Victorians, conversations and poems

Language& Communication,Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 303-335, 1987. Printed

0271-5309/87 $3.00 + 40 Pergamon Journals Ltd.

in Great Britain.

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

ANDREW St GEORGE Let me set down four propositions. First, we all communicate, or try to communicate, with each other; second, we can equate two acts which are both acts of communication: the writing of poems and the holding of conversations; third, Robert Browning’s poems encourage and require the involved engagement typically asked of us in conversation; and fourth, the rules which regulate the conversations we hold with each other today can be shown to differ from the rules which governed the conduct of conversations towards the end of the nineteenth century. I begin with a scene of reading which is also a scene of speaking. On 24 June, 1872, Browning’s friend Carlyle read Fifirze at the Fair. William Allingham recalls: C. in lower room writing behind screen calls out ‘Are you there?’ He has been reading Fifine at the Fair, and saying every now and again to Browning (though not present), ‘What the Devil do you mean? (AIlingham and Radford, 1907, p. 209).

For Carlyle, reading this poem by Browning equates to questioning Browning. On both sides of the equation, he enters a special relation with Browning. The particular situation which concerns me here is the relation between Browning and his readers: his Victorian readers, and those who are reading him now. The rules which govern this situation maintain close and vital links with the rules which govern the way we converse, and with the way the Victorians aspired to converse. Our interpretation of his poems benefits from our keeping alert to the conversational both in the situations they present for us to read, and in the situations they put us in as readers. I everywhere make clear that speaking differs from writing. And while I think this approach suitable for some poems, I do not claim that an approach which draws on our experience of conversations enhances our reading of every poem we read. It might suit an argument about our reading which draws on our experience of conversations to suppose that poets talk exactly as they write. But they do not. The ways in which they do not can illuminate their poems. And here, I nowhere claim that Browning speaks just as he writes, or that his verse reproduces his conversation exactly, but rather that he adopts an attitude in writing which invites the cooperative effort required of us in reading similar to that required of us in conversation. We can look at the utterance which is a poem in terms of the utterances which constitute conversation. I stress the Victorian context of serious concern for conversation. I hope to show that the Victorians conducted their conversations on an identifiably Victorian basis. I then want to show how it is possible to use our knowledge of the Victorians’ conversation to inform our reading of poems-for example those of Browning, Tennyson, Meredith, Correspondence relating OX1 lDW, U.K.

to this paper

should

be addressed

303

to Andrew

St George,

Pembroke

College,

Oxford

ANDREW St GEORGE

304

Patmore, and Clough-which issue from that context. In the case of Victorian poems, I attempt to account for the process of linguistic interaction between people uttering and comprehending texts; as Roger Fowler says, ‘texts can be regarded as the medium of discourse,’ (Fowler, 1988, p. 85) and this will take us beyond considering texts as formal objects. He continues, ‘literary’ texts, like all texts, do speak: they participate in society’s communicative practices’ (p. 102). In this regard, I draw on some of the methods of pragmatics, which ‘deals with verbal acts or performances which take place in particular situations, in time’ (Leech, 1983, p. 14).

Grice, Boswell and the Accomplishment Principle Roger Boswell wrote The Art of Conversation in 1876; Paul Grice, Logic and Conversation in 1967 (William James Lectures, Harvard University). Boswell approaches the subject through a prescriptive, pragmatic method; Grice through an inductive, philosophical engagement. A comparison of the two illustrates that the Victorians (I take Boswell as representative) entertain a particular notion of what it is to hold a conversation, and what must happen for felicitous conversation. We can use the difference between Grice and Boswell to augment the former’s maxims with specific social and historical evidence and to enable a reading of certain nineteenth century poems in the light of Grice’s elucidations about conversation. Grice’s maxims would not fit directly into a Victorian framework of conversational habit; Boswell’s observations would sit uneasily in the context of 1967 conversational behaviour. Grice’s refreshingly forthright operates in conversation:

and brilliant

essay centres

on the ‘Principle’

he believes

We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris par&us) to observe, namely: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE (&ice, 1967, p. 45).

Grice distinguishes four constituent categories which will, he claims, ‘in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle’ (p. 45). He calls these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. While Grice envisages conversation as an essentially it more as a matter of proficiency and practice, as a in keeping face and refusing to allow the others in example, Boswell’s third hint, ‘do as you would be Grice’s categories First, quantity:

underpin

the Cooperative

cooperative enterprise, Boswell sees venture where cooperation consists the conversation to lose theirs; for done by’ (Boswell, 1867, p. 23).

Principal.

Each covers a series of maxims.

(1) Make your contribution as infomative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). (2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required (Grice, 1967, p. 45).

Then quality, under which falls the supermaxim that is true’ and two further maxims: (1) Do not say what you believe to be false. (2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate

evidence

‘Try to make your contribution

(&ice,

one

1967, p. 46).

Boswell has no equivalents for Grice’s Quantity and Quality. This is because while Grice sees the purpose of conversation as ‘a maximally effective exchange of information’ (Grice, 1967, p. 47), Boswell sees it as a means of passing the time, of making others like us, and of instructing and improving ourselves and others.

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND

POEMS

305

For the category of relation, Grice simply states ‘Be relevant,’ (p. 46) while Boswell’s equivalent, ‘Try to say Something Interesting, and do not imagine that Everything that ever happened to you, Everything you have seen, heard, or done, is of Interest to Others,’ (p. 34) has an eye on social consequences. For the final category, that of manner which relates-unlike the first three categories-to how something is said rather than what is said, Grice offers four maxims: (1) Avoid

obscurity of expression. (2) Avoid ambiguity. (3) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). (4) Be orderly. And one might need others (p. 46).

This finds an equivalent in Boswell’s plain ‘study to acquire a good Conversational Style,’ (p. 49). In fact, we should expect the category of manner in conversational exchange to cleave to social and cultural evidence sufficiently to allow us to distinguish between, for instance, an Augustan manner,’ a Victorian manner, and a present day manner. In this area, the sane generosity of Grice’s ‘And one might need others’ holds open the possibility that these maxims might vary. Grice adds, ‘there are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as ‘Be polite’, that are normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate conversational implicatures (p. 47). For example, Boswell warns (for the sake of what we might call the politeness principle) (Leech, 1983, p. 7, p. 18 n. 10) ‘Seldom argue’, ‘Avoid being positive, very confident, dogmatic’, ‘Do not obtrude Opinions, nor give them out uncalled for’, and ‘never quiz, ridicule, nor make game of anyone’ (Boswell, 1867, pp. 37, 42, 45, 46). Yet Boswell conceives of conversation as an object in itself as well as a process with others. He urges us to ‘Gather material for conversation’, stresses that ‘Previous Preparation is necessary for conversation’ (Boswell, 1867, pp. 24, 17) and in doing so emphasises conversation as more an object than a human process. We can add principles to Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Geoffrey Leech, for example, adds the Politeness Principle. I offer the accomplishment principle, which I shall explain and define in Victorian terms. It addresses the way the Victorians actually regarded the practice of conversation; it maintains strong social roots; and it bears on the ways the Victorians envisaged and aspired to the ideal in their conversation, elocution, and etiquette manuals. The Accomplishment Principle involves five maxims: (1) Make your contribution as expertly as possible (in Boswell’s words, ‘study to acquire a good conversational style’). (2) Keep in mind the objects of conversation (Boswell’s list is exemplary from a Victorian point of view).2 (3) Prepare for conversation. (4) Respect the claims of others. (5) Treat conversation as a matter of performance-it can be practised, learned, and used for improving others as well as yourself. And we may need other maxims. We need to recognise these socially determined principles (and of course allow the possibility of others such as ‘Improve others’, or ‘Maintain class’) in order to give particularity to the discussion. This puts the discussion at some points in the area often covered by socio-pragmatics. Geoffrey Leech:

ANDREW St GEORGE

306

It is clear that the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle operate variably in different cultures or language communities, in different social situations, among different social classes, etc. (Leech, 1983, p. 10).

several principles in the sixth chapter of his Principles alongside the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle, the Interest Principle and the Pollyanna Principle, each with its contributory maxims (Leech, 1983, pp. 131-151). Indeed,

Leech himself

enumerates

of Pragmatics, and these include,

Leech also adds this caveat: These observations assume, of course, that such principles, being the general functional ‘imperatives’ of human communication, are more or less universal, but that their relative weights will vary from one cultural, social, or linguistic milieu to another (Leech, 1983, p. 150).

The linguistic poems. If we understanding how Victorian and practices to Elizabethan,

milieu which concerns us here is the milieu in which Browning wrote his can use the model of communication which is conversation to inform our of the communication which is reading poems, we need to be able to say (as opposed to Elizabethan, Augustan, or late twentieth century) concepts of conversation relate to the Victorians’ readings of Victorian (as opposed Augustan, or late twentieth century) poems.

We can see forms of the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle, and the Accomplishment Principle underpinning Boswell’s own Objects of Conversation, which resemble Grice’s Cooperative Principle put to practical and typically Victorian uses: [the proper objects of conversation are] to make the time pass agreeably, for others as well as ourselves To make people like us and think well of us. And, when suitable opportunities occur, to instruct iid improve ourselves and others (Leech, 1983, p. 23).

The verbs and their objects ‘make time pass’, ‘make people like us’, ‘instruct and improve ourselves and others’ bespeak a view of the conversational exchange which privileges the individual as speaker. Grice, on the other hand bases his maxims on the notion that the purpose of talk is ‘a maximally effective exchange of information’ (Grice, 1967, p. 47). Clearly, one can imagine many kinds of utterance whose purpose is not that in the Gricean sense (Pratt, 1977, p. 131). For example, Malinowski’s ‘phatic communion’, Browning’s poems, or Boswell’s socially biased conception of the purpose of conversation. And with Boswell’s sense of the importance of others’ claims, put firmly in the language of contract, we find one of those social maxims which Grice thinks may be necessary: But, as conversation is entered into for the mutual advantage of all the company, there is a tacit obligation on each to respect the rights, wishes and feelings of the others (Leech, 1983, p. 24).

Setting aside the question of what it would be not to respect the rights, wishes and feelings of others, we can see that the thrust of Boswell’s remark here issues from his sense of that ‘tacit obligation’ in the relationship. This theme occupies him much further on: If you neglect the rights of others, you are unfairly of a breach of that implied contract which brings

gratifying

yourself

at others’

expense,

and are guilty

people together to converse (Leech, 1983, p. 72). Again, Boswell’s contractual, commercial vocabulary entails a view of conversation more as a contract entered into than a human process. Here, I suggest that Boswell’s notion of the ‘tacit obligation’ and ‘implied contract’ can apply to the relationship between author and reader. In Linguistic Criticism, Roger Fowler rightly says that Grice’s Cooperative the communicators together (1986, p. 106) and he wisely avoids positing a contract. So does Grice:

Principle binds a full sense of

For a time, I was attracted by the idea that observance of the CP and rhe maxims, in a talk exchange, could be thought of as a quasi-contractual matter, with parallels outside rhe realm of discourse. But

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

307

while some such quasi-contractual basis as this may apply to some cases, there are too many types of exchange, like quarreling and letter writing, that it fails to fit comfortably (Grice, 1967, p. 48).

We can opt out of reading by putting down the book, of listening to the poem by thinking about something else; we can opt out of conversation in as many ways as we choose. No contract, no comparison seems the sensible view here. But we can equate reading and conversing on this basis because reading disallows the notion of a strictly firm contract in exactly the same way as conversing disallows the same possibility. Both involve cooperation and goodwill. Donald Davie: Some of the more careful readers of Articulute Energy have fastened upon those pages where I speak of a tacit compact or contract between writer and reader. . . What seems to be never recognized is that some contract mustexist between a poet and his readers, a contract which, if the poet suppresses it from his mind when he writes his poems, at least must be in his mind when he publishes them. The reader who pays hard cash for a book of poems, and then spares the time to look at what he’s bought, certainly does so in the expectation of getting some return for his trouble (Davie, 1955, pp. xii-xiii).3

Davie suggests that Ezra Pound first loosened and then rewrote ‘the traditional contract so as to weigh it towards the writer and against the reader’, and that Pound would now be appalled to find that the new form of contract ‘in effect makes the writer wholly the slave and creature of his public’. Davie puts it bleakly: ‘Yet this is what has happened;’ and warns darkly: ‘But once the poet abandons the traditional forms of contract he has no control over who shall countersign the document that is his poem’ (pp. xiii-xiv). Davie puts genuine and honest questions honestly which in this instance are hard to answer. What is the nature of the contract that obtains between the poet and his reader? Or rather (since the whole idea of ‘contract’ is now being challenged), what has been the nature of such poetic contracts in the past? One obvious clue is the idea of ‘genre’: the poet, by advertising that his poem is to be elegy or epistle or satire or epic, asks of his reader a certain kind of attention and promises him in return a certain kind of profit (Davie, 1955, p. 102).

