Introduction: Victorian Talk

Introduction:Victorian Talk Martin Hewitt (bio) and Patrick Leary (bio) The conversational life of the Victorians has received little sustained scholarly investigation, despite its obvious importance. For that reason, we set out in 2020 with funds from the Margaret Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies at St Hugh's College Oxford to convene a colloquium on "Victorian talk" that would bring together scholars from different fields and perspectives to exchange ideas about this neglected subject. Because we felt that face-to-face talk was, given the subject matter, by far the best way to proceed, we postponed our plans until pandemic restrictions eased. At last, however, in April 2022, we were all able to meet in Oxford. It is from that lively mix of presentations and conversations that the essays in this Victorian Review forum are drawn. If the talk of the Victorians was evanescent, it was also ubiquitous. Family life, social life, working life, intellectual life, political life—all were lived within, and sustained by, a vast eddying sea of now-vanished talk. It permeated literary life, as well, and although historians and literary scholars have understandably focused on the burgeoning print culture of the period, one marked by the stupendous output of the world's first industrialized mass press and the flowering of Victorian fiction and poetry, much less attention has been paid to the manifold ways in which talk shaped and interacted with this torrent of print. The conversation of the workplace, the dinner table, the coffee house, the pub, and the clubroom was continually replenished by the steady tidal flow of the news of the day and the ready-made opinions on offer in magazine reviews and newspaper leaders. At the same time, as Walter Bagehot observed, the tone of periodical prose that emerged with the new century was that of "the talk of the manifold talker, glancing lightly from topic to topic" (256). The private circulation of gossip could, as in the case of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, importantly shape critical reactions that appeared in print. The discussion of fiction, as Clemence Schultze demonstrates here, could be a staple of the "community of readers" that made up a middle-class family like Charlotte Yonge's. If novels were much talked about, those same novels crucially relied upon varied representations of talk to engage their readers, representations that have been the subject of recent scholarly analysis by such scholars as Ivan Kreilkamp and Amy Wong. While the bibulous discursive communities of Blackwood's Noctes Ambrosianae, the Fraser's circle, and the Punch table were undoubtedly the subject of mythmaking, there is no question that talk was central to the editorial and reporting processes of much of the nineteenth-century press, from the choice of topics and themes to the gathering of news. Oral testimony in courtrooms or at Parliamentary committee hearings appeared in newspaper columns that in turn provided fodder for many a End Page 189 verbal debate. Whether as gossip or argument, exhortation or denunciation, storytelling or witnessing, Victorian talk was always in motion, circulating restlessly from one setting to another, from private spheres to public ones, and from oral to print media and back again. Much of the significance of talk in the nineteenth century also derives from the cultural capital it embodied and circulated. Famous talkers were feted in Society, their company sought out and their facility in conversation and debate valued almost above all other accomplishments. Not even excellence in public speaking, which jurist A.V. Dicey considered "a very much less improving occupation than good talking," commanded the respect and admiration of impromptu eloquence in private settings. The political circuits associated especially with the early-century Whigs, at Brooks' or the Reform Club, or at Holland House, which nourished the talk of Sydney Smith, Samuel Rogers, and T.B. Macaulay, established an enduring and expanding model encompassing literary celebrity as well as political persuasion. Just as Lady Palmerston exercised enormous influence over Liberalism as a political hostess, so Thackeray and Carlyle eagerly participated in the salons of Jane Brookfield and Lady Ashburnham. For all its venom, the "many-sided yet concentrated malice" with which Abraham Hayward held forth at...