ and, Macleod added, potentially ‘obstructive of their sympathetic attention’ (pp. xiv–xv).

‘Speakers’ could, by extension, document diatopic features with marked specificity while also recommending their disuse in ways that served to place Victorian phonology and its coexisting variables in an arresting discourse of stigma as well as shibboleth. The role of h-fullness as a delocalized marker was a case in point. While its zero-realization in initial position typified (and typifies) a range of regional forms, its presence as a feature of ‘good English’, first isolated by Sheridan in 1762, prompted extensive directives. According to George Vandenhoff, it ‘deserved a whole chapter […] with a view to repairing the neglect and outrages that are hourly offered to it’. Judged ‘a gross vulgarism’ (and ‘a fatal blot in ordinary conversation’), habits of [h]-loss were, he added, freighted with affective stigma and ‘calculated to produce a great prejudice against the offender’ which the forces of education and elocutionary application could now remove.⁴⁸ Similar precepts framed the realization of ing which, as Connery confirmed, was a feature that ‘requires particular accuracy in its enunciation’. Speakers ‘in Lancashire and some other parts of England’, he added, ‘make the articulation too close […] and pronounce thing as if it were written think’; those in the South meanwhile ‘say singin for singing, diggins for diggings’ or, still worse, ‘mounting for mountain’ (p. 37).

Still more problematic in diatopic terms was the fact that ‘Speakers’ uniformly prescribed the use of /ʌ/ in up and /ʊ/ in pull — a split that marked the phoneme inventory of southern rather than northern regions (and was conventionally delimited by the Trent).⁴⁹ The lengthened vowel in words such as bath and fast, a change in progress which exhibited similar geographical diffusion, was another feature that texts of this kind sought to codify. So, too, was the ongoing diphthongization (like ‘a-ee’, Alexander Bell explained) in words such as take. ‘The omission of this final element of these beautiful vowels is a marked provincialism’, Bell noted of monophthongal realizations within his New Elucidation of the Principles of Speech in 1849, a work which contained, as its title page affirmed, ‘numerous practical exercises, for the correction of imperfect utterance’.⁵⁰ The presence of the closing vowel glide was, he emphasized, obligatory in ‘good’ and ‘standard’ speakers. Instruction even at the very earliest levels could implement strictures of this kind (Fig. 4). ‘“Prevention is better than cure”’, as Bell commented on other articulatory matters which, to his mind, might require normative redress: ‘such elementary disfigurements of adult speech ought to have been rendered impossible by attention in the nursery and school-room.’⁵¹

Fig. 4: Alexander Melville Bell, Letters and Sounds: An Introduction to English Reading (Kennedy, [c. 1850–59]), p. 9.

Readings of language and place within contemporary ‘Speakers’ could therefore display a marked unease. As for Alexander Bell, the ‘Scotch bagpipe’, and its accompanying metalanguage, might provide an evocative image in explaining the nature of articulatory mechanisms and the breath. ‘[It] gives an excellent and most convincing illustration of the comparative efficacy […] of the lungs’, he stated: ‘See the piper, when the bag is only half-filled, tuning the long drones! how his arm jerks on the wind-bag! […] hear the harsh and uneven notes that come jolting out from the pressure.’⁵² Yet in other respects, anglicization remained the predominant ideological (and articulatory) frame — a reference point against which other national (and local) varieties were measured and found wanting. Scotch ‘defects’ and their vital remediation were, for example, discussed in detail by Graham (described in the ‘Editor’s Preface’ as a ‘successful and popular Lecturer upon and Teacher of Elocution in Edinburgh’). Rhoticity (‘one of the points by which a Northern utterance is most readily detected in England’, as Bell likewise affirmed), as well as the excessive contraction of the ‘slender a’, as in made, were presented as particular objects of concern, as was the propensity of Scotch speakers to sound the a in words such as canal as ‘canawl’, or to mispronounce the sound in feel.⁵³ ‘The Scotch do not give this sound with the same delicate contraction as the English, and they do not dwell sufficiently on it’, Graham observed: ‘in pronouncing the word feel, an Englishman will dwell twice as long on the vowel as a Scotsman’ (p. 15, note). In a similar remit, Bell could attempt to reassure his own Scottish readers in relation to what he depicted as the problematic northern lengthening in words such as vision (pronounced veesion) or condition (pronounced condeetion). But such reassurance, especially for ‘Northern speakers, ambitious of an English enunciation’, again depended on a determined process of convergence and eradication: ‘this need not any longer be a mark of Northern English, for there is no difficulty in producing the true sound of the English element once its formation is understood.’⁵⁴ As Alexander Bell expounded, ‘when a defective articulation was to be corrected, [or] a dialectic vowel-habit anglicised’, systematic practice should bring the desired results.⁵⁵