Davie sets out to determine that the contract he has in mind precedes the contract of genre. First, the notion of changing the contract which Davie locates in Pound actually applies to some of the experimental poems Browning wrote in the 1870s and 1880s. Second, the genre which Browning made his own--the dramatic monologue-naturally calls up questions of the contractural agreement between poet and reader (‘Is it really Browning speaking?’ was answered in the 1842 preface to Dramatic Romances and Lyrics);4 and those late poems such as The Inn Album invite questions of genre which also turn out to be contractural questions. Third, when Davie writes of the ‘tacit compact’ between writer and reader (1955, pp. xii, 101-105) and Roger Boswell of the ‘tacit obligation’ (Boswell, 1867, p. 24) between conversers, they can be said to be writing of comparable relationships. To know more about the relationship between Victorian writer and reader, we have to know more about two things: the ways in which reading a poem can resemble bearing a part in a conversation; and exactly how the Victorians conversed. Poems, speech acts and conversations First, if we follow Searle’s assertion that the unit of linguistic communication is the issuing of a symbol, word, or sentence in the production of a speech act (Searle, 1969, p. 16), then we can follow him when he remarks: If you believe, as I do, that the basic unit of human linguistic communication is the illocutionary act, then the most important form of the original question will be, ‘How many categories of illocutionary acts are there? (Searle, 1976, p. 1).

The rules, for example, which obtain in the act of promising (Searle, 1969, p. 63), closely

308

ANDREW

St GEORGE

parallel the rules required for the production of certain literary works, for example, the Japanese Haiku poem.’ The point here is not one of detail, but of principle: the speech act of promising can be equated to the speech act of writing a haiku because the felicitous completion of each act requires certain comparable preconditions to exist. Searle’s rules for promises exemplify the rules which constitute and regulate an exemplary illocutionary act, that ‘basic unit of human linguistic communication’ (Searle, 1976, p. 1). Thinking about utterances in terms of illocutionary acts enables us to talk not only about their grammatical properties, but also about their contexts, the undeclared rules in force when an utterance is made and received. From what Roger Fowler calls a ‘pioneer essay on the application of speech act theory’ (1986, p. 185), Mary Louise Pratt: There are enormous advantages in talking about our communicative activities, are context-dependent.

literature in this way, too, for literary works, like all Literature itself is a speech context (Pratt, 1977, p. 86).

This brings us back to Grice and to Boswell, for if conversations comprise series of illocutionary acts, and if the major principle which governs the conduct of conversations is the Cooperative Principle, then the completion of illocutionary acts (and the illocutionary acts which are poems) must at some level entail a degree of cooperation. In fact, the Cooperative Principle which regulates our conversational exchanges ‘can be regarded as a large-scale appropriateness condition governing all language use’ (Traugott and Pratt, 1980, p. 237). Clearly certain speech situations exist in which the Cooperative Principle would not function: a prisoner of war under interrogation, for example; but the exceptions should not vitiate the usefulness of its general application. Elizabeth Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt: . in the most general terms, being a cooperative speaker means speaking with a viable communicative purpose vis-a-vis the hearer in the context, and speaking in such a way that this purpose is recognizable to the hearer. Being a cooperative hearer means trusting that the speaker has a reasonable purpose in speaking, and doing the necessary work to discern that purpose (1980, p. 237).

This holds for the communications which are poems as much as for the communications which are conversations or company reports or job interviews, although the degree and kind of cooperation will differ in each, and according to the particular communicative behaviour of the individuals involved.6 Of course, certain objections must be raised here. First, we participate in conversations by actively playing a role, by answering, agreeing, contributing and, crucially, by speaking. This participation in everyday talk compared to the nonparticipation in poems, plays,’ and novels marks, as Mary Louise Pratt says, ‘the point on which the literary speech situation would appear to differ most radically from spoken discourse’ (Pratt, 1977, p. 100). But then being unable to speak to the speaker merely defines us as an audience, and a good many of our encounters do that: To sum up the argument as it applies to verbal behavior, I am proposing that we recognize the speaker/Audience relation as one of the possible role structures that may obtain between the participants in a speech situation . Our role in the literary speech situation has the main formal characteristic I have been using to define an Audience: we knowingly and willingly enter a speech situation in which another speaker has unique access to the floor (Pratt, 1977, pp. 113-l 14).

The situation of Audience and speaker which obtains in literary speech acts is not uniquely literary, but has rather to do with our relations with each other. Mary Louise Pratt once more: the nonparticipant Audience role, which has been considered a key to literary response, is a familiar component of other speech situations as well. The role is not part of the rhetoric of fiction but of the rhetoric of Audience-ship which is itself defined in relation to the rhetoric of conversation (1977, pp. 115-116).

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

309

And the rhetoric of conversation operates under the aegis of the set of maxims and principles which have been outlined by Grice recently and Roger Boswell in the nineteenth century. Second, one could object to the application of the Cooperative Principle to the reading of poems by maintaining that literary works cannot actually carry out speech acts in a felicitous way, they do not represent speech acts, and should not be treated as speech acts in their own right. Austin puts the case well: A performative utterance will, for example, be in (I peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy (Austin, 1962, p. 22).

Writing

on the act of promising,

Austin

on

asks:

Surely the words must be spoken ‘seriously’ and so as to be taken ‘seriously’? This is, though vague, true enough in general-it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, or writing a poem (1962, p. 9).

After pointing out another of Austin’s references a falling star’) Richard Ohmann comments:

to poetry

(to Donne’s

‘Go and catch

Writing (or speaking) a literary work is evidently an illocutionary performance of a special type, logically different from the seeming acts that make it up. The contract between the poet and the reader or hearer does not put the poet behind the various statements, rejoinders, laments, promises, or whatever, that he seemingly voices. His word is not his bond, in just this way. . . The main point here is that if we attend to illocutionary acts, we can identify a perfectly clean cognitive break between literature-poems, plays, novels, jokes, fairy tales, fantasies, etc.-and discourses that are not literature. Literary works are discourses with the usual illocutionary rules suspended (1972, p. 53).

According to Ohmann, the writer ‘puts out imitation speech acts, as if they were being performed by someone (1972, p. 54). The extra effort required of us does not, however, mean that it is a different kind of effort from that required of us when we talk to each other. For Ohmann, the reader makes sense of the sentences in a literary work by applying to them a tacit knowledge of the conditions for performance of illocutionary acts. He argues that while engaged in daily discourse with others, we use what we know of the circumstances of those we speak with and of the situation to assess the felicity of the acts involved; in reading literature, we ‘assume the felicity of the hypothetical acts, and infer a world from the circumstances required for this felicity (Ohmann, 1972, p. 55). In other words, the reader does a great deal of the work. But to accept Ohmann here, and elsewhere,8 we must, as Mary Louise Pratt says, be prepared to ‘regard a good deal of what we say to be impaired and incomplete in this way’ (Pratt, 1977, p. 95). And after all, when we converse with those who do not make themselves clear-over a bad telephone line, with a strokeimpaired speaker, with someone who lies habitually-we recognise that the speech acts which constitute the conversation may require the special degree of cooperation we apply to literature. In the case of Browning’s poems, the degree to which he agrees himself to be (or to present by means of a narrator) a cooperative speaker tends to be inversely proportional to the cooperation required of the readers. This is another way of saying that some of his poems present greater difficulties to the reader than others. But to deem poems difficult is not to explain why the difficulties exist or why these particular difficulties in this particular communication perplex. And the ease with which we can say ‘this poem is difficult’ camouflages the difficulties inherent in our own easy inattention to the precise nature of the communicative aspect of the poem. An awareness of the functioning of principles in the communicative act which regulate that difficulty actually makes it hard to be content just to say ‘this is a difficult poem’. And the opinion that identifiable principles govern

310

ANDREW

our reading It is .

and writing

St GEORGE

has long been held. Samuel

Johnson

writes in The Rambler:

the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy . (No. 92).

And for a pointed application of principle to practice, contemporary have this address to the reader from Sterne, which has close affinities of cooperation:

with Johnson, we with the principle

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I thinks mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;-so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself (Fowler, 1986, pp. 120-121).

Leaving the reader something to imagine asks for cooperation on both sides; the way a writer balances the work left for a reader depends upon how he regards his readers. In Browning’s case, once we have established that the Cooperative Principle bears on our reading of his poems, we can look at the poems which show him at his most and least cooperative, at how he changes the principle, and at what other principles preside. In this sense, we can raise questions about our reading based on the assumption that we apply the same cooperative process as we do in all kinds of speech communication to make sense of the speech acts within the poem, and the poem itself. The Cooperative Principle obtains, then, in the conducting of conversations and the reading of poems. This Principle, however, does not have to be obeyed to be seen to be in force. Grice offers four cases in which the speaker knowingly fails to fulfil a maxim which supports the Cooperative Principle. The speaker can violate a maxim; opt out of a maxim; recognise a clash between two maxims, for example in being unable to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity (make your contribution as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim of Quality (do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence); and blatantly fail to fulfil a maxim (Grice, 1967, p. 49). Grice continues by giving examples of the kind of language uses often found in concentrated forms in verse and prose: irony, metaphor, meiosis (and litotes), hyperbole, ambiguity, obscurity. The latter two occur particularly in literature. Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and Steiner’s On Difficulty (1978) for instance, represent a literary criticism which assumes that the ambiguities and obscurities are there to be worked at. Richard Ohmann maintains that our reading of literary works and our attitude towards deviations (ambiguity or obscurity, for example) for the Cooperative Principle which we meet in literature depends on our view of literature: Our readiness to discover and dwell on the implicit meanings in literary works-and to judge them important-is a consequence of our knowing them to be literary works, rather than that which tells us that they are such (Ohmann, 1971, p. 6).

Much of the obscurity in Browning’s later poems turns on his unwillingness to grant us concessions set against our faith in his cooperation in having something to say. It turns on his wilful suspension of the Cooperative Principle, and on his allowing the influence of a principle which affects the way both he and other Victorians conducted themselves in conversations, what I have called the Accomplishment Principle. Browning also flouts recognisably Victorian maxims ‘Be Polite’, for example, in his own talk. Roger Boswell sets out the need to identify

the class of rules which govern conversation:

In conversation, as in life, there is much tyranny, the strong and the unscrupulous invariably overpowering the weak and retiring; hence the necessity for something like a code of well-understood rules to protect

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

the weak from such oppression, just as laws were required purpose (Boswell, 1867, p. 12).

AND POEMS

in national

and social communities

311

for a similar

Later, he suggests that in conversation, a few ‘with extraordinary endowments, excel naturally; while the great majority, less favoured by nature, require much and careful cultivation to render themselves proficients, (1867, p. 17). Here we can see the emergence of a keen sense of the rules of the game together with the notion that training improves us. This principle works strongly in Browning’s poems; to understand them, it helps to understand what talk meant to the Victorians. When readers read Browning, they expected cooperation. They got accomplished performance. Yet they read, as we do, believing that a little more effort on their part would complete the cooperative enterprise. But Browning wrote by different rules, and to come closer to an understanding of his poems, we must realise the importance he attached to competence in conversation. We can ask what principles govern the way Browning writes, and the contract between him and his readers. Or we can follow Carlyle, playing by the old rules, and finding himself able to say, alone in his study, to an imagined Browning, ‘what the Devil do you mean?‘.

