Victorian Soundscapes

Chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Victorian Soundscapes attends to the gothic intersections of nineteenth-century literature, technology, psychology, and acoustics. This book recaptures the sense of aural discovery that Victorian philosophers, psychologists, and inventors shared with the period's novelists and poets.

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Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.