ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to trace nineteenth-century aurality as it became newly urbanized, industrialized, and commercialized, that is to say, newly modern. Traditional overviews of the Victorian period typically ignored the ways that sound shaped individuals and communities, and how responses to it articulated Victorian concerns over identity and self-definition. Yet important work from at least the late 1990s by social and cultural historians such as Peter Bailey and Steven Connor has made it harder to continue to marginalize the value of attending to Victorian soundscapes (Bailey 1998; Connor 1997, 2000). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the well-documented professionalization of the listener – in medicine, in music, in communications media – accompanied attempts to hear more, and listen more closely, than ever before (Sterne 2003). The invention of the phonograph in 1877 was in a sense the culmination of the Victorians’ impulse to archive, analyze, and manipulate the sonic experiences that their era was making more rich and complex.