The Victorians and their conversation In 1874 Browning’s poems were printed in the railway timetable, read at public readings or in the family circle and, for those who knew Browning, read by him along with the poems of his contemporaries. Victorian poems placed themselves in the midst of Victorian life, and formed a vital part of the social and intellectual commerce of the Victorians. Let me repeat that I believe the Victorians had an identifiably particular attitude to talk and conversation. This attitude informs their view of poetry and their reading of poems in private, in the home, and at public readings. Henry James: All life therefore comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with each other. These relations are made possible, are registered, are verily constituted, by our speech, and are successful (to repeat my word) in proportion as our speech is worthy of its great human and social function (James, 1905, p. 10).

Victorian poems made their way in a particular style in a particular world. They represent one of the ways the Victorians communicated with each other. They come to form part of a continuum of conversation, recitation, and reading aloud during the second half of the nineteenth century. The issue of conversation touches a good many quintessentially Victorian matters: the ‘At Home’, the literary meeting, the family reading circle, the drive for self-improvement, the getting of wisdom, and the making of one’s way in the world. I will begin by showing as exactly as possible the importance of talk for the Victorians. Behind much of my inquiry lies a genuine disquiet about what it would be to study Victorian poems which emulate and represent conversation and to remain unaware of the status of conversation for the Victorians. It is an area which, like our own conversation, looks familiar and resists categorisation. We all have a stake in the business of communicating with each other. Most can lay claim to an area of expertise peculiarly our own (poems, letters, dinner talk, university teaching, television writing, thesis writing, office memos, for instance), others’ partial knowledge of our area can turn out to be particularly refreshing and dangerous. Most of us are talkers, yet most of us are not experts in the theory or sociology of conversation.

312

ANDREW

St GEORGE

Success in being clear about a subject at once wide (we all think we know what it is to converse) and exact (the relation between the conversation of certain Victorians, especially Browning, and the way we might now read certain Victorian poems) probably lies in exposing the complexities and honestly refusing to theorise in face of the evidence. I propose to set out a number of distinctions in the field of Victorian conversation which recognises that the matters are all linked, and that to explore this issue is to uncover the tissue of connections between oratory, elocution, recitation, the uses of conversation for moral and religious instruction, social furtherment and self improvement, and the social mechanisms which enable certain kinds of conversation to come about. First the word ‘conversation’. across a range of applications. Its uses as recorded in the Oxford English of its earlier recorded meanings from the eighteenth The word’s beginnings are certainly what one would call social:

It spreads

Dictionary witness a gradual narrowing century.

The action

of living or having

one’s being in a place or among

The action of consorting or having dealings intimacy (OED, 1770, use 2).

with others;

persons

living together;

The meaning then moves on from ‘sexual intercourse or ‘the condition of acquaintance or intimacy with a matter’ in The Spectator with ‘that all Conversations in the World in this case’, (The Spectator, No. 429) where the word acquaintance, a company or society.

(O&I,

1705, use 1).

commerse,

intercourse,

society,

intimacy’ (OED, use 3), through (OED, use 4, figurative) to Steele have induldged Human Infirmity can be taken to mean a circle of

We can see that the meaning fluctuates, probably because the notion of what it is to be a conversant member of society alters over the years. The nineteenth century muddles matters decently, with ‘manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society; behaviour, mode, or course of life’ and the citation from Morley’ alongside ‘interchange of thoughts and words; familiar discourse or talk’ (OED, uses 7 (a)). Yet the start of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of three crucial terms. The first, ‘conversazione’, according to the OED ‘from about the close of the Eighteenth Century, chiefly applied to assemblies of an intellectual character, in connection with literature, art, or science, (OED, use 3),” broadens into one of the staples of Victorian social life: Now chiefly used for a soiree given by a learned body or society of arts at which the society’s illustrated by the exhibition of specimens, experiments, or demonstrations (OED, use 4).

work is

The second, ‘conversationist’ comes into the language, according to the OED, in 1806, and means ‘one who converses much, or is addicted to conversation; one who practises the art of conversation’. Here, conversation stands as an objective accomplishment; yet the term does not include someone who is an expert at conversing: it merely registers the quantity rather than the quality of the devotion to talking. Thus in 1864, we find Nathanial Hawthorne in The English Notebooks writing that ‘Mr. Taylor is reckoned a brilliant conversationist’ (1879 edn, Vol. II, p. 24), and having to slip that adjective in. However, the concept of someone who specialises in conversation has become familiar by the time Hawthorne writes this, and we shall see the wide usage of the word throughout the nineteenth century. Together with ‘conversationist’ comes the third of these crucial terms, ‘conversationalist’, first in the language in 1836, according to the OED. With the meaning given to it by the dictionary, ‘one who in conversational; one who excells in conversation’, we find that vital addition of the notion of competence. The two words move closer together throughout the period, but never close enough to be synonymous; for example, Benjamin Moran’s comment on Browning ‘He is one of the

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most entertaining and instructive conversationists at dinner in London’ (Journal of Benjamin Moran, 6 February 1873) still keeps a distinct distance from the poised observation of F. Arnold, ‘A Middle-Aged Englishman’: I once went to dine at the high table of a Cambridge conversationalist. In those days there were professional are professional beauties (Arnold, 1886, p. 276).

college, where I was to meet with a professed conversationalists, as at the present time there

Arnold chimes a neat connection between ‘professed’ and ‘professional”’ raising an eyebrow and a question with ‘was to meet’: either he did not in fact go to dine, did not meet the person he was to meet, or the person turned out to be a flop as a conversationalist. If the meeting happened, the professed conversationalist disappointed; and the tone of the next sentence suggests exactly that. The word was applied to Browning in exactly that context of competence, of professionalism, by L. B. Walford, who recalls a dinner with the Lehmanns in Half Moon Street. The Lehmanns had triumphed in gathering Millais, Leighton and Browning around the same table: ‘the Lehmanns had succeeded; and though each of the gifted conversationalists loved to take the lead, they all subdued their inclinations so courteously that no one of the three usurped more than his fair share of public attention’ (Walford, 1912, p. 64). When a widely acknowledged talker comments on the conversation of his friends, we find ourselves at the heart of a world in which talk is talked about in this way. The wit, raconteur, conversationist, and orator Sydney Smith always knew what to look for in the talk of others, and always knew exactly how to frame his objections courteously. He says of Macaulay, whom he met at the home of the poet, Samuel Rogers: He is certainly more agreeable since his return from India. His enemies might, perhaps, have said before (though I never did so) that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful (Holland, 1869, p. 234).

When Smith describes Macaulay as that ‘book in breeches’, (Reid, 1896), he points to a way of listening to others which will produce a literary metaphor, and a way of hearing conversation which puts it in the same category as the written word. Smith, no mean talker himself, catches perfectly the good natured pique of a man with something to offer who is prevented from offering it: ‘Oh yes! we both talk a great deal, but I don’t believe Macaulay ever did hear my voice,’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘Sometimes, when I have told a good story, I have thought to myself, Poor Macaulay! he will be very sorry some day to have missed hearing that’ (Holland, 1869, pp. 236-237).

Smith lived during a time when conversation came to be one of the registers of a person’s worth12. And his own conversation can be heard as far down the century as 1898. G. W. E. Russell: We have agreed that Parliamentary Oratory, as our fathers understood that phrase, is a lost art. Must Conversation be included in the same category? To answer with positiveness is difficult; but this much may be readily conceded-that a belief in the decadence of conversation is natural to those who have specially cultivated Links with the Past; who grew up in the traditions of Luttrell and Mackintosh, and Lord Alvanley and Samuel Rogers; who have felt Sydney Smith’s irresistible fun, and known the overwhelming fulness of Lord Macaulay (1898, p. 129).

Here, then, we have the notion that we can talk about conversation, that it has somehow changed over the years, and therefore has in some sense a set of qualities which allow it to be defined. I have set out to define conversation in Victorian terms, to look at the uses and purposes of conversation, and at its role in the literary life of the period. Talking about, writing and collecting talk bring two media into a relation sometimes fruitful and sometimes

ANDREW

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unhelpful. James Sutherland’s Oxford Book of English Talk gathers a variety of interesting pieces, and quietly avoids the issue of what it is to record a conversation. Sutherland rightly says, ‘a vast and unimaginable tide of conversation ebbs and flows around us’ (1953, p. v) and wisely and for the sake of practicality, avoids engaging with Bulwer Lytton’s views on the subject beyond quoting from him: Our rational conversation is for the most part carried on in a series of the most extraordinary and rugged abbreviations-a species of talking shorthand. Hesitating, Humming, and Drawling are the three Graces of our Conversation (Lytton, 1833, p. 156ff).

Most of our conversations fully transcribed (without the gestures, the tones of voice, the colours and smells of the environment) would be long-winded and largely inaccurate affairs. So some of the truths about conversation lie in the society’s basic assumptions about its purpose, use, practice and impact, rather than in verbatim records. We can see from contemporary elocution, recitation and etiquette manuals what the Victorians valued in public utterance. For example, spoken English

Henry Alford’s can be:

The Queen’s English measures

just how important

that

That which we treat is not the grammarians’ English, nor the Dictionary-writers’ English, but The Queen’s Englkh: not that English which certain individuals, more or less, acquainted with their subject, have chosen to tell us we ought to speak and write, but that which the nation, in the secular unfolding of its will and habits, has agreed to speak and write (Alford, 1870, pp. 3-4).

The demotic ‘the nation, in the secular unfolding of its will and habits’ is brought neatly into line with the patriotic ‘The Queen’s English’, a line which marks out exactly the debate about who exactly has the political, economic, or moral right to speak a certain kind of ‘English’. Here, Alford puts his faith in the language as he finds it used by those around him. ‘The national mind is reflected in the national speech’, he writes later in the introduction (1870, p. 6), conversation forms a large part of that national speech. In fact, the rugged empiricism of Alford’s enterprise finds voice in his opening statement, ‘it may be well to premise once for all, that it is my object not so much to enquire in each case what is according to strict rule and analogy, as to point out what is the usage of our spoken language’ (1870, pp. l-2). The sanity of this approach lies in its refusal to prescribe rules where rules would serve little use. Alford does find a telling metaphor to deliver, along with tart social comment, of different lexical registers. He imagines language as a road:

a sense

Along it the lawyer and the parliamentary agent propel their heavy wagons, clogged with a thousand pieces of cumbrous antiquated machinery,-and no wonder, when they charge freightlage, not by the weight of the load, combined with the distance, but by the number of impediments which they can manage to offer to the progress of their vehicle. Along it the poet and novelist drive their airy tandems, dependent for their success on the dust which they raise, and through which their varnished equipages glitter (Alford, 1870, p. 5).

Given Alford’s original declared wish to explore the usage of the spoken language, and his choice here of those-lawyers and politicos-who make their way by speaking in public, we can assume that he gives the spoken word a certain privileged status. And this typifies the Victorian attitude to the language: spoken by all, the property of all and, most importantly, shaped by individuals in their individual uses of it. The individual certainly enjoyed more scope for idiosyncrasy in the nineteenth century, as K.C. Phillips has pointed out: In nineteenth-century England there were certainly many more deviations standard English, even among the upper classes, than there are today. Apart

from anything approaching from the absence of present-

VICTORIANS,

day standardizing and titled ladies,

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315

influences, those with sufficient power and confidence in themselves (schoolmasters for example), liked to alter the language arbitrarily (Phillips, 1984, pp. 56-57).

Much discussion of Victorian talk understandably comes down to the discussion of Victorian talkers. But sometimes this appears insufficient. For example, The Spectator, 5 August, 1882 responds to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Cornhiil piece, ‘Talk and Talkers’ which celebrates individual conversational style. The response raises some notions about conversation which have much wider implications for the author and the reader: Real talk, even when it is such talk as that of Plato’s “Dialogues’‘-intended, that is, in the main, to bring out the aspects of the truth-contributes to the mastery of truth simply by showing what is the fascination of various aspects of truth or untruth for particular kinds of mind; how these minds are affected by the influence of certain ideas, and whether they are sensitive or insensible to the control of these ideas. And this seems to us to be the real characteristic of good conversation,-to be able to show simply how you are yourself affected by the predominant interests of the hour, and to make others feel at once that they contribute something, and what it is they contribute, to your appreciation of those interests; and, at the same time, to make your interlocutors feel that their own appreciation of these interests is genuinely affected by the vital perception of how they affect you (Spectator, 5 August 1882, p. 1018).