Related Anglocentric strictures (and associated readings of ‘defect’ and remediation) were applied to Irish and Welsh English. As Alexander Bell explained (here in relation to the sounds of a), ‘the Welsh always […] mispronounce English; but a little elementary practice will supply the deficient power to any person who is conscious of the defect, and desirous of its correction.’⁵⁶ Irish enunciations of <ea> and <e> in words such as tea, decent, and supreme were likewise condemned, as by Graham, as a ‘national peculiarity’, as well as a ‘violation’ of ‘proper English’ (p. 15). The tendency to pronounce words such as met as mit (with a raised vowel) or ill ‘nearly like ale’ was presented as equally concerning, while enunciations of great as greet, also identified as typical of Irish speakers, fared no better.⁵⁷ David Bell was, as we have seen, working in Dublin but, here and elsewhere, he provided careful descriptions of the English diphthongal realization of o as in old, and of a as in able, as features that ‘good readers’ should strive to achieve irrespective of their place of habitation. Non-diphthongal enunciations, seen as typical of Scottish and Irish speakers, were, in contrast, to be avoided. As Macleod affirmed, a deregionalized and transnational English remained the aim — one that was, he noted, used by ‘educated people — not in one particular district, but throughout the country’ (p. xxiv).

‘Speakers’ as a textual phenomenon hence both harnessed and perpetuated a range of topicalities in relation to literary and linguistic transnationalism across this period. Paradoxically, as we have seen, they could draw together the literature of the ‘nation’ in ways that cemented the cultural contributions (and communality) of its component parts while also consolidating the unitary rhetoric of ‘proper English’ and the hegemonies of a spoken standard that normative constructions of accent increasingly involved. If, as Ankhi Mukherjee notes, ‘ideological operations’ are typically seen as ‘unobtrusive’ in the generality of anthologies, here, too ‘Speakers’ proved an exception to the rule.⁵⁸ In important ways therefore, they form a significant, if neglected, component not only within the anthology as genre, but also within the rise and formal codification of Received Pronunciation (RP) — a supra-local accent first formally identified by the phonetician Alexander Ellis in 1869 but which has important precursors in the work of writers such as Thomas Sheridan, John Walker, as well as Benjamin Smart, and the normative educational agendas that they advanced. ‘Speakers’, however, placed similar ideas in educational praxis across Britain from the very earliest points of instruction. ‘I am’, as Millard declared, ‘convinced that if the organs of speech are thus early trained to the niceties of articulation, absolute perfection will reward the perseverance of the pupil’ (p. x).

The contemporaneous narrowing of elocution to what Samuel Wood in 1833 deemed its ‘modern sense’ (in which pronunciation rather than gesture or stance predominated) presents a further aspect of the shifting parameters that educational praxis in this respect came to attest.⁵⁹ So, too, does the fact that teacher training, as well as school inspection (in a system established in 1839), adopted national models of evaluation that were closely aligned with the speech styles that ‘Speakers’ aimed to instil. Macleod’s appointment as a teacher of elocution at the Aberdeen Training School for Male and Female Teachers is, in this, particularly telling, though the prevalence of elocutionary teaching at university level — Forsyth and Baynham were both masters of elocution at the University of Glasgow; David Bell occupied a similar role in Dublin — is equally significant, not least given the fact that many university-educated students went onto become tutors in both private and public schools. As Victorian school inspector reports attest, school assessments, held in person, often relied on a kind of performative orality in which ‘good’ delocalized reading was deemed a formal measure of success.⁶⁰ That the reading lesson was, by extension, frequently depicted as the ‘hearing lesson’ and ‘bad pronunciation’ deemed ‘misspelling to the ear’ played its own part in the rhetoric of the ‘educated voice’ that results.⁶¹

In wider terms, a standardized accent for all nevertheless remained elusive. John Stubbs, a working-class writer from Macclesfield, might depict the nineteenth century as one of new elocutionary opportunities with the potential to effect wide-ranging ‘reformation’ in this respect. ‘Were every person to pay attention to this, and practice it, all country, or local dialects would be abolished, and only one universally pure and correct language spoken in its stead’, he stressed. Diversity was, as for Sheridan, presented as ‘one of the most formidable barriers’ in society. The positive impact of elocutionary instruction on ‘the manners of that important class of society — a class, which the writer of these few humble pages is proud to say he belongs viz, — the labouring population’ was, he added, undoubted.⁶² Delocalization might, as here, be rhetorically affirmed, as well as educationally endorsed in establishments across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in relation to language and literature alike. As for Hardy’s Tess, a double fluency might perhaps be acquired; the ‘Sixth Standard’ she attains in Marlott was, interestingly, dominated by Isbister’s works in many schools.⁶³ Grace Melbury, in Hardy’s Woodlanders (1887) and Hilda Lessways, whose delocalized voice (and recitation skills) appear in Arnold Bennett’s These Twain (1916), are other literary recipients of instruction of this kind. Yet, at least outside the elocution class, the covert prestige of vernacular forms and the patterns of belonging and community that they affirm served, of course, for many speakers, to impose their own corrective measures for prescriptive narratives of this kind in which, as we have seen, a single national voice was repeatedly rendered a formal object of desire. ‘Speakers’ can present us with a fascinating example of intended unitary praxis in the supra-regionality and phonetic standardization that they both extolled and sought to implement. Voice nevertheless remained, and remains, an important and complex signifier of selfhood in which national, regional, and social identities audibly resisted both effacement and hegemonic control.