Private Opinion, Public Speech: The Continued Importance of Talk in Victorian Politics

Private Opinion, Public Speech:The Continued Importance of Talk in Victorian Politics Josephine Hoegaerts (bio) The Library of Hawarden, containing the private library of William Gladstone, holds a slim, somewhat dramatically titled volume by Irish classicist and staunch Unionist John Pentland Mahaffy. The Decay of Modern Preaching (1882) lists historical, social, and personal causes for what Mahaffy considered the abysmal state of preachers' ability to speak well. Gladstone read the essay with minute attention, highlighting numerous passages with enthusiasm, scribbling furious notes in the margins next to others. Mahaffy's views on dogma and interpretation puzzled him. "Liberty of opinion, and the right to private judgement as to doctrine, is the stronghold of modern enlightenment," the essay states confidently (115). Next to it, the prime minister wrote "meaning?" What did it mean, indeed? For Mahaffy, the liberty of holding private opinions was an issue to grapple with in the context of the dogmatic practices of the Church, which brought it into tension with modern ideas of individuality. For Gladstone, ideas of liberty of opinion must also have fed into his life as a public figure. As Edward Packard has noted, there was a "voracious appetite for oratory across the social spectrum in Victorian London" (37), showing that the ubiquity and multiplicity of Victorian talk mentioned in the introduction to this forum also applied to practices of politicized discussions. Exchanging opinions about politics, morality, and the Church was an important part of Victorian life, and while those opinions may have been private, they were often communicated publicly—from a box in Hyde Park, for example, or in the pages of the increasingly important press. When current discussions of free speech delve into its history, the latter mode of expression usually takes centre stage. Histories of free speech easily draw parallels between the rise of the newspaper in the nineteenth century and current shifts in ideas about the exchange of opinion on social End Page 195 media. As this forum shows, however, the significance of talk in both public and private settings should not be underestimated. Any Victorian history of free speech should therefore also be a history of talk. Mahaffy's comments on the decline of preaching, like the hunger for public debate noted by historians, demonstrate that, despite the undeniable impact of the printed word as a means to spread and mould opinions, talk remained important as a vehicle for the exchange and formation of private judgments by making them public. This is perhaps not so very surprising given the enduring connection between the written and spoken word in other areas, such as literature and poetry (see, e.g., Kreilkamp 2009, Wilke 2022, Wong 2023). The incessant talk of Victorian politics, however, is rarely approached as a sounding practice. Historians of political speech tend to focus on its rhetorical or discursive aspects (e.g., Jung 2019, te Velde 2015), perhaps because its sounding qualities do not promise the same pleasures as those of poetry. The contents of Gladstone's library reflect this ambiguous status of talk in Victorian politics. On the one hand, handbooks for elocution, good speech, and vocal training take up significant space on its shelves. Many authors sent the prime minister, who was known as an exemplary public speaker, their work on speech and vocal training. On the other hand, although these authors were convinced that their subject must have been of interest to him, Gladstone seems to have paid little attention to these works. Works on elocution included in the library bear few or no annotations. Mahaffy's work—together with some others on preaching—is an exception, as was Frederic Bateman's scientific treatise on aphasia, in which he claimed that by speech "man is placed on the threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit" (155). Gladstone underlined numerous passages in this work that made claims about the assumed inherent humanity of speech—its effects of setting humans apart from animals, as well as its capacity to convey inner thought. The passage below, for example, was underlined and the latter sentence marked "with disapprobation" of its insistence on "nature" rather than divine endowment: Nature has endowed the human race with other interpreters...