This could stand as the ideal frame of mind to adopt when we read Browning’s late poems: for Browning puts us in the position of having to contribute something to the process; he eschews the easy showmanship of technical display-an accomplishment which alienates the reader in a very specific sense; and in poems such as The Inn Album and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country makes things hard for us by inviting us to make the connections. This constitutes a truly participatory poetry, and participatory in a way that Browning’s own conversation disallowed. The silent latitude given to the reader rests on a conversational notion of what it is to communicate. The Spectator continues to talk about talk; these comments have all the appearance of a case well made for the pluralism of the dramatic monologue: The value of talk as talk is the fresh insight you get and give into the various vital ways of looking at things and persons, the experience you obtain and the experience you impart of the various influences at work around you, so far as these contribute to the better kinds of social life, and do not increase the danger of its disorganisation. All talk, that is talk, and not analysis, should be essentially dramatic; that is, it should help the world on, by creating new mutual understandings without endangering the old. Genuine talk is only secondary, even when it is in any degree, an instrument for finding abstract truth. In the first instance, it is mere true communication between mind and mind, so far as such true communication is desirable; but of course, truth, in any broad sense, is hardly within the reach of any mind which has not had a large experience of the way in which different minds are affected by different characters, thoughts, and situations (Spectator, 5 August 1882, p. 1018).

This remains pertinent to the reading of the dramatic monologue and to many of Browning’s demanding later poems, because the poem itself becomes one of the surrounding influences, and our speculation about, for example, the fate of Duchess or of Gigiadibs continues from and is germane to the poems which engender the speculations. We take part in the dialogue of ideas with the poem as we read, return and reread in order to make some sense of the details before us.

Conversation

as conversation

In 1887, J. P. Mahaffy wrote this in his Principles of the Art of Conversation: There can be no doubt that of all the accomplishments in conversation is the very first (1887, p. 1).

prized in modern

society that of being agreeable

The Victorians regarded conversation as something which could be practised, studied, and improved. They tried to deal with it in objective terms. In 1856, there appeared a book, small enough to be carried in the pocket, called ‘Talking and Debating; or Fluency of Speech

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St GEORGE

Without the Sacrifice of Elegance and Sense. A Handbook of Conversation and It puts the practice of conversation in touch with some familiar Victorian concerns:

To speak very practically, the conversation of a person marks the state that person has attained to in intellectual and moral culture. The merest word of the most taciturn is as expressive of the character as the prolix dialogue of empty wordiness; and to talk well is everywhere the ambition of persons moving in refined circles, or aspiring to such circles for the qualification of honest ambition (Mahaffy, 1887, p. 4).

Conversation in its uses and practice naturally focusses other forces, ‘intellectual and moral culture’, ‘ambition’, and the desire for those ‘refined circles’. A good many of the Victorians’ most cherished notions of self-improvement, hard work, diligence, endeavour and accomplishment, can easily be made to apply to the practice and conduct of a conversation. Thus here we have that vital word ‘improvement’: It is a very educational age this-we are all bent on mutual improvement; and if we can acquire something like accuracy and elegance in our written and spoken expression, we feel a just pride in having subdued some of the roughnesses that beset our moral life, and of having required in their stead the polish that bespeaks refinement (Mahaffy, 1887, p. 4). The particular puts literature

kind of refinement at a premium:

envisaged

here depends

on a certain

knowledge

which

What subjects are best? Plainly those that belong to the elegancies of life, and which are not likely to strike deep at personal prejudices, or to beget contentions on secretarian differences:-Nature, as seen abroad and at home-the varied aspects of human society, as witnessed during foreign travel-History, in its various unfoldings of human character, and its record of the greatnesses and failings of nationsScience, in its applications to the wants of life, and its revealings of natural laws and economies-and, above all, Art and Literature-pictures, sculpture, and books (Mahaffy, 1887, p. 7).13

We are seeing here the definition of a particular area of human life fenced off by Victorian concerns into a manageable field. The very fact that conversation can be talked of in these terms,-social, intellectual, moral,-sets it aside as a subject in its own right; and at the heart of the good conversation, according to Talking and Debating, we find Art and Literature. Literature, which so often delivers conversations in novels, poems, and plays, stands in doubly-bound relation to the conversations which then take it as a subject for discussion. The author of Talking and Debating warns us off politics and religion in matter, provincialisms and cockneyisms in manner (Talking and Debating, pp. 8-9, 13). Such lapses in social diction could entail a great deal. G. M. Young: An unguarded look, a word, a gesture . . might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart, and the same word or gesture might betray a lingering affinity with the class below (1936, p. 2).

Much, then depended on one’s conversation; and the responsibilities involved look very much like those which govern the conduct of the poet and novelist: ‘the dignity of the subject and propriety of expression’. In fact those words come not from a literary critical text, but from one of the many speaking manuals of the period. Yet the ease with which those words could so readily be applied to the written word testifies to the links in this case between the two. Edwin Drew, who wrote those words in 1857, exalts common conversation as the best model for the aspiring public speaker: The nearer our enunciation in public comes to the freedom and ease of that which we use in common discourse (provided we keep up the dignity of the subject, and preserve a propriety of expression), the more just, natural, and agreeable will it generally be (Drew, 1857).

The Victorians regarded conversation as something in a category all of its own; this view persists in the writing of social theorists and personal advisers even after the turn of the century. The sociologist Stanley Bligh, who takes a communicative view of conversation,

VICTORIANS,

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can write as late as 1912 as if conversation of a nation:

AND POEMS

were an institution

317

enshrined

in the culture

The assumptions on which this book is based are that conversation is a means of culture which was in former times more highly valued than it is now, that it has recently been allowed to fall into neglect and disuse, and that it should be restored to its former high estate. Signs are not wanting that these assumptions are being gradually recognized and that many people are prepared to welcome an attempt, even though it be imperfect, to improve the general tone and standard of conversation and private discussion (Bligh, 1912, p. 1).

The rich uncertainties inherent in the study of conversation present Bligh’s analytic mind with a real challenge; he goes on to write of the various planes of conversation: the anecdotal, personal, spiritual, scientific, political, aesthetic and ethical. And he writes with confidence of a ‘conversational method soon acquired if undivided attention be paid to it for an hour a day for a few weeks . . .,’ adding, ‘once acquired it becomes automatic and is hardly ever lost’ (1912, p. 28). Bligh’s prescriptive approach testifies to the strength of the Victorians’ notions about conversation. For example, that high Victorian E. J. Hardy (author of How to be Happy Though Married), includes the capacity to converse well as a sine qua non in his Manners Makyth Man; and here too we find him referring to that familiar nostalgia for a golden age of talk: ‘It is frequently remarked that the art of conversation is lost; that everything is printed nowadays and nothing said; that such good talkers and good listeners as Dr Johnson and his friends are extinct’; only to rebut the suggestion with ‘We do not think that these laments are justified’ (Hardy, 1887, p. 129). Hardy actually points up a fascinating crux in the discussion of conversation which has been examined in other and more general terms by philosophers of language since then. He says simply: ‘It is of course true that the printingpress has in a measure superseeded the tongue, but not altogether’ (1887, p. 129). The history of a discipline often turns on its ability to gain the status which confers on it the general right to be studied: we can see this today in such subjects as Media Studies or Parapsychology in much the same way as we would have seen the process in the study of English Literature in a 1920s’ Cambridge. The status of conversation as something apt for study depends on what one is prepared to grant as its domain. J. P. Mahaffy, editor of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and correspondent of Browning sets out the best approach for the theorist of conversation in the preface to the second edition of Principles of the Art of Conversation: There is no object of human life, however serious, of men. But in all these higher cases conversation for recreation’s sake, that is to say, for its own must approach it. Then all the higher interests of of recreation [Preface to the 2nd edn (1st edn,

which does not depend upon the exposition and discussion is only a means. When it becomes an end, it is prosecuted sake, and this is the point of view from which a theorist life become in their turn means, and means for the purpose 1887), pp. ix-x].

Mahaffy sets out his own qualifications for presuming to treat ‘so complex and indeed novel a subject’, with (for us today) refreshing panache; the author has a claim to write on this subject because, says Mahaffy ‘he has thought a long time and with much care about it, and this, for a theorist, is sufficient vindication’ (Preface to 1st edn, p. vii), In fact, this remark typifies so much of the attitude of Victorian conversation writers, and really bespeaks the boldness and imagination possible at the inception of a discipline. Conversation, then, comes to be regarded by the Victorians as something which can be studied, learned and practised. It comes to be regarded as both a thing apart, and a thing intimate with everyday commerce. As a subject in its own right, it maintains vital links

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through its subject matter with many of the pressing concerns of the age, and through its manner and uses with many of the commonly held ideas and beliefs of the Victorians. From here, its precise links with poetry seem slight until we realise that this Victorian attitude to conversation forms the world in which Victorian poems come to be written and make their way. Poetry, like conversation, witnesses another way of looking at and learning about the world; in this sense, radical differences between writing and speaking do not apply. Poems which rely on our keen sense of the spoken word and of what it would be to conduct a conversation, such as Browning’s dramatic monologues, The Ring and the Book, or the longer, wordier, later works draw on the conversational milieu of the Victorians and specifically on Browning’s own sense of how to manage a conversation. We will now look at that milieu by looking at how the Victorians thought conversation should be used, and at some of its recognised practitioners.

The uses of conversation The range of Victorian notions of conversation points to a variety of opinions uses and usefulness. In the comprehensive and helpful The Art of Conversation, Boswell advises us to ‘Remember the proper Objects of Conversation’:

on its Roger

These are, to make the time pass agreeably, for others as well as ourselves. To make people like us and think well of us. And, when suitable opportunities occur, to instruct and improve ourselves and others (Boswell, 1867, p. 23).

Conversation, however, could be put to specific uses. These embrace some central Victorian concerns; and the fact that conversation comes to associate with them shows us how a new way of ordering things-like a new scientific theory, a new notion of economic or social management, or a new poetic-in fact, many new orientations of the facts, can be taken up by a society and drawn into its structure by means of assimilation and alteration. Thinking about conversation for the Victorians meant thinking afresh about old problems. ‘The power of conversation’, wrote the Reverend G. S. Bowes in 1886, ‘what a means it is of diffusing knowledge and promoting enjoyment’ (1886, p. x). Bowes takes a specifically religious line on the usefulness of talk and strikes a resounding late-Victorian chord: How few Christians, though of good education and sound sense, have set themselves seriously to study the art of conversation! How few Christians look upon this as a distinct branch of Christian usefulness, whereby they may glorify God, and be constantly helping to make life happier, brighter, better! (Bowes, 1886, p. x).

Bowes stakes out the occasions on which he feels it appropriate to talk, ‘in the home circle, in travelling, in social gatherings’ (p. xii); and then the advantage in being able to put one’s case well, ‘having the power to say it in an interesting manner’ (p. 18), while keeping this in mind: If language be the gift of God, should it not be employed so as to honour Him? and that, looking at it in this particular sphere, in its ordinary use in common conversation? and, most of all, when employed for the expression of our highest thoughts upon the most sacred subject-religious conversation? (Bowes, 1886, p. 84).

He calculated the number of volumes of talk produced by each of us (some 27,300 volumes of 520 octave pages over a lifetime) (pp. 124-125) from an extraordinary estimated average of five hours’ conversation every day. The Victorians spent a great deal of time talking, according to Bowes’ figures. Such a large proportion of time spent in conversation today would seem excessive. Yet with the sheer volume of words, Bowes envisages a commensurate

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force of utterance; writing of language as ‘one of the most wonderful of the many wonderful gifts of God’, he remarks, ‘Who has not felt its power, whether exercised for good or evil, in the daily intercourse of private life, or in the more studied art of public oratory?’ (p. 82). He shares this sense of the potential power of language with a good many of the reviewers of Browning’s late poems, who note equivocally the power and force of the writing. The Victorian literary critical world shares a vocabulary with writers like Bowes and Boswell, and it helps to recognise that. The ‘force’ referred to in reviews of the poems Browning wrote in the 1870s is of essentially the same kind as that exerted in normal conversations: the force of presence, of character. The ‘power’ referred to here by The Reverend Jenner of Camberwell, for example, is exactly the power at work in Browning’s long poem, Red

Cotton Night-Cap Country: Being gifted with the power, not merely of talking, but of conversing, that is, not merely of communicating thought, but of exciting it in others, and holding intercourse by means of this invisible agent, it would be strange if man did not cultivate the power with a view to its improvement (Jenner, 1860, p. vi).

This ‘invisible agent’ effects many of Browning’s successes, and can be glimpsed at work where his later poems are misread or misunderstood; the exercise of the power itself becomes the basis of the poems, the ground of their construction. Jenner keeps faith with the views of Bowes and, later, the Reverend J. P. Sandlands,14 maintaining that ‘it is the Christian religion that should regulate the whole of our conversation’, (Mahaffy, 1887, pp. xv-xvi) while at the same time leaving room for improvement: any of our sober good seyze, or destroying the distinctiveness of our national Without a..andoning tf we will only turn our attention more to the rhetoric we may yet become more conversable character, of conversation (Mahaffy, 1887, p. xvii).

The concept of the intimacy of national identity with conversational noted by Jenner himself” and more directly by W. H. Griffiths which, for all its scientific treatment of the voice as an instrument functioning of the body, gives us this:

behaviour is glancingly in The Human Voice subject to the proper

For conversational purposes also, the language is very characteristic of the solid determination and bulldog tenacity of the English people, and it is probably this peculiarity which helps to make it such a universal and widespread mode of conversation (Griffiths, 1892, p. 62).

Conversation

can display

the force of a national

character

The Reverend J. P. Sandlands regards public speaking, as an exercise in exactly this kind of force of character, resting with the individual; he emerges from comparing Demosthenes and Cicero:

as well as the personal.

for him close to conversation,‘* here a national affair typically the speakers of the 1880s with

But we are no less than they are. We have the same, or at least an equal force of character, and we possess the same, or at least equal, mental powers. It remains, then, for us only to do as they did to produce the same results. We must feel that we possess powers and we must labour to make a way for them to display themselves (Sandlands, 1885, pp. 14-15).

Sandlands follow with this strange relevance, ‘We live in days of progress. Every art and science is advancing. Civilization makes rapid strides’ (pp. 14-13, and puts himself and the matter of public speaking firmly in the main stream. Here we can witness the emergence of the Victorian belief in the primacy of conversation and its role in communicating with others. Divines such as Bowes, Jenner and Sandlands point to a particular role for conversation in Christian conduct; this alone would make it central to Victorian culture, but the issue of conversation and its uses reaches even further.

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For example, writing about conversation gave the full scope to Victorian speculation about the respective claims of various members of society to talk to one another. The criteria of conversational competence cede to that of social standing. L. A. Tollemache on ‘Literary Egotism’: Our humbler task will be that of defending, not the extreme, but the mean, and of inquiring whether persons in general are not justified in talking of themselves more than is strictly necessary; and further, whether, by one of society’s by-laws, certain classes of persons are not privileged to do so more even than is usual (1884, p. 79).

This equivocates

while describing.

But Tollemache

hits a louder,

surer note later:

It would be premature

to lay aside our plea on behalf of conversational, or, if we may christen it by a shorter name, social egotism, until we have mentioned a case in which even persons of very ordinary attainments may sometimes be pardoned for talking about themselves--the case, namely, when they have nothing better to talk about (1884, p. 87).

The smugness of this wraps up the snobbishness in a complacent cocoon; but the opinion remains. Those whose talents could not find a scale for measurement outside their class were given some rights to speak in the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. But in the society envisaged by Tollemache, it must have been strangely off-putting to talk well like Disraeli or Gladstone or Milnes or Browning with the knowledge that some people considered it the social duty of the eloquent and interesting to speak of themselves. The risk of disappointing loomed. One could disappoint by not talking, or by deliberately saying the wrong thing: for example, Mrs Humphrey Ward remembers a Kensington dinner party ‘in ‘84 or ‘85’ at which Browning, exasperated with the talk of the guest opposite ‘which was damping the conversation’, began to quote Moliere to his neighbour; ‘the recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or twice threw uneasy glances towards us, for Browning was the “lion” of the evening’ (Ward, 1918, pp. 223-224). Our equivalent of the public ‘lion of the evening’ situation, the chat-show on radio and television, calls up other and stronger incitements to speak-publicity for a project, or the topicality of one’s work-but the idea (put forcibly by Tollemache) that those unlike the rest of us with our very ordinary attainments have a duty to talk still persists. J. P. Mahaffy frames it neatly: [The same good result may be some remarkable person, who or show offstyle, in which the or with a rival silenced before

Perhaps

we should

balance

obtained] When the company comes together for the purpose of hearing is held out as the attraction of the party this is truly the epideictic solitary speaker is supposed to delight and display himself without a rival, him (Mahaffy, 1887, pp. 170-171).

this view with a remark

from Roger Boswell:

Do not suppose that all is right because you succeed in silencing others and getting a monopoly of the conversation. Numbers of modest, unobtrusive persons, who are able to converse pleasantly and well in a quiet, easy style, give way to loud, rapid, boisterous talkers, who haste always to snatch the first word, and hate them all the while (1867, p. 31). will see something of the discomfort of the silenced in records of Browning’s conversation; but then the fame of the speaker and the desire to learn attenuates the disquiet in a good many of Browning’s listeners. Boswell makes a startling and vital comment on the question of balance in conversation in this connection; to upset the balance is to break that ‘implied contract which brings people together to converse’ (1867, P. 72). We

Boswell’s ‘implied contract’ closely resembles that implied contract drawn up between the writer and the reader. That contract was shaped by Victorian notions of what it was to converse. And we strike different contracts with the poets writing today which clearly depend on what we think of poets, of poetry, of the possibilities of communication, and

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where we place ourselves in relation to our society. An ‘implied contract’ which unites speaker and listener involves a set of tacit rules and maxims for us as well for the Victorians. The Victorians’ attitude to conversation can add another dimension to those maxims. These I have grouped under the Accomplishment Principle. The practice of conversation for the Victorians was a matter of improving others as well as staking out one’s own territory in the field of daily intercourse. ‘You see that conversation is not limited to talking merely-it embraces your general conduct as well’, we read in How to Shine in Society; or, the Art of Conversation (1867, p. 78); and general conduct involved the use of conversation: ‘one end for which tongues were given us certainly was, that we might correct and improve each other’.lg So the idea of a thing called conversation which could be practised, improved and used to improve others intellectually, morally and spiritually places the business and conduct of conversation at the heart of the Victorians’ sense of themselves and of each other. How To Shine again: Conversation at all times is one of the greatest educators of the mind. The conversation of our companions moulds us more than the lessons and lectures of our teachers. A man’s daily conversation is the mood of his mind confessed before the world. The very business he is daily engaged in is a kind of conversation in deed and fact. It is an indispensable condition for him making his mark in the world, and especially if he wishes to make that mark a distinguished one (p. IS).

A woman’s daily conversation cultivation of conversation and events-the tea, the ‘At Home’ from 1887: ‘What and what are it is their duty to cultivate the art

also helped her make her mark in the world, but the the gaining of competence for taking part in prescribed comes over as the peculiar burden of the woman. This not “women’s rights”, is a point much disputed, but that of conversation, none will question’ (Hardy, 1887, p. 137).

For the ambitious married couple, the woman and her conversation played a vital part, especially at dinners. Here is advice for an evening off from dinners governed by ‘commercial principals or duty’ which goes to show how many of those there were. The advice, from Lady Greville’s 1892 The Gentlewoman in Society, comes across as a kind of post prandial Mrs Beeton or Eliza Acton2’: Small dinners require even greater care in their management. Here there must be no question of commercial principles or duty; the selection of friends must be studied solely with a view to the quota they can add to pleasant conversation. The women must be pretty or agreeable; the men, noted in some way (Greville, 1892, p. 90).

Such evidence indicates that even when relaxing, friends were selected according to their ability to converse well: and the measure of how well one conversed became, for an evening at least, the measure of one’s worth. The Victorians,

society,

and talkers

Individuals and not societies hold conversations. Studying the Victorians’ conversation means gathering the evidence both from etiquette and conversation manuals, and from records of those considered by their contemporaries to be great conversationists. For the famous, the reputation for conversation could mean a great deal. Here I examine the kinds of approbation or disapproval visited on renowned talkers. G. W. E. Russell writes in the second of the chapters on conversation from Collections and Recollections: This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield’s conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame. Though written in admiration, it seems to me to describe the most intolerable performance that could ever have afflicted society. He talked /ike a racehorse approaching the winning-post. Could the wit of man devise a more appalling image? (Russell, 1898, pp. 138-139).

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Russell posits a proper and definite relation between Disraeli’s ability to talk and his impact on society. While Russell knows exactly what he means by ‘society’, it rightly presents the difficulties of uncertainty when the late twentieth century encounters a word redolent with Victorian nuance. The Victorian society pictured by Russell exists for us in the form of individuals remembered by other individuals. Therefore I want to look at the role of conversation in Victorian society by looking specifically at individual talkers and at the way widely held ideals of what it is to converse locate themselves in descriptions of them from nineteenth century memoirs. This will also provide a vital context for the discussion of Browning’s own highly idiosyncratic style of conversation. The poems Browning wrote in the London of the 1870s and 1880s stand in fertile relation to the style and norms of the conversation he heard around him, and to his own style of talking to others. I believe that the way we communicate with each other bears on the way certain poems come to be written and read. Besides, if we have a clearer idea of what a notion of conversation entailed for the Victorians, we will begin to understand what they meant by that word ‘society’ used to describe a group of people who have gathered to converse with each other.*’ Russell himself makes an interesting equation with: ‘I hold it to be an axiom that a man who is only a member of society can never be so agreeable as one who is something else as well (1898, p. 141), which suggests that there are indeed those whose sole function is membership of society: this apercu evidently depends on a narrower and different usage of ‘society’ than we might choose 90 years later. The approbation for Disraeli discomforts Russell. Indeed, so much of what the Victorians meant as praise now appals. The unacknowldged description of Disraeli quoted by Russell goes further: The Spectator of 5 August, 1882 also found it useful: He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post,-every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression thrown into every burst. Victor Hugo, and his extraordinary novels, came next under discussion, and D’lsraeli, who was fired by his own eloquence, started off apropos des bottes, with a long story of impalement he had seen in Upper Egypt. No mystic priest of the Corybantes could have worked himself up into a finer frenzy of language (p. 1019).

It is worth quoting this passage because both Russell and The Spectator cite it within the context of a discussion on conversation; this has clear and strong links with parliamentary oratory. But then so much of the discussion about the Victorians’ conversation wishes it to resemble public oratory. I want to stress that talk had a particular status identifiably Victorian. The writers of personal memoirs who recall the talk of Browning often draw on their experiences of eminent Victorians at the dinner table and in conversation; for instance: Carlyle, Dickens, Disraeli, Eliot, Gladstone, James, Lewes, Meredith, Morley, Palgrave, Tennyson. **Almost any memoir of the period reveals the striking coherence of the society in which these men and women moved; almost any modern biography of a famous Victorian now has to for the sake of accuracy. 23 The links between the political and the literary worlds were neither strictly political nor literary, but essentially social. For example, Lady Greville hints to the society hostess: ‘I should advise no one, who wishes for a successful small party, to invite members of the House of Commons on any nights but Wednesday and Saturday, as I know nothing more annoying than to receive a telegram at the moment of dressing, to say So-and-So cannot leave the House, a division being momentarily expected’ (1892, p. 95).24 For example, 20, 1877:

F. T. Palgrave

records

without

great excitement

in his journal

for March

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

323

Dined with the Tennysons in Upper Brook Street: met Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, Joachim, Browning, and Lord Monteagle. I had a good deal of talk with the Lord of the Violin [Joachim], who seems a man of much taste in literature, and wholly untouched or unspoiled by his great fame (1899, p. 153).

Here, a statesman, two poets, an editor, a violinist and others gather around the dining table. Victorian society at this level remained fluid within particular constraints. Conversation figured as the life of its being, and people were judged according to their conversational abilities. In the case of Gladstone, success at the dinner table maintains close links with public political success; T. W. Reid remarks in his work on Gladstone’s conversation, ‘The personal fascination which, as I have sought to show, made him supreme in the social circle, was not less conspicuous on the battle-field of party politics’ (1899, p. 27). Certainly the Gladstone fascination worked over longer periods; ‘I heard Gladstone for near five hours’, wrote Lord Houghton to his daughter Amy, ‘he spoke so pleasantly that nobody was tired’ (Reid, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 198). As so much of Victorian life took place around the dinner table, memoirs from the dining room and drawing room abound. It was in these rooms that poems were read aloud, or discussed; and as the topic of literature made itself germane to polite conversation, the very habit of literary discussion haunts the Victorian reception rooms. E. F. Benson recalls the table of that close friend of Browning, Anne Proctor,2s and her mother, Anna Montagu: Mrs. Proctor carried on her mother’s tradition of salon and beautiful speech, but her tongue could have an exceedingly sharp edge to it, which earned her the sub-title of “Our Lady of Bitterness.” Thackeray, Browning, and Kinglake were of her intimate circle . . . (Benson, 1930, p. 45).

The task of gathering the right conversationists weighed heavy on the society host, especially when dinner guests made themselves and their reputations known by the power of their conversation; this gathering at the Lehmanns’ house, therefore, has all the makings of a great success: ‘there were present three men who were accounted the three best talkers in London, and many had tried to gather together Mr. Millais, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Leighton round the same festal board, but tried in vain’ (Walford, 1912, p. 64). This testifies to the immense status of talk and talkers in the Victorian London of Browning and his readers; the poet parades before the public, but crucially in the company of other great talkers who are not necessarily poets as well. Meeting and talking with others comes to be a public event. John Murray knew Browning well, and his parties in Wimbledon garnered the great talkers of the day; in a casual remark about the circle which surrounded Murray, E. M. Symonds laments the advent of the literary agent and points to a world of contact between authors, journalists, politicians, divines and intellectuals so typically Victorian: One of the pleasantest features of a publisher’s life before the advent of the literary agent, was the direct personal association with the authors, which often led to long and intimate personal friendships. But apart from these, most of the notabilities of the day seemed to have met at Newstead and it must have been a delight to listen to the conversation of such men as Lord Houghton, Robert Browning, Lord Bowen, Dean Milman, Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Richard Owen, Henry Reeve, Delane of The Times, Canon ScottHolland and countless others (Symonds, 1932, pp. 305-306).

And what Symonds

imagines

is the conversation.

Even among what might be called a narrower literary world, the circle of connection spread wide. For example, Derek Patmore, writing of the Patmore family’s connections with the literary world, remarks that ‘by reason of Emily Patmore’s charm and beauty, and the brilliant originality of Coventry Patmore’s mind, their little drawing-room became the meeting-place of such different personalities as Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning’, then quotes Coventry Patmore’s description of an encounter between Ruskin and Sydney Dobell

ANDREW St GEORGE

324

(with Browning and Tennyson present), and concludes, ‘it is tantalizing to imagine the conversation on these occasions. Unfortunately, there was no Boswell present to set it down’ (Patmore, 1935, p. 65). First we should notice that Patmore regards the home as a ‘meetingplace’, and second the meetings as ‘occasions’ which would produce recordable conversations. That sense of the ‘occasion’ underpins the narrative memoirs of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes at home: This was one of the few occasions her better, and it made me feel indeed, that she did not breathe a talked, or Vivier, the horn-blower solemnity of religious function,

of Frederick

Locker-Lampson’s

on which I had seen George Eliot entirely alone; it enabled me to know sorry that she had not more sprightly and natural people about hermore healthy atmosphere; for unless Dr. Maurier sang, or W. K. Clifford gave one of his impersonations, her reunions had somewhat of the with the religion cut out (1896, p. 310).

Here, the elements of performance and accomplishment figure large; and performing in the relatively public space of Eliot’s drawing room put the business of conversation at a premium. Browning himself, like many of the characters he creates in the dramatic monologues, existed here in and by his ability to talk. Frederick Harrison recalls the ‘Sunday afternoon receptions’ at The Priory, Regent’s Park, where there was ‘a continuous flow of varied company,’ which included ‘The superb Frederick Leighton . _ . or the hearty Robert Browning, with endless anecdotes and happy mots,’ and where the voices of Meredith, Lecky, Lord Acton, Charles Bowen, Lord Lytton (‘the cosmopolitan courtier’) blended with ‘the jolly rattle of Anthony Trollope,’ and the conversation of Lord Houghton, Frederick Burton the painter and Leicester Warren the poet (Harrison, 1911, Vol. 2, pp. 109-110). Through this society Browning moved with considerable ease, as Harrison recalls, ‘I doubt if, in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, London had any more genial companion. . . . He was always ready to meet a congenial company, large or small, at a club, a mansion, or a cottage, to talk with every one on every topic that could interest a man of letters, a man of the world, or a lady of fashion. . . . I think him the happiest social spirit whom it has ever been my fortune to meet’ (1911, vol. 2, p. 106). Harrison’s praise for Browning rests on personal admiration. A good deal of the available evidence about Victorian conversation comes from personal reminiscence, where individual styles are highlighted against a sense that other and objective standards exist. The prevalence of so many etiquette books encouraged speculation about objective criteria for judging prowess at conversation. So when G. W. E. Russell puts the essentially Victorian question ‘Who best understands the Art of Conversation? Who, in a word, are our best talkers?’ (1898, p. 140) the Victorians answer him in two ways: those who best understand the art of conversation are the writers of manuals on the subject; the best talkers are the poets, politicians, writers and figures of society (meant in the strictest sense); but not yet the entrepreneurial men and women for whom the conversation instruction manuals were presumably written. Beatrice Knollys’ The Gentle Art of Good Talking, offers a set of typically definite, prescriptive, and dogmatic rules for the conduct of conversation. She has a keen sense of state of the art: ‘women are the chief offenders as regards French, while men err on the side of Latin, though it is not so common a custom now to cram Latin quotations into conversations’ (1899, p. 85). Her sense of a difference in practice between the sexes informs one of her most interesting observations about the impact of conversation:

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

325

The society of brilliant men may temper and strengthen the steel blade of eloquence with the logic and discretion so wanting in women, but it is the society of brilliant women that gives the point and polish to that steel blade as they sharpen it with their repartee and brighten it with their tact (p. 25).

Conversation becomes a way of differentiating between the genders; we hear of, for example, Jane Welsh Carlyle only as a footnote to her husband when Francis Espinasse remarks after a discussion of Carlyle’s conversational manner, ‘Naturally she shone more in conversation when her husband was absent than when he was present’ (Espinasse, 1893, p. 203). However, for social and economic reasons, most of the great talkers actually recorded in Victorian memoirs tend to be men. When Knollys writes of talkers, her terms move gradually through ‘individuals’ via ‘the truly clever’ and ‘person’ to ‘lions’ and finally ‘men’ in: Individuals as a rule want to shine, not to reflect; to instruct, not to learn. This especially applies to those who have very little to teach, for you will notice that the truly clever are the truly humble, for nothing makes a person so conscious of ignorance as knowledge. That is one reason why intellectual lions are frequently disappointing when on exhibition at some social function. . . Of course there are exceptions to the rule that the most clever men are the most silent: Macaulay, Sheridan, Johnson, Sydney Smith, Gladstone, were among the exceptions. They talked much, but had much to say (Knollys, 1899, pp. 37-38).

Those

wanting

had only to read How to Shine in Society: or, The Art of of the good communicator are those of the good man, in the presence of a set of Victorian cultural norms:

to shine

Conversation. Here, the qualities and we find ourselves

Now, sir, the first thing for you to do is to make yourself a man. Manliness is the backbone of our nature. All other qualities distribute themselves around this. Man means thinker, so that to be a man you must be able to think, and to prove and steady your thoughts by bringing them in contact with others through reading and conversation (p. 6).

First, reading and conversation are equated here; and second, the contact with others is stressed, for, as we read later, conversation is ‘a general contribution of talk, not a lesson, a sermon, or a lecture’ (pp. 20-21). Yet there were places where conversation showed all the signs of that staged, formal talk so common in London, and gained an important pedagogic role. Earlier in the century, Working Men’s Institutes, Reading Circles, Societies for Mental Improvement based meetings on what was called ‘Conversation’. For example in 1848-50, the Aylesbury Mechanics’ Institution tabled a series of Three Literary Conversational Evenings, and had printed on each handbill these words: ‘Between each address a short period will be allowed for conversation and refreshments’.26 Or later, in the 189Os, we find that the British Weekly Handbook for Young Men’s Societies, a book circulated to those who ran Young Men’s Societies, included the ‘conversazione’ as a regular part of the ideal programmes of reading and activity it advocates; one of the suggested ‘Topics for Discussion’, puts this proposition up for debate: ‘The best in-door recreation is:-Conversation/Games/ Music/Reading’ (1890, pp. 20, 28). Conversation here is regarded as an activity alongside reading and playing an instrument. Such an equation now would be almost inconceivable. The influential National Home Reading Union*’ produced circulars and advertisements on The Pleasure and Use of NHR U Reading Circles. What Are They? to encourage people to join the Union by setting up a reading circle. Conversation plays the crucial role here. The advert states, ‘the circle gave them [its reader members] food for interesting talk all week,’ and goes on: . If there are any passages of special beauty, or opinions he [the reader] agrees or disagrees with, or statements the truth of which he cannot see, all these are noted, and brought and conversation (John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library).

to the Circle for discussion

326

ANDREW

Moreover,

in the 1894 NHRU

pamphlet

St GEORGE

Notes for Working Members of the Associated

Workers League, we find this: Finally, there is the conversational element, which is at last being recognised as the pivot of all true lessons, and, as a means of education, far above the lecture. Conversation as an art is essentially the teacher’s art, and our Circle leaders soon find that, by its means, they are put in touch with the mind of each reader, and thereby enabled to understand the individual mind. (p. 12).

Here we have the liberal ideal of communication between equals, an ideal which looks back to the notions of learning and teaching through conversation, and of respecting the claims of others in discourse with them. Poems discussed and read out form part of this world and take their place in a pedagogic continuum of mutually informing conversation. In essence the reading of a poem duplicates that vital contact between minds which figures so large in the learning process set out by the national Home Reading Union.

Conversation, elocution, and reading aloud Conversation was regarded not only as a way of helping others, but as a means and focus of self-improvement. The study of elocution produced terms and diagrams for the way the voice worked, and how and where it could be improved. Edwin Drew writes in The Elocutionist Annual for 1889: And the beauty of elocution is-you can always practise it; wherever you go, it is available, and, if you happen to be above the ordinary level, able to touch with a pathetic point, or amuse by a humorous turn, you will be a more important being altogether (Drew, 1889, p. 23).

Drew certainly puts conversation close to elocution, and both close to social competence. Conversation provides the best opportunity for the exercise of self-improvement** ‘the elocutionist,’ writes Drew, ‘can be always on show’ (p. 45). Indeed, he strikes a vital note when he touches on the aspect of performance in conversation; the delivery of one’s anecdotes matters as much as the content: ‘It is said that writing is now become a common art.. . . Let speech become a common art; for men should be taught the delights of delivery, and to this end all able elocutionary teachers should be sincerely encouraged’ (p. 45). If communication with each other can be seen, as Drew sees it, in the terms of a public performance, we might want to look at public performances in terms of communication. The Public Speaker’s Vade Mecum offers this crucial advice to the putative speaker: Another important rule to be observed in elocution is Study Nature, that is, study the most easy and natural way of expressing yourself, but as to the tone of voice and the manner of speech. This is best learnt by observations on common conversation, where all is free, natural, and easy, where we are only intent on making ourselves understood, and conveying our ideas in a strong, plain, and lively manner, by the most natural language, enunciation, and action. And the nearer our enunciation in public comes to the freedom and ease of that which we use in common discourse (provided we keep up the dignity of the subject, and preserve a propriety of expression), the more just, natural, and agreeable will it generally be (Drew, 1857).

contains a notion of diction more familiar in literary discussion, while The parenthesis reading itself becomes linked closely to conversation. George Vandenhoff in The Art of Reading Aloud applauds the ‘merely natural or conversational style, for commonplace subjects and occasions’ (1878, p. 193, which raises the question, in the light of the behaviour, elocution and etiquette books of the period, of exactly what it would be to speak in a conversational style. Concerns bearing on the practice of conversation press on the Victorians from several directions: the writers of conversation manuals treat it as an art to be acquired; divines and teachers as a means of instruction; and elocutionists or public speakers as a model for delivery.29 Those who write on the techniques of elocution and reading aloud often

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

327

refer to conversation-just as Public Speaker’s Vade Mecum does-on the one hand, and the matter for reading aloud on the other; but both are the end and means of voice exercise. One of the foremost Victorian theorists of voice production, Charles Lunn, claims in The Philosophy of Voice that voice production ‘affects the pulpit, the platform, the forum, and the stage’ (1878, p. 57). 3o‘The forum’ might signify the social circle or the political; either way, the two come to be regarded as s~on~ous by theorists of conversation because in them the same oratorical skills preside. All of Lunn’s areas (and his differentiation of the stage and the platform shows a mind apt for accurate distinctions) figure large in Victorian life. The Victorians valued the oratorical and the public valued great talkers, great public speakers and fine preachers. They also valued the attempt to discover a scientific grounding for the business of voice production; so Lunn can assert with some assurance in 1880, ‘It is Fait Accompli, I have founded a New Profession standing midway between the Musical and the Medical worlds, with Art on its one side, Science on the other; firm and irrefutable’.31 His relief may, perhaps, stem from the uncertainties he underwent on the way to being able to say just that; for uncertainties and disappointments wait on most new discoveries, and final presentations often conceal the pains of formulation. Lunn comments uncharacteristically on the essays in VOX Populi, ‘they were wrung from my pen as a duty during a time of intense intellectual depression’ (1880, Preface). The growing technical and professional interest in conversation coincided with the growth of the science of elocution. As more became known of the way humans made sounds, articles and pamphlets3* appeared putting elocution in truly interdisciplinary territory by giving diagrams of the vocal apparatus, hints on how to use the diaphragm for breath control, medical tips for singers,13 comments on the nature of language,34 and poems to read as part of a regimen in the drawing room or on the platform. As the study of elocution and of conversation became more widespread, so the custom of reading aloud came under closer scrutiny in the home and at the theatre. Elocution ranged conversation alongside literary, dramatic and musical expression as another way of using the voice. Poems were there to be read. The Athenaeum, Saturday 22 July, 1876: To properly enjoy this [Herve Reil], as is indeed the case with almost all that Mr. Browning has ever written, we must read it aloud, and then-to use a phrase as abominable as “numpholeptos”, or “Aischulos”the “onomatopoeia,” or liit of the thing, becomes not so much evident as infectious (p. 101).

The Athenaem asks for a special kind of attention for Browning’s poems, a criticism which begins with the reading aloud of the matter in hand. The Victorians were adept and habitual readers; a world before television, radio, telephone or widespread recording must have made room for the speaking voice in the drawing room. Browning stands in fascinating relation to this aspect of the Victorians’ social behaviour, first because some of his poems, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’ or ‘Incident of the French Camp’ came to be read much more than others; and second because Browning’s poems appear less widely read aloud than those of Tennyson. For a sense of what had become canonical in elocutionary readings, we can turn to ‘a standard work on the elocutionary art’ . . . ‘the best of the many works on the subject I have seen,’ which ‘stands quite alone in its comprehensive and practical exposition of the technique of the art of elocution’.35 These comments, together with the work they refer to, Voice, Speech, and Gesture: A Practical Handbook to the Elocutionary Art, show us three things. First, that there are ‘many works on the subject’; second, that this is

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St GEORGE

particularly good one; and third that (as it comprises sections written by different authors) there are a number of writers (as well as the reviewers) interested in the subject. Elocution and reading aloud were buoyant concerns. Clifford Harris: Perhaps no form of entertainment, or expression of dramatic art, has been so well abused and so mercilessly caricatured as has Recitation over the last few years. . For who has not suffered from its evil and desolating claims to silence and a hearing at “At Homes” and social gatherings? (pp. 188-189).

Harris writes of ‘the over-strained popularity of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, or of “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent”, and attests to ‘the welcome an audience invariably gives to “Amphion”, “The Brook”, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”, and “Abt Vogler”, (p. 175). Here, ‘over-strained’ and ‘invariably’ call up the world of the habitual. While we can also amass evidence from journal, memoir and reminiscence which bears on the Victorians reading aloud to each other, we do not really need to; the presence and popularity of so many books on elocution testify to a public interest in reading aloud. The memoirs fill in the detail. But then the detail can reveal a great deal. Trollope’s journal, for example includes an inventory of what he read aloud to the family. He obviously enjoyed reading longer poems, for the list from 1876 includes The Faery Queen, Aurora Leigh, The Excursion, The Odyssey and The Iliad (both Homer and Pope in both cases), The Task, and The Ring and The Book. The latter, unlike any other entry, receives two exclamation marks in the manuscript; even Paradise Lost is listed without comment. 36 The Ring and The Book presents a daunting challenge and represents a considerable investment in time; yet Trollope’s reading aloud should not look unusual or aberrant.37 Trollope also read prose to his family, Gladstone’s The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question ofthe East, (Trollope, October 1875) and in this too he keeps company with practice elsewhere.3s An understanding of a poem may depend on our reading it aloud, just as part of the impact of poems such as Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ or William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Right of Way’ (last stanza) depend on our seeing them. Hiram Corson, one of the early appreciators of Browning in America, read The Ring and the Book aloud to his Cornell classes each year, and in doing so, reports Elizabeth Porter Gould, ‘reached a high opinion’ of the poem (Gould, 1904, pp. 36-37). Here, while the reaching a high opinion does not rely on the reading aloud, some intimate relation suggests itself. James Stuart records a similar experience in a reminiscence of the Cambridge mathematician, W. P. Turnbull: He had an extraordinary memory, and it was a specially good verbal one, so that he could repeat whole poems without a single misplaced word. He was the only person who ever made me understand Browning. When he repeated any of his poetry at all it seemed quite plain (1911, p. 203).

Stuart’s account suddenly finds Browning not by discussing poetry but by recalling an individual reading style. Therefore both Corson and Stuart put the reading aloud of Browning at a premium in interpretation. So does Mark Twain, who took great pride in spending three days to prepare for an hour’s reading, indicating by underscore the shades of emphasis to be brought out; Twain said, ‘I don’t wish to flatter anybody, yet I will say this much: put me in the right condition and give me room, according to my strength, and I can read Browning so Browning himself can understand it’ (Baylor Browning Interests, 1960). Browning himself was a keen reader, of his own and others’ poems. F. T. Palgrave puts these readings in their natural social context, amongst talk: ‘Latterly he now and then dined with us. At his last house I had some long talks with him, when he spoke enthusiastically,

VICTORIANS, CONVERSATIONS AND POEMS

and much, of his wife; and one day read over passages on love, with much warmth’ (1899, p. 218).

329

to me from Troilus and Cressida

Browning’s poems share in this scene of reading and talking in that they developed sense of the staged, the oratorical: ‘By the Fire-Side’, ‘Bishop Apology’, ‘My Last Duchess’, or The Inn Album, for example. These poems formal relations between the characters, and depend on a notion of what it conversation. Katherine

Bronson

quotes her friend Mrs Sargent Curtis, who knew Browning

witness his Blougram’s explore the is to hold a in Venice:

His reading of his own poems was a never-to-be forgotten delight-simple, direct, virile, as was the nature of the man. The graver portions he read in a quiet, almost introspective way, as if he were thinking it all out again. . . . He seemed as full of dramatic interest in reading “In a Balcony” as if he had just written it for our benefit (Bronson, 1902, p. 159).

The immediacy of ‘as if he were thinking it all out again,’ comes close to the immediacy of conversation. We might regard Browning’s style of reading as one of the best ways to approach his poems; and his ability to convey that sense of the newly and especially coined poem draws on his ability to be truly spontaneous in conversation. Reading and talking cohere. In a separate reminiscence, Katherine Bronson reconstructs a conversation which begins ‘Now I will read to you. What would you like?’ or this:

with Browning

Once, on his first arrival at La Mura, he said of his own accord, “I will read Shakespeare to you tonight”. . . . All his own volumes were there, the works of the poets above mentioned, and many others, but they were not what he sought . . . “What! No Shakespeare?” he exclaimed. “I would never have believed it! Now, to punish you, I will read some of my toughest poems-at least, so the critics say” (The Century Magazine, 1899-1900, vol. 37, p. 929).

First, ‘of his own accord’ implies that Browning was frequently called upon to read; second, ‘Now I will read to you’ that he enjoyed it; third, ‘my toughest poems’ that he had an idea of what it might be to listen. He reads. Katherine Bronson recalls, ‘It was far from being the punishment he pretended I deserved, for when he read a difficult poem, giving his own emphasis and punctuation, it seemed to be revealed in a new light, and to become as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire’ (ibid). Browning reading provides the model for our reading of some of his poems. When Katherine Bronson hears him read, he inserts ‘his own emphasis and punctuation’. She must be referring to performance punctuation, for she ignores the issue of what it would be to find someone else’s punctuation in a poem of one’s own. Anyway, Browning’s poems are everywhere meticulously punctuated, and in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country and The Inn AZbum, that punctuation takes most notably the form of dashes designed to render the fluid complexities of the speaking voice; complexities which become incorporated into short poems as well: the tone of ‘Memorabilia’, for example depends on the way certain lines are scanned and spoken. For example, Browning read to Furnivall’s friend, Teena Rochefort-Smith, on the occasion of their meeting. ‘I shall never forget the poet,’ an attendant friend recalls, ‘the proofs of Jocoseria in his hand, reading out in his fine manly voice poem after poem’ (Rochefort-Smith, 1883, p. 6). Teena Rochefort-Smith proved an apt listener, with “‘Yes, yes,” to the poet’s “You follow,” at the quick turns of “Christina and Monaldeschi” ’ (p. 7). The reading included ‘Donald’ and ‘Ixion’, where we find in the listener that robust Victorian sentimentalism which manages to remain dignified: ‘I never saw the poet so stirred as in the reading of the last three pages of “Ixion”; and as I read the lines again, I see

330

ANDREW St GEORGE

the trembling hand, hear the impassioned voice, proclaiming “the triumph of Hell,” and yet the victory over it of man’s faith’ (p. 7). The tone of the reminiscence suggests the ‘friend’ knew Browning less than intimately. But his willingness to read ‘poem after poem’, and his ability to move his listeners3’ shows us a man skilled at reading his own poems, possessed of the imagined sound of them in his own and others’ minds. Browning read aloud frequently to the family.40 He regarded reading as a kind of metier rather like a singer’s performance, as this exchange with the singer Edith Abel1 shows: she says he was always pleased to read his poems aloud, and he also knew how to say the nice thing. ‘I will read to you, and in turn you shall sing to me’ (Gould, 1904, pp. 66-67). He read Asolando to Fannie Barrett Browning in Asolo: One evening before dinner he read from the “Asolando,” and 1 remember how delightfully he read “The Pope and the Net” . . (Barrett Browning, 1928, p. 22). However, he did not always read his own poems, or even poems. For example, Katherine Bronson says that he used to read out police reports; ‘comparisons of these delinquencies with those of similar columns in other lands was really a source of delight to the poet’ (Bronson, 1902, p. 181).4’ Browning also read sermons. On the penultimate Sunday of his life he ends up reading his own poems, but begins by suggesting the work of someone else. Fannie Barrett Browning again: But the Sunday before the last one of his life stands out alone from all the times I ever heard him read. All the household, everyone but he and I, had gone out and I was lying on the sofa when he came into the room and said he would sit with me a little while, and would read aloud if I wanted him to do so, suggesting one of Canon Melville’s sermons (Barrett Browning, 1928, p. 22).42

Before sermons could be read, they had to be gathered, written, or transcribed. The collection of sermons represents one of the most enduring forms of Victorian literature; in that these collections were read aloud, on Sunday, just as Browning proposes to read here, the reading of them comes to be seen as a social and political act in the light of the great debates over the role of the Sunday in the life of the nation.43 Browning’s wish to read to his daughter-in-law represents a typical Victorian impulse. Collections of sermons suited Sunday reading because they dealt with devotional subjects; and reading aloud, because divines wrote them to be heard. Robert Browning: I am informed that a collection of sermons by the late Rev. Thomas Jones, of Bedford Chapel, has been made and will shortly be published. Among them may probably appear some of those I listened to a long while since, and I shall have curiosity as well as interest in ascertaining how far the surviving speechwhether preserved by a reporter or printed from the author’s own notes-will correspond in effect with the original extempore utterance, of which I retain a sufficient memory (1884, p. v).

Here, Browning clearly recognises the difference between speaking and writing, while remaining fully aware of how the two interact in a book of the written versions of spoken works. ‘Surviving speech’ hints at speech which can be preserved and a form which can preserve it; ‘original extempore utterance’ at the fact that the spoken cannot be preserved exactly. When recitation puts the written into the realm of the spoken, according to Clifford Harris in Reciting and Recitative, ‘It touches the material it uses, not only with the bare truth of an interpreting voice, but also with a force and delicacy that are its own,’ (p. 190) and introduces the reciter’s distinct contribution. Recitation communicates texts. It allows one group of people to experience simultaneously a single utterance. Public readings and private contemplation of poems bring the listener

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

AND POEMS

331

or contemplator into direct relation with the writer. This is how a writer communicates. The participants in this kind of communicative discourse do not have to be identified for their exchange to be called discourse. And with the fictionalised ‘I’ and ‘you’ in poems which have narrators and addressees, we can set aside the matter of whether the writer speaks in his own voice. As Roger Fowler says of Yeats’ poems, ‘to what extent these poems are autobiographical, or may be said to be Yeats speaking, does not concern us. At least there is the implication that the poems transcribe a voice, and in each case it is up to the reader to work out what kind of speaker this is, in what kind of utterance context’ (1986, p. 90). Fowler remarks, ‘often a title will frame the poem as discourse’. It is the use of conversation in Browning’s poems which interests me here; our reading of those Browning poems which adopt a discursive relation with us benefits greatly from a knowledge about how Browning placed himself in discursive relation-conversation-with others, and how that relation stands to cultural norms-in this case, the conversational postures struck by Browning’s contemporaries. Let me close with three remarks: first, I have set out to give sense and purpose to the complicated process of interaction between people uttering and comprehending texts at a particular moment; second, I hope I have shown that it is possible to talk of an identifiably Victorian conversation; and third, I have tried to marshal literary, biographical and sociological with linguistic criticism towards reviving our own comprehension of a set of utterances (in this case, certain Victorian peoms, and certain Victorian conversations) in the terms of a particular society (in this case, Victorian literary society in the 1870s and 1880s). And we can learn most from the Victorians in our differences from them.

NOTES ‘For example, Herbert J. Davis (Sedgewick Memorial Lecture 2, University ‘The Augustan Art of Conversation’ supposes that there is an identifiably

of Vancouver, 11 February, Augustan way of talking.

1957).

*[the proper objects of conversation are] ‘to make the time pass agreeably, for others as well as ourselves. . . To make people like us and think well of us. And, when suitable opportunities occur, to instruct and improve ourselves and others’ (Boswell, 1967, p. 23). 3Davie (1955, pp. xii-xiii).

This is Davie’s

1975 Postscript

on the book’s

reception

.

since 1955.

4He initials this ‘R. B.‘: ‘ Such poems as the majority in this volume might also come, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though often Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’ (Pettigrew, 1981, p. 347). ‘This analysis

made in a lecture

by Professor

Roy Harris,

Oxford

University,

5 March,

1987.

6’In the literary speech situation, we are prepared to cooperate as hearers to a greater extent than we would in conversation; we are prepared to make more of an effort to ‘decipher’ deviance, to work at understanding beyond the point at which in other texts the Cooperative Principle would have broken down. Knowing this to be the case, authors are more free to exploit and explore communicative deviance in literature’ (Traugott and Pratt, 1980, p. 262). ‘Attempts

at audience

participation

generally

embarrass.

sFor example, Ohmann (1971, p. 17): a literary work presents a world . . by providing the reader with impaired and incomplete speech acts which he completes by supplying the appropriate circumstances. ‘The OED quotes

Carlyle,

Critical Miscellany,

p. 193.

“See also Rosaline Masson in Poets, Patriots, and Lovers, writing naturally enough in 1933 about an event in 1884: ‘At a conversazione held in the Museum of Science and Art [Edinburgh University] it became apparent that Browning was drawing the crowd as a magnet draws steel shavings’ (p. 33). “See also Arnold “Sydney

(1856, pp. 4-5 ff) for a professional

Smith was born on 3 June,

sense of the word

1771; he died on 22 February,

‘conversationalist’.

1845. Reid (1896, pp. 1, 364).

332

ANDREW

St

GEORGE

13See also Mahaffy (1887, p. 29), ‘All people are supposed to study literature, and a good knowledge of either familiar or fashionable books can hardly fail to tell in any gathering of cultivated men and women.’ 14Such use was recognized in secular writing on conversation. J. P. Mahaffy inserts this note into the second edition of his 1887 Principles of the Art of Conversation ‘I have explained in the new Preface why I have not included the profound moral uses of conversation, which is in fact the main vehicle of good education and of religious teaching’ (p. 4, nl). “See Mahaffy (1887, p. v), ‘The Rhetoric of Conversation is an American work; but though we may learn much from it-perhaps all the more for its being American.’

an American

work,

%onversable’ generally fits into a social context in the nineteenth century: ‘A loose desultory habit of reading, a loose unmethodical habit of thinking, and a loose idefinite manner of speaking, will make but a sorry conversable member of society’ (How to Shine in Society: or, The Art of Conversation: Containing its Principles, Laws, and General Usage in Modern Polite Society, Watson’s Pocket Guides, Glasgow 1867, p. 82). “‘After some laborious research, the writer came to the conclusion, that no complete work on this subject exclusively has ever been published in any country, not even in France [my emphasis], where Conversation is deservedly ranked among the arts’ (How to Shine in Society . ., p. i). ‘*‘There is a peculiar charm in a good voice, even in conversation, 1885, p. 22). IgJenner’s editorial addition Conversation’ p. 227. “At

this point,

manuals

to Hervey’s

of etiquette

which few other things can inspire’ (Sandlands,

The Rhetoric of Conversation (1860), under the head ‘The Uses of

shelve into manuals

of household

management

such as Ross Murray’s

Modern Householder: a Manual of Domestic Economy (London, 1872), or Cre-Fydd’s Family Fare, The Young Housewife’s Daily Assistant (London, 1888). Less to do with managing the house, and more with managing parties, are; The Manners and Rules of Good Society (reached the 32nd edn by 1910), The Duties of Servants, and Manners and tone of Good Society (3rd edn, London, 1879) all by ‘A Member of the Aristocracy’. “Certainly this sense can be understood from Anne Jameson’s letter to her sisters, 30 October, 1857, Florence: ‘I am on a first floor too (which as I am not strong and a little lame, tho’ much better) is a great advantage & I am near the Brownings who are a great resource, for when I want society I can go to them’ (Erskine, 1915, pp. 313-314). 221 avoid biographies in favour of contemporary memoirs. For example, for Carlyle, see: Literary Recollections by Francis Espinasse, London 1893, pp. 204-205; for Dickens, see: Memoirs of a Bookman by J. Mime, London 1934 (1857 recollection by John Murray’s butler at Albermarle Street, James Mills) p. 201; for Disraeli, see: The Spectator, 5 August, 1882, p. 1019; for Eliot and Lewes, see: My Confidences by Frederick Locker-Lampson, London 1893, pp. 307-308, 310, 321; for Gladstone, see: G. W. E. Russell, 1898, p. 143 and Life of Gladstone by T. W. Reid, London 1899, pp. 15-17; for James, see: Forty Years in London by W. Pett Ridge, London 1823, p. 57; for James and Palgrave, see: Adventures, Social and Literary by Henry Ainslie, London 1922, pp. 246, 25i; for Meredith (and Gladstone), see: My Life and Friends by James Sully, London 1918, pp. 324-325; for Morley, see: G. W. E. Russell, 1898, p. 149; for Tennyson, see: Celebrities at Home by E. Yates, London, 1878, p. 27). 23Richard 1984.

Gladstone, London

Shannon’s

*“The suitable days may have changed Lady Greville’s advice did not.

1982, and Anne Thwaite’s

with House regulations

Edmund Gosse: A Literary Life, London

over the last part of the century.

The ethos behind

25Mrs. Proctor . . a very particular friend of the poet’s (Walford, 1912, p. 16). Anne Procter wrote to Monkton Mimes on 17 November, 1871: ‘I saw Browning on Sunday; he never fails me. He had dined with Knowles to meet Tennyson, who read his new poem to them’ (Reid, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 256). 2eThis series of meetings: Wednesday 11 December, 1848; Wednesday 19 January, and Wednesday 16 February, 1849. The Institution dealt with a variety of topics other than literary. John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library. 27A useful account “‘It

of the Union,

is true that nothing

its inception

yields so readily

and activities

to training

is given in Radford

as the voice’ (Sandlands,

2gFor example, Frederic Maccabe offers this advice to public speakers as though you were conversing with a friend’ (1893, p. 108).

(1910). n.d.,

p. 92).

‘Speak with calmness

and confidence,

30The first edition of 1874 sold well: ‘the entire edition has become exhausted in the brief space of two months’ (Lunn’s Preface to the Second Edition, 1875); and the second, too: ‘Now that in the briefest time a third edition is required, it would be idle in me to pretend not to know that I have been accepted by the public as an authority upon these questions’ (Preface to the Third Edition, 1875). Perhaps these good sales indicate Lunn’s popularity. “VOX Populi, London

Orchestra.

1880, p. 1. Lunn

points

out in his preface

that the work

reprints

articles

from

The

VICTORIANS,

CONVERSATIONS

333

AND POEMS

32For example, in addition to those already cited: Correct Voice Production by Frank Quatremayne (1888); Voice and Health by Henry Sidon (1890); Voice Production by Theodore W. Barth (1890); Voice Cultivation by Josiah Richardson (1892); Voice Production by H. Fell (1983); The Pocket Voice Gymnasium (Anon, 1893); (Voice Production and Vowel Enunciation by J. J. Mewburn Levien (1895); Voice Production (1896) and Science and the Art of Adjustment Between the Producing and Reflecting Vocal Apparatus (1897) by Paul Mahlendorff; Practical Guide to Articulation by Joseph Clarkson (1903); The First Principles of Voice Production by Thomas Kelly; and the familiar J. P. Sandlands The True Theory of Voice Production (1903). 33For example: ‘To public speakers, vocalists, & c., much pains have been taken to make the book a kind of Medical Guide or Companion-a sort of VOCAL Vade Mecum, to which reference may be made for information relating to the minor troubles, and some of the graver diseases, to which the vocal organs are liable’ (Farrar, 1881, pp. iii-iv). ‘%or example, Exercises in Voice-Production and Enunciation for Speakers and Readers, by Ralph (London 1896, p. 19) refers to Max Muller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, (2 Vols, London discussing the correct articulation of vowels. 35Comments Publications

of Ernest of Charles

Pertwee, Richard Temple, and Allen Beaumont William Deacon & Co.,’ London 1898.

in ‘A Selection

from

Dunstan 1864) in

the Recent

3?he dates, respectively: November-December 1876; April 1877; May 1877; June 1877-February 1878; Summer & Autumn 1878; January 1879; Winter 1880-1881; Winter-December 1881 (Hall, 1983, appendix to Vol. 2). 37F. T. Palgrave writes to a friend, 17 March, to my wife’ (Palgrave, 1899, p. 103).

1869: ‘I have just finished reading

The Ring and the Book through

“For example, Mrs W. W. Story read Milnes’ Life of Keats, lent her by Browning, he worked in his studio in Florence (Gould, 1904, p. 84). 3g’Teena sat in a chair on his left, all eager attention, with tearful of Donald and Ixion’ (Rochefort-Smith, 1883, p. 7).

4’Browning’s interest in newspaper of 1 December, 1875, p. 1538.

is noted in a newspaper in Camberwell

43For example: George Howard, MP for East Cumberland, Museums and Galleries on Sundays; the bill was opposed

passages

report

on The Inn Album

by the Guardian

I believe, when they were young

and thought

tabled the bill of 19 May, 1882 to open all National principally by Henry Broadhurst, MP for Stoke.

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